Pentecost (30 page)

***

Hearing Faye’s scream, Morgan groaned and rolled over onto her side, sharp pain stabbing through her ribs and into her chest. Wounded but not out just yet, she was lucky Jake had appeared when he did. She fleetingly wondered why he had come back, after leaving in such a definitive way. She could see Joseph examining the stones at the table near the pyre and by the look on his face, they were real. He saw her looking at him.

 
“It seems we will have our sacrifice today, after all. You and your sister, the twins, are the perfect final offering for the stones. Michael doesn’t yet have your energy but he will soon. The stones will heal him and restore his mind and we shall be true brothers again.”

 
They heard shots down in the rainforest, and Joseph smiled.

 
“I wouldn’t expect Jake to rescue you again, Morgan. We’ll summon the new Pentecost now. Finally the twelve stones are together again.”

 
He wheeled Michael closer to the pyre. Faye lay still now, her eyes on the little figure of Gemma on the ground. Morgan looked around desperately for something she could use to stop this madness. Joseph placed six of the stones in a bag of netting and draped it around his brother’s neck. He paused to wipe some drool from Michael’s mouth and whispered, “Not long now. Soon you’ll be restored to me.”

 
In that moment, Morgan saw that his fanaticism stemmed from a deep love of his wounded brother, and she understood that both she and Everett would both do anything to save what remained of their family. Then he lit a taper and held it to the bottom of the pyre and Faye began to scream again.

 
As the flames started to catch at the base of the pyre, storm clouds gathered over the Biosphere and turned the sky black from the nearby town of Oracle to as far away as Tucson in the Catalina foothills. It was as if a heavy lid of cloud had dropped over the area, the shadow darkening to a radius of only a few kilometers. Lightning began to flicker inside the clouds, metallic blue streaks against the burnt orange sky lit with the final rays of the smothered sun. Purple sheets of rain bruised the land, punishing the saguaro cacti as they raised their dusty gray arms to God like desperate believers. Crimson and silver-blue cracks broke the clouds and hurtled to earth. Jagged lightning strikes came closer to the stepped ziggurat of the Biosphere as the earthy grumble of thunder rattled the windows of the adobe houses nearby. High above the clouds, in an event not seen for two thousand years, the eye of the comet storm reached the Earth’s atmosphere.

 
Inside the glass dome, Joseph laughed and shouted up to heaven.

 
“It has begun. The twelve are reunited and I call down this power from heaven.”

 
Clouds covered the rocky outcrops surrounding the Biosphere, their tops shrouded in thick swirling darkness as the wind grew in intensity and volume, pounding the structure and engulfing it in fury. The howling increased as the rain pounded down, wind whipping it into the sides of the structure with increasing speed. The steel creaked and moaned, trying to hold together beneath the ferocity of the storm. Lightning crackled even closer, luminous veins connecting sky to earth as electricity supercharged the air.

 
The first strike hit the north side of the Biosphere ziggurat, lighting the rainforest in brilliant magnesium white and the deep explosion of thunder followed immediately. The storm was on top of them. Forked lightning split the sky, visible branches breaking into splinters of light while thick bolts smashed into the glass and steel. Wind tornadoed the building, encasing the Biosphere in its own hellish vortex. Then the first cracks appeared in the glass and spread quickly, raining shards down on the remaining guards below. Joseph seemed unaware of the falling glass, reveling in the power of the storm but his men ran for the exits, unwilling to risk their lives for this madman. Torrents of water poured down on them now, and Joseph held his hands up to the unseen forces as the wind whipped around him.

 
Morgan rolled over and crawled towards her sister, moving slowly but surely out of the line of Joseph’s sight. He was totally manic now, cackling and dancing in the rain and the wind. The stones were glowing as if they were sculpted from volcanic magma, torn from inside the earth. Joseph held the largest in his outstretched hands towards the splintering roof. He was oblivious to them now, focused only on the stones and the storm. Morgan climbed onto the pyre behind Faye and pulled the knife from her boot. She cut the bonds that held her sister to the smoldering pyre, the smoke of the wet wood hiding them from Everett. Morgan almost felt pity as she looked down at them, the brothers together, one a silent witness to the other’s madness. Then she saw Gemma lying on the ground, soaked by the rain. Pulling her sister off the side of the pyre, they crawled around to where the little girl lay motionless by the edge of the rainforest where she had been dumped by the fleeing guards.

 
Lifting Gemma and holding the little face tightly to her neck, Faye started for the exit, stumbling a little as Morgan covered her escape. Then Jake appeared, sweeping Gemma into his arms and helping Faye down the stairs. He met Morgan’s eyes briefly and she nodded, no time for words. It was enough for now that he had come back for her. They ran down through the rainforest and onto the desert mesa, past the ocean. No one stopped them. The men had deserted Joseph as the end seemed to be in sight and the Biosphere was clearly failing in the face of the tempest. As they reached the exit, the creaking of the structure turned to a mechanical scream as the supports started to break and buckle under the dense rain and hail, lightning superheating the steel.

 
As they ran from the building, a bolt of pure scarlet scythed apart the clouds above the Biosphere. Morgan turned to see it strike the platform where Joseph stood next to Michael, his hands on the wheelchair. It seemed to flicker around them gently, lighting their limbs and touching their necks where the stones hung then it became a pillar of flame connecting heaven to earth. Growing in intensity, it lit the scene in a crimson glow. Morgan watched, transfixed, as Michael rose up out of his chair and embraced his brother, the two frozen in the ruby light from above that split into a million drops as the rain hammered down. Was it a miracle, she thought, and in that split second, Morgan cast aside her skepticism and believed in the power of the stones, a divine phenomenon ignited by the storm. Then the light around the men exploded and they were lost in the glare. Morgan blinked and the moment was gone. Had she really seen something deep in the flames? She and the others ran out into the rain to escape the destruction as the Biosphere collapsed behind them.

