by Sean Platt
“Is she … ?”
Lila turned to Peers. All at once, something snapped.
“How dare you,” she said.
“I had nothing to do with — ”
“How dare you!”
“Lila, I swear, I want to find Clara as much as — ”
Lila’s hands flashed out in front of her. Before she knew it, they were clawing for his throat. Peers scrambled to back away, fell back against the dune, then rushed back like a crab when she dove again, Meyer’s arm restraining her.
“You took her!”
“I didn’t t — ”
“You took her, you motherfucker!”
“Lila!” Meyer hissed. “Keep your voice down!”
“I don’t care who hears me! Got that?” She raised her voice and shouted, “I DON’T CARE IF THEY ALL HEAR ME!”
“Lila!”
Lila turned to Meyer and Kindred. Tears obscured her vision. She didn’t know what she was feeling. Sadness? Loss? Anger? Outright fury? It was all a soup inside her.
“He’s with the Mullah. You heard them. He’s got a tattoo to prove it!”
“It’s a brand,” Peers said. “And if you’ll let me explain … ”
Lila lashed out, but Meyer and Kindred both moved to hold her. She could only flail one arm, and only halfway. A fan of loose sand sprayed at Peers, her fingers scrambling madly for whatever they could hold, finding nothing.
“He’s Mullah! That’s how he found us back in Turkey, when the Mullah were after us! That’s why he had that big cave full of alien gear: because he was working with them! They’re all in it together, and they took my daughter!”
“Lila! Quiet!” Kindred seemed agitated — furious, even. He kept shooting glances at the top of the dune, presumably at the cannibals beyond. It seemed as if he wasn’t just worried that Lila would give them away, but angry about it.
“Let her get it out.” The voice, strangely calm, was Piper’s.
“There are clans right there, Piper,” Kindred said.
“And they didn’t come when she shouted. They won’t come after us yet.”
“Yet?”
“The message just went up. They’re waiting for some sort of broadcast. The Astrals turned water to blood to set the stage, then shook the ground to get everyone’s attention. Those people down there won’t look away. You can barely look away. We’re safe. For now.”
“We’re not safe, Piper,” said Meyer. “Not until we reach the Cradle. And not even then.”
“We’re safe for now,” Piper repeated.
Her gaze was fixed on Lila, and the effect was hypnotic. Lila suddenly understood: Piper wasn’t guessing. She somehow knew.
“I can try and explain later,” Piper said. “For now you need to trust me. We’re going to get out of here if we follow instructions.”
“Your instructions?”
Piper shook her head. “No. It’s someone else. I can hear them. In here.” A finger went to her temple.
“The Astrals?”
“No. Someone else.”
“Clara?” said Lila.
“It’s a man. In my head, he sounds almost like Meyer.”
Peers shifted. Brushed sand from his shirt. He looked at Meyer and Kindred then said, “Seems like everyone is Meyer Dempsey these days.”
The hold on Lila had shifted enough that this time when she lunged, she managed to break free, making a loose fist as she leaped at Peers, then connected with his left eye. The impact against bone sent a shudder through her knuckles, hand, and wrist. But the pain didn’t bother Lila, as long as Peers felt it, too. After this long forcing herself to go numb, even pain seemed like a blessing.
“Lila!”
“Stop holding me back, Dad! What’s wrong with you? You should be killing him yourself!”
“If you’d just let me explain!” Peers said, hand over his beaten eye.
“Explain what? That you kidnapped my daughter? That you’ve been ratting us out the entire time?”
“I didn’t do either of those things! I’m — !”
“Where is she? Where is Clara?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know!”
“He doesn’t know, Lila,” said Piper.
Lila stopped, sniveling, practically foaming at the mouth. Piper’s voice shut her down like flicking a switch, and now there was only the worry and sadness she’d kept so tightly behind an internal shell.
Her head fell. Her hand caught it.
“I was with them when I was a child.” She heard Peers from behind her curtain of black hair. “I made a mistake. A … a dreadful mistake.”
Lila felt hesitant fingers tap her back. When she didn’t flinch, Peers touched her again. Fury bubbled inside. She wanted to lash out. To grab it. To break that hand like a twig. How dare he? How dare he touch her after what he did?
“He’s telling the truth,” Piper said.
She wasn’t just talking to Lila. She was talking to them all.
