Queen answered by throwing the sand to the side of sphere. The sand farthest from the light fell away. The sand closest fell into the light, sucked in by an invisible force. And the sand in between floated as though in orbit around a star. “Not static. Gravity.”

For the small object to have gravity, it would have to be incredibly dense. “They’re miniature suns,” he said.

“Very bad,” Alexander repeated before heading past the sun. “Scientists at the National Ignition Facility are trying to achieve a sunlike fusion reaction using lasers that would supply infinite energy, but this … this goes beyond any science known to me.”

“And I don’t see any lasers,” Queen said.

They all knew the implications. Ridley had unlocked the secrets to not just immortality, animating stone, and imbuing clay with life, or a close approximation of it, but he’d also unlocked the secret to creating light—not in a Thomas Edison sense, but in a real creator of all existence sense. Something beyond their comprehension.

King looked at his high-tech XM-25. Its exploding rounds seemed crude compared to the tiny sun behind them. Could he really stop a man who had made himself a god? He looked at Alexander, who had manipulated history so that the world believed he, the mighty Hercules, was a half-human half-god myth. But now Ridley had, in fact, achieved such a thing.

Alexander met King’s eyes. “He’s still human.”

Realizing they’d been thinking the same thing, King asked, “How do we kill him?”

“We can’t kill him,” Alexander said. “But we can silence him.”

“How?”

“Take off his head. Burn the flesh.”

“Like the Hydra.”

A raised hand from the front of the hall silenced the hushed conversation. Knight pointed through the tunnel exit, then to his ear. They heard somebody. King met them at the end of the tunnel and stopped to listen. The deep baritone voice was impossible to mistake.

They’d found Richard Ridley.

A second voice, identical to the first, replied.

They’d found several Richard Ridleys.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

SEVENTY-EIGHT

KING LED THE team toward the voice, moving slowly and silently. He stopped at a tunnel that branched away and turned back to the others. He pointed to Queen, Bishop, and Knight. “See where this goes. Keep your eyes open for Fiona.”

Queen hesitated, but then nodded. She didn’t want to miss taking out Ridley, but King was right. Their best chance of finding Fiona was splitting up. Each member of the team carried an insulin shot. It didn’t matter which one of them found her first. As long as someone found her.

Queen led Bishop and Knight down the side tunnel, their path lit by equally spaced mini-suns.