39
Briefing
Christina and Ammu gathered everyone back into the classroom after breakfast, where there was now a television in front of the whiteboard with a DVD player hooked up to it. Mackenzie was grateful when Christina sat down with them at the far end. Leaving one of the six chairs empty all morning would have been a bit too reminiscent of a missing man formation, and if Mackenzie was feeling Rush’s absence, Sketch and Sam were taking it ten times harder.
Mackenzie had expected Sketch’s glum demeanor, but Sam’s vehement reaction surprised her, making her wonder whether Sam had liked the charismatic gamer more than she had let on. Mackenzie sat in the chair near the door on purpose, so that Sam and Sketch would both have to sit somewhere in the middle. Whether they liked it or not, neither one of them needed to feel any more alone right now than they already did.
In the end, Sketch sat next to Mackenzie, and Kaitlyn sat next to Christina. Daniel hesitated for a moment but ultimately sat next to Sketch, and Mackenzie nodded at him thankfully, leaving Sam to perch sullenly between Daniel and Kaitlyn. Ammu took his place near the television, cleared his throat, and began speaking.
“What I am about to tell you has its roots in ancient history, but I believe the historical facts will be difficult to take in—and even more difficult to believe—without a modern reference point. The video I am about to show you took place in Afghanistan. It is one of the events that prompted the development of the Intuition Assessment Battery.”
Ammu turned the television on, and the image that appeared was a still shot of a helicopter, viewed from above.
“This footage is highly classified. I can only show you the very brief segment that applies to our work here at the ICIC. It was captured by a drone, which was filming a certain mission, the details of which are not important. What is important is what happens in the next seven seconds of real time, so watch closely. I’ll play it at half speed to make it easier to see.”
Ammu pressed a button on the remote, and the video started moving. There was no sound, but the blades of the helicopter began to turn, and the camera tilted oddly for a moment before returning to its original angle. A second later, something raced into the picture from offscreen. Even at half speed, it moved incredibly fast. The image was blurred by the movement of the camera, but still, it was clear enough—whatever it was flew right up to the helicopter and caught the main blade in its hands, stopping the rotor and sending the copter into a wild spin.
“What the hell?” Sam blurted out, sitting up straighter and staring at the screen.
The image stopped again as Ammu paused the video.
“That, unfortunately, is all I have been permitted to show you. The helicopter crashed not long afterward, killing the soldiers on board. The military believed this to be some kind of bizarre mechanical failure, as they could not see what you have all just seen for yourselves. But suffice it to say they were soon convinced there was more going on than modern science could account for.”
“What was that thing?” Kaitlyn asked.
“You saw it?” Sketch asked in surprise, looking across Daniel and Sam to catch her eye.
“Yeah,” she confirmed.
“We all did, Sketch,” Mackenzie assured him.
“I didn’t, actually,” Christina said, her soft voice sounding troubled. “But I’d like to know what you all saw.”
“Sketch?” Ammu prompted. “Would you be willing to draw what you just saw for Christina?”
Sketch looked around nervously. He had not shown anyone any of his dark drawings since the whole Mr. Lockhart incident—not even Rush—and he didn’t want to start now. They all said they saw something, but was it the same thing he had seen? What if they thought it looked different? What if his drawing made them scared of him? Or made them think he was crazy?
“I don’t have my drawing stuff with me,” Sketch protested. “Maybe everyone else could just describe it?”
“Sure, Sketch,” Daniel agreed immediately, and Sketch gave him a small but grateful smile. “It looked like a body made of wind. Like a tornado sort of, only more like the size of a person. And it had a face, with dark holes for eyes and another hole for its mouth.”
In truth, Daniel was extremely nervous about describing it for Christina, especially given how strange Ammu had seemed yesterday. But Ammu wasn’t behaving oddly now, as though showing people videos of wind monsters taking down helicopters were a perfectly normal thing to do. And, anyway, Daniel had promised Rush he’d look out for Sketch. If it had been his own little brother in the hot seat, Daniel would have jumped in for him, too.
“It had lightning in its hands,” Kaitlyn added, not wanting Daniel to have to describe it alone, “but I didn’t see any feet. Just a tail that narrowed at the bottom.”
Sketch quietly exhaled a long sigh of relief. That was exactly what he had seen.
“That’s how Ammu described it,” Christina admitted. “I just wanted to know how it looked to you.”
Just wanted to check Ammu’s story, you mean, Sam thought, but Ammu didn’t seem troubled. In fact, he smiled at her comment. Probably glad he finally has someone to back him up.
Ammu turned the television off and began speaking again.
“What do you know about Alexander the Great?” he asked, seeming to change the subject entirely.
“He conquered Persia for the Greeks in something like three hundred BC, more or less,” Sam offered.
“He was a brilliant strategist,” Mackenzie chimed in. “They still teach him in military history, even today.”
