“What are they?” Buru asked.

She shrugged. “I dunno, but I can tell you two things for sure. First, we won’t be escaping without help. Second, help is on the way.”

Buru looked incredulous, like he’d just remembered he was speaking to a young girl. “How do you know this?”

She looked at Elma, trying her best to sound confident, to believe that King, her father, would scour the earth for her, and said, “I never did tell you who my father is.”

NINETEEN

Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina

KING RESTED HIS elbows on the table and tried the word on for size. “Golem.” He didn’t like it. “As in the legendary Jewish variety?”

“You know it?” Aleman asked.

“Just the basics,” King said. “That they’re figures, most often created from clay and brought to life when a rabbi places a piece of paper in its mouth with the word ‘Emet,’ truth, written on it. Sometimes the word is inscribed on the golem’s body instead. To destroy the golem the ‘E’ is erased, leaving the word ‘Met,’ death.” King looked up at Aleman, who was typing away on his laptop as he listened. “You know how stupid this sounds?”

“You’ve seen Hydra reborn and Neanderthal women wanting to mate with Rook. This kind of thing should no longer be strange. What else do we know?”

King sat back and focused. They had covered the golem briefly during their year of study, along with a slew of other myths representing the world’s cultures and religions. Visualizing what he knew of the golem, images began to fill in the missing gaps.

“The most popular golem story involved a rabbi in Prague. In the 1500s. He used a golem to defend his ghetto against anti-Semitic attacks. The golem grew violent. Killed slews of people. Non-Jews. And the persecution was stopped.”

“Are they intelligent?” Aleman asked.

“No,” King said. “They can’t act without instructions from the rabbi who gives them life. They can’t talk. I suppose they have a limited intelligence in that they can understand commands and carry them out, but maybe that’s just the creator’s thoughts and feelings being imprinted on the golem?”

Aleman looked up slowly.

“What?” King asked.

“Just impressed is all. I don’t think you would have said that a year ago.”

“That’s nice, but none of it tells me who to shoot. Any idea?”

Aleman shrugged. “Beats me. But if inanimate objects really are being brought to life, maybe someone figured out how to tap into some kind of ancient creative power. God. Aliens. Intelligent capybara from another dimension. I’m leaving all the cards on the table.”

King opened his hands. “Okay, fine. We’ll call them golems for now, but that doesn’t get us any closer to finding Fiona, which is why I’m still here. Tell me what happened again. How she was taken.”

Aleman pursed his lips, looking down at the empty table. “The thing … the golem … was charging us. A man in black special ops gear, who I thought was you until he latched onto its head and drove what had to be a ton of stone into the pavement. As my vision faded I saw two things, black shapes attack the downed golem. I couldn’t see the man’s face, but he had a deep voice and said you would know who he was.”