Our Hearts. Chapter Twelve. The Exodus

If the scorching air of Kato-Tombe possessed a larynx and a stomach, this morning it would have fed on scents that in any other, normal place would have seemed utterly incompatible, inducing nausea:

the foul, acrid-sweat-dripping rubber of generator belts, the sharp, palate-scratching soot of diesel, the warm, yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread from the camp kitchen, and a subtle, barely perceptible note of burnt machine oil settling on the tongue as a viscous, slimy film.

Three days had passed since Leo first descended into the inconspicuous shack on the very edge of the crumbling precipice. Three days that had merged into a single continuous, grueling procedure: the monotonous, eye-straining work at the microscope, the short, ragged sleep drenched in sticky sweat, and the slow, frighteningly palpable physical ingrowth into the alien anatomy of his own rapidly changing body.

Leo sat under the stretched canvas awning of the mess hall, which offered salvation from the blinding sun. Before him, in a chipped mug, strong Ethiopian coffee was cooling—incredibly dark, tart, smelling of burnt wood and leaving cloudy, muddy-brown streaks on the white walls of the ceramic. On the polished wooden table, worn smooth by the elbows of mercenaries, lay a small stack of papers: the dense handwritten diaries of Maurice Brunet, DNA sequencing graphs, and rustling printouts of chemical tables detailing isotopic compositions.

But today Leo was in no hurry. He sat, leaning back languidly against the hard backrest of the wooden bench, observing and absorbing reality.

His slightly inflamed eyes glided over the inscribed sheets, tenaciously registering the small details of camp life that went unnoticed at a first, superficial glance. Outwardly, Kato-Tombe functioned like a perfect Swiss watch. The PMC mercenaries lazily exchanged short, guttural phrases in Lingala and Romanian, smoked strong unfiltered cigarettes, spitting into the ochre dust, and methodically, with a metallic clatter, cleaned their disassembled carbines. But behind this familiar military routine, Leo could already unerringly divine another, hidden, colossal mechanism.

The morning before, during a similarly drawn-out, slow breakfast, Leo had noticed something important. A small, heavily battered canvas-topped truck—a Japanese Isuzu Elf with a dented, dirty roof and a bed thickly spattered with red clay—had rolled onto the base territory through the south gate, swaying heavily on its springs. The driver—a young Congolese man in dusty goggles that hid his eyes—steered the puffing vehicle not toward the food depot, but toward a remote, windowless hangar with an inconspicuous “IC Waze” sign.

Before raising the rattling aluminum roller shutters, two guards dropped the truck’s tailgate for a routine inspection. In that brief window of time, Leo, standing a couple of dozen meters away with a hot cup of Robusta in his hands, managed to examine the contents through the morning haze.

Inside the truck bed, in tight, neat rows, stood blue plastic barrels—standard two-hundred-liter drums with removable lids tightly secured by massive steel locking rings.

His professional experience told Leo: such specific containers are not used to transport diesel, or drinking water, or sterile PCR reagents. These barrels are universally used at large hydrometallurgical plants to transport granular ion-exchange resins—powerful sorbents applied in the industrial extraction of heavy metals from aggressive solutions.

And as the truck, growling with the strain, slowly pulled into the dense penumbra of the hangar, Leo managed to make out, deep within the massive space, sheets of thick, high-density black polyethylene rolled into long cylinders—standard waterproofing liners for heap leaching—as well as steel pumping stations, reeking of factory grease, lined up along the concrete base of the wall.

This was no secret biological research base, nor a banal site for illegal copper mining. It was the foundation for a fully-fledged, jungle-concealed technological hub for a liquid extraction process.

Diana Pătrașcu came out personally to receive this cargo. She stood at the foot of the concrete ramp in a flawless, crisp white shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, confidently holding a tablet in her hands, speaking to the driver about something in a harsh, utterly emotionless manner. At that moment, her face, illuminated by the slanting rays, seemed carved from cold gray granite.

But today, everything around looked as if yesterday’s truck with the blue barrels simply had not existed. The diesel hummed on the same monotonous note. The tropical sun inexorably ate into the wooden decking, drawing the smell of old resin from it.