Lila let her head hang. And she broke. Cried, until it was all out of her. She heard and saw nothing of consequence outside her own knees until she finally looked up, the Egyptian day still shadowed like dusk. The black ship hadn’t moved. Its presence was everything, except for the static crackle of energy moving between it and the Apex and the whisper of a warm breeze.
Lila looked at Piper. Piper looked back, a question on her face. And when Lila nodded slightly, Piper rose to her knees. Both Meyer and Kindred looked toward her, deferring. Whatever analytical power they’d had, it now seemed diminished. Meyer looked spent, and Kindred barely contained. Peers was off to the side, penitent, with his dog. Only Piper seemed clear. Something inside — not Clara but a strange man who sounded like Meyer — was telling them all what to do.
“We need to go.” Piper took a moment, seemed to reflect, then pointed. “That way. We need to find the nook where the Cradle subs are stored. Nobody has beaten us to them, and nobody will. They’ve not been discovered. The clans won’t follow, and the Mullah have stopped trying. They don’t care about us, only about recovering their man, plus whatever they lost. But they’re wrong about the Astrals. The Astrals didn’t take it. It’s gone somewhere else.”
“Is it Clara?” Lila asked. “The thing the Mullah lost?”
“I don’t know, Lila.”
“How do you know you can trust whatever’s telling you all of this?” Meyer asked. It wasn’t a challenge. It was simply a question.
“Because he gains nothing by lying.”
“What does he want?”
“To exist.”
“Who is he?”
“I only know he’s not Astral. He’s human, or something close.”
“What does that mean?” Meyer asked.
Piper went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “And he feels very familiar. And that I’d trust him in exactly the same way that I trust you.”
“Trusting a voice you hear in your head isn’t the same as trusting us,” Kindred said.
“Not trusting you,” Piper told Kindred. “Trusting Meyer.”
Kindred looked like he might protest but didn’t. Piper said, “We have to go. We can’t be here when the announcement comes.”
There was a crackle from behind them. From the direction of the big, black ship.
Letters vanished from the sky, replaced by the projection of a young-looking brunette woman in a simple white blouse. She was cut off at the waist, but otherwise she looked as if she were really there above Ember Flats — not a hologram at all.
Her voice was like soft, pleasant thunder. “Please hold whatever you are doing, and pay attention to the following message.”
Blue lightning crackled between ship and pyramid. Its activity seemed to increase, arcing to one side to form a tiny storm.
“This message is being shown to all eight of your remaining capitals, though anyone watching our broadcast channel from the outlands will hear it as well.”
More sparking. More lightning.
&nbs
p; “Humanity’s current form has failed our tests. Your species, such as it exists, must be pruned back and allowed to regrow.”
“Pruned?” Lila whispered.
Nobody answered, but the genocidal meaning was clear.
The tiny storm to one side of the line between ship and Apex increased its fury, becoming something like a ball.
“Each capital is being given a vessel,” the woman said. “And as long as you are aboard the vessel, no harm will come to you in the days that follow.
The lightning ball seemed to stretch out. To take shape. To become something as long and as broad as the Apex itself. As the light show died, Lila could see that what had materialized there looked like a large boat, its keel nearly on the ground, its body propped up by blue-glass scaffolding.
“Each capital’s vessel will hold approximately 1 percent of the city’s population,” the woman said.
Lila looked at Meyer, Kindred, Piper, and even Peers.
“But it is up to you to decide who lives and who dies.”
Lila gaped. Watched the air, waiting for more. But then the woman in the sky vanished and the giant black ship began to move, ever so slightly, the blue lightning breaking its connection, an enormous blue spark churning in its metallic gut as it journeyed toward whatever it meant to destroy.
A killing storm.
A destroyer of worlds.
Beyond the dune and in the city, what remained of humanity began to panic and scream and rampage and kill.
CHAPTER 22
Mara watched the screen as the woman representing Divinity vanished. She didn’t fade away. She simply cut out of existence. And then the chaos began.
Not Astral on human. The Astrals seemed, according to the monitors, to have piled into their shuttles and left the surface sometime between when Meyer, Peers, Kindred, Lila, and Piper left the bunker and when the rumbling began.
No. This violence was human on human.
