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It wasn’t until Zero had utterly lost track of where he was when he realized that the government laboratory was merely the entrypoint into a subterranean sprawl far older than the city that glittered above the layers of rebar like broken glass. He stopped running, turned around, and did not recognize the way he came. There was only deeper to go, and a burning itch in his veins to sate. The fetid stink of the jungle was growing stronger.
He was called by some fear into the heart of the complex, or maybe the intuition was that turning back would end in him desiccating into a curled-up bloodless husk as soon as he reemerged. No one was feeding him Chronos anymore. He had to hunt for it, and he’d rather go all-in and chase down rumors of bounty than become shackled again to someone above.
They had built these bunkers to protect the people from God-Cleaver, that which turned Old Mecca and its one million minarets, arabesques, and unborn mathematics into a stamp of sweet void. But the warning sirens had been smothered that night, and then the bunkers could no longer be bunkers. Fifty of them became reliquaries/radioactive waste containment sites for the millions of new martyrs.
Mecca, the shattering of it. Of faith turned funerary rite. The blaze, the abyss, the burning fire. Mecca, the earthly gate to Jahannam. The pilgrims’ families came to weep but when they tried to pray they realized the house of God had been burned down with Him inside it.
The other fifty not-bunkers, empty and arable, stretched down into the earth like divining rods. They spun into incubators of retribution. Zero had been told that the “acceptable loss” of the NULL program—some sort of budget of cruelty—was that done to Mecca. Not one body more, just enough to have a precedent of jus in bello in international court.
Ferns licked at the edges of his mind. Wetness gathered in the folds of his body. Was he falling apart again? There was no color in the bunkers, only endless gray and charcoal black, down, down like the tombs they were, until creeping vines and a green, frangipani-like effluvia crawled up and carpeted the stairway down as if welcoming him home. He gripped the iron railing to keep his beat-up sandals from slipping on the thick, glistening cords of plant matter. They leaked from a broken blast door that Zero stared at, disbelieving and panting. He knew from the streaks of carbon radiating along the walls that an explosion had leveled the door, but he preferred the thought that it had cracked with the weight of all that verdancy it once contained. Evening sunlight dappled the wall behind him like bullet holes.
He recognized the flora, which did not grow anywhere on this continent but here. Gingerly, he got down to his knees and crawled through the remnants of the blast door, into the red light. Soft moss blanketed the way in so that his flesh dragged across shards of iron but never tore.
The lowland jungle opened up beneath his hands and knees and he was swallowed up like a pill. He burst into an expanse of green and red. He could feel the life of the place dripping off his face. Nearby, the sea beat its drum. Trembling, weak-kneed, ecstatic, he picked his way through the vegetation that was infinite shivs of green.
Minutes later, the cold kiss of a muzzle met the back of his neck.
He let the gunman push him up against a nearby tree and take his sword. He hadn’t encountered the gun in any other iteration of this minute—that meant they were both on the drug. He couldn’t take his chances.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“Testing Ground Four,” replied a hard, slightly feminine voice that rang with the deathless cavalier of a Gamma NULL. He could recognize the crackle of the full-face visors in his dreams. “Slaughterhouse was TG-Five. It was cheaper.”
“Huh.” Cautiously, to test her tolerance for misbehavior, he took his left hand off the tree and held it up to watch the false sunlight shoot past his fingers. “All this, just to run QC.”
The gunman gently snatched his errant wrist and pushed up his sleeve. The newest track mark was already a few days old and scabbing over. “Right?” She let his arm drop. “You turn around now. I know what you’re here for.”
“There have been others?”
“Several. They don’t stick around.”
The gunman was covered from head to toe in mud-flecked armor, but for the index and thumb of her right hand which pointed dark and gleaming from her glove. Braids wove behind her neck like a fishing basket. She smelled like an open wound.
She led him toward the sunlight until they broke out of the brush onto a sandbank rimmed by palms. The ocean rolled out before him, hot and black as always, reeking of ripe kelp. Titanic, silhouetted pillars of karst ringed them in like the eroded fingers of an old giant. He paused before the sea and squinted to scan the horizon for evidence that none of this was real.
“It doesn’t go on forever, does it?” he asked. He was haunted by the image of a third Mecca, an empty Mecca standing still in sublime darkness, gestating far, far across the sea like a tooth ready to bud if its predecessor was ever ripped out again.
“I still don’t know.” Her dark glass faceplate conferred nothing but that red light that did not wane. She watched him shake for a long moment, a sea breeze tossing the ends of her braids. Then she resumed walking.
They followed the coastline north (south? he couldn’t tell if it was a sunrise or sunset) until a trail carved its way back through the jungle. Golden idols no taller than his knee flanked the path, which the gunman maintained with careful swings of her machete at encroaching vegetation. They walked past clusters of straw-roofed houses and glimpses of their soft, worn innards. Farther away, past the forest, a rice paddy stretched up a small hill. Two tawny oxen grazed sedately among the sprouts.
