The heat was a physical weight. It pressed down on my shoulders, squeezing the water from my body.
One step.
My boot sank into the sand.
Two steps.
"My tongue is swelling," Jean Chouan rasped. The smuggler was stumbling. His pirate swagger was gone, replaced by the jerky, puppet-like movements of severe dehydration.
"Keep walking," I said.
I checked the compass. The needle was spinning lazily. The magnetic field was still unstable from the EMP blast.
"North is a suggestion," I muttered.
I looked at Marshal Ney. The Bravest of the Brave was a ruin. His uniform was torn, his face blistered by the sun. He was carrying his musket like a crutch.
"Charles," Ney croaked. "Look."
He pointed.
I squinted through the heat haze.
A mirage. It had to be.
In the middle of the endless, bleaching white dunes, there was a stain of green.
Not the dusty grey-green of scrub brush.
Emerald green. Jungle green.
"Water," Chouan whispered. He started to run. A clumsy, shambling run.
"Wait!" I yelled. "It's not natural!"
I looked closer.
The plants weren't just sitting there. They were writhing.
Ferns as tall as trees uncurled in seconds, their fronds snapping open like whips. Vines crawled over the sand, visibly lengthening, hunting for purchase.
"The Terraforming Beam," I realized.
The Sun Engine hadn't just fired into the sky. The containment breach had sprayed energy into the desert.
"It's an acceleration zone," I said. "Evolution on steroids."
Chouan didn't listen. He reached the edge of the green circle. He fell to his knees beside a pool of water.
He scooped it up.
"Jean, don't!"
He drank.
He paused.
Then he laughed. A wet, joyous sound.
"It's sweet!" Chouan yelled. "It tastes like honey!"
I walked up to him. I checked the Geiger counter.
Click. Click. Click.
Not radiation. Life signs. The needle was buried in the red.
I looked at the pool.
It wasn't water. It was a thick, golden liquid. It glowed faintly, pulsing with a rhythm that matched my own heartbeat.
"Golden Ichor," I whispered.
The ancient texts in the library mentioned it. The Blood of Ra. The Silt of Life.
"Look at his leg," Ney said.
I looked.
Chouan had a deep gash on his calf from the fight in the library. It had been infected, oozing black pus.
Now, as the golden liquid dripped onto the wound, the flesh hissed.
Steam rose.
"Argh!" Chouan gritted his teeth. "It burns!"
"It's knitting," I said.
I watched in horror and fascination. The black rot vanished. Pink, healthy tissue grew over the bone. The skin closed up. In ten seconds, the wound was gone. Only a faint white scar remained.
"It's a cure," Ney whispered. He looked at the pool with hungry eyes. "It cures everything."
I dipped a flask into the liquid. It was warm.
"It's not a cure," I said. "It's fuel."
I looked at a flower near the water. It bloomed, turned a brilliant purple, dropped seeds, and withered to dust in the span of a minute.
"It accelerates the life cycle," I said. "It heals you by speeding up your cellular regeneration. But it burns your lifespan to do it."
"Who cares?" Chouan stood up. He jumped. He looked ten years younger. "I feel like I could fight a bull!"
"We fill the canteens," I ordered. "But use it only for emergencies. It's dangerous."
We knelt by the pool. The air was thick with oxygen. It made my head spin.
"With this..." Ney said, watching the golden liquid fill his flask. "We could heal the army. We could march across Russia in winter. We could live forever."
"Or we could burn out like matches," I said.
I capped my flask.
My mind went to Paris. To the man in the wheelchair.
Alex.
His disease was Timeline Rejection. His cells were dying because they didn't belong in this century. He was fading.
This forces cells to grow, I thought. It forces life to stick.
It was the variable I had been missing.
"Company!" Chouan hissed.
He dropped to the ground, drawing his knife.
I heard it too.
Thunder. But not from the sky.
From the sand.
Hoofbeats.
A dozen riders crested the dune.
They weren't British. They weren't French.
They wore flowing robes of silk and chainmail armor. Their horses were magnificent Arabians, foaming at the mouth.
"Mamluks," Ney cursed. "Raiders."
The lead rider saw us. He saw the golden pool.
He shouted something in Arabic. He pointed his scimitar at the water.
"They think it's holy," I said. "They saw the green light."
"They want the water," Chouan said.
"They want our heads," Ney corrected.
The Mamluks charged.
"Fire!" Ney shouted.
He raised his musket. Bang.
A rider fell. But eleven more kept coming.
I raised my LeMat revolver.
I aimed. Not at the riders.
"What are you doing?" Chouan yelled. "Shoot them!"
I was looking at the canopy above them.
Hanging from a massive, accelerated palm tree was a pod. It was the size of a watermelon, purple and throbbing.
Pressure.
If the plants grew this fast, their reproductive cycle was explosive.
"Physics," I whispered.
I pulled the trigger. The shotgun barrel of the LeMat.
BOOM.
The grapeshot shredded the stem of the pod.
It fell.
It hit the ground right in front of the charging horses.
SPLAT.
The pod didn't just break. It detonated.
A cloud of yellow spores exploded outward.
The horses ran into the cloud.
The effect was instant.
The spores hit the moist mucus membranes of the horses' noses. The accelerated growth kicked in.
Moss erupted from the horses' nostrils. Vines shot out of their mouths.
The animals panicked. They couldn't breathe. They bucked, throwing their riders into the sand.
The Mamluks screamed as the spores hit their faces. Green fuzz covered their eyes, their throats. They clawed at their skin, choking on rapid-growth fungus.
"My God," Ney whispered. He lowered his musket.
It was a massacre. But it wasn't war. It was biology weaponized.
"Run," I said. "Before the wind shifts."
We sprinted.
We ran through the jungle, dodging vines that tried to grab our ankles. We scrambled up the far dune, away from the green hell.
We collapsed on the other side, back in the dead, safe sand.
Behind us, the screams of the Mamluks faded.
Chouan looked at me. He looked terrified.
"You... you knew that would happen?"
"I calculated the probability," I lied. I didn't know. I just hoped.
I checked the flask in my pocket. The Golden Ichor. The Genesis Asset.
It was warm against my chest.
"We have the package," I said.
Ney looked at the flask.
"That stuff... it's power, Charles. Pure power. If we give it to the Emperor..."
"No," I said sharply.
I stood up. I brushed the sand off my knees.
"Napoleon is a soldier. He would put this in the water supply of the Grande Armée. He would create a legion of monsters that burn out in a month."
I looked North. Toward the sea. Toward Paris.
"This isn't for the Empire," I said. "This is for the Administrator."
"Your father?" Ney asked.
"My partner," I corrected. But my voice cracked.
I remembered Alex coughing blood into a handkerchief. I remembered him trying to hide his shaking hands.
He was dying to save me. To save this timeline.
"We are walking to the coast," I said. "We find a boat. We row if we have to."
"It's four hundred miles," Chouan said.
I took a sip from my canteen. Just water. No gold.
"Then start walking."
I looked back at the oasis one last time.
The jungle was already dying. The accelerated growth was eating itself. Brown rot was spreading from the center.
Entropy always wins, Alex had told me. You can't cheat the house.
Maybe, I thought, clutching the flask. But you can bribe the dealer.
I turned my back on the miracle and walked into the fire of the sun.