“Of course. My apologies,” Alpha said, and the hallway immediately was illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights. “I forgot someone here might need them.”

Alpha was standing in the hallway’s center, his hands clasped together in front of him. He looked like he had a hunchback, a detail I didn’t recall having noticed before.

Ignoring Maggie’s gun on him, Mu turned around and walked back toward the stairwell. We paid him no mind.

“Please come with me,” Alpha said, and walked ahead of Maggie and me as if with no care in the world. Given that he seemed just fine after I’d shot him three times in the chest, maybe he was right.

We stopped at a door, a thick steel slab with a deadbolt on our side, as though it were locking something in. Alpha had to use a key on the knob nonetheless, then flipped the deadbolt.

“You will—ah—not need your guns,” he said through his malformed lips and teeth.

“We’ll decide that,” Maggie said with a little quaver in her voice.

“Understood,” Alpha said, giving the best impression of a smile that his bare muscles and tendons could manage.

Ahead of us stood another door, the final barrier. I contemplated that what we’d see on the other side would explain everything we’d been wondering and agonizing about.

And I was terrified.

Alpha opened the door to more darkness. Then a pleasant female voice intoned, “Let there be light,” and the room blazed with floodlights.

Ishango didn’t look as she sounded. I wasn’t even sure where I was supposed to look, what I’d be addressing. What I saw was a large rectangular metal box and rows and rows of … servers? I don’t know this stuff. Some kind of construction was taking place in the far corner of the room, with a temporary staircase leading up into a hole in the ceiling. I could see the steel skeleton of a new building that would rise above.

I took a deep breath.

“What do you want with us?” I asked loudly, not sure where its “ears” were. “We’re just two kids.”

“Two prophets will preach,” Ishango responded in a soothing voice, “and it will rain not in the days of their prophecy; and have power over waters to turn them to blood and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.”

This recitation seemed to come from all around us, as if Ishango were rigged to a surround-sound system.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Maggie asked.

“I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning,” Ishango returned.

“So you’re a pastor?” I asked. “Funny, you sound like you’re reading a pharmaceutical ad.”

“And when the two shall have finished their testimony,” Ishango resumed, “the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.”

“The two—who are they?” I didn’t expect her to answer this, either.

“Why, you, of course,” Ishango said. “You can say whatever you want of me. And then I will emerge from the bottomless pit and destroy you.”