What Enlil had bestowed, he could take away, and Lakesh hadn’t noticed that until he physically passed the age of fifty a while back. Now his knees popped and crackled with each step, and his back couldn’t stand the burden of even a small backpack. The subtle shake of his fingers as he fumbled to unfold the map was an indication that everything was failing him. His genetic code had been laden with a deadly little bomb. Whereas Lakesh had previously been able to maintain control of his body, even at his advanced age of 275 years, two hundred of which had been negated by suspended animation and cloned organs, Lakesh knew that this time, as his body continued to collapse at Enlil’s will, his brilliant mind would be quick to go.
Domi had twice complained in the past couple of days that she couldn’t understand what Lakesh was saying. Lakesh grimaced, knowing that those lapses in communication were caused by memory lapses and he was speaking his original Hindi. Those brain farts were something that Lakesh could recognize as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Most people only displayed signs of the dementia in their mid-sixties, though he was aware that subjects could manifest symptoms eight years before they reached the point of easy diagnosis for Alzheimer’s. Memory lapses could have been brought on by stress, especially with the horrific events of Ullikummis’s conquest of the redoubt and taking its staff prisoner. The sight of the son of Enlil forcing a stone seed into the broken skull of Morganstern would itself have been more than sufficient to break the sanity of a less experienced person. As it was, the young mathematician’s demise had been sickening. His fight against the assimilation by Ullikummis’s seed ended with his brains burst on the floor, crushed to a pulp.
Lakesh tried to picture that event, but nothing came to mind. Lakesh knew his brain too well, and he knew his coping mechanisms. He’d seen the world he’d known destroyed in a rain of atomic fire and had withstood the shock, retaining details of the annihilation. His ego didn’t sublimate terrible memories, and it especially didn’t do that this quickly. Something had happened to him, and self-analysis told him that he’d obviously reached a point in time where he was being destroyed from the inside by neurological degeneration.
Of course, that now meant he was in his late fifties if he was experiencing the inability to retain recently learned information or recall current events in his short-term memory. He looked around, and wondered where Kane, Brigid and Grant were on this road.
“Where are the others?” he asked out loud. “Didn’t they make the jump with us?”
Domi frowned and gently took the map from his hand. “We didn’t jump, Moe.”
Lakesh looked into her crimson eyes and saw a flicker of recognition in them. “Domi… I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Told me an hour ago,” she said. She rested her hand on his cheek. “Hour before that, too.”
“How long have I been telling you?” Lakesh asked.
“Past half day,” she answered. “Told me you’re getting tangle brain. Not remembering stuff.”
Lakesh swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry.”
She kissed him gently on the forehead, stroking his thinning silver hair. “It’s okay, Moe. It’ll be all right.”
“We’re still going to Vegas, correct?” Lakesh asked.
“To get away from Rocky,” Domi replied.
“Rocky…” Lakesh repeated. It took everything to drag up the image of Ullikummis. The stone-fleshed giant had swept through Cerberus like a deadly storm, had driven a stone through Daryl Morganstern’s forehead, calling for him to submit. “I’ve been losing my mind for half a day, but how long—?”
“We’ve been away from Cerberus for four days,” Domi told him, slowing her speech down, speaking clearly and fighting not to drop words. Lakesh knew that was a struggle for the wild-born creature who had learned to talk while fighting for her life tooth and nail. She was going above and beyond for his sake, and he could see the exhaustion in the form of gray-and-pink wrinkles under her ruby-red eyes. “We’re almost to Vegas.”
Lakesh closed his eyes. Old information was something he always would have access to. Route 66 swung up north for a bit before crossing just south of Las Vegas from New Mexico to California. The road they were on was as good as any paper map he carried, and there would be a turnoff that would direct them the rest of the way to the deserted city of sin. “About twenty more miles, right?”
Domi smiled, nodding in agreement. “Right.”
Lakesh returned her grin. “I’m not completely simple yet.”
“Never will be,” Domi replied, cupping his cheek once more.
The ancient scientist swallowed, wishing that he had some water to remove the dried gunk from his tongue. As if on cue, Domi handed him a small canteen, and Lakesh took a sip. Domi turned and continued her role of leading him to a promised land.
Lakesh’s heart ached. He knew he was going to forget her as Enlil’s destructive genetic code tore through his intellect. The overlord had found a way to torture the Cerberus founder—attacking his mind but leaving him sufficient cognitive ability to realize what his fate would be. The New Mexican heat and desert winds had dried his eyes out too much for the tears he wished he could bring.
Enlil was stealing Lakesh, dismantling his brain by bits and pieces, almost as if he had been strapped down to a buffet table and forced to watch as carrion birds tore at his flesh and not allowed to die.
“Damn you, Enlil,” Lakesh growled under his breath. He continued to follow Domi, trying to count down to the moment when he forgot this exchange.
After fifty minutes, Lakesh wondered why he had been counting.
THE YOUNG WOMAN HAD stalked ahead of the two men, acting as a scout but also to get away from the stifling feeling of being the outsider among the pair. Though she was beautiful—a shapely, curvaceous vixen with flowing dark hair, tanned olive skin and bright, attentive hazel eyes—she felt a resistance to her presence, despite their asking her for her allegiance. Kane and Grant, the rebel ex-Magistrates and fabled warriors who had taken on the hybrid barons and foiled them in battle after battle, were missing their third counterpart, the tall, flame-haired and brilliant Brigid Baptiste in the wake of an all-consuming battle that had shattered the defenses of Cerberus redoubt. There had been loss of life, but the mastermind of the assault and takeover, Ullikummis, had been repelled.
Now Rosalia found herself alongside the pair as they did what they could to find leads on the stone giant, the spawn of an alien overlord that had been forged by science and cruelty into a living weapon. The trouble with seeking out information on Ullikummis was that they lived in a world where cross-country communication had been severely curtailed. Sure, the Cerberus redoubt had done its best to spread globe-crossing comms to its allies, enabling them to keep close ties to New Edo in the archipelago that used to be Southern California, but as of now, the Tigers of Heaven were on lockdown, preparing for Ullikummis’s attempts to lay siege to them. On the other side of the planet, there was radio contact with New Olympus, but they had been told to lay low, as well.
Ullikummis’s power was simply too big a threat right now. Taking over the minds of war-honed samurai or armored mobile skeletons would mean that the Annunaki prince would become unstoppable. Ullikummis sought the tools to reforge the Earth, to destroy his father, Enlil, and to take his place as a cruel master of human life.
There were friends and allies scattered across the face of the planet, but calling them in against a mind-controlling god who was hewed from living, lava-blooded stone would be folly. Firepower and technology, martial skill and courage, these would only lead to the slaughter of Ullikummis’s thralls.
Rosalia was practical enough to value her life over those sent to attack her, no matter how innocent