The Last Oracle (Sigma Force #5)

The large soldier pointed a beefy arm toward the stairwell. “Please, General-Major. We will hold off as long as we can.”

“The children…” Savina said, knowing her plan was crumbling around her. She could not let anyone else steal what she had started. “Shoot them all.”

The man’s eyes grew large, but he was a soldier.

He nodded.

Savina retreated down the stairs. She could not watch. Her legs stumbled under her as she reached the bottom of the stairs. The door to the room was four-inch steel. Barricaded inside, she would wait out the war above. Ahead, she noted the flicker of the screens beyond the doorway. In the center screen, water flooded poison into the earth. As she holed up here, she would take solace as she watched.

Gunfire erupted overhead.

The children…

Cringing, she headed for the room.

But a shape stepped into view in the open doorway, blocking her.

A boy.

Pyotr.

Pyotr stood in the doorway and stared up at the woman. She was darkness and shadow in the gloom of the stairwell. He did not truly see her, but he knew her. He focused on the flame of her heart, aglow at the foot of the stairs.

“Pyotr,” she called to him, with a shining note of hope in her voice.

As she stepped toward him, he lifted his arms and reached out—not with flesh but with his fiery spirit. He cupped the flame of her heart between his open palms, holding it like a frightened bird. Then he gently squeezed, smothering her flame.

The woman dropped to her knees with a cry, a fist clutched to her heart. “Pyotr, what are you—?”

Hope turned to terror as she screamed.

He was not done.

There was another facet to Pyotr’s talent of empathy. He could certainly sense others’ emotions, but with the force of a hundred behind him, he could do more.

As a hundred eyes stared out of his, he drew from the other children: all the agony of the scalpel, the ache of loneliness, the coldness of neglect, the pain of secret abuse at night. He reached farther back, to a blue-eyed child in a dark church, watching a woman and a man approach. He stole all that fear out of the past and thrust it like a dagger into her heart.

The woman shrieked, arched back, racked and locked in a pain without end.

Yet, likewise, as the dark emotions ran through Pyotr, the same fire grazed him. Hot tears flowed for all the lost innocence, including his own.

He barely registered the pistol as it lifted toward him.

The woman sought to blindly kill what tortured her.

While he did the same to her.

The pistol blast shattered the silence.

Pyotr fell back when the woman’s flame suddenly snuffed out between his palms. As he stumbled back, she fell to the floor, half her face gone. He stared up and saw Monk rushing down the stairs from above, his pistol smoking.

The man leaped over the woman and scooped him in his arms.

“Pyotr!”

Monk lifted the stiff boy. He ran his hand over his small frame. He seemed uninjured, though his skin burned to the touch. He hugged Pyotr to his chest.

The others ran down the stairs behind him.

A brief firefight had eliminated the defenders above. It had looked like the Russians had been about to fire upon a group of unconscious children.

If they’d been a half minute later…

The Gypsies remained above to secure the area and watch over the children. They were safe here for the moment.

“Is this the place?” Gray asked.

With the boy in his arms, Monk crossed with the others into the bunker. The control board smoked from deep gashes into the smoldering circuitry. Keyboards lay cracked. Glass crunched underfoot. Everything was shattered, except for a row of wall monitors.

Monk pointed to the center screen, recognizing the room. It was the heart of Operation Saturn. Only now, black water poured like a river out of a hole in the roof and swirled down a shaft in the floor.

“It’s already under way,” he said hollowly. “We’re too late.”

On a neighboring screen, Monk spotted the mining chamber where he’d left Konstantin and the others. The kids were sprawled in tangled piles. The view was too grainy to tell if they were still alive. Had the radiation somehow reached them?

A well of despair swept through him.

As Gray fished out a sat-phone, Monk stared at the others: Kowalski and Rosauro. Monk sought any glimmer of recognition. There was none. Who were these people? If they were friends, shouldn’t they jar some reaction from him?

As he studied the others, Pyotr reached a hand toward the center screen and placed his palm on it.

“What’s he doing?” Gray asked with the phone at his ear.

Monk turned his attention. “Pyotr?”

The boy stared deeply at the image on the screen.

Kowalski spoke to the left. “Hey! The train’s moving over here!”

Monk glanced over. The train slowly shifted down the tracks, sparking with electricity. The tunnel must still have power, not that they had any control over it.

“Is the kid doing that?” Kowalski asked. “Moving it with his mind?”

