by Sean Platt
“Where are we going?”
Piper didn’t answer. Neither did anyone else. Charlie had Lila by the shoulders, steering her numb carcass from the rear into the RV. She was going willingly enough but looked blank-faced. Something must have snapped. Christopher supposed he should help, seeing as he, if anyone, was Lila’s right hand. Piper was too no-bullshit. When this was over, if they were still alive, maybe she’d become a mother figure again. But right now, Piper was a general.
“I’ll — ” Christopher began talking to Charlie.
“Get inside,” Charlie barked.
As if Christopher weren’t, right now, wearing a guard uniform. He bellowed the same order to Captain Jons, who was still bleeding copiously down one arm and may have lost more blood than Christopher had thought at a glance. Cameron looked woozy from being knocked flat, punched out, and carried. Coffey had already explained as much, just as she’d bluntly expounded that Heather “hadn’t made it.” Lila wasn’t supposed to hear that, but no one was being especially careful.
Christopher found Clara already inside, sitting between the forked legs of Nathan Andreus’s daughter. She was smiling, putting a comforting hand on Christopher’s leg. Grace, above her, seemed either neutral or lost. Christopher didn’t know if anyone had told the girl that her father, too, was dead.
He could feel static in the air. Even Christopher’s thick, heavy Italian-Irish mane wanted to stand on end. He could see a hazy halo of flyaways rising from Clara’s loose hair across from him, Grace’s dark ponytail fraying at the end.
He didn’t know where Lila had gone. Everything was moving too fast.
Then he saw her just down the long padded bench running along the RV’s side. She was upright and alert, her own hair also rising away from her head. But something was off. Something about Lila’s face, her posture, the set of her shoulders was different.
Christopher moved down. But before he could put an arm around her, Lila spoke.
“She said they want to make it scream.”
“We don’t know what that means.”
“Clara knows. So does Piper.”
Christopher glanced toward the front, toward Piper. Coffey had taken the passenger seat. The girls were at the head of this ship, no doubt. The men had squandered their turn. Meyer had become an alien figurehead and assisted planetary takeover; Benjamin had managed to get himself killed in a mission gone wrong; Andreus had found a similar fate; Cameron had the key to a machine he didn’t know how to find. Except that he might. Maybe that was over, and they’d die without reaching something they knew rather than dying without knowing what they were after.
“My mother is dead.”
Christopher didn’t know what to say. Her brother was dead, too. And, if the implications were correct, her father might be, too.
“My husband is dead.”
Christopher’s eyes flicked toward Clara. The girl either didn’t know or (and this sounded terrible; it couldn’t be true) didn’t care. Raj had still been Daddy to her. One of them, anyway.
But Clara, out of all of them, looked the least concerned. The least upset. She looked like she was excited to be going on a road trip. And why not? The girl had never left the city.
Christopher opened his mouth to talk, but only an exhale came out. Before he could try again, the RV’s cockpit erupted in shouted orders. His lips stilled and slowly closed, his eyes fixing on something behind Lila’s head.
He tried to turn away, but she saw his glance and looked, too. Lila’s hair lifted higher, electricity in the air gathering into something furious.
“What?”
But she knew what. So did Grace, Jons, Charlie, and Cameron. Lila slid away from the wall-mounted screen behind her as it sparked and popped, dying a sudden, unexpected death.
“Shit,” came a voice from the vehicle’s front.
There was a Vellum — just a simple ebook reader — on the shelf back there, too. It popped like popcorn.
The stove’s dials, farther back, sprang into small flames. The light above the sink. The lights down the RV’s center, snapping to black one by one.
And again from the front: “Shit!”
Cameron rushed forward. He stood between the seats, one hand per headrest. “What is it?”
“It’s offline.”
“Drive manual!”
“I am using manual, Cameron!” Piper’s dry voice yelled back. “I’m telling you it’s offline!”
“What’s offline, if you’re using manual?”
