by Sean Platt
They couldn’t smash the key.
They couldn’t just walk away.
And even if they knew how to get out of Heaven’s Veil now that their mission had become harder, they couldn’t do that, either. Because Thor’s Hammer was here, in the throat of the lion trying to devour them.
“It’s so close,” Cameron said, again gazing.
“Maybe we can sneak.”
“They’ll be watching.” He shook his head, exhaling. “They were tipped off, Piper.”
“You can’t know that.”
“They were. They wanted to take us in. Maybe kill us. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t know where the Hammer was, and only wanted us to think they needed our help to find it.”
“Maybe they wanted to catch us, take the key, then force us to show them.”
“It’s too unsure. We could refuse.”
“Then maybe they figured that if we came back here to Heaven’s Veil, we’d only have done it because the Hammer was here.”
“Too unsure,” Cameron repeated. “Think about it. They hadn’t touched us before. They let us enter Moab then let us come all the way here. What’s the advantage in not letting us go until we couldn’t go anymore? Keep their distance, let us lead them right to it. Then grab us, take the key, and fire it up.”
Piper opened her mouth, but she had nothing to say. He was right, and she hated the implications. The Astrals had already shown they didn’t know how to find Thor’s Hammer. So unless they’d stumbled upon it by accident and assumed Cameron would be dumb enough to walk right into Heaven’s Veil with the key he’d been trying to conceal, the only other possibility was that someone had tipped them off.
Andreus.
Coffey.
Andreus’s daughter, Grace, somehow.
Or Charlie.
“Maybe it was the shadow,” Cameron said. “Maybe it’s like we thought at first. Maybe that thing really was Astral, like a spy. Just like the BB. It heard us talking, only this time we didn’t try to fool it. So the thing ran and told.”
Piper had considered that, but it didn’t merit much consideration. The aliens had already shown them a sensible spy device: tiny spheres that echoed both mothership and shuttle, small enough in most cases to dart about unseen. Sure, Andreus had his signal detector, and sure, the network was out. But couldn’t it record now then zip off and play it for its owners in person? What were the odds that the Astrals had an entirely different means of surveillance — one so different as to be unreal — and had only loosed it now?
Piper wasn’t buying it. But there was more to it. More reason to disbelieve that the shadow had ratted them out.
“I don’t think it’s against us,” Piper said. “I think it’s for us.”
“Why?” Cameron asked.
While they sat in Grandma Mary’s kitchen, Piper told him.
CHAPTER 42
As Piper talked, Cameron’s mind wandered to recent images and thoughts that didn’t seem to be his. Thoughts and images nobody else seemed to be experiencing. He wanted to dismiss them, but he’d had this experience before and knew to take them seriously. The Astrals had once lined the planet with monoliths to harvest humanity’s thoughts. Those monoliths were gone, but the feeling was similar. And yet the source — Cameron had no more idea how he knew this than Piper seemed to know what she knew — was different.
He’d been down this road. So had Piper, in the past.
But this was new.
Still, as Piper spoke, Cameron felt the unknown finger beckoning, drawing him toward something he couldn’t reach. Some unknown intelligence seemed to spot the obstructions and encourage him anyway.
Yes, I see the wall as well. So what? Just walk through it.
But strangely, not to the Apex. At least not to Thor’s Hammer, sitting in its glass belly.
This was something else.
“When you came out and saw me?” Piper asked.
Cameron shook his head. For a moment, he hadn’t heard her. Piper’s voice hadn’t existed. He hadn’t been in Grandma Mary’s kitchen with only a small lantern and the glowing blue Apex for illumination. He hadn’t even been in Heaven’s Veil.
A giant hill, like a mountain.
A dark place.
And a misconception. Something Cameron already knew, but a small, female voice was only reminding him to consider. Something he was doing wrong, though not terribly so. Something he’d realize because he’d known it long ago but had buried it like …
Well, like Thor’s Hammer.
Broken. Sifted. Contained. Handed down and obeyed then stored like a book on a shelf.
Cameron blinked up at Piper.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, what did it look like to you when you came out and saw me?”
“In Moab?”
Piper nodded. “When the ship took me. When it flew me to Vail.”
The strange new images fled Cameron’s mind. All at once, he was back in that dark night, two years ago, on the evening the Vail mothership first became Vail’s rather than Moab’s. He remembered running, breath ripped from his lungs. He remembered tripping. Falling. Feeling helpless, impotent. Watching the ship snatch Piper away when he could only watch.
“It looked like you were in a trance. Like it had you hypnotized.”
“I thought I didn’t remember any of it,” Piper said, her eyes straying to the blue-lit window. “I just remembered going to sleep, dreaming of Meyer, and coming back to reality in Vail. Trevor and the others came and drew them out of the bunker.” She sniffed, pushing past thoughts of her stepson. “But over the past few days, I’ve started to remember more.”
Cameron turned to face her. Piper’s face was lit by the lantern, arced with shadow, eyes mostly black pits, her hair a curtain of ebony.