The muffled creak of wood tore Leo from his memories. Dragoș Horia settled heavily onto the bench opposite him. The former commando arrived without food, without his constant coffee, without his usual retinue. He just sat down, calmly placing his massive hands with battered, whitened knuckles, covered in thick reddish hair, on the faded table surface scarred by knives. He smelled of good, tart tobacco, alkaline soap, and for some reason—sharply and alarmingly—of cold weapon metal.

“How is your research progressing, Doctor?” Dragoș’s voice sounded hollow and colorless, as if passing through a thick layer of pressed felt. His barely visible eyes from beneath the tinted glasses slid with absolute indifference over the complex printouts on the table.

Leo slowly raised his heavy eyelids and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingertips. His face—swollen, with bluish, sickly hollows beneath his eye sockets and a cracked, crusted scab on his lips—required no special acting. He truly looked like a man gradually descending into the abyss of total physical exhaustion.

“Poorly,” Leo admitted, staring straight ahead. He paused for a long time, cleared his parched throat with difficulty, and allowed his voice to sound as sincere and dry as possible. “I… I am at an absolute dead end, Dragoș.”

“In what sense?” Horia didn’t even stir; not a single muscle on his face twitched.

“There has to be at least some logic… in the mutations,” Leo tapped the tip of his fingernail against a winding sequencing graph in irritation. “Any pathogen, even the most aggressive and wild, like the Ebola or Marburg virus, obeys the ironclad laws of evolutionary pressure. There is always a vector of adaptation, a reaction to the host’s immune response. But here… here the mutational drift looks absolutely chaotic. Somehow insane. Or…” Leo hesitated, pretending to agonizingly search for the right word, “or it’s not adapting to the host organism at all. But to some external, incredibly powerful physical factor that we do not see… or do not notice under laboratory conditions. One gets the persistent impression that the virus is behaving entirely arbitrarily, reacting to the ebbs and flows of an invisible ocean.”

Dragoș took off his glasses and stared at the papers for a long time without blinking. His gaze wasn’t reading the Latin letters and numbers—rather, he was weighing the very density of the text on the page, assessing the threat level.

“I hope you find it. The sequence,” he finally said, very calmly. But the conversation, swaying, slowly slid toward an oppressive silence. “We all very much hope for it, Gonzales. Time is not playing on our side. It’s not playing on anyone’s side here at all.”

Leo leaned forward, resting his elbows heavily on the table, and looked the mercenary right in his faded eyes, trying to pierce this armor: “IC Waze… it’s just a paper license for cover, isn’t it? You’re not just digging for rare-earth metals here, are you?”

Horia didn’t look away. But the expected threat didn’t flare up in his narrowed pupils—instead, at the very bottom, an entirely different emotion surfaced: the old, frozen, existential fatigue of a man who has too long and too blindly followed others’ orders in a place where those orders have long since lost all meaning.

“You know, Gonzales…” Dragoș paused. He looked closely at his thick, calloused fingers, then unhurriedly shifted his gaze to the scorching edges of the camp perimeter. “Sometimes it seems to me… we dug too deep into this cursed earth. Much deeper than necessary. And we woke up what was sleeping.”

He straightened up abruptly, in a military fashion, cutting off the nascent frankness in a single motion, and gave a brief nod toward the two armed guards patiently shifting from one foot to the other at the mess hall gate.

“Your boys have been waiting for you. Go to the shack, Doctor. Get to work.”

The shack on the edge of the precipice met Leo with a stifling, stagnant, gelatinous heat. The heavy lock clanked, the metal door shut with a dull thud behind his back, instantly cutting off the saving noise of the diesels and the guttural shouts of the mercenaries. He was left alone in this crypt.

Inside, there was a thick smell of formalin, phenol, and raw, ancient loam. Leo flicked the toggle switch, turning on the fluorescent lamps. Their faded, sickly flickering light flooded the cold steel tables, the chrome-plated centrifuge, and the racks holding dozens of test tubes. The fan quickly picked up speed.

Leo sat down heavily on the creaking wooden stool. His right hand unexpectedly responded with a sharp bout of icy cramp—the old copper bracelet on his wrist tightened painfully, seeming to shrink in size, forcing the blue vein under his skin to twitch convulsively. In his chest, strictly behind the aching sternum, the second heart gave a dull, moist, alien thud. Leo instinctively pressed his palm to his ribs: through the fabric of his shirt, under his fingers, he could clearly feel hard, rolling nodules that felt like large lead shot—swollen subdermal lymph nodes, predatorily sprouting along his blood vessels.

