SIXTY-FOUR

COLD, WET DARKNESS surrounded Sara. She felt herself pushed and pulled as the water encasing her flowed like a roller coaster through the interior of the mountain. Her back slammed into the stone roof. As she screamed out in pain, the air in her lungs escaped. The benefit was that her body became more naturally buoyant and sank down to the center of the flow. The downside was that she now needed to take a breath.

Her lungs and battered back burned. Nausea pulsed through her body, generated from the impact, the fear of death, and the rapid undulations of the river. She opened her eyes and saw only darkness. The others might have been feet away, but it was like they no longer existed. She’d entered some kind of torturous limbo where there was no up or down. Unlike limbo, there was plenty of pain to go around.

Sara clenched her hands over her mouth and nose, fighting her body’s natural urge to suck in air. Her foot struck bottom and spun her body. She opened her eyes again and saw a bright sphere floating ahead. Within the sphere she saw five silhouettes kicking toward the light. They were headed for an exit!

Moonlight glowed above her through a clearing in the fading storm’s clouds. Her equilibrium returned. Facing up, she shoved her feet down against the silt-coated river bottom and launched to the surface. She broke through the water gasping and gagging. The river slowed and deepened, allowing the team to collect themselves.

King, Queen, and Rook swam together at the center of the river. Sara, still ten feet behind, lay back and looked at the storm above. It wasn’t the swirling dark clouds, the bullet-sized raindrops, or the sweet smell of the storm that held her attention, it was the way she experienced them. A flash of lighting arced through the sky. She saw it with her eyes . . . and felt it in her chest. She could hear the wind whipping through the forest, scratching leaves. The sound tickled the back of her neck. She was experiencing the world as she knew it again. And it was beautiful.

King swam to her. “You okay?”

Sara smiled. “You have no—” A splash, different from the deep resonating river, entered her ears and created a tension in her shoulders. Something had risen from the water, behind her. The smell told her who. A metallic click caused a deep tickle in her back. “Get down!”

Sara and King ducked beneath the water as three shots rang out. They kicked farther downriver, staying underwater, and surfaced next to the other four members of the team.

“We can’t keep dodging bullets!” Rook said. “He’s going to get lucky sooner or later.”

They needed to get out of the river. King looked up. The walls around them ranged between forty and fifty feet tall—too high to scale, unless they wanted to make themselves easy targets. And there was no shoreline to speak of. If one existed earlier, it had been covered by the deepening water level. They were stuck. At the mercy of the river and the pistol-wielding Weston.

Sara grasped King’s arm. He grunted in pain.

“Sorry,” she said, then pointed up.

A group of hybrids ran along the cliff’s edge, forty feet above the river, keeping pace with the team, watching and waiting for them to exit. He looked to the other side and shook his head. Five of the old mothers, including Red, pounded through the wet brush as they too kept pace with the group being carried downriver.

With enemies on both sides and behind, their only option was to let the river take them and pray the crocodiles didn’t like to feed during a storm. King looked back and found Weston missing. He’d been far behind them, aiming his gun but never firing. Now, he had vanished. “Where’s Weston?” he shouted.

The team looked for him, too, but found nothing.

“Did he bug out?” Knight asked.

King doubted it, looking for Weston among his progeny. But he was nowhere to be seen.

Lightning crisscrossed through the sky and struck in the forest nearby. The pulse of thunder that followed as the globules of rain superheated in a flash ripped through the air around them. The intense sensory backlash shot a pain through Sara’s chest. She fled from it, ducking underwater.

King followed her under, afraid she had succumbed to a cramp, but found her treading water just below the surface.

Lightning flashed again, illuminating the underwater world. Fish freed from the giant pond, some living, some dead, moved through the water with them. A hybrid body bounced along below. Dead. A glint of silver far ahead, glowing brightly in the sudden light, caught King’s eye.

He kicked toward the light, but a tug on his foot turned him around. He expected to see one of the fish attempting to once again make a meal of his body, but instead found Weston’s face, twisted with anger. He’d taken hold of his ankle! King kicked and twisted, wrenching his leg free. He shot to the surface.

“Weston’s surfacing!” he shouted, then dove back under. The team followed him under as Weston, and his pistol, surfaced.

Weston growled loudly then ducked back under. He could see the Chess Team several feet ahead of him. He slid back toward the surface, waiting for one of them to run out of air. He would surface with them and then fire. It would be easy.

King turned forward and swam hard ahead of the group, making for the glint of metal he’d seen. Lightning shot through the sky again and he saw it just beneath him. He reached out, fumbled, and then wrapped his hands around the familiar object. He turned forward just as the team headed for the surface.

The Chess Team’s tactic had been to rise as one, possibly confusing Weston by giving him multiple targets, but as they watched him rise with them, each one of them realized his aim would be true.

Sara would fall first.

But if they didn’t rise to take a breath, all would drown.

King pushed hard against the river bottom and shot up like a torpedo. He breached the surface before the others and took aim with Rook’s lost .50-caliber Desert Eagle, clutching it in both hands.

The taste of silty fresh water filled his mouth as he took a breath. His eyes caught sight of Weston’s head cresting like a rising submarine as Sara neared the surface. The sight of Weston’s head rising held his gaze with laserlike focus. He pulled the trigger as Weston rose, pulling his own trigger a fraction of a second later. Weston’s shot went wild as he was flung backward.

All but Sara rose from the river in time to see Weston’s face implode and exit through the back of his skull. His body fell flat and shifted to the side of the river, where it bounced off the wall.

The hybrids above wailed, calling out for their father. But his body, now stuck against a branch, lay still and unmoving.

Their father was dead.

They stood still at the cliff’s edge, their pursuit forgotten, and mourned him.

The old mothers, however, barely flinched. They weren’t interested in the father. Their eyes were on Rook.

Sara surfaced, sputtering and looking for danger. King joined her.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Where’s Weston?”

King held up the magnum and checked the magazine. Empty. “Dead.” Returning his gaze to the old mothers, he wondered when they would make a move. By the time they freed themselves from the river, they’d be too exhausted to run very far, let alone fight.

“Knight,” King called out. “Where does this river go?”

“It runs southwest through Laos and into Cambodia.”

“Past Anh Dung?”

Knight thought about it, recalling the map he’d taken from the maze chamber and cross-referencing it mentally with the maps of the region he’d memorized on the flight over. “Yeah, it does.”

King nodded. That’s where they’d stand their ground against the old mothers.

Birthplace of Brugada.

A village plagued by death.

Unwitting guinea pigs to Weston’s observations.

Home to a field full of land mines.

Anh Dung.

They would finish this where it all began.