by Sean Platt
Mom had seemed so certain. So sure. So serious, without any of her usual jokes.
But something was going on with her and probably had been for years. Since Astral Day. She’d been through as much as the rest of them, maybe more. But she wasn’t keeping it together. Heather masked torment with humor. Lila tended to feel the pain, which she supposed was healthy. But now all that bottled emotion must be backing up inside her mom like a clogged toilet trying to clear its throat. And now she’d either broken inside or had leveled up as an asshole.
Still, Clara led Lila angrily up the stairs. The small girl never looked back. If she had, Lila would have realized something she’d been trying in various degrees to ignore: that Clara, not Mo Weir, was the one to ask about any happenings in the house. She could ask Clara directly, without the subterfuge that would be necessary if she asked the aide. Clara wouldn’t think her mom was ridiculous to ask if Grandma was telling the truth, when everyone knew she was short a few critical nuts from her snack bowl.
Her father was dead. It was an impossible thing to think, given the mansion’s reaction. What she’d overheard from Mo earlier. What Raj had said — his claim like the planting of a flag.
She was being stupid.
Maybe her father was alive after all. Not asking made her the sick one, not Heather.
“Clara … ”
Clara kept moving. Her small legs were, as with the rest of her, oddly certain. It was eerie, watching her climb. She was barely old enough to be clambering up the stone steps hand-and-knee, yet she took them like an adult, holding to the newel posts because the risers were huge relative to her natural gait.
Lila didn’t need an answer. She already had it.
Let’s go find him, Clara had said earlier. About Meyer. About Grandpa, while everyone else was saying he’d kicked his final bucket.
But nobody told Lila anything. No one had in forever. Terrence and Heather didn’t try to enlist her help to overthrow the Raj regime; she’d had to discover that by chasing her father. And Dad hadn’t asked her thoughts; she’d had to guilt him into changing his mind and shooting Raj, right there on the spot.
And Raj? He was so much worse. Normal husbands talked to their wives. He might have said, Honey, your mom and everyone else in the world seem to be up to something, like trying to overthrow the city. She might have listened. At least he’d have been sharing his day, discussing his work.
Back upstairs, Clara grew quiet. Suddenly uninterested in the Apex, which had claimed her attention just minutes before, now back to pulsing blue outside the window — albeit brighter with the lights out. Maybe faster.
Clara shuffled blocks. She lined them up in long rows. Two banks with a space in the middle, like a highway. She arranged tiny men and women from a play set no two-year-old should have. But getting them from imported merchandise stockpiles had seemed so natural. Clara didn’t play like a toddler. She played like a teenager and swallowed nothing.
“What are you doing, honey?” Lila asked, coming to her knees, dismissing thoughts of her father — something to deal with later, like her mother’s mental collapse.
Clara said, “Shh.”
Lila shushed for a few seconds, but there was a meticulous feel to Clara’s play. The kind of play, she realized, that Lila had come to view like a news report or weather forecast.
Rows of blocks.
Little plastic men and women, lined along the edges.
Two figures in the middle — far too large for the rest, a Barbie and a Ken.
A second line of people and set-aside blocks to one side. If the long row was a highway, the offshoot would be an exit ramp. A second option, smaller than the first.
But most of Clara’s attention had, strangely, turned to a dark-purple scarf that one of the other capitals’ ambassadors had given to the Heaven’s Veil viceroy’s family members as a gift. She didn’t need a scarf; as New American royalty, Lila had ample closet space, stuffed with all the clothing she’d ever want — not that she ever went anywhere or did anything worthy of her fancy apparel.
Lila had given the scarf to Clara. Somehow, the thing — fine to touch, surely expensive in the old world — had made it to the floor. Now it might as well be a rag. Something Clara was cleaning her play area with, bunched in one childishly pudgy fist.
Except that Clara wasn’t cleaning with the scarf. She was playing with it, trotting it along at one end of the line of blocks as if it were a character in her game.
“What is that, Clara?” Lila asked. Not meaning its real-life identity, but its function in her game.
Again Clara said, “Shh. It’s almost time.”
Clara touched Ken’s forehead.
She swooshed the scarf, beyond the line of people, as if unseen.
Lila watched a smile form on her daughter’s lips.
The scarf unfolded. Clara tossed it lightly. And beneath it, all of the little people vanished.
“Good night,” she said.
CHAPTER 29
Rows of Titans moved closer. First at the front and rear and then from the sides. It happened like squeezing a tube; ahead, the Titans came from right and left to meet in the middle. Then the line pinched down from ahead, closing like an approaching zipper.
Piper stopped. Cameron turned.
It was happening at the rear, too.
Closing around from the sides. Slowly. With smiles. Piper didn’t see Reptars. Just Titans, politely choking in.
“What do we do?” she asked Cameron, who seemed to have an answer tucked up his sleeve.
“It’s okay. I … I think this is okay.”
“What are you expecting to happen?”
“I don’t know what it is. Just … something.”
“Cam … ”
“It’s okay. They don’t know where the Hammer is. They still think we’ll lead them to it.”