He pulled a portable dosimeter from his canvas bag, slid out the thin steel needle of the sensor with a dry click, and turned on the device.

The cramped space of the shack immediately filled with a sparse but strong, frightening crackle.

Leo began methodically moving around the tables, checking every sample: Sample No. 1 (bat blood plasma): 420 µR/h. Elevated. Sample No. 4 (the crimson liquid seeping from the shaft): 610 µR/h. Dozens of times above normal. A deadly, radiating cocktail.

He walked over to the far metal shelving unit, where Maurice’s personal archive lay in an airtight, impact-resistant plastic case—several glass microscope slides with dried, darkened tissue smears made before his death.

Leo brought the Geiger counter’s probe to glass slide No. 3. The device didn’t just crackle—it immediately erupted into a continuous, hysterical, ear-piercing whistle. The red numbers on the digital display flickered and flashed out a monstrous value: 740 µR/h.

Leo froze, feeling a trickle of icy sweat run down his spine. Maurice’s dry blood smear was more radioactive than the mineral, poisoned exudate from the underground shaft itself. It seemed the French biologist hadn’t simply been infected by a viral strain—his organic matrix in life had tried to greedily absorb and accumulate the isotopes of uranium and thorium, restructuring its very cellular structure for the deadly radiation. Like the bats. Maurice had turned into a living, pulsating reactor.

Suddenly, behind Leo’s back, there was a sound.

It wasn’t a demanding knock at the door. The inner lock didn’t even clack. The massive door of the shack opened inward unusually softly, without a single creak, as if by itself, letting in a streak of scorching light.

Leo whirled around abruptly, reflexively clenching a long steel forceps for gripping biological tissues in his fist until his knuckles turned white—a pitiful but solitary weapon.

On the threshold stood Ilunga.

His once-white undershirt was soaked through with rusty mud and caked lumps of sweat; an AK-47, darkened by time and blood, with a deeply scratched wooden stock, hung on his shoulder. Behind him, in the wavering penumbra of the opening, hovered two more figures—wiry Congolese men, taut as strings, with colored bandanas on their heads and assault rifles at the ready.

“Quiet, Doctor,” Ilunga said softly, raising an open palm with a pink underside. His voice was trembling, ragged, full of adrenaline, as if from a long, exhausting run.

“I’m here for you. Imani sent me. We are leaving. Now.”

Leo stood like a stone statue, not lowering the clenched forceps. A hot wave of adrenaline rushed swiftly through his body, instantly drowning out the internal muscle ache and nausea.

“Imani?” “Yes.” “And the guards…” Leo nodded toward the open door.

“Lying by the gate,” Ilunga cut him off, quickly and angrily. “Hogtied like chickens. We have five minutes at most before the patrol on the tower notices they aren’t moving. Drop everything, let’s go!”

Leo shifted his feverish gaze from Ilunga’s tense face to the steel tables. To the open laptop with its priceless, decoded sequences. To the containers with the deadly, unstable strain. To Maurice’s handwritten diaries, holding the secret.

“No,” Leo countered harshly, indisputably, and steel cut through his voice. “We have to take everything we can. Just don’t open the containers!… Come on, help me!”

Ilunga swore quietly, filthily through his teeth in French, but immediately, realizing that arguing was useless, waved his hand to his fighters: “Quickly! Shove everything into boxes!”

They began to feverishly clear the tables, sweeping everything in their path. With professional, cold-blooded precision, Leo shoved racks of mutated blood sera samples, storage flash drives, microscope slides carefully wrapped in styrofoam, and the laptop, having ripped out the cords, into his spacious canvas duffel bag. A partisan with a terrible, lumpy scar on his cheek hoisted a cardboard box of reagents and a portable sequencer onto his shoulder.

And at that very moment, the ground beneath their feet gave a drawn-out, resonant shudder.

It was no ordinary seismic tremor. From behind the dirty-green canvas tarp that tightly covered the passage to the old shaft, a thin, piercing infrasonic hum erupted. It passed through the stone floor, through the thick soles of their boots, striking with an abrasive pain straight into their shin bones, making their teeth vibrate.

