The Queen

Chapter 2

Lomekwi 3, Turkana Kenya 2011

The desert wind screamed like a living thing.

Dr. Elias Carter pulled his scarf tighter around his face, the fine Ethiopian grit stinging his exposed skin like a swarm of angry wasps. Around him, the excavation team moved like ghosts through the swirling dust, their headlamps cutting weak yellow cones through the ochre haze.

"We should call it," shouted Dr. Lina Morales over the gale, her gloved hands clutching a buckling tent flap. "This storm's going biblical!"

Elias checked his seismograph for the twelfth time in as many minutes. The strange harmonic vibrations they'd detected three days ago were getting stronger, resonating at a frequency that made his fillings ache. "One more trench," he yelled back. "The anomaly's centered right—"

A thunderclap of splitting stone cut him off.

The ground between Trenches 4 and 5 erupted in a geyser of sand. The team dove for cover as something massive and angular thrust upward from the earth, its edges too precise, too straight to be natural geology.

When the dust settled, Elias was the first to crawl forward, his headlamp illuminating what looked like a black metallic obelisk rising twelve feet from the torn earth. Its surface was covered in spiraling glyphs that hurt to look at—not carved, but somehow grown into the material itself.

"Jesus Christ," whispered Lina as she joined him, her breath fogging in the suddenly frigid air. "That wasn't on any GPR scan."

Elias reached out a trembling hand. The moment his glove made contact, the glyphs ignited with cobalt-blue light, racing up the monolith in fractal patterns. Somewhere beneath them, the earth groaned like a waking giant.

Then the screaming started.

**+++**

Site Supervisor Mark Reynolds didn't so much die as unravel.

He'd been the first to touch one of the smaller artifacts—a palm-sized disc of that same black material they'd found scattered around the main dig site. When the glyphs on the obelisk activated, the disc in Mark's hands liquefied, flowing up his arms in obsidian tendrils.

The team watched in paralyzed horror as the substance crawled into his mouth, his nose, his tear ducts. His final shriek cut off abruptly when his jaw unhinged with a wet crack, his skull elongating, his spine twisting like warm taffy. Within seconds, whatever Mark had become collapsed into a twitching black puddle that evaporated into the suddenly static-charged air.

"Back to the trucks!" Elias roared, shoving stunned grad students toward the vehicles. "Now, now, NOW!"

But the Land Rovers wouldn't start. Every electrical system had fused the moment the obelisk activated.

**+++**

The thing that emerged from Trench 7 made no sense.

At first it seemed humanoid—tall, slender, its proportions just slightly wrong. Then the sand cascading off its form revealed the truth: its "skin" was a shifting lattice of black geometric plates, constantly rearranging itself in four-dimensional folds. Where a face should have been, there was only a smooth oval indentation filled with swirling blue mist.

It moved without walking, its feet never quite touching the ground. The sand parted before it like a receding tide.

Lina made a small, pathetic sound in her throat as the creature turned its non-face toward her. The blue mist pulsed in what might have been recognition.

Then it spoke.

Not with sound, but directly into their brains, the words forming behind their eyeballs like remembered trauma:

"YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE AWAKENED US."

**+++**

Elias's mind fractured into pure animal panic. Around him, team members collapsed, some clutching their heads, others simply going limp as neural overload shut down their higher functions. Only Lina remained standing, though her nose bled freely down her dust-caked shirt.

The creature—no, the entity—gestured with a too-long arm toward the obelisk. The glyphs reconfigured themselves into something almost legible:

2.1 MYA

CONTAMINATION EVENT

QUARANTINE PROTOCOL INITIATED

Lina made a broken, laughing sound. "Three point three million years ago? That's when we dated the first tools. Oh God, we didn't discover anything. We tripped some kind of... cosmic burglar alarm."

The entity's head tilted at an impossible angle. The mental voice came again, quieter now, almost sorrowful:

"THE OTHERS ARE COMING. YOU WILL LEAD THEM TO US. THIS CANNOT BE PERMITTED."

Elias found his voice. "What others? Who are you?"

The blue mist in the entity's face swirled violently. For one terrifying second, Elias saw something in that mist—a city of impossible angles, a sky with three black suns, a great rift opening in the fabric of reality itself.

Then the pain hit.

**+++**

When the Ethiopian military found them two days later, Elias and Lina were the only survivors.

They sat side by side in the lee of the now-dormant obelisk, their eyes vacant, their clothes stiff with dried blood. Of the other fourteen team members, there was no trace—no bodies, no personal effects, not even disturbed sand to mark where they'd fallen.

The monolith's glyphs had returned to their dormant state. The anomalous tools were gone. The seismic anomalies had ceased.

And neither archaeologist could remember anything past breakfast three mornings prior.

As the choppers carried them away, neither noticed the matching scars on their right palms—tiny, star-shaped burns that pulsed faintly in time with the amber moon rising over the desert.

**+++**

Deep beneath the shifting sands, something vast and ancient completed its diagnostic cycle.

The quarantine had held.

For now.