“Not working! Offline! I’m sorry if I’m not using the right … ” Piper slapped the dashboard with her palm, frustration leaking from every pore. Her hair, along with loose ends from Coffey’s own tidy ponytail, was fraying, dancing in the air’s mounting static, “ … the right term, Cameron!” She slapped the dash again.
“Let me try.”
“I know how to drive!”
“Yes, of course, but there’s a — ”
The small dashboard clock popped like a wood knot in a fire. A small rain of sparks sizzled through slots in the dash, around the environmental controls. There was a backup camera screen above the clock. It looked like the Vellum’s, as if it had been dropped and someone had poured black dye behind the glass.
Christopher couldn’t see anything outside the windows, all of which had been drawn. He couldn’t see the city through the windshield from back here either, but he could see the mounting glow outside, turning Piper’s, Cameron’s, and Coffey’s faces bright white. Something happening. Christopher shifted, bringing his hand near the right-side table’s edge. A large arc of blue static jumped between his index finger and the metal trim strip, making him jump.
“Get out!” Coffey yelled, turning in her seat. “Get out and run!”
But that was ridiculous. Where could they go? The ships were about to annihilate the city, and at least three or four members of their party seemed convinced it would pack a nuclear punch. They’d seen cities hit before. But this time, there were four motherships. This time, Clara had said they had an intention other than destruction — to elicit a scream, whatever that meant. This time would be different.
“Go! Go!”
Coffey stood. She shouted. She waved them out as fast as they would go, practically pushing Christopher to the dirt. But once they were all outside, now on the far side of the RV, the light from … from whatever was happening over toward the city … was leaking around the big malfunctioning vehicle’s side, and no one knew what to do. The feeling of a mounting charge was so immense, Christopher didn’t trust himself to get too close to anyone, let alone touch them. He felt like he could arc untold voltages. Each was a generator in themselves, all hair wanting to stand, the air a soup of rushing electrons dying for ground.
“Run!” Coffee screamed, though they clearly had nowhere to go. They could rush for the shallow ravine where she swung her finger to point, or put heads between their legs to kiss their asses goodbye. They could duck and cover for nothing. At this point, it wasn’t about saving anyone. It was degrees of destruction, loss, and pain.
Christopher, all too willing to be led if anyone cared to guide him, turned with the others.
But he couldn’t see the ravine because there was a shuttle directly in front of them, hovering in poisonous silence, arcs of blue lightning dancing between the ground and its gleaming chrome surface.
CHAPTER 89
The shuttle didn’t precisely open. It was more that its front, in a door like arch, fell away and was siphoned back into the edges. The craft settled on the grass. Its aperture was darker than it should seem — about the size of an 18-wheeler’s trailer, rounded out. Plenty of room to enter, if she’d been dumb enough to do so.
But Coffey, who’d been leading the charge from the ship, merely lowered her hand. They should go around. They shouldn’t change their plans. It wanted to settle and land? Fine. Maybe it was malfunctioning as badly as the RV, and they could still flee.
“We could go inside.”
Piper didn’t understand why she couldn’t see inside. It was as if the ship had an invisible curtain. It was large, but not that large. The motherships were shining a charged spotlight over everything, including the shuttle’s doorway.
“No.” She couldn’t say why.
Something emerged and took her by the arm: Meyer.
“Hurry, Piper,” he said. “Get inside.”
Piper shook him off. She backed up a step then two. It was her husband, all right. But she felt upside-down, seeing him here. It was wrong in a precise and jarring way.
Trust me, he said. But this time, he didn’t say it at all.
Meyer was dressed like always. To the nines. In his fine, bespoke viceroy’s suit, dark fabric, starched white shirt underneath, red tie and collar buttoned all the way to his strong neck. His dark hair was neatly combed, his green eyes hard, a ghost of stubble on his strong jaw. His cuffs were even perfect as he reached for her. He was the same man she’d seen every day in the mansion — and, honestly, most days before the Astrals’ arrival. But the perfection of his dress, here and now, was in itself a problem.