Biosphere 2, Oracle, Arizona, USA
 
May 27, Pentecost Sunday, 11.52pm

Firefighters and police arrived at the Biosphere, drawn by the storm and the inferno that had been seen across the plains to the town of Oracle. An ambulance crew rushed to meet the group as they emerged from the dome, coughing in the smoke. Jake squeezed Morgan’s hand and then disappeared towards the police vehicles. She watched a paramedic work on Gemma as she held her arm around her sobbing sister. She borrowed a cellphone and dialed David’s number, handing the phone to Faye when he answered in a desperate tone. They belonged together and only now was her guilt beginning to lift.
 

Morgan turned to watch as the structure of the Biosphere burnt furiously in the night, the fires still fierce even in the bucketing monsoon. She held her face up to the storm, feeling the wash of cool rain running down her neck, hiding the tears of relief now that her family were safe again.
 

***

 
Hours later, Morgan sat in one of the Biosphere’s outlying adobe houses watching Faye and Gemma sleeping on the bed. Faye was wrapped around the little girl, her body a protective shield. Morgan reached out to gently brush a curl from her sister’s forehead. She thought of what these two meant to her and how she would have given her life to save them. It was time to go home. But first, she wanted to find Jake.
 

Standing, she looked at herself in the mirror on the rough wall. Her eyes were bloodshot, skin bruised from the beating and still sooty from the ash. Her arm was in a new sling but her t-shirt was dirty and she smelled of smoke. She smiled. This wasn’t Morgan the academic anymore and she was glad of it. Despite Jake’s betrayal, he had come back and he had helped her find this side of herself again.

 
She walked out into the Arizona dawn, the first rays of the sun inching over the horizon. The fires still smoldered but she could see firefighters and police now sifting through the ash. Jake stood at the edge of the debris, his back to her. She could see the strength in his stance, the muscles in his back through the torn shirt. There was so much to say but she knew it would go unsaid by both of them. As she walked up behind him, he turned, silhouetted against the russet sky.

 
“Hi,” Morgan said, smiling up at him.
 

 
“Hi yourself. How are Faye and Gemma?”

 
“They’re sleeping now.”

 
They both fell silent and then spoke at once.

 
“Jake ...”

 
“Morgan ...”

 
Laughing, they turned back to look at the shattered ruins, the moment broken.

 
“They only found one skeleton,” Jake said.

 
“What? How can that be?” Morgan looked puzzled, remembering the vision she had seen. “Nothing could have survived that inferno.”

 
“It’s true. ARKANE is working with the police to ID the body we have but they were twins and the remains are burnt beyond recognition so we don’t know which one it is.”

 
Morgan looked at him, “And what about the stones?”

 
“I’ll find them, don’t worry. It’s time you took your family home.”

 
As they watched the last of the fires burn down, Jake reached for Morgan’s hand. Her fingers entwined with his, united for a moment at the end of the storm.

London, England.
 
2 weeks later.

 
Morgan had been invited to London for a debriefing on the mission with ARKANE Director Elias Marietti. She decided to accept for a sense of closure, and she knew that part of her wanted to see Jake again. There was so much that remained unsaid between them and she had left that night before he had found the stones. Perhaps they hadn’t survived the inferno after all?
 

She was met at the official entrance of ARKANE by Marietti’s secretary and taken up to the Director’s office. He rose to greet her and indicated a chair. She glanced at the art on the walls, the books on his shelves and saw evidence of the latent power Ben had spoke of.

“You’ve been a great asset to us, Morgan. Thank you for helping our mission to retrieve the Pentecost stones.”

 
“You’re mistaken, Director. It was always my mission. I was never there to help ARKANE find the stones, I only wanted to help my family. You would have sent them to their deaths just to save some relics of the early Church.”

 
Marietti gave a thin smile.

 
“But you’re intrigued by ARKANE, aren’t you, Morgan? You saw something in the flames that was evidence of another reality. You know some of what we research here and it fascinates you. We have many mysteries to solve, many unique areas of research you could be part of. There are things happening in this world that you can only imagine, the stuff of angelic dreams and demonic nightmares.”

 
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.
 

 
“I want you to join us,” Marietti replied.

 
There was a sharp intake of breath from behind her and Morgan turned to see Jake in the doorway. He was clean shaven and wearing a slate grey suit, his white corkscrew scar standing out against his tanned skin. He was a handsome incarnation of the man she had travelled with, who had been beaten, bruised and smudged with ash from the flames of Pentecost. But this man was a stranger, his face stony as Marietti ignored his entrance and continued.

 
“We need a top researcher who can help us solve some of these mysteries, someone with your expertise in biblical matters and psychology of religion and someone who can hold her own in the field. Of course, you would have access to all our research.”

 
Morgan thought of the database of which she had only touched the surface, the amazing resources ARKANE had and the secrets they protected. Marietti certainly knew how to tempt her professional side. Being back in staid academia for such a short time already, she was already longing for adventure. But then she thought of what Faye and Gemma had been through, of how close she had come to the flames of Everett’s fire and the bullets of Thanatos. She started to speak but Marietti held up his hand.

 
“Just think about it. Right now, you want to see this.”

 
He picked up a plain black case from behind his desk and held it out to her. It was dark wood, inscribed with tongues of fire that were picked out in gold leaf.