If the Astrals needed them, Piper wasn’t seeing it.
The Titans inched closer. They didn’t look menacing or threatening. They almost looked curious. But then again, that’s how Titans always looked. It hadn’t changed them from becoming beasts, then tearing their friends to shreds.
They didn’t need anything. They’d take the key. Then they’d kill them.
Cameron’s eyes flicked to the side. Piper turned and saw human officers filling the space behind the Titans. Reinforcements, as if they were needed.
Piper felt a change sweep the air, as if something had flown by unseen. The generator-fueled lights flickered then blinked out. Something seeped from the street itself, filling the air like a fog. Something that filled her ears with sinister-sounding whispers.
In the pulsing blue glow, the Titans looked at each other. They looked at their hands, as if they’d never seen them before.
The pyramid’s light came and went. While lit, Piper could barely see with her adjusted eyes. Once it was out, she could only see silhouettes.
A black fog oozed among the Titans. A fog she recognized. And when Piper forced her eyes to defocus, she could see it happen: that one black dog shape she’d seen at the edge of her vision for days was splitting into many pieces, running amid the Titans, becoming mist, sliding into their bodies through their humanlike noses.
Ahead, one Titan looked at the Astral beside him.
The second Titan shoved the first, whose face formed a scowl, some unknown grievance suddenly pressing between the always-placid hulks.
The one who’d done the shoving opened his mouth to a sharp row of Reptar teeth.
The blue light from the Apex departed. The blue light returned.
More shoving from the other side. Grunting shouts. All around them, Titans began to transform — not morphing as they had in Cottonwood Canyon, but becoming confused hybrid things with parts of each: eyes of a Reptar, throat-deep blue and glowing. Titans grew scales. Fingernails became claws at the end of muscular white arms, ready to slash.
Piper heard human shouts. Somewhere in the dark, a gun went off. She could see its flash in t
he blackness: a millisecond starburst of white.
Piper looked at Cameron. Cameron looked at Piper. They were afraid to move, still in their capsule with its empty halo around them.
The Titans weren’t coming for the intruders. They were too preoccupied, all of a sudden, with fighting each other.
“What the hell is going on?” Cameron shouted.
But he’d known something was coming. Piper could only watch it happen. Struggling to maintain her lack of focus in the flickering gloom, she watched the dark shape change again, moving from mist to something larger, collecting to the right. Forming a partition, prying Titans apart, making those it touched all the more furious.
Piper watched one’s entire arm become that of a Reptar. The Titan slashed another’s throat, spilling blood that, in the dark, looked all too human.
The wedge between dark shapes opened. And at the end of the newly opened way, Piper saw Christopher.
They didn’t hesitate.
Piper and Cameron ran, leaving the alien bloodbath behind.
CHAPTER 30
One minute, Raj was looking down at Terrence, watching his progress without knowing what he was doing. In that minute, all was well with the world. He’d learned something the Astrals couldn’t know, and he’d sent the cops out to handle it. He hadn’t quite unearthed the dirt on Meyer he wanted given the strange way he’d freaked out while speaking to Terrence, but he was on his way. With a victory in the streets under his belt and forthcoming evidence of the viceroy’s duplicity, it was beginning to feel like Raj might ascend in the Heaven’s Veil power structure after all.
But the next minute, the lights flicked away. Raj saw something approaching, big, and fast. The room’s single battery-powered security light flickered on, and Raj saw that the big thing was the viceroy. Meyer grabbed his shirt with both fists, not bothering to yell before hurling him backward.
Raj spilled from his chair, the seat wheeling out from under him. His head rapped the ground. The chair struck one of the server racks and rebounded, rolling to Meyer’s feet as he continued to come, murder still burning bright in his eyes. He grabbed the chair without seeming to think, raised it over his head, and threw it hard at Raj as he lay sprawled on the floor. Raj managed to roll to the side but not far enough; the chair hit his leg sideways, its metal frame tearing a gash on his leg.
Raj looked up. There were guards in the room as before, but they were just watching. Letting the man in charge do whatever he chose.
“WAIT!” Raj yelled, on his back like a beetle, hands up toward Meyer, legs held off the floor to deflect further attacks.
But Meyer didn’t wait. He came hard, grabbing Raj by one upper arm and a fistful of canvas undershirt, dragging him to his feet far too easily. The man’s strength was insane; he always looked fit, but now he lifted Raj like a strongman, slamming him into one of the racks, making it clang. Hardware dropped to the floor. The viceroy’s fist returned. Raj tried to hold up a hand, but the knuckles came anyway, and Raj could only duck away.
Fist met metal, hard enough to dent it. Tiny electronics tapped onto the surrounding surfaces like blown shrapnel. Terrence yelled out, raising his hands, standing, concerned more for the machines than for the human combatants.
Raj slid to the ground. When Meyer picked him up again, Raj’s eyes rolled to his fist — a red, shredded mess. Bone was visible at his knuckles, blood running down his punching hand to stain his white cuffs.
