Chapter 18: The Old World's Echo
The decision to go from defense to offense split the Athenaeum council down the middle. Fear was a powerful argument.
"We are farmers and librarians, not soldiers!" argued Gabriel, the same man who had wanted to deal with the Akudama. "Our walls are our strength. Venturing out there is suicide!"
"And waiting for the walls to fall is what?" Ade shot back, his voice low and dangerous. "A sensible retirement plan? That thing out there isn't going to get bored and leave. It's going to get smarter. Stronger."
Uche, his face a roadmap of new wrinkles, held up a hand for silence. "Gabriel is not wrong about what we are. But Ade is not wrong about the threat." He turned to Dr. Adisa. "Doctor. Is it possible? Can we fight this... Keeper?"
Adisa steepled his fingers, his gaze distant. "The Crimson Hour was a cataclysm. This is an invasion. In a cataclysm, you hide. In an invasion, you must disrupt the command structure. Theoretically, eliminating a coordinating intelligence could cause the lesser creatures to revert to baser, more manageable instincts. It could buy us years. Perhaps even a generation."
That was the word that settled it. A generation. A future for Ngozi. For the other children who had been born in the shadow of the crimson sky.
The vote was cast. We would hunt the hunter.
Our plan was simple, which was all we were capable of. Ade would lead a small, hand-picked team of our best scouts to locate the Keeper's exact lair and observe its patterns. My task, with a separate team, was more daunting: to find the tools for the kill.
We weren't soldiers. But the old world had been full of them, and they had left their toys behind.
Using the tunnel systems, now expanded and mapped with obsessive detail, we emerged deep in the city's former commercial district. Our target: an armored police transport depot Adisa had marked on an old city planning map.
The world above was a graveyard reclaimed by new, terrible life. Phosphorescent moss crawled up the sides of buildings, and the air hummed with the clicks and chitters of unseen things. We moved like ghosts, our footsteps silent on the cracked asphalt.
The depot was a fortress in its own right. The main gate was a mangled wreck, torn open by some long-ago struggle. Inside, it was a time capsule of desperation. Skeletons in tactical vests lay where they fell, their weapons empty beside them. They had made their last stand here.
But in the back, in the vehicle bay, we struck gold.
Two intact SWAT trucks, their tires flat but their armored bodies still imposing. And in the armory, its door blasted open from the inside, we found it. Not just rifles and pistols. A .50 caliber heavy sniper rifle, still in its hardened case. And four M72 LAWs—Light Anti-Tank Weapons. Single-use, disposable rocket launchers.
I ran my hand over the cold, green tube of a LAW. It felt alien, a relic of a scale of violence I could barely comprehend. But as I thought of the Keeper's obsidian form, its four arms directing a horde of monsters, it also felt like the only language it might understand.
While we looted the depot, Ade's team was in position, hidden in the skeleton of a high-rise overlooking the financial district. His report came crackling over our salvaged radio that evening.
"Target confirmed. It's using the old Stock Exchange building as a nest. It's... busy."
"Busy how?" I asked, my hand tight on the radio.
"It's not just staring at the walls, Emeka. It's building something. The Rippers are bringing it scrap metal, wiring, even old computer monitors. It's assembling them. I don't know what it is, but it doesn't look like a weapon. It looks like a... a console."
A cold dread, deeper than any fear of claws or teeth, trickled down my spine. It wasn't just a strategist. It was a technologist. It was learning to use our own world's corpse against us.
"The plot thickens," a new, staticky voice cut into our frequency. A voice I hadn't heard in two years, smooth, amused, and laced with electronic distortion. Hacker.
My blood ran cold. "Where are you?"
"Watching the same channel, it seems. You're thinking too small, little mouse. You see a monster to be shot. I see a competitor."
"What are you talking about?" Ade's voice crackled from the other radio.
"The Keeper isn't just organizing beasts. It's tapping into the residual dimensional energy. It's creating a network. My network." Hacker's voice lost its amusement, turning cold and possessive. "It's trying to hack the ghost of the world. And I can't have that."
Silence hung over the radio waves, heavy with implication. The Akudama were still out there. And Hacker saw the Keeper not as an existential threat, but as a rival stepping on his turf.
"Your pop-guns might get its attention," Hacker continued, his voice dripping with condescension. "But if you want to actually kill it, you'll need to sever its connection. You need to crash its server. You need me."
The choice was untenable. Trust the devil we knew, who had burned our home and killed our friends, to help us kill a newer, more alien devil? Or go it alone, with our salvaged weapons and desperate courage, against an enemy that was literally rewriting the rules of the world?
Ade's voice was a grim whisper in my ear, from his radio to mine. "Emeka... he's a monster. But he's our monster."
I keyed the radio, my heart a stone in my chest. "What's your price, Hacker?"
His laugh was a dry crackle. "Why, the same as always. I want control. You get to live in the world. I get to own its operating system. Do we have a deal?"
We had stopped one apocalypse. Now, to have a chance against the next, we had to make a pact with the one who had profited from the first. The war for Earth had begun, and our first, most terrible decision, was to recruit a general from the enemy's ranks.