Judgment

by Sean Platt

  “Tell me what to do,” he whispered.

  Nobody answered.

  Nothing answered.

  He watched the keyhole. A circle with ridges at the edges to match the key. Turning it in Heaven’s Veil, Cameron often thought, had killed Heather. She’d sent him out, making his distraction. Then she’d stayed behind to die. Because of him.

  This time, turning the key might kill nearly all of humanity.

  And yet he couldn’t go. The stone’s faintly glowing circle shone up at his face, illuminating it, captivating him.

  In his mind — this time as a memory — Cameron heard Benjamin’s voice. It had been the Pall speaking and yet somehow his father, too.

  I’m proud of you, kiddo.

  Cameron pressed the key into the keyhole.

  A skim of metal slid from somewhere and covered it, locking his decision into place.

  The very walls of the buildings around the courtyard seemed to shriek as the world cried out, as the ground shook, as the air filled with an ominous hum. Cameron felt a new mind join the others, sifting data, weighing with a grudge, dealing through humanity’s past with gritted teeth and absolute fury in its every mental movement.

  He turned to run, but his hands seemed fixed to the Ark’s top corners. Nothing seemed to be holding them, except that he couldn’t pull them away. The glowing surface under his fingers felt like it was changing, molding itself to his touch in the same way the key had always felt so comfortable in his hands. His eyes saw no difference, but the feeling was that of new hands reaching out, intertwining its fingers with his own, holding tight.

  It was the wrong choice, Cameron thought.

  He could already feel the archive’s fury beginning to boil. He felt himself bleed into the Astral mind as the Ark held him, making him complicit, making him part of this. As his mind reached out, he realized something wasn’t right. The archive wasn’t supposed to have any anger. It wasn’t supposed to be Morgan Matthews; it wasn’t supposed to present in prejudgment at all. But it couldn’t help itself, not now, not as the thoughts of the people across Ember Flats streamed into the thing he and the archive had conjoined to become. Inside his mind he watched oil mix with water, acid with base, fire with ice, matter with antimatter. The brew’s percolations reached a fever pitch as Divinity seemed to watch it all from above, from over Cameron’s shoulder.

  The Ark was a wild animal stalked by a predator, terrified of the dark. A startled rattlesnake, coiled to strike. A roused mother, protecting its young. Its entire lid had slid into its sides, leaving the top open and churning, swirling down into an unfathomable void of human experience. To Cameron it looked like a brewing storm. Like death on her way.

  Now run, the Pall seemed to whisper in Cameron’s ear, though he saw it nowhere. The voice was somehow inside the Ark now, from its guts. From the primal infection that human emotion had wrought on what was supposed to be a simple, objective process. Run back to Piper.

  But as Cameron held the Ark, snippets of truth kept flitting through his mind.

  The Astrals knew about Jabari’s exodus plan. They’d accounted for it. The Astrals knew whom they planned to spare and who would perish. There was no true future. There was only inevitability in Divinity’s mind. The balance of justice was weighted, and judgment — for most, at least — had been rendered while the archive’s guts choked on human poison, well before the top had been opened.

  Guilty.

  Cameron would run to Piper and Lila.

  The Dark Rider, as the Astral mind knew the Mullah called it, would come.

  Then they all would die.

  There was no need for deliberation. No need for the jury to leave the room to deliberate. The equation was already solved. The way was already decided, already blocked. The Astrals knew about the Messiah. They knew about the Cradle. And three little people who’d already served their purpose meant nothing.

  The Ark let Cameron go, the connection suddenly broken. He was just a man again, standing beside an ornate box with the world shrieking around him.

  Run, Cameron!

  But instead of running, Cameron put his hands back on the Ark. He looked into its hurricane of a soul.

  The Astrals had all they needed. Every bit of evidence was in place, judgment rendered in advance. The Ark had been making its case for thousands of years, and by now it knew all it needed to know.

  Cameron looked down. The verdict couldn’t be argued.

  But all new evidence muddied waters and raised reasonable doubts.

