by Platt, Sean
Trevor raised his eyebrows.
“Whatever the Astrals lost and the Templars hid from them,” Cameron said, slipping the plate into a satchel he’d prepared and carefully padded before leaving Moab, “it can’t be used without this.”
“I’ll tell you another,” said Andreus. “If the BB decides to inspect that bag of yours on the way out and finds what’s in it, we’re seriously fucked.”
Cameron wanted to smirk at Andreus’s paranoia, but he’d picked a bag with a tight-sealing zipper for exactly that reason. The BB could force its way in, but not without Cameron’s knowledge.
“Okay,” he said instead. “Then let’s go.”
Cameron led the way down the tunnel, suddenly eager to find the others, rescue them from their wild goose chases in the name of showmanship, and gather their group of ill-prepared intellectuals back home. There were still mysteries (how to inspect the key plate without the BB seeing, how to rid themselves of the BB, and how to find and disarm Thor’s Hammer were only a few), but for now, the first big hurdle had been crossed.
Cameron stopped when there was a small, almost inaudible beeping sound to his rear.
He was thinking he’d imagined the noise when it chirped again.
Cameron turned to see Nathan Andreus — torturer, gang lord, conspirer with the enemy — staring at something in his hand with an expression of unabashed terror.
“What?” Cameron asked, feeling his heart beating harder as if it already knew. “What is it?”
Andreus held up the detector, which beeped again.
“The Astrals’ little spy BB,” he said, his voice disarmingly neutral. “It’s coming right at us.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
There was a noise from somewhere near Terrence’s belt. Meyer looked at him with questioning eyes, and there was a moment where Terrence looked like he might pretend the noise hadn’t come. But then he seemed to remember who’d opened the hub door, who’d tied Raj’s hands with one of the policemen’s zip ties, and who’d unbound his own. The viceroy had been on the wrong side for a long time and still might be now, in Terrence’s mind. But all three of the room’s occupants knew that if Meyer was playing a con at this point, it was so long that its duplicity failed to matter.
Meyer had broken them into the network center with his own palm, and Terrence had what he’d called Canned Heat in his hands.
Meyer wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing or not, but he was in with them for sure: lock, stock, and smoking barrel.
Without waiting for Meyer to ask about the noise, Terrence held up something that must have been another of his odd inventions. A communicator of some kind — maybe even the thing he’d sort of been told about by Divinity. The thing that allowed him to communicate with the other group while the Astrals feigned ignorance.
“That was my signal. If we’re going to install the virus, we need to do it now.”
Thinking of the signal from outside Salt Lake City — from Piper and Trevor’s group — made Meyer recall something that bothered him, though Divinity hadn’t explained more than the basics. The Astrals knew what the other group was up to. Meyer had no idea what they planned to do about it, but instinct told him their knowledge was good for no one.
“You’re in contact with them?” Meyer extended a hand, standing from his perch at the edge of what might be a rack of servers. Heather watched, uncharacteristically quiet. “Let me talk to someone.”
“It’s automated,” Terrence said. “On a timer. They’re underground now and can’t send or receive signals.”
Meyer had thought of that. Not even the Astrals could talk through a mountain. Given that Meyer seriously doubted ships couldn’t get into the archive he’d seen through Divinity, it seemed the others were much safer now than in Moab. The irony.
“Why do you need to sync whatever you’re doing with them?”
Again, Terrence regarded Meyer with doubt. Unlike Terrence and Christopher’s disloyalty and the Moab crew’s incursion into the Mormon archive, this wasn’t something Divinity understood. The droids had inspected the cylinder once, and they’d been aware of its general function. But the specifics — as, strangely, with the details concerning a lot of mundane human technology — were still a mystery. Telling Meyer now would mean popping the last advantage Terrence’s group had. Until he plugged his strange canister in to do its job, there was still a chance that Meyer was only pretending to have flip-flopped. He might be trying to get information the Astrals didn’t have before flip-flopping back, and Terrence knew it.
Still, taking a very human leap of faith, Terrence’s dark eyes — unshielded by sunglasses, for once — met Meyer’s.
“What this does,” he said, shaking the canister, “is something we’re fairly sure the Astrals will be able to counteract once they see the way it works. The network will be open for a window, but not forever.”
“And?”
Another assessing stare. He could refuse to answer or make something up, but Meyer would know if he lied. The Canned Heat was near its intended port, as if he might be preparing to shove it and run if Meyer’s honor fell suspect.
“We need the window open when they come out. So they can transmit data other people need to help solve a problem.” His jaw worked. “And because if they need help, an open network will help them get it.”
Meyer looked at the canister. Heather and Terrence looked at Meyer.
“Do what you need to do,” Meyer said.
Terrence stuck the end of the thing into a terminal port. A dialogue box appeared. He clicked around then entered something on the keyboard. A progress bar replaced the box as the software unpacked and began to do its work.
Heather stood while they waited. Meyer watched, her eyes on something else. Searching.
“Where’s Raj?”
“By the d—”
Terrence had been about to say “by the doors.” That’s where Meyer had left him before binding his wrists. But Meyer looked over and saw the spot vacant.
