by Sean Platt
“Do you see it?”
Piper eyed the horizon, where road met sky. The trick was easy, now that she’d done it a few times. She blurred her eyes and immediately saw the dark shadow where she’d seen it last, running down the road beside them like a spectral cheetah with an endless supply of energy.
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
Piper pointed. Then she relaxed her attention, and the thing seemed to vanish. She kept thinking of something her mother had told her: Keep making that expression, and your face will freeze that way. Maybe the same was true for defocusing your eyes. She didn’t want to see the shadow on their heels — and whatever else might be out there at the limits of her vision — forever and ever.
“It’s keeping up?” Cameron asked.
Piper nodded.
“I wondered. I thought we might leave it behind.”
But that’s not the way the strange shadow-shape struck Piper. Cameron had said the thing had been following them since before their return to Moab. But she felt different. It seemed to be doing the leading, and it if they risked falling behind, it would slow enough to let them catch it again.
“I don’t like this,” Piper said.
“Which part?”
She made an all-encompassing gesture. As she did, Piper’s surroundings struck her with an intense sense of déjà vu. She’d ridden shotgun with Meyer at the wheel in their Jetvan, with three kids in back. Reduce ages by a few decades and subtract a person, and they’d be more or less the same now.
But then again, maybe they hadn’t been running away back then, either.
“All of it.”
“Be more specific.”
“Okay,” Piper said. “Driving right down the middle of the road instead of keeping a low profile.”
“The Astrals know we know. They still need us, same as before, only closer to the bone on both sides. We’re playing chicken.”
“I also don’t like the shadow thing. It’s leading us around by the collar, and we’re letting it.”
“We decided to go to Vail, not it.”
“The feeling we’re being used. Again. The fact that people keep dying. The fact that we’re headed to the same place we ran from not long ago. Both of us, Cam.”
“We know something now that we didn’t know then.”
Piper nodded. “Yes. And yet we don’t know all we need to know. You don’t know you’re right about Thor’s Hammer. You don’t know how to use that plate thing, or even for sure that it’s really a key. You don’t know how we’ll get into the city.”
“I didn’t know how I’d get in last time, and I managed to find a way.”
“Because they opened the door, needing you to take me to Benjamin to decipher that stupid stone tablet!”
Cameron apparently didn’t know how to respond. He remained mute. After a few seconds, Piper went on.
“You can’t just waltz into the Apex. You don’t know what it is, what it does, or what might protect it. The place is probably surrounded by guards. Reptars.” Piper looked out the window, their shadow long on the road as the sun set behind them. “And even if we find Thor’s Hammer, if it even exists, we have no idea if it can be deactivated. You might wind it up and set it off early.”
“All I can do is try, Piper.”
“We can’t call anyone. Can’t look at the satellites. Can’t — ”
“Okay, stop. Mercy. I see your objections.”
Piper watched Cameron drive. She hadn’t expected him to turn the RV around after she’d aired her grievances, but the entire conversation’s point seemed flagrantly moot. Why had he wanted her objections if it was all just FYI?
“What makes you so sure you can do any of what you think you can?” she asked, unwilling to drop the issue. She would have, in the past. She’d never put her foot down even halfway with Meyer (in New York, on the road, or in Heaven’s Veil), and for some reason at least attempting to now mattered. Not because she was sure of anything, or because she was afraid. Just because, like humanity, Piper didn’t intend to end her life on her knees.
Cameron sighed. He looked at her as if asking a question he couldn’t quite vocalize then followed with one he could.
“Remember how when you and I went to Moab the first time, we walked through a line of monoliths and could suddenly hear thoughts?”
“Sure.”
“And how we seemed to know things? Like how we almost walked into the Andreus group once, but we saw the path and suddenly knew that going ahead was wrong … and so we went down into the ravine?”
“I remember.”
“Does that feeling ever — you know — return a little? Do you ever get flashbacks?”
Those were two separate questions. For Piper, their psychic interlude had ended by the time they hit Utah and never recurred. But she still heard things in the dead of night while sleeping. She still saw things. They might be dreams, and Piper had always dismissed them accordingly. But seeing the ship above the ranch had stirred something inside her. Memories of being taken as Meyer had. Memories of minds that weren’t hers. Memories that she’d lost and that had only resumed their continuity once she’d disembarked in Vail. It had never seemed strange. But now it felt like a conspicuous omission — a jump cut in her mind, with a whole world missing. Except in half-seen phantasms, like the shadow pacing them on the berm.
“No,” she said, not wanting to delve. Not here. Not now.
“I wonder if it was the same for them in Vail — what you told me about Heather seeming to communicate with Meyer, and about Lila seeming to hear Clara inside her before she was born.”
“I have no idea.”
Cameron’s head bobbed. She could tell he wasn’t done, or didn’t want to be.
“Why?”
“Nothing.”
Piper felt a chill. He’d raised the issue after she’d asked what made him believe he was right about heading to Vail now.
“Why are we really heading to Vail, Cameron?”