We’ve had this talk before, Piper. You know I’d do anything to protect you. To protect all of us.
Coffey looked from Piper to Meyer. She seemed to realize something was happening between them beyond the static-filled silence, but her expression was decisive. The energy behind them continued to swell — enough, Piper thought, that they might all get sunburns. For Coffey, the decision was between fat and fire: the least of evils, if only by a sliver.
“Get the hell inside! Hurry!” Coffey demanded, now shoving.
“No.”
Trust me, Piper.
“What are you waiting for? It’s going to go off any second!”
Piper shook her head. Cameron came up beside her.
“It’s not him, is it?” he asked.
And Meyer sent her images, as he had in her distant memory. She saw Trevor. She saw Lila. She saw something else, more like an emotion than anything real: him, not as a self-image but as something worth saving. As if he saw himself from the outside and wanted to protect that strange person, too.
I don’t have time to explain. You have to trust me. You have to feel me.
“No.”
Coffey was looking over with her mouth open. She looked like she wanted to punch them. Each beat of Piper’s heart felt like a countdown: one second, two seconds, three seconds closer to destruction. If they stayed here, they’d fry.
But this wasn’t Meyer Dempsey.
Coffey tried to move forward. To grab Charlie, who grabbed Lila, who already had hold of Clara. But Meyer continued to block the doorway as seconds disappeared, locking eyes with Piper, trying to convince her of a lie. Or a half lie. It was so hard to tell, so hard to recall.
“Trust me,” he repeated.
“No. We’ll stay here. I don’t trust you at all.”
“Then trust me,” said a new voice.
A man with sunken cheeks and a long beard appeared at Meyer’s side. In many ways, he was the first man’s opposite. Where Meyer was polished, the newcomer was disheveled. Where Meyer looked strong, the new man looked weak. He wore a threadbare white robe, his cheeks sunken, color pale and waxy.
But the eyes. His piercing green eyes were the same.
“Get on the ship, Piper,” the newcomer ordered.
He was Meyer Dempsey, too.
CHAPTER 90
Meyer pinched himself off.
It was more of an intellectual construct than anything he could precisely recall or even conceive, but he believed the other part of himself (the other Meyer, the real Meyer, the donor, to use the Astral term) when he said that there had been yet another Meyer Dempsey between the two of them. He believed that he, himself, had once held a Titan’s white body and had been connected more fully to the Astral collective.
He believed it, but it was hard to feel. Hard to internalize and accept. Because he was Meyer Dempsey, after all. Except that the proof was right in front of him in this frail human man: He wasn’t the real Meyer. The man in the robe was the true Meyer, and he — whatever the hell he should call himself, be it Titan or what — was the copy.
“I can hear you,” said the real Meyer Dempsey.
The being who intellectually knew he was a copy but was unable to fathom it said, “I’m pinching myself off.” He stood taller in the drive circle. He lifted the shuttle, watching the city shrink through the craft’s semi-translucent skin.
“I can still hear you.”
“Divinity feels we are connected. That means you will probably always hear me.”
“Of course we’re connected. You’ve sucked my memories like blood.”
They locked eyes. They’d had this argument many times already. The quarrel usually required no speech. They shared the same thoughts up until the moment Divinity had taken the Titan he used to be and bled Meyer Dempsey’s essence into him. Since then, they’d lived separate lives, but it had barely been a week. The real Meyer didn’t remember meeting with Andreus or squaring off with Heather, who hadn’t believed he was back from the dead. He did know about Trevor, and almost certainly about his ex-wife. Conveying those thoughts hadn’t required words. It was simply understood. Sorrow, regret, and rage flowed against the usual order, this time backwashing from recipient to donor. They didn’t need words to argue, and they shared the same obstinance, that petulant insistence on getting their way. Real Meyer knew it wasn’t Fake Meyer’s fault that he’d been created. He supposed he’d volunteered, but the Astral collective now struck him as bees in a hive with a singular mind. Now that he was more or less human, he couldn’t believe it had once been appealing. Especially given what seemed to be happing in the collective now. Especially since the Pall.
