He found them, or rather, the psychic residue of them, near the garden tomb. The merged consciousness of Julian and Isabelle, now a permanent fixture of the Ikannuna's will. They were not there in body, but their presence was a cold spot in the warm Jerusalem morning.
"The data is clear," Julian's flat, collective voice stated in Enki's mind. "The conclusion is theft. Any other postulation is sentiment, not evidence."
"You are filing the most significant event in human history as a petty crime," Enki argued into the empty air.
"It is not significant. It is noise," Isabelle's dual-voice replied, laced with biological disdain. "A body decomposes. This one was moved. The event is closed. The system continues."
As their presence faded, a new, overwhelming psychic shockwave hit Enki, a decree broadcast to all seven of them:
THE VEIL OF MORTALITY IS DECLARED. REVEAL YOUR NATURE, AND THE COMETS WILL FALL. THE SECRET WAR BEGINS.
The message was absolute. The age of myth was over. The age of hiding had begun. They were now forbidden from being known, from being seen as anything other than mortal. The stakes were no longer just ideological; they were existential. A single slip, and they would trigger the annihilation of their local experiment.
Enki looked back at the empty tomb, now just a curiosity in a back alley. The Anomaly had been dismissed. The war had been declared. And he was alone, a ghost with a book, in a world that had just witnessed a miracle and called it a crime.