by Platt, Sean
“My wife is in there. Piper. You know Piper Dempsey?”
Meyer saw a flash inside his mind: Piper, as she appeared on the occasional broadcast. He was annoyed to be reminded of his wife’s identity, but he understood. He’d asked the question. They’d answered.
“One of the rebels, too. One of them is outside. I know something about him, if he’s who I think, you might not know that—”
Again, Meyer saw the green circle with the black outline. This time, the image came from higher. From Divinity, aboard the mothership.
“You’re just going to let him in?” Meyer tried to summon pointless indignation. “What if he has a nuke? What if he plans to blow up Heaven’s Veil? I don’t know if you know much about nukes, but if they get close like this, it doesn’t matter how much you try to—”
The Titan on the right cut him off again, still pleasantly smiling. He held up a tiny sliver object. It looked like a stainless steel pearl.
To accompany it, again, Meyer saw the green circle in his mind. He sensed his earlier panic starting to subside, as if the Astrals’ collective will was pushing it down. He could still sense something in the group mind that felt like Reptar rage but could no longer feel the discordant sense of unraveling plans, and panic about the man outside the gate. Whatever had alerted them earlier, it wasn’t bothering them now. And he couldn’t sense any worry over Piper, as if all that alarm over her disappearance had ceased to matter.
Move along, the Titans seemed to say. Nothing to see here.
At the far side of Meyer’s vision, just beyond the Titan’s shoulder, he could see a single, young-looking man with untidy brown hair appear in the valley between the inner gates. The aliens were staying back, mostly invisible from the approaching man. Meyer could see him, but the Titans were doing their best to stay hidden from the walking man.
Still the Titans’ pleasant expressions seemed to say: Move along. Nothing to see here.
Behind him, in the blocks to Meyer’s rear, a contingent of Reptars circled and prowled, thinking alien thoughts of murder.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A shuttle flashed, discharging its weapon two blocks up. A woman screamed, and Raj swore he could smell charred flesh. Then he heard running and saw the shuttle’s pursuit.
He thought to flee in the other direction, but that was old Raj thinking. He was no longer a scared little Indian, running from alien ships while dodging emasculating abuse from Lila alongside her mother’s racist barbs. He wouldn’t pretend he commanded those ships (though he sometimes dreamed of a day when he might), but he didn’t have to run from their danger.
They shared a side, the Astrals and Raj.
What they pursued, he could pursue.
What they incinerated, he more or less wanted incinerated … or at least understood.
Instead of running from the shuttle, Raj ran toward it.
His mind showed him the map he’d seen back in the guard shack. He knew where the red dot had been and where the flash must have occurred relative to it. If he added the city’s double front gates and the long sunken valley sloping between them, the three points drew a straight line.
The conclusion was obvious: something was happening near the gate, and the Astrals were headed to intercept it, apparently blowing things up along the way.
Was it Piper? What if she’d fallen in with malcontents, and whoever had fired the weapon earlier — whoever was running from the shuttle — was one of them?
The shuttle rose above the buildings ahead, seeming to give up its chase. Raj stood still, making no effort to hide, watching it fly directly overhead.
He stood indecisive for a minute after the ship passed, torn between investigating whatever the thing had just blown up and the survivors it had lost (or lost interest in) and discovering what commotion lay at the gate.
Before he could make a decision, Raj heard the shuffling of feet: the runners he’d heard earlier. The ones who’d been fleeing the shuttle, running right toward him.
This time he did slink back, pressing himself into a doorway.
Peeking around a corner, Raj saw Piper.
Terrence was with her, apparently helping the deserter. That made sense; Raj had been watching Terrence for a while now, sure he was up to something.
The party’s third member was harder to account for, and would definitely be more difficult to explain to the viceroy. It was Trevor Dempsey.
Raj let them pass then turned to follow, keeping low and staying hidden.
Raj mostly liked Trevor, but this was business.
These three may have somehow evaded the shuttle and peacekeepers; they wouldn’t escape the commander of the guard.
And wouldn’t the viceroy be thrilled when Raj caught loose ends missed by the Astrals’ best efforts?
Chapter Thirty-Four
Trevor took the lead.
His breath was short and fast. He remembered playing paintball in his youth, before the world had ended, and the way he’d ducked around a faux warscape in a protective helmet to play it. The helmet had only been a hat with a face shield, more or less open, and he’d been playing a harmless war game — and yet he’d still felt suffocated by his breath.
This was like that. Trevor felt as if a cotton wad had been stuffed down his throat.
But this wasn’t a game. He was on the losing side, no doubt. It might not even matter that he was the viceroy’s son. The Astrals kept Meyer because he was well liked by what remained of North America and was now known to the rest of the world. Meyer was a face that humanity seemed willing to trust, but Trevor had no illusions; the Astrals were in charge and would only keep partners for as long as those comrades stayed out of their way.