In Leo’s chest, the second heart answered with an instantaneous, wild, joyful rebellion. It struck with monstrous hydraulic force, painfully compressing his left lung and conjuring a persistent, nauseating taste of oxidized copper in his throat. The warm bracelet grew searing hot to the point of physical pain, burning his skin.

Snap!

The dusty canvas tarp trembled, drew taut as if hit by a blast wave, and burst along its center seam with a crack, as if cleaved by the swing of an invisible giant blade.

From the black maw of the shaft, smelling thickly of old ammonia, damp matted fur, and something sickeningly sour, a solid living mass poured out.

Huge hammer-headed bats—with a span of leathery, velvet wings over a meter wide—burst into the shack with a deafening rustle. Blinded by the flickering fluorescent light, they darted beneath the corrugated iron ceiling with a dull, continuous flapping. Massive wings knocked down suspended lamps, shattered glass flasks off the shelving units, showering the floor with sparkling shards. The room quickly filled with a piercing, eardrum-shredding ultrasonic squeal.

One of the creatures, whistling as it sliced the air, plummeted straight onto the central metal table, just half a meter from Leo’s face. Its hideous, elongated muzzle with a blunt, leathery, hammer-like growth twitched nervously; its huge gray nostrils flared, drawing in the air—his scent—and its small, whitish, completely blind eyes flared in the light of the fallen lamp with a murky, infernal violet fire. The bat forcefully dug its long, curved claws into the wooden tabletop, emitting a hissing, grating, hate-filled sound.

“Run! Outside!” Ilunga screamed in a voice not his own, fighting off a huge shadow flying past with the butt of his rifle.

They sprang out of the shack, slamming the metal door shut with a crash and sliding the bolt home. From inside, the clinking of shattering laboratory glass, the heavy thuds of leathery wings against the walls, and the inhuman, vibrating squeaking continued to emanate.

In front of the gate, faces fearfully buried in the gray-brown dust, lay two camp guards face down. Their hands were dead-tied behind their backs with white plastic zip ties. The black Israeli Emtan MZ-4Ps lay forlornly in the parched, scorched grass by a wooden post.

“To the cliff! Hurry!” Ilunga jabbed his hot barrel toward a narrow, crumbling goat trail that immediately wound along the wall of the exhausted quarry.

Leo, operating on pure automatism, dropped to one knee without breaking stride. Losing not a second, he snatched both heavy carbines from the dust, slung the stiff straps over his shoulder right on top of his stuffed duffel, and with a sharp motion, tore a tactical vest with four full spare magazines off the back of a groaning mercenary.

Ilunga froze for a second, staring at the doctor in astonishment. Deep, unfeigned surprise flashed in his widened eyes—a strictly civilian doctor, a scientist, was handling combat weapons with that cold, practiced, mechanical dexterity that only comes from blood and experience.

“Go,” Leo said firmly, adjusting a rifle strap digging into his shoulder.

They ran along the trail. On the right, literally half a meter from their slipping boots, the hundred-meter sheer, dizzying wall of the quarry plunged downwards; at the very bottom, the dead skeletons of old Belgian excavators were rusting away. The red clay crumbled treacherously beneath their feet, small stones flying into the terrifying void with a papery rustle.

Behind them, from the direction of the camp’s central square, they could already hear Dragoș’s hoarse, torn shout, the sharp pops of diesel engines starting, and the crackle of two-way radios coming to life. The patrols had noticed the tied-up guards. The clock was ticking down to minutes.

“Run!” Ilunga was the first to begin the descent down the narrow, crumbling ledge, holding tightly to the old safety rope stretched along the rock face.

Leo followed, trying not to look down. His own heart was beating a rapid, ragged, panicked pulse, but the other, the second one that had formed inside, hammered out an even, incredibly powerful, almost mechanical beat. It tirelessly, rhythmically pumped his leg muscles with additional, synthetic adrenaline, burning away the lactic acid and providing a fierce, primal, dense endurance.

They passed the most dangerous section of the ledge, jumped down onto solid ground, and disappeared into the thick, steaming shrubbery at the foot of the hill.

