Chapter 17: Truth Extraction
The silence of the moorland hung like a held breath after the cataclysm at the stones. A low, golden hum seemed to linger just at the edge of hearing, a phantom resonance from the nexus they’d become. Bruce stood in the center of the stone circle, his hands flexing at his sides. The others were a loose constellation of stunned, glowing figures. Camille’s fingertips traced her own lips, still tingling from the taste of Moira, still seeing Julianna’s dark hair fanned against the monolith. Ketut’s pronouncement—‘The stones remember this’—echoed, not just a statement, but a key turning in a lock deep within him.
Julianna leaned against a stone, her breathing finally steadying. “That… changed something. A calibration.” Her eyes, now a deep amber shot with rich gold, held Bruce’s. “It’s not just dormant power anymore. It’s awake. It’s listening.”
“And learning,” Moira added quietly, pushing herself up from where she’d collapsed on the dewy moss. Her freckles stood out like tiny constellations against her flushed skin. There was a new awareness in her, less raw, more channeled.
Bruce felt it too. A clarity. The overwhelming tidal force was still there, but the banks of his control had been reinforced, expanded by the shared communion. He could sense them now, all of them—a web of subtle energy, a thrumming network of awakened potential. Camille was a steady, warm glow; Lena a brilliant, incisive spark; Elara a cool, patient river of pale blue light; Sophia a disciplined, humming current of strength.
He raised his head. In the distance, a kilometer beyond the perimeter of the stones, a solitary, colorless spark in that web of life and light flared—a point of focused intent. Malign observation.
“We have a guest,” Bruce said, his voice low and final.
Camille stiffened. “One of them?”
“No. A loner. Professional, hidden. Watching.”
“We vanish,” Ketut suggested, her black-gold eyes scanning the horizon. “As we planned. Remain ghosts.”
Bruce felt the power coil inside him, not with exhaustion, but with anticipatory ease. “No. I’m done with hiding from shadows. We take the initiative.” He turned to her, to all of them. “If you run, they’ll only hunt harder. You show them the prey has fangs, you sever the hunter from his pack first.Isolate. Interrogate.”
He met Camille’s gaze. There was no fear in her eyes, only a hard, protective resolve. She gave a single, slow nod.
“Wait here,” Bruce said.
The command wasn’t just spoken. It was layered with a directive, a pulse of his newfound, shared authority that settled over the clearing like a command of nature itself. No one argued. They simply became still, statues in the moonlight.
Then he was gone.
Not a blur. An absence. The air didn’t even stir. It was a dismissal of physics itself, a trick of displacement they had only glimpsed at the airport in Naples. He flowed through the intervening space like a drop of rain merging with a pond—one location, then the other.
The man was a silhouette, prone in a shallow foxhole scraped into the peat, a state-of-the-art digital spotting scope fixed on the stones. To his senses, Bruce’s arrival was less a sound and more a sudden, gut-deep certainty of wrongness. He jerked, rolling, his hand flying towards the matte-black pistol at his side.
It was like moving in gel. Bruce stood over him, a hand extended. The space around the operative thickened, congealed, pressing down on him with impossible weight, pinning him to the wet earth. He could barely draw breath. His fingers twitched uselessly inches from his weapon.
In the next instant, the crushing sensation shifted, becoming a sickening lurch. The world snapped around him. One moment he was buried in the soggy moor, the next he was sprawled on his back in the damp grass at the very center of the circle he’d been watching, the looming stones now surrounding him like judge and jury.
The women were there, arranged in a loose half-circle. Camille, hands on hips. Julianna, arms crossed. The others, expressionless.
The operative gasped, panic flooding his nervous system. Trained composure shattered by an impossibility. He tried to sit up.
Bruce’s boot came down gently but firmly on his chest, not crushing, but removing all possibility of movement. The power that held him was absolute, invisible, and terrifying.
“You will answer our questions,” Bruce said, his voice devoid of anger, cold as the stones. It wasn’t a request. It was a directive, a force that wormed past the man’s tactical indoctrination and gripped the core of his will.
The man stared up. The man before him was just that—a man, albeit powerfully built. But his eyes… in the moonlight, they seemed to swirl, hazel fractals shot through with flecks of molten gold that seemed to smolder with an internal light. It was a predator’s gaze, ancient and indifferent.