Monk held his breath, then let it out slowly. “No,” he said and stared at the receding train, suddenly remembering. “There’s someone else out there.”

“Who?” Gray asked.

As Pyotr’s hand touched the screen, he cast his senses out into the tunnel, stretching to his limits. Fired by stolen talents, steel and concrete could not stop his reach. As voices faded behind him, he dove into the dark tunnel and swept toward the one flaming star that remained inside, a great heart, one he had loved all his young life.

Pyotr found her cowering in the train, rocking. She had hid out of sight of the cameras because he had asked it of her. She was part of the pattern. But for the moment, nothing mattered. He hurt, deeper than he’d ever been hurt. He simply needed her. Reaching her old heart, he cupped the flame gently and sent her all his love and his need.

She knew he was there and hooted gently, reaching to the empty air. In the dark tunnel, they wrapped around each other, sharing emotions at a level deeper than anyone else.

It was one of their secrets.

He had known the truth the moment they’d first touched hands. Pyotr knew the reason so many children loved Marta, came to her for comfort, to cry in her arms or to simply be held.

She had a talent, unknown to her keepers, a strong gift of empathy, like Pyotr. Two kindred spirits. So he kept her secret, and she kept his.

But it wasn’t their only secret.

There was a darker one, wrapped in terror, revealed in a way neither understood but both knew to be true. From the moment they first saw each other, they knew they would die together.

Gray watched the train accelerate down the tunnel toward the site of Operation Saturn. Monk had given him a thumbnail version of the purpose.

“But who’s in the train?” he asked. “Can we communicate with them?”

Monk held the boy as his small fingers were splayed on the screen. “I think Pyotr is already there. The boy knows how to operate the train.”

“But who’s on the train?”

“A friend.”

On the screen displaying the heart of Operation Saturn, the train pulled into view at the edge and braked. A dark shape hopped out of the front car and loped into the chamber.

“Is that a monkey?” Kowalski asked, stepping back.

“Ape,” Rosauro corrected with a sigh, as if she was tired of correcting the man. “A chimpanzee.”

“It’s Marta,” Monk said.

Gray heard the pain in his voice. A storm of radiation had to be surging through there. The figure moved slowly, slipping, knuckling awkwardly, already sick.

“What’s she trying to do?” Gray asked.

“Trying to save us all,” Monk answered.

Pyotr stayed with Marta. He pulled her flame close to his, not enough to be consumed, but so he could feed her his strength, let her know what she had to do, that she wasn’t alone. Likewise, he caught glimpses through her eyes, through her sharper senses.

He saw the column of roaring water. He felt a heat weakening and burning Marta. The air smelled like rotting fish and frightened both of them, a flow of dark water, from their shared nightmares.

Deadlier than any river.

But they faced it together.

Marta skirted around the gaping hole that swallowed the water so thirstily. It had to be stopped.

There was only one way.

Pyotr knew and told Marta. Konstantin had explained in detail how all the equipment worked: about the explosive charges, about the radio transmitters, about the giant silo doors.

He had also told Pyotr about the lever.

Marta needed no help. She spotted the rod of steel behind a piece of equipment. It could close the silo doors and stop the flow into the heart of the world. Pyotr felt the soft hoots of fear coming from her. He felt them under his own ribs.

You can do it, Marta…

She struggled, her skin burned, her fur fell like pine needles, her knuckles blistered in contact with the spray of water on the rock.

Pyotr held her flame and willed her strength.

She reached the lever. It was tilted close to the floor. It needed to be raised straight up. She hunched a shoulder under it, gripped the length with both hands, and heaved with her legs.

The steel would not move.

As death flowed behind her in a burning current, Pyotr felt the strain in her back, in her legs, in her heart.

Her flame flickered in his hands.

Marta…

But the lever would not move.

Monk watched Marta struggle with the lever. She was too weak. It would not budge. Pyotr began breathing hard, sharing the old chimpanzee’s fear and pain.

“Why won’t it move?” Gray asked.

“C’mon, you damn monkey!” Kowalski yelled.

Monk leaned closer, placing his own palm on the screen. He tried to remember the brief glimpse into the room as he had hurried past. As he strained, a sharp jab of electric pain shot through his head. Images from another time and place flashed.

…a man covered in coal soot…a plunging ride in an ore car…a white grin against dusty skin…that’s a boy!…just like, Daddy…