“Excellent!” Ammu agreed. “History remembers him as a conqueror, but he was much more than that. Persian mythology of Alexander’s day describes a vast, spiritual realm made up of both light and dark forces that had claimed our own world as its battlefield. There were good spirits and bad, as well as a whole host of marvelous animals and even plants that could fight for the forces of life or death, depending on which side controlled them.”
At these words, Daniel and Kaitlyn shared a surreptitious glance over Sketch’s head, remembering the gryphon in the workshop.
“This spiritual world was invisible to most people, but Alexander had been a student of Aristotle, who had taught him to master the pathways of his mind. As a result, he could see that these myths were more than just stories. There was a great war between good and evil taking place all around him, and he vowed, when he succeeded his father to the throne as a young man, that he would fight here in our world with the forces of good, taking back those lands in which evil had been winning the battle, unbeknownst to most of mankind.
“He learned how to summon the forces of good to aid him, and he taught others to do so as well—to see through the eyes of the unconscious mind. These men became his most trusted generals. Together, they held the forces of darkness at bay, not only in Greece and Persia but throughout as much of the ancient world as they could protect. Unfortunately, Alexander died while he was still relatively young. Without his leadership, the forces of darkness pushed back against his army, exploiting the weaknesses within his generals to turn them against each other, creating a rash of civil wars that threatened to tear apart all that he had built.
“But Alexander’s true mission had had nothing to do with conquering lands or expanding the Greek empire. He had dedicated himself in every spare moment, in every brief respite during the war he was waging against the forces of darkness, to divining the ultimate weapon he needed to end the war once and for all: the secret to banishing all the invisible spirits, both good and bad, back to their own world. The forces of darkness ended his life, but not before he had completed his work and shared it, cautiously, with only the most trusted of all his generals.”
With these words, Ammu reached into his satchel and produced his leather-bound book. He opened it to a spot near the back and pulled out several photographs, which he handed to Mackenzie. Glancing through them, she saw a myriad of statues—some of real animals and others of strange, mythological creatures—engaged in battle throughout a cavernous space, with what looked like an Egyptian pyramid in its center.
Not wanting to miss what he was saying, she handed the photos to Sketch, who pored over each one for a long time. When he came to the photograph of the seal on the tomb itself, his eyes widened in surprise, and he glanced up at Ammu to the symbol that glowed over his heart. It was, indeed, one and the same. He chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, deciding to go through all the photos again before finally handing them on to Daniel.
“These generals took his body from its resting place and secreted it away,” Ammu continued, “hiding it from all the world. They buried him in a sacred tomb, concealing it within an ancient Zoroastrian temple that had long been abandoned, and there, they performed the ritual he had taught them just before his death, sealing the rift between the worlds, so that no summoner, no matter how great, could again bridge the gap between this world and the other, for as long as the seal remained unbroken.
“The generals then went their separate ways, swearing each other to secrecy, but each promised to protect the knowledge, should it ever again be needed, by teaching this history—along with the ancient secrets of the true summoners—to a single, trusted member of the next generation. Sometimes this would be a son or daughter, sometimes a niece or nephew, sometimes a promising student of no blood relation at all, but always only one, who would, in turn, promise to do the same.
“Over the centuries, some of these lines of knowledge have been cut short, their keepers having departed unexpectedly from this life before their great secret could be passed on. I do not know of any others besides myself who remain, but there may well be a few, scattered throughout the world. How many, I have no way of knowing. It is not as though we advertise.”
He smiled when he said this—his usual, humble smile—and Mackenzie realized with a start how badly he had been wanting to tell them what he was finally telling them now.
“Seven years ago, after more than two millennia, a team of archaeologists discovered the tomb of Alexander the Great, buried deep beneath what is today an Islamic mosque—the mosque, in turn, having been built many centuries ago atop the site of the ancient Zoroastrian temple. Without understanding the implications of their actions, they broke the seal, enabling the ancient rituals of summoning to be completed successfully once again.”
Sam looked down at her hands and then shared a brief glance with Kaitlyn before pointedly looking away.
“Unfortunately, as you can see from the video, the rituals can be used for devastating results. Whether the knowledge has been retained by another line of descent from those ancient generals, or whether there exists a Zoroastrian sect which has also managed to protect these secrets across the centuries, or whether the process is simply being rediscovered by those who possess the strongest of pathways between the conscious and the unconscious mind, I do not know.
“What I do know is that the forces of darkness must not be released again upon an unknowing world. Which leads me to the ultimate point of this morning’s briefing: the true nature of the ICIC. We have brought you here for the sole purpose of completing a summoning ritual—hopefully, in fact, several such rituals—in a place where the process can be controlled and studied, so that we might learn how to put a stop to attacks of this nature.”
Ammu paused and turned the television back on, revealing the final image of the helicopter spinning out of control.
“Before more human lives are lost.”