A rocket detonated in Raj’s left cheek, shooting all the way up into his brain. He’d never before understood seeing stars, but he got it now, his vision blackening, white pinpoints of light dancing around him like fireflies. Then he was limp, trying to stand, able to think bizarrely only that the fist Meyer had hit him with had been macerated.
A blow to his stomach. A guttural roar, like an animal’s. Lights strobed, turning the room into a disco.
Something crashed. Raj could barely pay attention. Terrence was somewhere above, now trying to hold Meyer despite being, Raj thought, firmly on Meyer’s side. He tried to sit up and say something, but his body wasn’t working. Something erupted in his side, and Raj rolled away, coming back to see the viceroy’s polished black shoe recoil, preparing for another kick.
Then the lights came on.
And Meyer, with his foot back, slowly lowered it.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Raj croaked, looking up at Meyer, meaning his assassination attempt, meaning the way he’d only been doing his duty while everyone else stood back and let Rome die in fire around them.
But Meyer didn’t look down with anger. His eyes clouded, and the expression crossing his features seemed confused, almost lost.
Then Meyer left the room, his fist dripping, without saying a word.
CHAPTER 31
The generator seemed to kick on, purring without anyone bothering to start it. Coughing back from nothing, returning the newly mounted floods to life around them.
“Get down,” said Malcolm Jons.
Cameron looked up at the man, now kneeling behind a wheeled refuse bin beside Piper. Jons had his arm out, his uniform sleeve straining against his massive diameter. Jons clearly trained, but he also struck Cameron as a natural giant. He probably looked at iron and grew muscle — as opposed to Cameron, who’d experimented with weight lifting in his twenties, only to give up in abject frustration.
He didn’t know if he could trust Captain Jons. But at this point, it hardly mattered.
“They were going to take us,” Piper said. “They weren’t going to let us near the pyramid. They were just going to take us in, maybe kill us outright.”
Cameron could only shake his head. That was only one of several things that had gone horribly awry in the last ten minutes.
“I thought they needed us to find Thor’s Hammer,” Piper said.
Cameron was still shaking his head, out of breath, adrenaline filled, and shocked. “Apparently, they decided they don’t need us after all.”
“Shh,” said Jons, warning arm still out, searching the street for signs of pursuit. Cameron thought they’d got away clean while the lights had been out, but there was no way to be sure. This hadn’t been like last time, when the Astrals had let Cameron believe he might be alone, that there’d been a huge oversight in security and intruders were free to wander the streets at will. This time, they hadn’t been as subtle. Piper was right; they weren’t planning merely to shadow them to the Apex, leaving them alone until they revealed what they knew in the quest for Thor’s Hammer. That had been a mob, closing around them like a noose.
It had always been a possibility, of course, and Cameron might never have gone if not for the visions — if not for the certainty that when they entered Heaven’s Veil, something unexpected would intervene to help them. And when the Titans closed around them in the knot, that had felt dream familiar too, as if he’d known it was coming. He could only see a few seconds ahead, but he’d believed those visions.
But that didn’t mean he had any idea what had just happened.
“They’ll be looking everywhere,” said Christopher, speaking to Jons. And as if to underscore his point, there was a purr one street over as a Reptar (or perhaps a contingent) ran past. Cameron could hear their claws scraping on concrete, the rattle of indrawn breath.
“Surveillance,” Christopher said when Jons didn’t respond.
“The networks are down. Surveillance is down.”
“The Astrals have their own devices.”
Cameron was about to speak up from their hidden position, adding his two cents about the tiny silver BBs. But Jons seemed to know about that, too.
“Based on what I got from those bald white fuckers earlier, most of their shit isn’t working, either. At least as far as prying eyes. If it was, they wouldn’t have been licking our balls to help out.”
“We can’t take them to the station.”
“We’ll take them to Grandma Mary.”
“Who’s that?”
But Piper see
med somehow, impossibly, to know. She raised her voice to Jons.
“They know about Mary. The church by the wall was an underground camp. I was with them a while ago. The church was raided, and we escaped through a tunnel that came up in Mary’s basement.”
“They don’t know about Mary,” Jons said.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she’s my grandmama. And she said they didn’t follow you through the tunnels.”
“I heard a shotgun behind us,” Piper protested.
“She shot a few through her window.”
“They’d come after her for that.”
“They did come after her for that. But Grandmama shot them, too.”
He lowered his arm then waved for them to follow.
“Let’s go. Her place isn’t far. If your asses are lucky, she’ll have a pie on.”
CHAPTER 32
She couldn’t just sit here.
Heather stood from her chair. Dusted herself off, even though Terrence’s old house (presumably old; he’d probably be cut into pieces and sent to the mothership as lunch after he was done) wasn’t especially dusty. She took a few deep breaths, looking out across the lawn between here and the main house.
Security lights had come back on a few minutes ago. City lights were still stubbornly dead. Neither had affected Heather as she sat in the dark. But now with the lights on, she could see the line Lila and Clara had tromped through the evening dew, straight as an arrow slicing the grass between here and the mansion’s side door. Even the line of footprints managed to look angry, as if Lila had left all her frustration behind.