chance, Isis. A chance to redeem yourself.”
When Isis said nothing, Ares continued. “We have an opportunity to right all the wrongs, to bring our people back together and save these humans.”
“How?”
“We can guide their evolution. We can create something that will end this war.”
Isis wanted desperately to resist, to run out of the room and never return, but the lure of righting the wrongs she had committed was irresistible. She decided that she would hear Ares out. There was no harm in that. Quietly, she said, “I’m listening.”
“I’ve taken genetic samples, but I don’t have the skill to engineer the species I need. You can. And I have the knowledge you need—information about how the sentinels target DNA and the Serpentine virus, information that I’ve kept from our people since the Exodus.” On the screen at the other end of the room, a DNA sequence appeared. “This is the Serpentine virus that was used on the Atlantean expeditionary fleet before the Exodus. It’s the key. With my information, and your knowledge of genetic engineering, we can change the course of the universe.” Ares stepped closer to her. “The species we create will restore our people. If you refuse, you truly have killed us all.”
Ares seemed to know where every one of her buttons was, and he played them like a musical instrument. He held the one thing Isis would do anything for: redemption. A chance to reunify their people and make the Exiles safe again. Isis told herself that to do good things, sometimes it was necessary to work with bad people. But in the back of her mind, she wondered if she was rationalizing.
In the years that followed, Isis worked with Ares in secret, again keeping her work from Janus, who Ares rightly predicted would have objected. Isis knew that Ares was withholding information, giving her just enough to complete the experiments that he needed. His mantra was always that the sentinel and Serpentine information was need-to-know, that revealing the full details to Isis would compromise the safety of countless worlds.
Isis knew she was a pawn, but she felt she had no way out, no alternatives. As the years went on, she couldn’t bring herself to come clean with Janus. She couldn’t betray him again.
Cycle after cycle, she retreated to her hibernation chamber, hoping that Ares would honor his word, that at the next awakening, Ares would announce that subspecies 8472 was ready, and that Atlantean reunification was at hand.
She instead awoke to an alarm. As the screen outside the hibernation chamber lit up with population alerts, Isis grasped the magnitude of Ares’ betrayal. Around the globe, human subspecies were dying out—three of them at once, all but subspecies 8472, his weapon.
If Janus realized the truth, he refused to say it. He did what Isis expected: rushed to save the species he could, subspecies 8470, which would later be called Neanderthals. The Alpha Lander touched down just off the coast of an area that would later be called Gibraltar, and Janus and Isis suited up, disembarked, and carried back the last living Neanderthal.
As they reached the ship, explosions rocked it, tearing the vessel in half, tossing Janus and Isis about wildly. They placed the Neanderthal in a hibernation tube and made their way to the bridge.
“Ares betrayed us,” Janus finally said.
Isis couldn’t bring herself to speak. As the seconds ticked by, she thought Janus realized the full truth, but he didn’t say a word to her. He focused on the control panel. He locked down the lander, then activated the intrusion protocols on their space vessel, ensuring that Ares would be trapped if he tried to use it. Another blast rocked the lander, throwing Isis into the wall. She looked up, semi-conscious. Janus moved across the room and knelt over her, staring into her face. Through his transparent visor, she could see the faintest hint of emotion. Pain. Hurt. Betrayal. Isis desperately wanted to confess, to tell him everything, to ask for his forgiveness. But no words came. He lifted her up, his suit’s exoskeleton easily supporting her weight. He raced through the lander’s corridors and charged through the portal, exiting into the ark. Isis’ last memory was seeing Ares fire a shot at her, a blast that killed her as she slipped from Janus’ arms.
Kate was drenched in sweat. Every breath felt as though she were drowning. She had seen all the memories now—the ones she was born with and those Janus had tried to hide from her. And she knew the rest. Ares had shot Janus that day in the resurrection ark, but he hadn’t killed him. Janus had made it back though the portal to the Alpha Lander that lay buried, wrecked off the coast of Gibraltar. Janus had been trapped in a section close to Morocco. He had desperately tried to resurrect his partner in the other section of the Alpha Lander, but without her death signal, the ship wouldn’t comply. He had tried for years, testing countless methods on the stasis chambers.
