Betty stood frozen with dread beside Miriam. “Does this mean Gabriel lied to us?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t buy his sob story,” Miriam said. “There’s more to the story than he’s letting on.” She hurried past the walls with a shiver of dread.

The tunnel finally ended at a cavernous chamber. While the roof was no higher than the passageway, it stretched outward into a vast room the length of a football field. Rows and rows of pillars held up the ceiling like some stone orchard. Each support beam was composed of stone blocks, one piled on another, and several even looked crooked and ready to fall.

A glint off one of the pillars drew Miriam’s attention. The reflection was too bright for the dank and dreary place. She approached the pillar and discovered a ring of wires wrapped around the middle of the stack of stones, linking transmitters and blasting caps to fistfuls of yellowish-grey clay. C4 explosives.

Mariam examined the bomb, careful not to disturb it. A small red LED light glowed from the transmitter, waiting for a signal. She cupped a hand over her flashlight and motioned for Betty to do the same with her helmet lamp. The room plunged into darkness, and as her eyes adjusted, she picked out the tell-tale pinpoints glowing across the room, hundreds of them, coming from pillars throughout the chamber.

The entire room had been mined to explode. “What is all of this?” Betty whispered beside Mariam, palpable dread clogging her voice.

“Connor’s purge,” Miriam surmised, picturing the bustling town above. She wondered how many other chambers across that necropolis were similarly set with explosives.

While thinking, Mariam remembered the bloodied corpses of clones on the walls they walked past earlier. Such brutality could send the regime into submission. It started to make more sense to Miriam now. Gabriel had sent them there not to steal the Repo66 in order to save his son, but to steal it on his behalf so he could carry out his own agenda. They were not saving his son’s life, instead, they were stealing a biological weapon from one mass murderer to another.

Betty must have feared the same thing. Her voice grew sombre with the implication. “They could bring half of Mpumalanga crashing down.”

As Miriam kept her hand cupped over her flashlight, her eyes acclimated themselves well enough to notice a wan glow from across the room, marking the entrance to a tunnel on the far side. She continued across the chamber, heading for the light. She slipped out her pistol and pointed it forward. Keeping her flashlight muffled in her other hand, she allowed just enough illumination to avoid obstacles.

Betty stayed behind with her helmet’s lamp switched off. The far tunnel was a mirror image of the first one. Dead clones filled niches; the corpses again broken down and separated into body parts. The only difference was that those body parts were bright white. There was no patina of age. With growing horror, Mariam realised that what she was looking at were not ancient remains, but they were the remains of fresh kills.

One niche, a yard deep, was half full of clone heads. A work in progress. From their tiny sizes, though, Mariam could tell that some of the heads had belonged to children, infants even.

Before Gabriel had finished his instructions over the phone, he had spoken of a heinous act committed by the former head of The Law of Moses. The man had sacrificed his own newly conceived clone, stabbing him with wooden stakes, believing the clone was the Antichrist. Apparently, the order’s taste for infanticide was not limited to that single incident.

The tunnel ended after another bend. Voices echoed from there, and they sounded like they were coming from another cavernous space. When Mariam heard this, she motioned for Betty to hang back. She edged forward, hugging a wall, and peered around the corner. Another room, smaller but similarly dotted with pillars, opened ahead. Only the pillars in that room were natural limestone columns, left behind as the miners dug out this chamber, making the space feel more ancient. But like the others, those pillars were similarly decorated with explosive charges.

In the centre of the room, Miriam could make out twenty people gathered in a circle, all on their knees and adorned in ceremonial robes. One couple, arm in arm, had come in formal attire for the momentous occasion. A handful looked drugged, weaving dully where they knelt or with their foreheads lowered to the floor.

Three bodies lay sprawled closer to the tunnel where Miriam was hiding: facedown, in pools of blood as dark as oil against the rock. It looked as if they had been shot in the back as they tried fleeing the coming destruction, likely after having second thoughts about giving up their lives in a suicidal orgy. A pair of guards, with assault rifles and body armour, stood to either side of the gathering, shadowed by pillars, watching the group, ready to discourage any other deserters.

Miriam ignored the guards for the moment and focused on the two figures standing in the centre of the circle. One, with bleached hair and Gallic features, wore a cloaked white robe, shining in a spotlight thrown by a nearby sodium lamp. Miriam could hear the soft chug of the generator powering the room. The man gave his flock a beautiful smile with his arms raised, and Mariam guessed him to be Connor Maddox.

But, when Mariam squint her eyes through the dim lit space, she that realised the man was Gabriel. It couldn’t be, though. After additional moments of studying the figure, she realised it wasn’t particularly Gabriel, but his clone.

“The time is at hand,” the man intoned. “As the sun reaches its zenith, the destruction wrought here will start. The screams of the dying, the rising souls of the dead, will carry you all upward to the next exultant stage of existence. You will become my dark angels as I claim my solar throne. I promise you: this is not the end, but only the beginning for us all. I must leave you now, but my chosen spiritual right hand will take my place and lead you out of the darkness and into the dawn of a new era.”

The man stepped aside, clearly planning to abandon his flock. From the way he cast a glance toward the two armed guards, it seemed he wasn’t sticking around for the festivities and he had arranged for escorts to guide him out of the catacombs—just in case any of the flock objected to his departure. Mariam suspected the bank accounts of those gathered had been emptied into the man’s vaults, ready to finance his next venture, which was to spread more widely The Law of Moses. Was he a cultist, a con artist, or merely a glorified serial killer?

From the vacuous sockets of the dead staring out at her from the nearby niche, Mariam suspected the answer was all of the above. She looked on as the man waved the second woman forward. He was in his mid-thirties, wore street clothes, and his face shining with a sheen of sweat, and his eyes were glassy from what appeared to be both drugs and adoration.

Even in the poor lighting of the space, it was impeccable how the man shared every single physical appearance with … “Gabriel, like the angel that is your namesake, and the devil that is my double, you will be transformed by blood and sacrifice into my warrior angel, the most exultant of my new heavenly legion. And your weapon will be a sword of fire.”

The man parted his cloak to reveal a steel short sword. It looked like an antique, a museum piece. “Like you, this steel will soon burn with the energies of the sun’s furnace. But first that weapon must be forged, made ready for its transformation. It must be bloodied like all of you. This last death by your hand, this singular sacrifice, will herald the others to come. This honour I give to you, my warrior angel, Christine.”

A blond-haired woman, looking in every way like Miriam, reached out to the man. The clone took the sword and lifted it high, then the two men stepped aside, revealing a low altar behind them. It had its own spotlight, too.

A red-haired man was chained naked to the stone, legs spread wide and arms outstretched. A second sacrifice, dark-haired and pale, knelt nearby, shaking in a thin white shift. On the altar, the man’s head was lolling in a drugged daze. But he must have sensed what was to come because he was struggling against the chains as the clone turned to him with her sword. She raised the sword even higher, and plunged it into the man’s bare stomach. Blood and gore sprayed in different directions.

“Oh my God!” Mariam said.

Tell us: What do you think is going to happen next?