“I don’t know how to describe it. It must be how it is for people who’ve repressed something. I know these things happened two years ago, and now that they’re coming back, it’s all obvious. But they’re new, too. Do you know what that’s like? To experience something old yet feel astonished as if you were looking at something new?”
Cameron gave a noncommittal nod. The answer was maybe. What he’d been sensing lately (small female voice notwithstanding) felt a lot like what Piper was describing. Maybe it was. Some of the images and thoughts were yet unseen. But some — deeper back, as if prompted by new thoughts rather than being those thoughts themselves — contained Benjamin. Tours through ruins that Cameron had bottled as parts of his old life, back when his father had been his hero. Childhood memories of ancient alien exploration that had been repressed, ironically, because the times portrayed were too happy for Cameron’s often-jaded adult mind — at least, where his father was concerned.
“If I think back on that night now,” Piper said, “I get two sets of memories. The first is the one I’ve been telling myself all along: that I went to sleep in the house, dreamed of Meyer, and woke in Veil. But now there’s another set. In this one, I wake up and see a light through the window. I decide to get up and check it out. I’m not afraid, even though I should have been. I remember feeling almost giddy, but not stupid. I could see Meyer. I wanted to go to him. I was aware with most of me that it couldn’t really be him, just hanging out outside. I knew it had to be an illusion — something put on for my benefit. But I knew it didn’t matter anyway, and that it was safe to go. That I should go. Maybe even that I was meant to go. Does that make any sense?”
“Not really,” said Cameron, wearing a smile he didn’t feel, encouraging her to continue.
“I remember a feeling of every part of me being lifted when the ship took me. It wasn’t like being raised on a hoist, where a strap or restraint is digging into your skin. Or where there’s an elevator under your feet, with the rest of your weight pressing down. Or like being pulled up by your hands. This was like floating. Being raised by my every square inch at once. Then I was inside. And if I really focus and go quiet now, I can remember pieces of it. I rem
ember a smooth surface. A sound I can’t quite put my finger on, running from me now like a dream in the morning.” Piper shook her head. “There’s not much more I remember about what I saw. At least not yet.”
Cameron sat back. It felt like a secret responsibly kept. Why hadn’t she said more? Why had she kept it all to herself when it suddenly felt so pressingly important?
And why does it feel so important? asked a voice inside Cameron. Maybe his own. Maybe another’s.
“What does this have to do with the shadow and what happened when we entered the city?”
Piper shook her head. It was a frustrated little motion, accompanied by slightly pursed lips. “I don’t know. But I feel like I should, or like I almost know. It has something to do with my time on the mothership. Not the shadow, necessarily, but the reason I feel … connected? … to it. Or like I might understand it, or once did.” She exhaled heavily. “It just feels so familiar. I don’t really know how or why. I only know the second-degree things. Not how I know it, I mean … but that I do, somehow, and that knowing is enough that I trust it.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Piper sighed, calibrated, then touched Cameron as she found a new tack.
“Do you remember when we were … mentally connected?”
Cameron remembered it well, the most interesting form of intimacy. This wasn’t the first time she’d asked. He nodded.
“I felt that return once I was on the ship, I think. Not with you, but with — ”
“With Meyer?”
He’d answered too quickly. Piper gave him a semi-pleased, semi-awkward look. The issue of Meyer versus Cameron might one day be faced, but so far they’d belonged to separate parts of her life and it had always been one or the other.
“Maybe with Meyer. But more with all of them. I don’t think it was something they were trying to bring me into; it was just something there. The way lights are shining overhead in a store whether you care to partake or not in their light when you enter.”
Cameron looked up at the dark ceiling. Piper chuckled.
“It’s all still fuzzy, and I can only remember it the way I’d remember a memory from when I was just a few years old. There are shapes and feelings, nothing specific.”
“And?” Cameron prompted. Piper was steering. She wouldn’t have brought it up if, in all this indistinctness, there was meaning.
“It was so calm. Pacifying, really. Not in a quelling sense, like they were giving me opiates to keep me quiet. There was just this abiding, genuine sense of peace. And a feeling of time. I’ve thought of some of the questions Benjamin and Charlie asked since — how they wondered why the Astrals were going about things the way they were. Why not just blast through the mountain to find Thor’s Hammer? Why painstakingly construct all of their monoliths and the Apexes around the world when there must be faster ways for an advanced species to work? I think it’s because they simply don’t feel the pressure of time.”
“So they’re timeless? They’re not in a hurry because they live to be a billion years old?”
“I think it’s bigger than that. Do you remember what I told you about what the monks told me?”
“Sure.”
“Franklin said that they were surprised and confused by the way we’ve ‘externalized’ our collective in the form of a computer network rather than connecting our minds directly, which is what he thought happened with the old civilizations, like the Egyptians and Mayans. I got the feeling that the Astrals are like that. Individuals — who knows how long they live? We know they die as easily as we do. But above that, I felt a kind of collective. It gives them an enduring identity. And that collective is ancient. It’s not even that they’re not in a hurry. It’s more that ‘hurry’ has virtually no meaning to them.” She bit her lip.