He tried to resist. A lifetime of black-ops conditioning screamed for silence. But the will pressing on his mind was a hydraulic press. It felt like his skull might crack. A whimper escaped his lips. He gave up. “Who do you work for?”
“Branch… of Special Access… it’s a black budget,” the man choked out, his voice tight with strain and terror. “Siphoned from governments. Off-the-books treaties. We’re like the men… the men in black. The quiet ones.”
“Who’s in charge? And where are they?”
The man swallowed, his throat dry. “Above me? Planning, strategy. The Summit. Top-level command is… Area 51. Not the airfield.Underground. It’s the biggest military complex in the world. Sixteen levels. Goes deeper.”
Bruce’s foot didn’t waver. “What’s there, Bruce asks?”
“Labs.Experiments. Asset storage. Containment for the… the Leaders.” He paused, his face pale. “They are not human.”
The circle went impossibly still. Even the wind seemed to hold.
Bruce leaned in slightly, the gold flecks in his eyes brightening. “Bruce asks what are they?”
The single word was a whisper of pure dread.
“Nephilim.”
Bruce remained silent for a long moment, processing the biblical weight of it. Connections snapped into place—the ancient power at the cairns, the different tiers of ability, the mythic scope of it all.
“Biblical entities?” he said, almost to himself. “The children of men and angels?”
The man on the ground gave a desperate, jerky nod, tears of defeat and terror now streaking through the camo paint on his face. “They called themselves that. In the oldest texts. But they are… are what remained. What stayed behind. What ruled.”
“What do they want with us?”
The operative’s eyes darted to the women, back to Bruce. “You threaten the hierarchy. They monitor power, anomalies. They hoard it. Eliminate it. They want to remain dominant. Over the thousands of years… their long lives… they’ve become quite evil.”
The way he said ‘quite evil’ was chilling. A clinical assessment, not a moral judgment.
“Bruce says what is Cage?” The question cut through the air.
“One of them. Full-blooded. Operative. A killer.” The words tumbled out now, a desperate catharsis. “Enjoys murder. Likes difficult power problems. A specialist in putting things down. But you… you are stronger. He can’t do what you just did to me. Teleportation, molecular binding… that’s different. That’s above.” He sucked in a breath. “Although don’t underestimate him.”
“Why are you working for them?” Camille asked, her voice sharp.
He looked at her, the confession complete now. “They have my wife. My kids. Sub-level three, residential quadrant. They have all of our families. Everyone in Field Ops. They take the best military personnel, special forces, intel… and recruit them. Or kill them and wipe their families. It’s a leash.”
The information hung over the clearing, a toxic miasma. A global conspiracy rooted not just in secrecy, but in hostage-taking, run by beings considered mythological. The original sin.
Bruce finally lifted his foot. He stood looking down, his expression unreadable. The power that held the man pressed down one last moment, then vanished. The operative lay there, not even trying to get up, utterly broken.
Bruce looked down at him, not with pity, but with a cold calculus that was somehow more terrifying than outright rage. “While I understand your dilemma,” he said, his voice flat, “I can’t feel sorry for you. You know why? Because that doesn’t wash the blood off. That just makes it greyer, but it’s still there. You were trying to murder me and my family. To put us in your labs. Sentiment for a slaver doesn’t stop the next drone they send, or the next. It just makes you weak.”
He turned away. “Julianna.”
She stepped forward, her expression mirroring his detached resolve.
“We’re not murderers,” Bruce said. “Not tonight.”
Julianna raised a hand. Tendrils of dense, soundless force wrapped around the prone man’s head like a neural net. A soft golden shimmer pulsed. His eyes fluttered shut.Not dead. Deeply, infinitely asleep. The best neurological interment could offer—a temporary, vacated storage unit. He’d wake with a headache days or weeks from now, in a place far from here, remembering nothing but his last thoughts—his family’s faces. Bruce’s strategy: a message without a body, an utter mystery that would cause more disruption than a corpse.
Bruce’s gaze swept across the stone circle, the slate floor, then to his wives, his loyal flame-tempered company. The scent of worn earth, blooming night jasmine, and electrified sweat coated the air. His moment of decision.