Reality Echo. James Axler

nodded in agreement. She turned back toward where Granny Epona sat with her protective cordon of mountain folk. The term “Granny” was a misnomer, as the water witch had the body of a woman in her twenties, lean and tight corded muscles beneath her protective furs and leathers. Her face, windburned to a deep tan by the cold mountaintop winds of this stretch of the Poconos in what used to be known as Pennsylvania, was relatively unlined, making any determination of her age difficult, though Brigid guessed that the woman was between forty and sixty. A breeze plucked at Epona’s black hair, tugging it aside like a curtain so that Brigid was able to see the water witch in profile.

      This was the second time that Brigid had met the woman. Their first meeting was when Brigid, Kane and Grant had arrived via interphaser to negotiate for the release of a small team of Cerberus explorers who had stumbled upon the mountain folk. Initially Epona and her people had been suspicious of outlanders, but their fear of outside interference was tempered by enough reason that the Appalachians didn’t execute them on the spot. It was a reprieve from the usual first contact that the three outlanders encountered, one of cold peace, both sides afraid to trust each other but too smart to make the first hostile move. Something had changed about Epona since then, and the flame-haired former archivist couldn’t quite place it. Given her observational skills and eidetic memory, the incongruence nibbled at her, but there was nothing concrete to quantify her suspicions.

      Epona looked up, as if she had noticed the attention locked on to her. “Has Kane appeared at the tree line?”

      “No,” Brigid answered.

      Grant’s lips curled in a sneer, but he kept his voice low so only Brigid could hear him. “You know, with our Commtacts, those primitive screwheads wouldn’t hear Kane even if he did turn his on.”

      Brigid sighed and fingered the Commtact attached to her jaw. The tiny unit was a two-part man-machine interface developed by Cerberus techs with the help of the scientists of Manitius. The little comm unit worn on the outside hooked up to implanted steel pintels and allowed Brigid to communicate with her partners, as well as keep in touch across the globe with the Cerberus redoubt, which served as their home. Thanks to a series of satellites controlled from the redoubt’s depths, the Commtact signal was strong and clear almost anywhere on the face of the Earth.

      The insert implanted on her mandible was voice activated and utilized vibrations in the bone mass to allow her to hear without anyone else listening in. She could also speak so softly that someone only a few feet away wouldn’t hear, but her jaw would transmit the sound to the Commtact in a way that it would be clear and audible to anyone with a proper receiving unit. More than once, since the addition of the Commtact to their regular gear, Brigid and her allies had been able to covertly communicate with one another, even under all but the closest scrutiny.

      “I’m going to have to teach that boy to turn his Commtact on,” Grant said.

      “That would be breaking the spirit of our deal, stranger,” Epona answered.

      Brigid whirled, surprised at the silence with which the witch woman had moved, but only momentarily. Epona traveled with mountain scouts who were as stealthy a group of hunters as Brigid had ever seen, rivaling even Sky Dog’s tribe.

      Epona continued after both Cerberus explorers took note of her presence. “Would you rather your friend dishonor your people by being a liar?”

      Grant’s eyes narrowed. “It’s funny you should mention honor, witch. Where I come from, it’s considered an affront to let your friend walk into a fucking trap just because you want to impress the natives. Something about loyalty and concern for those who’ve watched out for you. Know anything about that?”

      Brigid bit her upper lip, both to kill the smile that threatened to cross her face and to bite back an apology for her friend’s rudeness. Sometimes Grant forgot the adage that you could draw more flies with honey than vinegar, but that was the big ex-Magistrate’s way. Kane had often joked that Grant wasn’t happy unless he was complaining about how miserable he was.

      Epona smirked. “Your loyalty does your friend honor. Just remember, we are the ones who invited you here. And I am the lawmaker of my people.”

      Grant rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Brigid. “She must be confusing us with some other group of travelers.”

      Brigid smiled. “Behave, Grant.”

      Grant managed a grin. “Where’s the joy in that?”

      He settled back down, staring toward the tree line.

      The rules of this particular engagement were simple. In order to open up diplomatic channels between the Appalachians and the Cerberus redoubt, Kane had to go into the forest of this particular valley. Hidden among the trees lurked a race of genetic mutations that had taken to calling themselves the Fomorians, claiming to be the descendants of the beings who menaced the Tuatha de Danaan.

      Nothing in Brigid’s studies of the interactions of the panterrestrial entities she knew as the Tuatha de Danaan suggested that the Fomorians were anything but Annunaki, whose roles in the history of humanity had been misinterpreted after years of permutations of the original stories. Brigid was aware that according to the creation legends of the Celts, the Fomorians were allegedly the predecessors of the more human-centric god entities, a parallel tale to the relations between the Hellenic pantheon of Olympian gods and their forebears, the Titans. According to information that Brigid had gleaned from various sources, the Tuatha de Danaan and the Annunaki had warred terribly, thus giving her the impression that those recorded as the malformed and misshapen Fomorians were actually Annunaki, or rather, one of their servant races, which were currently known as the Nephilhim.

      Only after the two godlike races had come to peace, and chose to create a supervisory hybrid race known as the Archons, did they fade from the forefront of interaction with humanity. The Archons had been crossbreeds, possessing genetic material of both great races, as well as the stuff of human DNA in them, serving as a bridge between the three species. The hybrid creatures had been charged with retarding human potential, keeping humankind from growing too powerful, lest they grow strong enough to resist the panterrestrial overlords as they slept or lived out their retirement in other dimensions.

      Brigid decided to throw a few questions at Epona, as long as she was present. The mystery of what the Fomorians actually were had weighed too much for her to keep her tongue still.

      “Your enemies claim to be actual descendants of the Fomorians of Celtic myth?” she asked the Appalachian headwoman.

      Epona glanced sidelong at Brigid, as if weighing her response. “You doubt our assertion?”

      Brigid shook her head. “I’m just trying to fit this in to what we know about the Tuatha de Danaan.”

      “Our forebears,” Epona stated.

      Brigid’s brow wrinkled. According to what she knew about Appalachian granny magic in the wake of the Cerberus explorers’ first encounter with Epona and her people, the arts of magic they used were supposedly imported with the Scottish and Irish immigrants who had first arrived on American shores back in the late 1700s. Given the region that they had originated in, it was likely that the isolated and secretive water witches and witch doctors who practiced the arts had links extending back to the Tuatha de Danaan. The only thing that stuck awkwardly in Brigid’s evaluation of Epona’s veracity was that the practitioners of granny magic tended to locate farther south than the Pennsylvanian Poconos, the original territory stretching from the Virginias down to Georgia, where the remote location of their territories allowed the immigrants to retain the ancient Irish and Scottish songs, dances and recipes far more easily than their island predecessors who were dragged into modern society by being made part of Great Britain.

      “You seem doubtful of my story. Is it because we’re not in our traditional homelands?” Epona asked.

      “That’s part of it,” Brigid said.

      Epona smiled. “We migrated in the wake of the great war. Rather than displace people in valleys that weren’t affected by the nuclear bombs, we wandered until we finally