The pilot let out a snore that caught Dorian’s attention. He looked over, annoyed. What to do? The gun and magazines loomed just beside him, silently presenting the solution.
His eyes drifted away as his mind explored alternatives. Every other option he considered was met with a single thought, cold and final: Don’t be a fool. You know what must be done. For the first time in Dorian’s life, he had a face to put with that voice: Ares. He knew it now. For the first time, he could feel his own thoughts, his true thoughts, the person he was before the first outbreak, when his father placed him in the tube. This moment was a microcosm of every difficult decision he had ever made: a struggle between what his emotional, his human self wanted to do, and that cruel, cold voice. Ares. Ares was the drive that had lingered in the background, unseen, prodding Dorian, shaping his thoughts. Dorian had never been fully aware of the struggle within him until this moment. Ares cried out again: Don’t be weak. You are special. You must survive. Your species is depending on you. He is another soldier lost to our cause. Don’t let his sacrifice cloud your judgment.
Dorian raised the phone to his face. “Captain, I just sent you some coordinates.”
He looked at the pilot, then at his burned feet—feet he could still walk on.
“Sir?”
Dorian’s mind rocked back and forth like a tiny ship on rough seas. The voice was firm now. This world wasn’t built for the weak. Dorian, you are playing the greatest chess game in history. Don’t risk a king to save a pawn.
“I’m here,” Dorian said. “I will be at the extraction point in…”
Don’t—
“…eight hours. Be advised, I have another survivor. If we’re not at those coordinates, the rescue team’s orders are to move into the woods and search for us on a heading bearing four-seven degrees.”
And like that, the voice was gone, silenced. Dorian’s thoughts were his own. He was free. He was… different, or was he the person he was always meant to be? The voice in his ear interrupted his reflection.
“Copy, General. Godspeed.”
“Captain.”
“Sir?”
“The girl in my quarters,” Dorian said.
“Yes, sir. She’s here—”
“Tell her… that I’m all right.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll see to it—”
Dorian ended the call.
Dorian fell back to the ground. He was hungry. He needed to eat, needed his strength, especially with the extra weight he had to carry. He would have to hunt.
In the distance, he heard a low rolling rumble. Thunder? No. It was the beat of horses charging through the forest.
CHAPTER 58
Somewhere off the coast of Ceuta
Mediterranean Sea
For the better part of the last hour, Kate and David hadn’t done any talking, and that made her very happy. They lay there, both naked, in the sheets of the king bed centered in the wood-paneled master stateroom.
It felt almost surreal to her, like they were lying in a luxury hotel room, as if the world outside had been only a bad dream. She felt safe and free, for the first time since… since she could remember.
Kate’s face rested on his chest. She loved listening to his heart, watching his body rise and fall with every breath. She traced her finger around the red burn marks on his chest. It looked like he had been branded. “This one is new,” she said softly.
“Cost of a wooden horse in this screwed-up world.” His voice was serious.
Was it a joke? Kate didn’t get it if it was. She pushed up and looked him in the eyes, hoping for an answer, but he didn’t look at her.
He was different somehow. Harder. More distant. She sensed it when they made love. He was not as gentle as he was in Gibraltar.
She returned her head to his chest, half-hiding. “I had a dream about a wooden horse. Two, actually. You were drawing—”
David pushed her off of him. “I was at a drafting table—”
The shock gripped her. She nodded, hesitating. “Yes… a veranda looked out on a blue bay and a forested peninsula—”
“Impossible…” David whispered. “How?”
Martin’s words echoed in her mind, We believe the Atlantis Gene is connected to a quantum biological process… Subatomic particles, transmitted faster than the speed of light…
Kate had given David a blood transfusion, but that couldn’t have changed his genome, couldn’t have given him the Atlantis Gene, yet there was some connection between them. “I think it has something to do with the Atlantis Gene—it activates some sort of quantum biological link—”
“Okay, stop right there. No more scientific mumbo jumbo. You and I have to talk.”
Kate drew back. “So talk. You don’t need a formal invitation.”
“You left me.”
“What?”
“Gibraltar. I trusted you—”
“Can I just remind you that you had been shot—three times? Keegan was going to kill you.”
“He didn’t.”
“I made a deal with him—”