“They changed….” Fuck it. Reese downed the glass. His windpipe threatened to close up, and tears filled his eyes. When he spoke, his voice strained. “They changed into something else.”
“What?”
“Anubis.”
“I don’t follow.”
The burn eased up, and he cleared his throat. “They turned into another thing. They changed shape. They looked like dogs or wolves, but they weren’t either.”
Doubt. The first flicker of it crossed Harrington’s expression.
Reese exhaled a sigh of relief. “Thank god, you think I’m crazy.”
“You want me to think you’re crazy?” Harrington held his empty tumbler in his lap.
“You’ve been taking this so well, you were really starting to worry me. Like you have experience with this or something like it. But now you think I’m nuts, and that’s a good thing.” Reese rattled the ice in his glass at the attendant who chatted with her co-worker near the front of the plane. She looked up. “Can I have another one of these?”
She walked over and took Reese’s glass.
“Water,” Harrington said to her. To Reese, “I need you sober.”
“I’ve been sober for too long. I need to be drunk. Absolutely smashed.”
“Water, please.” Harrington didn’t even look at her.
The woman left.
A drum began to beat behind one of Reese’s eyes. Okay, maybe water was better.
The woman returned and handed a bottle of water to Reese.
When the attendant lingered, Harrington sent her away with a look. “Tell me about Phase.”
Reese opened the bottle and took a swig. “There are three.” That they knew of. Although the hieroglyphs suggested there were more. “Phase one, there are no outward changes except going from dead to very alive. They become exceedingly strong, fast, and acquire heightened senses such as smell, hearing, night vision, thermal, and something akin to interference affecting surrounding particles. Phase two is where the physical changes occur. And Phase three? The flight’s only four hours, so there’s not enough time to explain it.”
“Why do you call it Phase?”
“Because they don’t just look different, they are different. They’re here but not here. Our physical laws quit applying to them.”
“And that means?”
Reese took another drink. “The easiest way to explain it is nothing we had could hold them. They didn’t just cut through solid matter; to them it was never solid. A liquid. At the most, thixotropic.”
“But you did contain them.”
“Yeah, with smoked glass.”
“Which is?”
“The transparent compound we found the ichor in. We backward engineered it. The molecular structure refracted light in a distinct pattern that resembled tendrils of… well, smoke.”
“Clear glass didn’t exist in ancient Egypt,” Phillips said.
“Which is what made the technology so remarkable.”
“So, it’s strong.”
“It was comparable to high-grade ballistic glass. But it was impenetrable to the Anubis and nothing else was.”