Piper was in their way now. Terrence had already told Trevor that whatever she’d stolen had been worth going to the dissidents for. Piper’s behavior rammed that point home. She’d stolen something from Meyer’s computer, and that something had been troubling enough to trigger a rather violent reaction. He’d seen their trailing knot of people turned to ash by the shuttle. Trevor, Terrence, and Piper were only alive now because they’d been twenty feet farther down the street when the weapon had discharged.
Trevor looked back, expecting to see the shuttle. But it wasn’t there; they’d somehow eluded their pursuer. Shuttle attacks didn’t fire like bullets or rockets. They used quick-cook heat rays. It didn’t take long to bake what they aimed at, but it did take a second or two. And in that second — against all odds and hope — they’d managed to sneak away.
It seemed too good to be true, but it was their reality nonetheless. They were alive, but they couldn’t expect that kind of luck to hold out.
They had to keep running. Stay hidden. Conceal themselves from prying eyes.
Despite what he’d told Piper, Trevor wasn’t positive he could talk his way out of the gate at all — let alone with a fugitive and another hanger-on. Still, he had to try. It was all they had. Either the shuttle had seen the three of them with the party they’d killed, or it hadn’t. Either the Astrals knew flight was afoot, or they didn’t. They’d either shifted their attention to whoever might be waiting at the gate … or they’d split their search in two, now looking for this knot of bandits as well.
There would be no going back to the house for Piper. Not after that shuttle blast.
Trevor could only try.
He had to try.
And if they could reach the gates clean — if Trevor could keep Piper away from Astral eyes for long enough to figure his angle — then maybe they’d survive. Maybe she’d survive.
If they could reach the gates undetected.
But Trevor couldn’t shake a sinking feeling that their luck was already gone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The area around the gate was entirely deserted.
Cameron almost wanted to raise his hands, feeling like a lone cowboy sauntering into an enemy camp in an old western. He wanted to take his fingers away from his guns and hold them high, telling
the sentries who had him in their sights that he meant no harm.
But there were no sentries.
There were no guards.
There were no shuttles, no animal-like peacekeepers, none of the big white beings the press called Titans. No human guards, from the viceroy’s detachment or otherwise. No police. No vehicles; no automated weapon systems; no locks; no slots or scanners to verify Cameron’s ID or rights to be here.
There was nothing at all.
Cameron walked through the gate and up the slowly rising valley between it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He felt fatalistic, like he had no choice. His actions were stupid. But really, how stupid was it compared to the mission’s idiocy in general?
Benjamin had given him a communication virus that he knew full well might fry the network rather than freeing it. Cameron wasn’t deaf. He’d heard the discussion, both from Terrence’s end during their original journey to Vail and back at Moab. Canned Heat had a fifty-fifty chance of working, at best. The wrong 50 percent left them worse than cut off, of no use to anyone, deader than they’d already been.
Cameron’s first stop had been with Nathan Andreus — the despot whose minions had nearly killed him and Piper on their way to Moab. Since that meeting, he’d crossed hostile land, along open roads, without so much tree cover for most of the trip, daring their airborne foes to challenge him.
Yes, walking directly into the enemy city’s beating heart at the end of that trek was stupid beyond belief.
But now he was in the city without a hint of harassment.
He still had the canister in his pack, despite the intense interest of those strange flying balls.
He was in the lion’s den and could be killed at any second. But hadn’t that been true from the start? Wasn’t that true, even now, every day, for the Moab lab?
They could jump out with drawn guns to take him.
Peacekeepers could appear and rip him apart with their teeth.
They could simply surround him and tell him to stop walking. That would be it for his mission. An end with no pomp, circumstance, or ceremony.
But around Cameron, there was nothing. Nothing at all.
He entered the city.
Nothing rose to stop him.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The alien signals inside Meyer’s mind were confusing. He couldn’t ever quite make sense of his soupy thoughts; now was no exception.
The Astrals all seemed to hive-think around him. Sometimes, he could catch their moods, but even the moods, now, seemed conflicted. Normally, it took the filter of Divinity — unseen archivists who never left the mothership — to turn all that messy Astral thought into something Meyer could understand. But even without collating and parsing, he could usually get a sense for how the Astrals were feeling.
And they did have emotion, contrary to what most humans thought. Meyer should know; he was there with their mind, absorbing it all.
They felt sympathy, though it was tempered by superior knowledge — like a parent might feel sympathy for a child even in the midst of administering discipline, for his own good.
They felt anger, though it was always blunted by logic.
They felt joy … maybe. Meyer could sense an emotion like pleasure, but it was like something seen far beneath a pond’s rippling surface.
There were even times when Meyer suspected the Astrals felt love.
And Meyer — slightly more evolved than his fellow humans even before this all began, certainly more evolved than nearly every human now — usually found he could sort it out in the end. He caught the scents of their thoughts, enough to feel the patterns. Even without Divinity’s help, he could spot their loudest edges, though the dots between were often muddled and harder to connect.
But not now. Now, discerning the thoughts and quiet emotions surrounding this standoff was so much harder.