“He was there,” Terrence said.
Heather looked at Meyer. “Did you let him go?”
“I shot him. I’ve been here the whole time.”
“But you touched him last.”
“You saw me, Heather. When would I have let him go?”
“He’s not there now.”
“I can see that.”
“Jesus Christ, Meyer. Why weren’t you watching him?”
Meyer’s mouth opened in disbelief. It was easy to forget that he was the viceroy, that he was feared, that they were all doing something they shouldn’t be. Here was Heather, behaving like her usual bitch self, reprimanding him the way she always had back when they’d been married.
“He was right th—”
“Oh,” Terrence interrupted. Meyer looked down at him, seeing him tapping the keyboard. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Heather asked.
“No. No no no no …”
“What the hell, Terrence?”
“No, you bitch.” Terrence slapped the terminal with his palm. “No!”
“Will you just fucking say what’s the matter?”
Terrence looked back, his face crushed with worry and loss. He pointed at the screen, filled with rapidly scrolling information in a white-on-black screen window that Meyer couldn’t come close to deciphering.
“It’s failing,” Terrence said.
“What’s failing?”
“The network. All of it.”
“You killed the Internet?” Heather looked more annoyed than panicked. “How did you kill the Internet?”
“The Canned Heat. I thought I’d worked it out, but it’s aggressive. The virus is only supposed to attack targeted sectors, and there’s no way and I thought of everything and MOTHERFUCKER!”
His face clenched and he kicked the server bank, as if brute force would erase the mistake.
He looked at Meyer, his features grim. “We have to disconnect it. Cut it off. Unplug it from the network.”<
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“Will that stop it?”
“It’s all I know to try.”
Meyer would have to take his word. He nodded curtly. “Then do it. Whatever you need.”
“Where are the main fiber lines?”
“I have no idea.”
“Or some sort of a data gate.”
“Can’t you just turn off the power?” Heather asked.
“Where?” Terrence ignored her.
“I … I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“Raj?”
“We have to find him. Heather, find him.”
“You find him!”
Meyer and Terrence turned back toward Heather’s irritated shout to find Raj by the door, his wrists unbound, flanked by two Titans and a pair of Reptars.
Beside them, visible from the corner of Meyer’s eye, the terminal’s screen flashed as the network began eating itself alive.
Chapter Sixty
“Wait a minute,” Piper said, turning. Benjamin was behind her, along with a few of the rebel camp survivors and a tech she didn’t recognize. “Where’s Trevor?”
Benjamin looked back, but he only shrugged.
“And Cameron. He was here too. And that bald guy. Andreus.”
“I think they broke off,” Benjamin told her. “There was another tunnel.”
Piper didn’t think so. First of all, she was sure there hadn’t been another tunnel. The Mormon Genealogical Archives had turned out to be grand but boring. An accountant’s wet dream of a secret hideout. Buried in a mountain and mysterious, but still just a series of identical rooms packed with endless rows of floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, stretching from one end of a room to the other, filled with small, square, carefully labeled drawers. She’d pulled out a drawer or two. They were long and narrow, filled with thousands of sheets of microfilm.
The place simply wasn’t the labyrinth they’d all been led to believe it was.
There didn’t seem to be anywhere old enough to house Benjamin’s codex relic.
And there certainly hadn’t been a branching tunnel since she’d last noticed Trevor and Cameron. The archive’s floor plan wasn’t that complicated, despite its underground location. She could even see another group down the wide tunnel, milling about more of the endless filing rooms ahead as if on a slightly earlier tour.
“They were right behind us. In this group,” Piper told Benjamin.
“I told them to split off.”
“When?”
“Originally. The plan was to break into a bunch of smaller groups.”
“But when were they supposed to split off?”
“When they … I’m not sure. But I know I can’t see them, so clearly they did.”
“Could they be lost?” asked the nameless tech.
Piper looked at the tech, then at the group farther down the hall. Impossibly, someone from the other group waved. Because this was nothing at all. The entire errand was one big, useless dead end.
“I couldn’t get lost in here,” Piper said, peering into the obvious, wide-open tunnel.
“Maybe they went into one of the rooms,” Benjamin said.
That sounded unlikely. The rooms held no interest. Unless one of the filing cabinets turned out to be fake and there was an ancient trove behind it, Piper couldn’t imagine what would have drawn Cameron’s attention enough to linger. Benjamin had made this sound like a hike through the past. He’d suggested they might find old passages behind new ones, littered with relics that would make a museum director drool. But this was something between a vault and an office, nothing more.
Piper pushed past Benjamin, headed back the way they’d come. Benjamin shuffled behind, protesting. Finally, after realizing they were rejoining other groups with similar discoveries of nothing, Piper met the scientist’s eye.
“You know where they went,” she said.
“Maybe into one of the rooms,” he repeated. But Benjamin was a terrible liar.
Piper gave the other members of her group a look then pulled him aside.
“What’s going on here, Benjamin?”
“What do you mean?”
“We uprooted the entire lab to run around in here. There’s nothing.”
“I guess I made a mistake.”