“Because my dad said I knew where it was. Because he made it sound like it was all so obvious. We’d get the key from our supposed cake walk to Cottonwood Canyon, then we’d head back to where Thor’s Hammer was buried. A thing that was big enough not to move … so maybe it didn’t move far at all. Dad said the plate confirmed what he’d already suspected. Something obvious.”
That was Benjamin Bannister, all right. He acted like everyone should know what he knew — especially his estranged son, who’d combed the world alongside him in youth.
But the answer struck Piper as complete. Yes, Benjamin had been researching the Apex when he’d died, and yes, the Hammer’s location, if it was right where it should have been all along, would be amusingly obvious. But it wouldn’t just be an obvious joke to Cameron, who had much of Benjamin’s context. It’d be an obvious jest to everyone — the Astrals included.
“There are other obvious places than Vail.”
“It’s there, Piper. It’s under the Apex. I’m sure of it.”
Sure of it? On a hunch?
Piper watched Cameron, knowing he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. He was hiding a secret. But she’d have to let it go, at least for now. He had a reason, even if he wouldn’t say it. He’d tell her eventually.
Until then, they could drive.
They could ride the wide-open road straight down the throat of those they hoped to choke, clinging to slivers of hope that they wouldn’t be eaten after reaching Vail’s borders.
CHAPTER 19
Cameron felt another press coming. So he peeked at Piper, touched the button on the wheel with his thumb, and engaged the dumb but relatively still reliable autodrive.
He waited for it, arms braced, secure at least that the coming shock wouldn’t steer them into a ditch.
Then he saw a sequence of images, somehow superimposed over his natural vision. It wasn’t like a movie, or a projection. It wasn’t even precisely sight. He could see the images; he could describe the colors and wha
t he watched happen within them. But there was more. The experience was closer to memory, like an intrusion of something he couldn’t forget if he’d tried.
The Apex, now almost complete.
An ornate chest, like something drawn by ancient artisans in his father’s old books.
Hands — Cameron’s own; he could read their scars like a map — setting the ornate plate with the spiral pattern into a flat circle on the chest.
The Apex somehow shifting. Changing. The image dug its claws into Cameron, tightening his grip on the wheel. He could feel the blue pyramid’s energy in his bones. He wanted to clench as if receiving a long, hot electric shock.
He saw a house. His own feet walking the hallways.
A tall man. The viceroy. But in the vision he wore a mask, like something from a Day of the Dead parade.
A flash of light. Maybe an explosion. In the vision, Cameron felt something break. Something come undone, become nothing at all.
He saw a small girl, a few years old but with wisdom in her deep, fathomless blue eyes. She had a single finger pressed to her lips, telling Cameron to keep the secret.
Then someone was snapping in his ear, over and over. At first, he thought it was part of the vision — something he felt sure was being sent to him deliberately like a siren song. Then he realized it was Charlie, displaying his usual lack of tact.
Cameron blinked up. It was dark. The passenger seat, where Piper had been sitting three seconds earlier, was empty. Charlie sat in it. Cameron pushed away a strange sense of unreality, sure that Charlie was about to sit on her.
But then the tall man was in the seat, staring blankly at him. The world beyond was dark except for twin cones of light from the RV’s front.
“I thought you didn’t trust the autodrive,” Charlie said like a challenge.
“I only turned it on for a second.”
But that second had lasted longer than Cameron thought.
“Where is Piper?”
“Asleep.”
“But she was just … ” He let the sentence hang, knowing Charlie wasn’t socially adept enough to care. Obviously Piper wasn’t “just” anything. It had been light outside when he’d last seen her. Which had been less than ten seconds ago.
“There’s a problem,” Charlie said.
“Okay. What’s the problem?”
“Andreus sent out a drone. I wouldn’t have allowed it if I’d known.”
Cameron almost laughed. The idea of Charlie forbidding Nathan Andreus from doing anything was ridiculous.
“It works off a stored map, independent of satellite guidance. But without GPS, he says it could only ballpark, based on our believed position. So he programmed it to go high, spot from a distance, then zero in on the Heaven’s Veil lights. It was then supposed to fly lower, make a sweep, and return. There’s a homing signal it finds on this end when it gets close.”
“Okay,” Cameron said, still trying to shake the cobwebs from his vision — his strange certainty that he could do what he was proposing, based on intel from a little girl he’d never met and wasn’t entirely sure even existed. The dreamlike state was hard to shed. He’d apparently been steeping in it for much longer than the few seconds he’d imagined.
“So what was the problem?” Cameron asked.
“There were no lights at Heaven’s Veil.”
Cameron took his hands from the wheel, surrendering the farce of driving. If they took a wayward road to the wrong place, armageddon’s edge would have to wait for them elsewhere.
“The network failure?”
Charlie gave a small nod. “And perhaps I’m overstating. There were some lights, but it’s clear they’re conserving power. I can see some small dots of civilization on the footage. But it’s just a few floods. Most of the city is black. Except for the Apex.”
“What about the Apex?”
“We’ve never seen it at night. There was never a reason to. But with the rest of the city’s lights off, it’s clear that something is happening inside. And outside.”
“Outside?”
