Chapter 21 - The Genesis Signal
Isabel felt the sickening sensation of weightlessness.
She threw herself sideways, her fingers clawing into the shifting shale of the cliff edge, her left arm locking around Naira’s waist with desperate, crushing strength. Rocks tumbled past them into the void, crashing into the white dust below.
They hung suspended over the abyss.
Isabel’s fingertips were torn to ribbons on the sharp rock, blood dripping down her wrists. With a final, agonizing heave that popped her broken shoulder completely out of its socket, she swung Naira onto a narrow ledge of solid granite three feet below the rim, rolling her own battered body after the child.
Above them, the canyon was silent. The crawler was gone. Halden was gone, buried under fifty thousand tons of shattered mesa rock.
The dust began to settle.
Isabel lay on her side, trembling uncontrollably, the cold mountain wind biting into her open wounds. She reached out, her bloody fingers gently brushing the hair away from Naira’s forehead.
"We made it..." Isabel choked out, a ragged, weeping laugh tearing from her throat. "Naira, we made it out. It's over."
Naira’s eyes opened.
They were not golden. They were not brown.
They were pitch black, reflecting the purple sky like polished obsidian.
The child sat bolt upright with mechanical precision. She turned her head toward the horizon. Slowly, terrifyingly, the scar across the back of her head did not close—it peeled wide open like a flowering bud, revealing a crystalline, multifaceted sphere of blinding silver that pulsed with an unbearable, blinding white radiance.
A pure, high-frequency tone shot up from the child's head, cutting through the clouds like a spear of solid light, piercing the upper stratosphere.
Far to the north, across the jagged horizon fifty miles away, a matching pillar of white light suddenly erupted from the peak of Black Ridge.
A second later, thirty miles to the west, another light ignited atop the Iron Mountains.
Then a third.
Isabel watched in paralyzed horror as the distant lights began to answer Naira’s signal.
And then, she felt an unbearable, burning itch beneath her own skin.
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Isabel raised her trembling, blood-soaked right hand to her face.
Beneath the clear skin of her fingernails, running along the veins of her forearms like an army of living silver ants, thousands of tiny, luminous threads were beginning to crawl toward her skull.
