Page 24 of The Gathering
Zodak moved again. Slower now. His steps feeling careful. Cautious.
“He’s seeing something,” Bishop said on his left.
“Indeed he is,” Seer agreed quietly.
“How many of those lenses does he have?” Shank asked behind him.
“I think that was the last one.”
“Oh shit, here goes the real deal,” Hurricane muttered as Zodak raised his hand and flipped up the final lens. With hisnaked eyes, he very slowly tilted his head right. Then left at the same pace. Again he moved around the body. This time, his steps moved faster.
He stopped when he reached his head again and looked right at Seer. He gave one shake of his head.
“What does that mean?” Bishop asked.
“He can see nothing,” he whispered, stirring the divine things in Seer.
“Bruuhhhh,” Hurricane said under his breath with certain doom.
“I hope he uses that badass hand,” Spook whispered behind him somewhere.
“Hell yeah,” Nitro agreed, eager. “Blast the answers out of his ass.”
****
Zodak’s eyes burned with the unsettling conclusion. No malevolence. Only a sterile void, just as the Bishop said.
Staring down at the bound man, his brain still attempted to find a point that would trigger his biochemical entanglement. But with no trauma or malice, his gift just slipped off.
Whether or not this was an intentional design would require him to touch.
Zodak lowered to his knees and placed his index finger along the side of his neck.Analyze energy. Low-intensity draw.
Vibration hummed through the haptic feedback system in his palm as the sensors fed the data directly into his nervous system. The vibration entered clean, high, and unnaturally regulated.
Zodak mentally pushed the command further.Locate the source.
His sensors reached deeper. The hum in his hand suddenly shattered into a high-frequency tremor, making his power modulators shriek with a frequency they couldn’t process.
Zodak’s neural interface triggered an emergency shutdown right as a kinetic shockwave erupted from the man’s body and hit him in the chest. The blast ripped Zodak off his feet and sent him flying into the glass wall with a bone-rattling force.
He hit the floor, gasping for air, his cybernetic hand twitching and spitting hot sparks.
The muffled sound of pounding boots reached his ears, Seer’s face before him, blue eyes boring into him. “Can you hear me? Zodak!”
His hearing cleared as his hand’s system rebooted. “Bishop is correct,” he said, winded, gripping Seer and King Dalk’s arm as they helped him stand. “There is something inside him that does not want to be discovered.” He looked at Seer for many seconds. “You must touch him,” Zodak realized.
****
Seer held Zodak’s sharp gaze, then glanced over his shoulder at Sinrik.
“I can assist,” King Dalk said.
“No, brother,” Zodak warned as Seer approached the mystery man on the floor. “Only him.”
Seer lowered to his knees and stared at the peaceful face. The first question for Seer was thewhatof him. Human or machine? Or both?
Maggie had touched him and it had produced several dozen prophetic pages. Spook had pried her away and he now wondered how many more pages she’d needed to draw. He wished he’d spoken to her.