  Benjamin Bannister was standing beside him again.

  “Cameron,” he said. “Are you sure about this?”

  This time, for once, he truly was.

  CHAPTER 52

  Piper was reaching for the doorknob, feeling a change in the air and watching light spill from around the corner of the otherwise dim courtyard, when her hand suddenly leaped to her chest. It happened involuntarily as if she’d been shot.

  Lila, behind her, worn beyond her breaking point, yelped when she saw Piper startle.

  “What? What is it?” She sounded panicked, almost out of her mind. Ever since the occupation, they’d all had a touch of extrasensory perception, and ever since the address had lit the screens, the psychic warble just under the world’s surface had set Piper’s heart to pounding. Unknown tension had ramped up on an exponential curve, each minute feeling twice as tense as the previous one. Now it felt like the room was packed with people, each holding a pistol with a hair trigger, cocked, aimed, eager to fire. Each step Piper took felt like it was on land mines. The very air around them felt like glass with jagged edges.

  Piper wanted to answer but couldn’t. She’d felt a low throb of fear for the past few minutes and recognized it as Cameron’s. Their bond had been mostly quiet, but in times of trouble she always seemed to feel him. And then there was this place. Maybe it was the monolith stones still around the Capital of Capitals that had made her so empathic lately, or perhaps the sheer harmonic convergence of all those hypersensitive citizens. Charlie had told her how the broadcasts worked: not over the air but through thought. Apparently modern humanity wasn’t as inept as they’d seemed, now able to do the tricks the Mayans, Ancient Egyptians, and countless other ancient societies had been able to do with their collective minds.

  But the thrum of Cameron’s fear had been growing increasingly intense, clearly more in her heart than in Lila’s — or Charlie’s, or Jeanine’s, or Peers’s, wherever they’d gone off to. His fear had joined hers, twisting around it like a terrified braid. The combination made Piper feel heavy as if her limbs didn’t want to work. She wanted to curl into a ball and wait for it to pass, like an animal in a hole.

  But now Cameron was gone. Just like that. She’d felt a sense of falling, and of having done something important. But he was gone, just the same.

  “Piper!” The word was drawn out, whiny, threadbare. Despite the pain, Piper felt her heart go out to Lila. Things were so much worse for her. Clara was gone, and they could only go on faith that what the note-leaver would hold up his or her end of the bargain. Piper knew Cameron had opened the Ark; she’d felt the air thicken before he’d vanished with that final noble thought. But she could already feel the world unraveling. Would the Mullah truly keep their word? Or really, by the note’s wording, had they even made a promise? They hadn’t really, and Lila knew it.

  She turned to Lila.

  “What is it?” Lila asked. “You looked like … ”

  “It’s Cameron.”

  “What about Cameron?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  But she wouldn’t say it. Couldn’t say it. Piper couldn’t let herself acknowledge that he was dead. Not yet. Not until this was over, until the minutes of horror were behind them.

  “Do you feel the change?” Piper said, looking up as if the answer were above.

  Someone ran by outside the door. The footfalls were rushed, each striking the floor like a hammer. Some els
e ran after the first, a woman, shouting. Lila startled at the sounds like a bird, but Piper was still trying to feel the ephemeral thing she could almost sense. Relief among the doom.

  “Where do we go to get her, Piper? Where do we go to find Clara?”

  “I don’t know. But I think we will.”

  Something seemed to detonate outside. A human sound — one large thing colliding with another. Through the window, Piper could see shifting light. Her mind showed her villagers running hither and yon with pitchforks and torches, metaphorical images of disintegrating chaos. There was still something streaming from the Ark’s direction, but Piper didn’t need to look out to see it. She could feel the stream pulse and hitch, choking, changing, adjusting its previously inevitable path. It was all happening in the pit of her chest, where Cameron fell through an endless void, his whisper not entirely quiet, his will a tangible thing.

  “Come on,” Piper said, obeying a heavy itch inside. There was suddenly no question about what they needed to do.

