The transhuman smiles. Die in hell. The female kicks away from the edge, falling … falling—

‘Oh my God!’ Dominique screams as the woman’s body disappears into the shadows of the abyss.

An unearthly flash of white light blinks in the ravine, then disappears.

Dominique stares at the spot, hyperventilating into her mouthpiece. What was that? What just happened?

For a long moment she simply hangs on, her mind threatening to crash.

Then she remembers Jacob.

Okay, come on … gather your strength and finish this. Haul ass!

The fingertips of her right hand press into the rock, the muscles of her lower back and buttocks clenching, straining to shift her weight.

Right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand … eight feet … focus on the ledge … right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand … three feet … two feet—

In a burst of adrenaline and sheer will, Dominique forces her right boot onto the ledge above her head as she maintains her delicate balance … pushing the knee up, then her thigh—

—then her upper torso.

She rolls onto the flat expanse of rock, panting, crying, smiling, all the while, sucking air from her mouthpiece.

Just breathe …

In time she sits up. Regains her feet and follows the plateau to its steep incline—a two-hundred-foot-high ridge that loops around the entire expanse of summit, blocking her view.

Dominique is beyond exhaustion. Her joints ache, her hands and wrists are raw, and her leg and lower back muscles burn with each painful step.

Above her head, the pyroclastic ceiling percolates like lava.

Come on, stop thinking about it and climb.

Sucking great gulps of air, she drags herself up the gradient, crawling the last fifty feet on her belly until she finds herself peeking over the edge.

Dominique looks down.

She is perched on the lip of a volcano, its craterlike valley resting several hundred feet below.

Nestled in the mountainous basin like some Tibetan hideaway is a village.

The Village of the Nephilim.

41

It is urban pestilence, an architecture of chaos haphazardly erected in uneven rows of single-story, poorly constructed, dust-caked dwellings. It is a maze of gray, a neighborhood worse than the worst parts of the cardboard-and-aluminum shantytowns of Olongopo and Subic after the volcanic eruption in the Philippines.

Soot-covered abodes on soot-covered streets funnel to the far end of town and the shoreline of a vast lake, its surface enshrouded in thick mist.

Dominique stifles her breathing as the thick clouds part along the subterranean ceiling, revealing a monstrous object, erected on the near side of the lake. Carved from rock, immeasurably old, it stands as tall as a ten-story building, its upper half appearing polished, its details lost in the returning haze.

Somewhere in the distance a bell tolls, its baritone gongs echoing across the valley.

As if summoned, the shadowy gray figures of the multitudes bleed slowly out from their dwellings, making their way en masse to the lake’s shoreline.