She grasped one of his hands and squeezed. Her eyes were wide with emotion. “Let’s do what we need to and get out of here.”
Duran nodded and led them off stage to the right, to the back of the house where the lighting and AV equipment were dust-covered and long asleep. He imagined, as they weeded in and out of the various theater lamps and speakers, that all of the equipment was antiquated now. Twenty years down the line and there would have been improvements, right? As with Ahmare’s car, the styling and buttons and screens of which he had not recognized or understood, there would be new technology, advancement, refinements.
That was not going to be the case for him, however.
He knew, on the same deep level that had gotten him through Chalen’s dungeon, that he was not going to progress past all this. There would be no technological improvement to him, no advancement . . . no refinement.
Collar or not, freedom or not, he would be ever among the skeletons here in his father’s arena, his mortal animation an insufficient distinguishing characteristic from the Dhavos’s dead. Made sense. Though he moved, his soul, his vital animation, had died out long ago.
In this respect, whether he made it out of here alive or not wasn’t going to matter.
“The trapdoor is here,” he said as he beckoned Ahmare down a cramped staircase.
At the bottom, the door was locked, but he entered the correct code and the pound key, and there was that shift inside the panels and the wall.
Pushing the way open, he flicked on his flashlight. The beam pierced the darkness and reflected gold. Gleaming, resonant gold.
“Oh, my God,” Ahmare breathed.
“A suitable entry hall for a god, right?” Duran muttered.
“Is it real?” she said as they started down the passageway.
“I think so.” He put his hand out and found the wall cool and smooth to the touch. “They were required to give him all their worldly assets if they joined. Houses, cars, jewelry, clothes. There are sorting rooms in the compound, everything segregated and valued for resale.”
“To think eBay didn’t exist back then.”
“What’s eBay?” Then he glanced over his shoulder. “I was the only young at the compound. He made them give away their offspring as well, telling them that sacrifice was necessary and paramount, but I think that was, like everything else he said, just bullshit. What he was really worried about was that their concern over the welfare of their young might at some point supersede their devotion to him. Unacceptable.”
No matter how quietly he put his boots down, the sound of his footfalls reverberated in the gold colon that dumped out at his father’s private quarters. Old habits of being silent died hard, and he became uncomfortable with the sound.
“I was strong even as a pretrans,” he told her. “And I found duct work in our bedroom cell that allowed me to travel through the ceilings and observe the cult’s layout and schedule of meditations and supplications. When I found the laundry room and the robes, I could even walk around during the night, blending in. Watching from under the hood. I got good at stealing things.” He looked up at the gold-leafed ceiling. “I’ll bet if you go into the ducts even now my stashes of clothes, car keys, glasses, and shoes were where I left them. I was a hoarder, and it was all about outfitting myself and my mahmen for when we got out.”
“How many people died back there?”
“Depends on when he ordered them dead. There were over three hundred people in the cult when I was taken out of here. Maybe it continued to grow, I don’t know. Maybe it faded. It depends on when he played the end of days card. He certainly intended to add to his flock. There was an expansion of this facility”—he tapped the wall—“about two years before I left. That was how I found the human contractors to build the bunker, and I paid them with money I took out of his vault.”
“He let humans down here?”
“What choice did he have? If he’d used members of our species and it had gotten back to Wrath or the Council? He had to use humans and he paid them well enough to ask no questions, work at night, and keep their eyes to themselves.”
They came up to a solid gold door. As he entered the passcode and pound key, he swallowed through a tight throat.
And then . . .
After the lock released, he opened the panel wide and pointed his flashlight into the darkness.
“Holy . . . shit,” Ahmare whispered.
It was Creed Bratton from The Office, Ahmare thought as she walked into a sumptuously appointed bedroom. Clicking on her own cell phone’s light, she shone her beam around.