  “Come on where?”

  “We have to find your fathers.”

  “But they’re still at the—”

  “They’ll be back in minutes,” Piper said. “With Jabari. And Jabari has a way out. She has a plan. And … ” But she cut herself off. Because that wasn’t all of it; the Astrals knew about that particular escape plan; they’d already cut it off. The knowledge came from outside Piper but not from Jabari or the Astrals or anyone else. It had come from Cameron.

  But there was a way now. All over again, there was a way. Maybe not the same escape. Maybe not escape at all. But one way or another, she felt a dominant, pressing certainty that all of a sudden there was a way out that hadn’t existed before.

  A thought flashed through her mind in a half second: Charlie in the hallway behind her, yammering on about angry juries, distracted judges who made mistakes.

  And in one gestalt leap, she understood.

  Charlie.

  Cameron.

  Jabari, Meyer, and Kindred.

  There was a way.

  “Take my hand,” Piper said, holding one toward Lila, the other reaching for the knob. “And don’t let go.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Jeanine chased Peers through the hallways, frustrated by her inability to catch him or even narrow the distance. Reaction to Ravi’s flight had taken her a good ten seconds. She’d stood frozen, listening to Kamal’s snoring, unsure which damned end was up and which was down. By the time she’d taken off after Peers, he’d had a big head start, and adrenaline-fueled legs to match.

  “Peers!”

  She caught a glimpse of his limbs at the end of one hallway as she entered it from the opposite end. She turned on her afterburners, tightly cut the corner, and saw more of the running man before he vanished the next time.

  She had no idea what was happening. They’d gone to Kamal’s office to beat a Mullah confession out of him, been cornered by the real Mullah, and then Jeanine had lost the thread. By the end, Peers and the kid had been trading unintelligible sentences like baseball cards. Ravi seemed to know something about Peers, and Peers seemed to know a hell of a lot about the Mullah. But why had he run, and why was Peers chasing him? Didn’t the kid have a gun? Shouldn’t they be counting their blessings? They weren’t going to find Clara. Given all the noise that had erupted outside (not to mention the thickening of air, which felt too much like Sinai for comfort), this had to be the end. Meyer and Kindred had delivered their dual-Dempsey fuck-you to the world, Cameron had probably opened the Ark, and now shit was going down hard. It had been a while since the civilized parts of what remained of the world had seen anything worthy of true panic, but Jeanine remembered how the dread and terror spread on Astral Day and the week before.

  She hoped Jabari wanted panic and widespread disorder in Ember Flats because the bitch was about to get exactly that.

  “Peers! Get back here, you asshole!”

  Peers was still hauling ass. Back toward the big room with the purple fireplace. But when they entered the big room, Ravi was nowhere in sight. Either he’d put a lot more distance between himself and Peers than was between Peers and herself, or the kid had vanished. And still Peers was hauling hard as if he could see his mark just ahead.

  “Where did he go?” she shouted.

  Peers ticked a chair with one of his legs, staggered as it dropped to the floor, and almost fell. Jeanine hurdled it five seconds later, now within yards of her quarry. But she still couldn’t see Ravi ahead. How was Peers hoping to catch someone he couldn’t see? And if he had seen him, Jeanine couldn’t be sure where. They were in the middle of the large room, its entrances and exits like a rotunda. Peers was only halfway across. He could be headed for any of three exits on the opposite side.

  “If you’d just fucking tell me which one he went into—” She heaved, her breath beginning to fail her. “I could cut him off!”

  No response. No turned head. Peers barreled forward as if the Devil were on his heels.

  “Peers!”

  Nothing.

  “PEERS!”

  When he didn’t acknowledge her again, Jeanine went for broke. She leaped and missed Peers’s foot by inches. Then he was regaining his lead while she scrambled to right herself. On the way to standing, she caught a panorama of the city through the big room’s semicircle of windows. Mostly she saw palace grounds, but beyond the gates Jeanine could see low, dark, stalking shapes that could only be Reptars. Lots of Reptars. She saw wavering orange light, probably from fire. With her heartbeat pounding, it was hard to hear the world beyond the glass, but Jeanine was sure — even if it was inside her mind — she could hear screaming.