Charlie fished a tablet from his shoulder bag. Cameron hadn’t noticed the bag, despite Charlie’s carrying it inside. Testament to how odd Charlie could be.
Charlie glanced at the wheel, saw it making minute steering adjustments on its own, then held the tablet so Cameron could see it. He started an already paused video and saw a shaky, green-tinted overhead shot of a city in the dark, most of its buildings unlit. The camera swooped higher, and Cameron could see the Apex, not just glowing blue but pulsing azure. There was a line protruding from the Apex’s top, like a string hooked high in the sky above.
“What’s this?”
“That’s what bothers me. This is an infrared shot, so I doubt this is visible to the naked eye — or it’s very faint if it is. But that’s not all of it. Look.”
Charlie skipped ahead. The drone was now flying over the area beyond the fence, where the artists had created their enormous stone carvings of Divinity’s various forms. Hulks of rock in the desert were difficult to see in the dark, but Cameron made them out with effort simply because of their size. They were so huge that the Astrals had clearly placed the source stones in place for the artists to carve. There were no high-rise cranes in Heaven’s Veil, as far as satellite footage had shown. Just buildings and fence and monoliths connected by narrow bands of light like the one streaming from the Apex’s top.
“Are those the statues outside the city?” Cameron asked.
“Yes.”
“What are these lines between them?”
“Either they’re being projected by the carvings themselves, or the Apex is projecting them. I think it’s the latter. See how this line, between this statue and this one, is broken? There’s a church steeple here — ” Charlie paused and scrolled the shot back to show what he meant, “that would, if it’s projected from the Apex, be in the way. But again, all infrared. People probably don’t know it’s there because they don’t see the city from above, in the dark, at night.”
Cameron felt a chill. Seen from far enough back, the pattern was obvious. The sculptures, with dull-green lines between them, formed an enormous spiral.
“What do you think it is?”
“It’s a Fibonacci spiral. Like the one in a nautilus. Or the spiral of a galaxy.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. It might be a landing pad, like a runway. It might be a marker. Or it might be a call for help.”
“Help?”
“Not as in Save us. But it might mean Give us a hand. Assist us.’”
“Why would they need assistance?”
“Because they’ve encountered a problem they can’t solve. It’s the same thing we’d do. We’d call someone who would know better.”
Cameron touched the tablet’s screen then the line at the top of the Apex. Like something coming into it. Or something going out.
“There’s no way to be sure when this happened. Not without my equipment, and not without talking to others around the world.”
“Why would you need to talk to others?”
“This might be happening at the other capitals, too.”
Cameron thought of the visions he’d been receiving — that he’d been given, more accurately. The missives that felt half like informational bulletins and half like calls from a little girl asking him to come and play. They were new, too. Just another thing that seemed to have changed since Cottonwood, since they’d kicked the hornet’s nest.
“If you had to guess, Charlie,” Cameron said, “what do you think this means?”
“That I hope you’re right. And that either way, the clock is ticking.”
CHAPTER 20
Lila crossed the dark lawn to Heather’s house, feeling unsure. Clara’s hand was in hers. It was late for the girl, but not too late. She slept erratically, in fits. Sometimes, she was down for fifteen hours out of twenty-four. Sometimes, she barely slept at all. She wasn’t tired now. And there was no way, with six pla
ymates on the way, that she could calm herself to sleep a wink.
“Mommy,” she said. “Look.”
Lila looked toward the Apex, where Clara was pointing. The thing was making its eerie blue pulse, though the tempo seemed faster. With city power off, the thing seemed ominous.
“It’s like a flashlight beam,” Clara said.
Lila looked over again. It wasn’t like a flashlight at all. It was like a nightlight, making sure that no one in the city could sleep.
“You’re sure she’s in here?” Lila said instead of answering.
“Not there.” Clara pointed at Heather’s small house, then her finger swung toward Terrence’s. His place was dark. Terrence was back, all right, but Raj was keeping him under lock and key and on a rather tight leash. “There,” Clara finished.
“That’s Mr. Terrence’s house, Sweetie.”
Clara broke Lila’s grip, skipping across the partially lit lawn toward the tiny home. The house had lights, but they were only as needed, giving the place a spooky, half-dead feel. The grounds were worse. There were outward-facing security lights, but in here, between main building and the row of guest houses, it was mostly long shadow. The air was warm. Watching Clara skip between long shafts of dark and light gave Lila a chill she couldn’t articulate.
Clara climbed the porch steps. Then, without knocking, she went inside. The place was nothing but darkness. She tried to cut into the gloom with the small flashlight she’d found on Raj’s nightstand, but the thing was barely fit for a keychain, too dim to reveal more than the doorknob.
Lila stood on the lawn, feeling the silence before crossing to the porch herself.
“Clara? Come on out, honey.”
But there was no answer.
“Clara?”
The door was still open. Lila entered, fighting dread, and batted at the wall for a switch. She flicked it, but nothing happened.
Too close, someone said, “Power’s out.”
Lila jumped. She turned her light and found herself feet from her mother, with Clara perched happily on her lap.