“What?” He could tell there was more, and didn’t like it.
“I think it might also make them sort of accidentally merciless, by our definition. Why would they think it was cruel to kill a single person if they’re used to seeing their entire species as one giant organism? It’d be like shedding a skin cell or a strand of hair, not ending anything with meaning in itself.”
Cameron watched the window and the Apex beyond, unsure what to say.
Piper went on.
“But again, what hit me most was the way they seemed so calm. It was like entering a room full of people who were all meditating, even though I’m sure I remember them moving around and being active. They were cool and collected. And I could feel them pinching me off — not because I was human and wasn’t supposed to be there, but because I wasn’t as cool and collected as they were.”
“You were a prisoner.”
Piper’s head tipped. “Maybe. But at the time, I don’t know. It felt like I’d be welcomed if I’d been … cleaner, maybe.”
“So … ”
“It took me a while to understand the reason I felt like I did about the shadow, that it’s more friend than foe. It scared the hell out of me when I saw it for the first time. And when it followed us or we followed it, the thing reminded me of the BB that followed us before, and I didn’t like how it seemed to be watching. But after what happened at the gate … ”
She trailed off, seeming to think. But the silence stretched and stretched. In the interim, Cameron realized he couldn’t hear Mary. They might be alone. Not just in the house, but in the entire city, state, and world.
“Piper?”
“The more I think back on it, Cam, the more I realize it feels familiar to me in the exact same way that sense of wholeness felt familiar to me on the ship. Just as indistinct, of course. It all feels so disconnected and without basis, like a dream from long ago. But … I don’t know.”
Cameron waited. Piper continued to arrange her thoughts, trying to make sense of what seemed so senseless. Cameron could relate. So much, even within the walls of his own skull, worked on faith these days.
“The Astrals are strong because they’re ‘one,’” she said. “That’s how it felt on the ship. Looking back, that made me feel like all of this was futile. How could we ever pull one over on them if they were so eminently logical and worked so smoothly as a unit? They couldn’t be scared like we could because their perspective was so different. They couldn’t be provoked or made to feel pity for disconnected, incomplete beings like us. And they couldn’t be angered.” She said the last with a knowing glance.
“Like they got angry at Little Cottonwood Canyon.”
“And like they got angry at the gate. Like that shadow … Cam, I’d swear it somehow made them angry. It made them disagree. It made their perfect culture of harmony want to fight itself.”
Cameron looked down. Away. Back at Piper. They had to make it to the Apex. There was no way. Unless there somehow was.
“So what is it? What can get inside their heads like that, Piper?”
“I keep coming back to the question of whether it’s already inside their heads,” Piper said. “And if that’s the case, we don’t need to decide if it’s good or bad for us as much as finding the truth of something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Whether it’s the chicken,” Piper said, “or the egg.”
CHAPTER 43
Meyer found his cufflinks in the bedroom. He didn’t need them for his meeting with Nathan Andreus, but he put them on anyway. A professional front was never a bad idea. He was humanity’s spokesman — a bridge between the Astrals and people like Andreus. A way to show those who wanted to play along that they were all, ultimately, sharing the same side.
There would always be dissenters. People who thought they knew best, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Meyer’s old life had been filled with them: those in charge of companies that had stood in his way, even dissenting opinions at Fable Studios, whose salaries Meyer paid. Healthy debate was acceptable. A good idea even. But once objections were addressed, people had to understand where certain slices of bread were buttered.
Meyer suppose
d he’d forgotten that the other day. He was only human. But after the Astrals had patched him up, he’d made sure to get his shit straight.
But even thinking back on those incidents was uncomfortable. It made Meyer want to fidget. It made him want to check the length of his cuffs. It made him want to cross his legs right over left after they’d been perfectly content left over right. It made him want to pace, the way he used to while sorting things out.
Why had he done it? It bothered him that Heather’s questions had no acceptable answers. He’d given her responses that made sense … but they weren’t precisely accurate. Or at least not the whole truth. He’d been irrational to the point of insanity. He’d upended sense for no reason and couldn’t replicate the moment of stupidity, even as a hypothetical, inside his mind. It was a bit like calling someone for a faulty appliance, only the technician arrives to find the appliance working just fine. You can’t fix a problem that refuses to appear.
Meyer closed his eyes in the bedroom, fingers trailing across the viceroy cufflinks. With his lantern off, the backs of his eyelids were black, not even noticing the Apex’s cycles as it powered up and prepared to broadcast in concert with its worldwide brothers.
He conjured the memory, which still felt fresh like dripping blood. He remembered running upstairs. He remembered seeing Raj sitting on Heather’s back with that dumb look on his face. That had seemed wrong; he’d told him to get off. Then Lila had appeared, and Meyer had …
He had …
He squeezed his eyelids tighter, trying to step into the memory. He knew what came next; the recollection was whole and easy. He’d taken the gun full of Terrence’s tranquilizer darts, and he’d fired them into Raj’s chest. Into Raj’s tough canvas shirt that had blunted all but the tips from scratching him.