“It’s nice here,” Zero remarked. He blinked at the gunman’s silence. “You hate it.”
She looked away. “I shouldn’t love it.”
Eventually, the path led to a vast sinkhole, and they descended via stone steps set into its rim. The red dusk shot a column straight down, where it ignited upon a golden roof and burning azure blue all around it. They spiraled down around it, and the temple appeared to rise out of the water to kiss them.
“The dispenser’s inside?”
The gunman scoffed. “Yeah. Shit, last temple of its kind. And it’s here and it does this .”
They landed at the base of the temple and crossed the bronze stepping stones toward its limestone steps. Fat serpents curled around the pillars that walled in their passage. Around them, the drip of stalactites into the lake harmonized sweetly.
She inhaled and drew out a small fileting knife, then marched toward the apex of the steps and under the crimson ribcage to the twisting bronze altar that slithered violently in Zero’s vision. In the center of the chamber’s floor was nothing but a gaping hole.
She looked back once and then kept walking as if unable to stop. “The dispenser only accepts tissue from a peninsular haplogroup—fresh.” She peeled a vambrace off. Underneath, browned bandages criss-crossed over her cratered skin. She took her spot before the hole and carved a shallow coin-sized disc from her forearm, flicking it irreverently outward. As it fell, she turned, stared down at Zero, and gathered her hair to the side to expose the back of her neck. From within the hole came the sound of wings fluttering. A bell chime once, and, with a great rumble, a mechanical arm unfolded from its nest in the ceiling. It poised over the gunman like a predator and then lunged forward to pierce between two cervical vertebrae with a long needle.
She gasped and slumped against the ornamented wall of the chamber, clutching her wound. The mechanical arm tucked back up beneath the ceiling. She reached back, wiped the blue leakage from her spine, and brought it underneath her mask to lick. “Your turn. I’m only half peninsular, so you’ll be okay giving it less than that.”
“I’m not a fucking cromag,” Zero blurted.
She looked at him like he was stupid.
“Whatever. Okay.” Zero drifted forward. He took the small knife from her and stood at the edge of the hole. There was nothing down there but darkness. Armed again, he thought of killing the gunman and throwing her in that hole that was blatantly meant for bodies.
But he couldn’t. The second he paused, the gun materialized in her palm. He rolled up his sleeve and shaved a slice of subcutaneous fat from the edge of his forearm, his throat tightening from the pain.
The gunman, tense, watched the piece slide off the blade. There was a chance she was wrong. He could have the wrong blood, and they would both know, and he would realize that the only way to secure more Chronos was to subdue and feed her in, piece by piece, just as she’d known from the start she’d need him dead in that case.
“I’m sorry,” Zero muttered.
She swallowed. “Ain’t nothing.”
The depths fluttered, rending and reading flesh. They waited. There was no better time for them to attack each other than now, before the other was ready. He gritted his teeth and clenched the knife until it shook and, with what could be his final thought, mapped the angle of the gunman’s pistol.
The fluttering stopped. Dead stillness.
The gunman’s finger shifted.
Zero’s hand flashed up and her bullet zinged against the knife and lanced back at her exposed neck—her jaw tucked and the bullet smashed instead into her faceplate, embedding into it among a web of cracks. The shockwave punched both their eardrums out. Through the ringing and the scream of blood in their veins, it was a miracle that they noticed it: a jingle soft as a child’s groan, dream-fuzzy.
Neither of them believed it. Neither of them breathed.
But then came the purr of a satisfied machine beneath their feet. The gunman laughed in shocked relief, the gun slackening in her hand. Zero let the knife slip from his shaking palm and collapsed. Behind him unfurled a massive, cold presence.
The slide of the intrathecal needle was deeply wrong , at first, but then icy bliss bloomed down the column of his spine. It was the purest rush he’d ever felt—his pupils threatened to tear as they blew out. He choked on his first breath. The world stretched out before him, and he could finally see beyond the endless pursuit of blue.
“Get it now, brother?” mouthed the gunman, rising. Through a crack in her visor glimmered the slim slope of her dark eye—his eye. The instinct to kill shuddered through his body but was cowed by the unfettered warmth in her gaze. “This is the start.”
She helped him up and out onto the steps, and they looked up through the sinkhole to the dizzying red dawn far above. Beyond the pursuit, there was always this. The cruel, easy euphoria of the spinal injection, the fecund flow of blood down his forearm, the false village above them glowing with comfort. Despite her wounds, the gunman was strong and well-fed like the oxen, the earth around them indestructible and green. Underneath miles of concrete, nestled in a lattice of forgotten crypts, two young gods wearing the faces of the forsaken could persist eternally off their own damned flesh, outliving New Mecca and every Mecca after that.
Even as he left to explore deeper the next day, it was all different. Quiet, now. He was not starving anymore. He was not afraid.