  Jeanine was up, off again, fighting the acid burn in her legs, feeling a perhaps-unreasonable need to catch Peers. Did it matter? He wasn’t going to catch Ravi, and without the kid, they’d never find Clara. Maybe the best course of action was to see what weapons she could find, hole up, and do what she’d done best since the world ended. How secure could the guns be, really? They’d taken them from her, but she hadn’t been thoroughly searched. Not enough to find the tiny grenade she’d faithfully strapped back between her boobs. They’d probably found her original when they’d taken her clothes, but the other had been between the seams of her pack, right where she’d left it.

  She startled. Jerked her head to the right, suddenly certain she’d see something. And she was right; a spherical Astral Shuttle was moving along outside the black iron fence, discharging its weapon at something she couldn’t see. There were already more fires. More Reptars. The world was sliding into shit with sickening ease.

  With her attention distracted, Jeanine didn’t see the obstacle in her way until she hit it full on. The wind left her. She hit the ground, unable to tuck or roll, and barked her head hard on the leg of something large and heavy and made of wood. It took a few seconds to reorient, and when she did she saw Charlie Cook kneeling over her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, reaching down.

  Jeanine’s frustration and fear came out as anger. Peers was gone, and she hadn’t seen which exit he’d taken. She was out of breath, had failed in her pursuit, had failed to find Clara, and frankly had no clue what to do next.

  “Get your hands off me,” she snarled.

  Charlie looked back the way Jeanine had come. “What’s chasing you?”

  His hands were still too close. She slapped them away in a flurry of wild movements, knowing how ridiculous and unreasonable she must seem. She climbed upright, suddenly aware of how drained she was, unwilling to grip a chair for support. Charlie did the same. He stood patiently, awaiting an answer, as if the world weren’t ending.

  “Nothing’s chasing me.” A heavy breath. “I was chasing Peers.”

  “Why?”

  “Where is Cameron?” she countered.

  Charlie’s face made a strange expression. It took seconds before Jeanine recognized the emotion as discomfort. She’d never seen Charlie uncomfortable. It took social awarene
ss to be uncomfortable, or emotion in general. Charlie had always been light on both.

  “He’s gone.”

  “He ran off? Did he open the Ark first?”

  “He opened it.” A long sigh from Charlie. “Then he stood there for a long time, just looking at it. And then he jumped inside.”

  “What?”

  Charlie’s expression firmed. “He did what he needed to, okay? I can … ” He stopped, seeming to grapple with another moment of discomfort. “I can feel that it’s what he needed to do. So now it’s our turn.”

  “To do what?”

  “Get Clara back. Get out of here.”

  “What the fuck do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  “I have no idea what you’ve been trying to do. Where is Piper? Where is Lila?”

  “I don’t know! Why should I know?”

  “Perfect. Just perfect. We all head out to do a job, and you just stay back here playing tag.”

  Jeanine could tell Charlie was at his wit’s end. He wasn’t showing it, but the man was panicking, mourning, terrified, furious. It came out as stoic arrogance, like he alone knew things in the middle of a forest of idiots. Like Charlie always did because he was so damn superior. So Jeanine did what her own worn-thin impulses demanded she do by hauling back and punching him hard in the face.

  He staggered, almost fell, and looked up, nose bleeding.

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do, Charlie. You have ideas? Let’s hear them. But if you say one goddamned thing I think sounds too superior, I swear I’ll—”

  “Do you know what’s happening out there? It’s not just people looting because the State of the City made them a little short. The mothership is moving closer. It dropped about thirty shuttles while I watched, and they all flew over here and started making a mess. They didn’t cut the broadcast, Jeanine. Do you understand what that means? They don’t particularly care if the capitals all fall apart because they’re about to be swept under the rug anyway. What happened the last time we saw a mothership move into place over a city? Do you remember?”