When he had finally given up, he programmed the ship’s time dilation device to emit radiation that would roll back Ares’ and Isis’ genetic changes, hoping to revert humanity to a genome that would be safe from the sentinels, Exiles, and Ares.
Then Janus had waited. The lander had lain buried for thirteen thousand years, until a group called Immari International began excavating the area under the Bay of Gibraltar, hoping to find Plato’s fabled city of Atlantis. They hired a miner named Patrick Pierce, who had been wounded during the First World War. When his team reached the time dilation device, which they would later call the Bell, it unleashed a pandemic, the Spanish flu, killing millions. Pierce had placed his dying wife in one of the tubes he had found, and the fetus inside her was born in 1978. He named her Kate Warner, and for thirty-five years, until the final outbreak of the Atlantis Plague, she had harbored some of Isis’ memories. The fragments in her subconscious had driven her entire life. She had become a geneticist focused on brain wiring, dedicating her life to creating a therapy that addressed cognitive differences. For her entire life, Kate had been trying to fix the Atlantis Gene, trying to complete Isis’ work and fulfill her desire to correct her mistake. Now Kate finally had the knowledge she needed to do that.
She opened her eyes.
She felt the cold floor of the bottom of the vat on her back and Milo’s arms around her shoulders. Blood dripped from her nose into the pool below.
“You’re hurt, Dr. Kate.”
“It’s okay. I know what we have to do.”
CHAPTER 49
Dorian felt his life slipping away. He lay on his back in the conference booth, staring at the ceiling. In his mind, he rifled through the memories and what he knew, hoping for a clue about Ares’ next move.
Ares had killed Isis the day he had attacked the Alpha Lander, but he had failed to kill Janus. For years, Janus had tried to resurrect Isis, and in his desperation, he had sent all the resurrection data except his own to the tubes in the section off the coast of Gibraltar. When the Bell attached to the Alpha Lander had unleashed the Spanish flu, Dorian’s father, a leading member of the Immari, had placed him inside one of the tubes, where he had remained until 1978. Dorian had awoken changed, unaware that Ares’ memories lay buried in his subconscious, driving him. All Ares’ hate, his resentment of Isis, was there, deep within Dorian’s mind. All his life, Dorian had feared an unseen enemy, a great threat he believed the human race was genetically unprepared to face. Now he knew it was true. The Serpentine Army, the Exiles, the sentinels—they were all threats. And so was Ares. He wanted to use humanity for his own ends; they were the key to his plan, which still wasn’t clear to Dorian.
After Ares’ attack on the ship in Gibraltar, he had deployed the retrovirus Isis had helped him develop, using a supervolcano in Indonesia as his delivery vehicle. Then he had ported to the scientists’ ship, but Janus’ countermeasures had trapped him there. Ares had used his link to the ark buried under Antarctica to appear as an avatar, making contact with Dorian when he had finally entered over thirty years after his rebirth in the tubes and thirteen thousand years after Ares’ attack on the science team. Dorian had carried a case out of the resurrection ark in Antarctica. Its radiation had completed humanity’s genetic transformation in the final days of the Atlantis Plague, and the portal the case had formed led Dorian to the scientists’ primary ship, where he had rescued Ares.
In the weeks that followed, Ares had wrecked the planet, flooding it, collapsing nations into civil wars. Dorian was sure of one thing: it was no way to build an army. Ares was weakening humanity. But why? As bait of some sort? Or was the plan longer range? It didn’t make sense.
Dorian struggled to his feet and staggered out of the glowing white conference booth. He stopped in the open area with the tall glass windows looking out on the massive assembly line. The cylinder that produced the sentinel spheres stretched into the blackness of space with no