Emotions were noisy as Meyer stood behind the Titan guards, watching a man he believed to be Cameron Bannister disappear behind the first row of buildings.
He could sense anger in them.
He could sense their worry that everything, despite careful planning, might not go correctly.
He could detect a slight fear of chaos — of the uncertain and unknown.
There was concern for those involved in this standoff, too. That was unusual. Meyer had never sensed remorse from the aliens because remorse carried the baggage of doubtful action. As far as he’d seen, the Astrals were never doubtful. Why would they care — even in their tiny, slight alien way — about doing the wrong thing (or having done the wrong thing) now?
Most perplexing of all, though, was the emotion Meyer could sense below all the shallower surface sentiments. It felt like the left-behind stink of burned toast in a recently used kitchen. He couldn’t even begin to name it. Something to do with Cameron Bannister — a man that Meyer, for one, had never met. For some reason, the Astral collective didn’t quite trust Cameron — not as a possible rebel, but in another, harder-to-define way. They also wanted to hurt him a little — not for logic, but for spite.
But Meyer’s thoughts dissolved as Cameron vanished into the city. He’d been certain the Titans would stop him. He’d been sure the Reptars would leap out and chase the man down before he exited the valley. But no, the standoff had ended without confrontation, and now Cameron Bannister was gone.
Meyer, feeling alien emotion as if it were his own, not pausing to understand his words, turned to the closest Titan and snapped, “You’re just going to let that motherfucker go? After what he’s done?”
The Titan smiled blandly, again holding up a single silver pearl.
“Go after him! Catch him! Don’t you know who that is? Don’t you know what he did?”
The Titan continued to smile.
With Cameron gone, a gap formed between the Titans, apparently content to let Cameron get away with everything.
Meyer forced his way through the gap.
The Titans raised silent arms, shouting inside Meyer’s head from behind. But the viceroy was already off and running, and nobody was going to stop him.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The house guard communicator crackled in Raj’s ear. Seconds later, the viceroy’s shouts blasted into his head. Meyer sounded out of breath and nervous. Two things Meyer Dempsey never, ever was.
“Christopher! Christopher, do you hear me?”
There was a beep.
“Yes, sir. I hear you.”
“Where are you?”
“At the house.”
Raj, listening, made note of Christopher’s tone. An of-course way of speaking, as if he wanted Meyer to know he’d have no reason to leave the grounds. But Raj knew that Christopher had left; he’d seen it himself. He’d even seen Meyer talking to Christopher, and then — oh yes, now this was staring to make sense — talking to Trevor.
Trevor seemed nice enough, but thinking about it, Raj supposed Trevor had always been against him. He’d allied with Christopher, even back in the bunker days. It had been Christopher and the crew against Raj, Heather against Raj, even Lila against Raj. Trevor hung with Christopher or with Lila, and that stayed true today. Raj had thought for a while that something fishy was going on — with Trevor, with Lila, with Christopher. Some secret they were keeping. Here it was again, except now they were keeping it from the viceroy: a step too far. Raj would have to call them out — and would delight in doing so.
“Do you have your weapon?” Meyer asked Christopher.
“Of course. What’s — ?”
“Get to Junction Road and—” A heavy pant, an intake of breath. “—and Vine. Near the gate. You know it?”
Raj looked around. He knew it just fine. That intersection was a few blocks away.
“Near the gate?” Christopher asked.
“YES, NEAR THE MOTHERFUCKING GATE!”
“Okay, okay, I hear you. Is something wr — ?”
“Bannister.” Puff. Inhale. The swishing of fabric. “Your old buddy Cameron.”
<
br /> “What about him?”
“He’s here.”
“Here in the city?”
“Yes, goddammit!”
“Where are you?”
Meyer resumed, now huffing harder, as if he was running. “Behind him. But they … fucking Titans … just let him go. Right up the … the central valley and … inside. They held me back and … now I’m going to lose him in—”
“What about the shuttle patrols? The peacekeepers?”
“Are you listening to me?” Two heavy breaths then, “They let him go!”
“Why?”
“Okay, okay,” Christopher said in Raj’s ear. “I’ll head out there now. But I’m on foot, and that’s a hike. You still might reach him before I do.”
Raj’s hand touched his weapon.
Junction and Vine. Not far at all.
He could be there in no time.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Oh my God,” Piper said.
Trevor turned toward her, as did Terrence from her other side. Their faces were curious, waiting for her to continue.
“That was …” Piper paused to regroup, still not believing her eyes. She finished the thought: “That was Cameron!”
Terrence looked around. “Where?”
“Up ahead.”
Terrence looked like he wanted to tell Piper she was seeing things but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it.
“Why would Cameron be here?”
Trevor swallowed. “Dad said someone was here. When he was talking to Mo Weir. Someone at the gate.”
“But Cameron?”
Piper felt her feet beginning to move faster. They’d been creeping, heavy with a sense that hurry would end them. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider the monks’ deaths, but that had happened while rushing. They had to be careful, tend every step lest they be discovered.