After two hundred meters of an exhausting run through the damp, suffocating, rot-smelling forest, where vines and thorny branches whipped their faces to the point of bleeding, they popped out onto an abandoned dirt track overgrown with elephant grass. Beneath the gigantic crowns of two sprawling ficus trees stood two old, mud-caked Toyota Hilux pickups with dented sides and engines purring dully at idle.

Imani was sitting in the bed of the first pickup.

She was wearing a light-colored dress, now completely covered in splatters of brick-red mud. Her short black hair was ruffled by the hot wind. When her anxious gaze fell upon Leo—breathing heavily, emerging from the thicket with a duffel full of deadly samples and two assault rifles on his shoulder—her bitten lips twitched in a short, ragged gasp of relief.

Leo met her eyes.

In that very second, his second heart in his chest froze for one agonizing moment—and then gave a single incredibly powerful, deep, absolutely synchronous beat alongside the first. The rhythms perfectly aligned. The two organs, human and alien, fell into a single, crushing measure. The icy metal of the old bracelet on his wrist instantly filled with a dense, elastic, pulsating warmth.

“Get in!” Ilunga barked, jumping behind the wheel and slamming it into gear.

Leo, tossing in the clanking carbines, vaulted over the iron side of the pickup. Behind him, the partisans with the sacks and rescued boxes jumped heavily into the bed. The vehicles roared off, crushing bushes with a crunch and digging their bald tires into the deep, water-filled clay ruts.

The pickups tore through the jungle, bouncing harshly over tree roots that protruded like veins. Leo sat on the ribbed metal floor of the bed, clutching the precious duffel tightly to himself and refusing to let the rifles out of his hands. Imani sat down softly beside him, shoulder to shoulder. She did not utter a single word, but her thin, cool fingers, when they settled on his hot wrist—right over the pulsating copper bracelet—whispered more eloquently than words: “Later. Everything later.”

They were racing toward the village of Bata Kolé. The PMC camp was left far behind, frozen in the blinding, molten midday heat of Katanga.

But at the very entrance to the settlement, where the narrow, battered forest road opened up to the first sun-drenched maize fields, Ilunga’s lead pickup abruptly slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed as they skidded on the slippery clay, kicking up a fan of mud.

Lying across the road was the massive, gigantic trunk of a recently felled tree.

Behind the barricade, standing like a silent wall, were people.

Eleven village men—with oil-gleaming machetes, long hunting spears, and old, worn rifles. And in front of them, three figures stood motionless.

The two on the flanks—tall elders, dry as parchment, in long white canvas shirts. And standing perfectly between them was he.

That same old sorcerer whom Leo had seen with the sisters from the village. He wore a long, faded colorful shirt over wide cotton pants, and on his sunken, dark chest ominously jingled the very same eerie amulets: dried bird claws and small bones polished by time. He seemed to have no eyebrows or eyelashes—only smooth skin, pulled taut as a drumhead over pale pupils covered by a thick, milky film. This was exactly what the blind, inexorable mask of fate from an ancient tragedy would look like. In his bony, knotted hands he firmly gripped a smooth wooden cane.

Ilunga killed the engine. A sticky, ringing, exhausting silence descended, broken only by the deafening, indifferent chirp of cicadas and the tired, hoarse breathing of the people in the truck bed.

The old man slowly raised his carved staff and stared with his milky, almost dead, yet paradoxically piercing eyes straight at the bed of the stalled pickup.

“Why… did you return?” his voice did not sound loud, but it carried that unnatural, rustling vibration that made every hair on Leo’s arms stand on end.

Imani rose unhurriedly, gracefully to her feet, balancing in the truck bed. Her fingers squeezed Leo’s hand to the point of pain, of bruising. She kept her silence.

“Your great-grandfather…” the sorcerer took one hollow step toward the vehicle, his cane descending onto the metal tailgate with a resonant, bone-like clack. “Your great-grandfather brought strangers to our land. White men with their clanking machines. They woke what was supposed to sleep eternally beneath these stones. And the earth began to drink blood.”

The old man thoughtfully turned his head from side to side, as if catching scents and scanning the space: “And now… you. And with you is an American once again.”

The sorcerer struck the cracked earth with his cane with unexpected force. Dry dust billowed up in a thick orange cloud, settling on their faces.

“You carry rotten blood within you. You must not return here…”

Chapter Thirteen. Imani →
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