“Never mind,” said the man in the robe. And, unspoken: Maybe it’s good that there’s two of us. Twice the insistence for the same desires. And at that, he felt his not-quite-human lips smile.
The shuttle rose. It avoided the motherships, knowing the collective wouldn’t follow. The weapon was engaged. Seeing into Divinity wasn’t hard — a classic case of the hunter underestimating its prey. Of course he could still feel part of the collective, even after being pinched off from it. Even Piper seemed to feel it, and Real Meyer had told him that she’d only been on the mothership for one short trip. But once you dipped your toe, the ability seemed to stay with you.
He could sense the others, but they assumed he couldn’t. They also seemed to have thought him dead, given the confusing data he’d sent back before freeing his doppelgänger — or progenitor, if he admitted the truth. And with Heaven’s Veil soon to be ashes, it hardly mattered. There would be eight capitals. Eight viceroys. Meyer Dempsey could be dead. Both of him could be dead and gone and out of their hair, if they’d had any.
“They don’t understand.”
Real Meyer looked at the others: Piper, Christopher, Lila, Clara, Cameron Bannister, Malcolm Jons, a man who might be from Moab with a teen girl, plus a strong-looking woman who must be Andreus’s lieutenant, in a loose huddle on the shuttle’s other side.
“Would you?”
He shook his head. “I guess not. But I’m still Meyer Dempsey.”
“So am I.”
“I look the part.”
“Then I guess we’re equals.”
But looking at the huddle, it was obvious that wasn’t true. Neither was precisely Meyer to them. The man steering the shuttle on the circle of light — moving them away from danger, Piper’s doubts notwithstanding — looked like the Meyer they’d always known, though clearly he wasn’t. The frail-seeming human, who would take time to re-feed and recover his strength, looked nothing like Meyer. Nobody won. Not yet.
“Why aren’t you driving us away?” Human Meyer asked. “The motherships might see us.”
“The motherships are occupied.”
“Shuttles then.”
He said nothing in reply. The original Meyer Dempsey had part of t
he collective just as Piper had part of the collective, but he was still human. Right now, the swarm’s attention was tuned to the signal. He could buzz around the ships, shooting them from the sky as they’d helped blow a tunnel for Cameron and the others. If they’d had another shuttle, he could plant another bomb. They’d never care. Their alien ears were all waiting for the scream.
“You know where it is. Clara has known for a while now. And Cameron has the name.”
“Shh.”
“Why are we staying? Why aren’t we crossing the ocean?”
The charge reached critical. The beam lanced down, filling the city. From high inside the shuttle, there was almost no sound. When the light dissipated, Heaven’s Veil was nothing but splintered remains, felled buildings, and canted utility poles. None had survived, and that was the point.
He was cut off from the collective — discarded, like a useless remainder, now that he’d taken on the dangerous mantle of humanity. But he heard the scream same as them. He heard the device from untold miles distant as the outpouring of human agony streamed from Heaven’s Veil, recorded now for the ages.
“Did it go?” asked the human.
“It went.”
“Will they be able to home in on it immediately?”
“It will take time to triangulate. Human experience is always being summoned to it. This wave was large enough to pinpoint for sure. But we still have our advantage, even if it’s a small one.”
Human Meyer shook his head in a very Meyer Dempsey way — a way that the new Meyer recognized from his mirror. A gesture that was both dismissive and irritated, conveying scorn at abject idiocy.
“You’re wasting time being here,” he said. “Let’s go.”
After an extra moment, he tilted forward in the drive circle, and the shuttle leaped forward — fast but not too fast, in deference to the fragile human bodies inside.
The first Meyer would never understand why he’d wanted to see the city destroyed, to hear the scream as the wretched agony from tens of thousands in tormented pain passed them on its way to the archive.