“We didn’t have to create a distraction to get in. We didn’t have to pick a lock. We ducked behind some rocks and came inside — and now that we’re in here, there’s nothing. Nobody at all.”
“It’s just an archive,” Benjamin said, his lie becoming more apparent with each passing second.
“You said this was one of the places the Astrals made sure to occupy when they showed up. That Andreus guy has all sorts of footage. But they just walk around outside? I swear I thought one of them glanced over and saw me outside then looked away.”
“We’ve been lucky.”
“You didn’t expect to find the codex here, did you?”
“What? Of course I did.”
Benjamin was squirming, his eyes darting around, uncomfortable.
“Why aren’t you telling me the truth, Benjamin? You and Cameron both.”
“Of course I’m—”
“You knew there was nothing here. Nothing for us to—”
“Shh!”
Piper’s head cocked. Her eyebrows bunched. They were away from the group, and she’d been softly talking. If Benjamin feared losing face — most everyone seemed to have made their way back into one big harmless, useless knot — her inquiries wouldn’t do it. What was the point of shushing?
Piper fixed her gaze on Benjamin, biting her lip. Rather than trying to worm more lies out of him, she simply marched farther down the hall toward the facility’s front, without bothering to stay quiet. The place was theirs. They could throw a party, and the Astrals would supply the punch.
Piper stopped when she reached their first branch, hands on her hips. There were some final stragglers down the last passageway she hadn’t been able to see from her old position, but now they were coming forward to join the others. Trevor and Cameron had been with them, so where had they gone? Her first instinct was worry, but a look at Benjamin nixed it. They weren’t lost. Their fearless leader knew exactly where they were, but he wasn’t telling.
“What’s really going on here, Benjamin?” Piper was loud enough for almost everyone to hear.
He flinched, looked around, then rushed forward, holding up his hands.
There was a cracking sound. Piper looked over to see an invisible seam crack the wall open. A hidden tunnel made from the kind of hewn stone they’d all been told to expect but hadn’t found lay behind it. Inside the tunnel were Andreus, Trevor, and Cameron.
Something shot past Piper’s line of sight. At first, she thought it was something someone had thrown, then realized the object stopped, hovering between her and Cameron as the trio emerged from the tunnel, their eyes wide, apparently still feeling the fear Piper had long ago lost from her shoulders.
The object was a tiny silver sphere, about half the size of a pearl.
After its moment of hesitation, it buzzed around Cameron like a light-speed hornet. It had no face and made no noise, but Piper knew shock and anger when she saw it.
There was a small noise of ripping fabric. Piper and Cameron looked down to see small movements inside of the bag slung around Cameron’s shoulder. There was another small ripping sound, and the BB re-emerged, again stationing itself between their faces.
Cameron’s wide eyes met Piper’s, his face flushed.
“We have to go,” he managed to say.
Alarms screamed from every direction.
Chapter Sixty-One
Titans and Reptars watched Raj bind Heather’s and Terrence’s wrists. Meyer shook him away when he tried to tie him. Heather thought Raj would force the issue, but he didn’t. That gave her a sliver of hope — the idea that if Meyer remained free under the guards’ eyes, they might yet survive to fight another day — but it was only a spark. Meyer wasn’t a runner, and Rep
tar peacekeepers were fast. Free hands meant little. They were giving Meyer the Viceroy’s dignity of walking out unrestrained, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in custody.
As they walked down the main stairway, Heather thought about how glad she was that Meyer had sent Lila off after shooting Raj. How glad she was that Lila was probably in her room with Clara instead of being led away with her parents. And, as the cherry atop a bitter sundae, that Clara hadn’t seen a thing.
Except that Clara, Heather knew, probably saw everything anyway.
Meyer paused when they reached the front lobby. He didn’t stop moving and wait for the others to notice him. Meyer moved to the group’s front — ahead of Raj and even the Astrals — before ceasing his feet and challenging the others to run into him.
Raj recovered too close, barely avoiding crashing into Meyer’s chest. He stepped to the side and brushed fussily at his shirt and the canvas undershirt beneath — thick enough, as it turned out, to keep all but the darts’ tips from breaking his skin.
“We’re not walking them out like this,” he announced.
Raj looked at Meyer in disbelief. Heather wanted to laugh, despite her bound wrists. Being caught in the middle of intergalactic treason didn’t stop Meyer from showing Raj who was boss.
“Them?” Raj repeated.
“Heather is mother to my granddaughter. Even walking Terrence out in restraints shows unrest in the viceroy’s mansion at a time when we can’t afford to appear unsettled, given the recent turmoil. Many Heaven’s Veil citizens saw that, and right now we can’t afford to—”
Raj straightened.
“Who are you talking to?” He looked at the Titans, enormous but still so blandly polite. The Reptars had their mouths closed and were quiet, seeming to behave in deference to the sanctity of the viceroy’s residence. Heather supposed both classes of aliens must understand human speech, but neither spoke. Meyer talked to the Astrals through his mind somehow. This posturing meant nothing.
“Not to you, Raj,” Meyer said.
Raj shook his head, disbelieving. He turned to the first Titan, who seemed to cordially nod.