A sweep of light caught a figure smaller than the others: Macy. It took all Eddie’s willpower not to call out her name. ‘They’ve got Macy too,’ he rumbled, unable to keep the fury from his voice.

Even expecting the grim news, Nina felt as if the blood was draining from her body. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself—

And was slammed into another reality.

The crystal pillar was inconceivably huge, the power flowing through it beyond imagination – and the full force of both hit her so hard that her consciousness was almost swept away. Somehow she clung on, overcoming the shock of contact with the earth’s strange energies . . .

She sensed others in the maelstrom with her.

Tiny points of awareness, diamond hard, trapped and tormented. The rest of the Nephilim. The captives of the Veteres, ‘benevolently’ imprisoned rather than killed for their crimes of birth, were here.

All of them. So many, she couldn’t even count. They were somewhere below her, inside the pillar itself.

But there was something else, outside the pillar – beyond Uluru, the entire country. A seething discord, growing in strength with every passing moment. Somehow, she knew Sidona had set it in motion. Another attack, on a far greater scale than the destruction in Xinengyuan. Nina tried to reach out to reshape it, but it was too big, too powerful—

The real world snapped back into place. Eddie’s worried face filled her vision. ‘Nina!’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I . . .’ she said, confused, before recovering. ‘Eddie, they’ve used the tracker to start another attack – I don’t know where, but it’s big. The power’s building up already.’

‘Can you stop it?’

‘No – not without the tracker, and maybe the key as well.’

‘Then we have to catch Zan!’ said Cheng.

‘We’ve got to rescue Macy,’ Eddie countered. ‘The only reason Wu would have come here with a special forces team is to kill the Nephilim – and us.’

‘There’s something else,’ said Nina. ‘I felt it when I touched the crystal. The other Nephilim really are imprisoned, somewhere below us. And there are hundreds of them, thousands.’

‘What? Jesus Christ, Gadreel’s going to end up with an army!’

‘No, he isn’t,’ she said, desperately trying to explain. ‘Yes, some of them might be warriors – but most of them aren’t. There are children imprisoned here, for God’s sake! If Wu and her team kill them all, it won’t just be murder – it’ll be genocide. We can’t let her do it.’

‘So what are we supposed to do? Let Gadreel wake ’em up so both sides can fight it out?’

‘I think the best thing would be to leave them where they are. If they’re resurrected, they’ll all be killed, one way or another. Humans exterminated the Veteres, just like the Neanderthals; you think we’d let another potential rival survive?’