Mara flicked the screen, half expecting the other city feeds to have been cut. But the Astrals and the city were full of surprises. They hadn’t been cut off when Meyer and Kindred had been blowing the Astrals’ secret about Heaven’s Veil, and nothing had been cut during all the blood and proclamations of mass extermination. Even the house above still had power, thanks to its buried lines and Astral non-interference. And all the video feeds — along with the emotional co-signals broadcast by the rocks around the borders — were still live and perfectly clear.
It was as if the Astrals wanted her to betray them then lead Meyer and Kindred to that stage. It was as if they knew what she’d been doing all along — right down to hiding in this bunker, watching things go to shit — and were cool with it.
This wasn’t in the Initiate’s projections. At all.
A booming sound seemed to shake the room. But it wasn’t another ship-moving earthquake. It was someone assaulting the outer door with their fists.
She tried to ignore it. Rioters had finally made it onto the palace grounds. It was fine; the bunker had been built on that exact assumption. She’d covered the bases, unlike Dempsey. She’d heard his story — both from the outside world and filtered through the Astrals’ knowledge. He’d reached his conclusions through drug trips rather than logic and planning. No wonder he’d made so many mistakes. He was lucky to have reached his Axis Mundi at all.
Mara had planned better now, and better then. They wanted to flee the city under the big ship’s unflinching eye? They wanted to try and reach the Cradle — then the broadcast rendezvous with the other viceroys — despite the interference introduced by the ship? They’d never make it without the Astrals’ allowance.
Like their allowing her little resistance despite clearly knowing the entire time.
She blinked the thought away, ignored the pounding, and watched the monitors. Whoever was up there would either give up and go away (the door was impregnable by anything other than explosives, and good luck finding those in an Astral-run city) or would be leveled by other rioters who wanted a try. The house must be sick with them.
She clicked away from the feed showing the big ship created by the blue lightning. It was large but not titanic. They’d be lucky to stuff 1 percent of the Ember Flats population inside.
People had massed around the thing but weren’t approaching. There was a force field or something surrounding the ship. The Astrals had apparently given each capital a Noah’s Ark, but the citizens couldn’t reach it to climb aboard. What a ripoff.
There was a beep from behind her. Mara hadn’t heard the sound in so long, it took her a while to figure out what it was. Then she opened the charging laptop computer and scanned the bottom row of icons — sure enough, it had come from where she’d thought.
Just the Astral collective dropping her a line.
Because they were old buddies, Divinity and the human viceroy.
At first Mara didn’t believe her eyes. It had to be an old message. Divinity had gone into a communication blackout around the time Cameron and Company entered the city. That’s when she’d suddenly found herself on her own, sensing shit rapidly approaching the fan, increasingly certain that her well-thought-out contingency plans A, B, and C would be needed.
Fortunately, she’d anticipated this.
Well, all but the enormous ship that ruined her plans. And that the aliens were apparently playing with her all along. It cast doubt on everything. Mara found herself wondering what would become of Meyer’s group as they headed toward the “secret” escape vessels. She wondered about the bunker, and if it was truly private or impregnable. She even wondered about the rioters banging on her door. And the force field around humanity’s only hope of salvation, of course.
Divinity’s message was the usual clipped, socially retarded brief:
Lifeboat perimeter deactivation code 091804.
Mara stared, her forehead wrinkled.
Lifeboat.
Deactivation.
Was this what she thought? It looked almost like a code to unlock the big Noah’s Ark thing. It sort of seemed like they’d given Mara — traitor to her masters, rebel who’d actually gotten away with nothing — the keys to her city’s only hope for survival.
For 1 percent of the population.
“MARA!”
She looked up. Toward the stairs. Toward the impregnable door where rioters were storming her gates.
She clicked the video feed to one showing the palace interior. It was empty, as it had been every time she’d checked. She’d seen some aides running through a giant hole in the wall, possibly blasted by Charlie Cook and Jeanine Coffey. Reptars had been chasing them. She’d seen others leave of their own accord, but certainly nobody was still here who was, once upon a time, supposed to be here. The place was open for rioters and had been for hours.
But still, the house was empty.
“MARA! LET ME IN!”
She climbed the steps. Turned all the right knobs and pulled all the right levers. She peeked tentatively out even after checking the screen beside the door, then opened it wide and stared slack-jawed at the black-and-blue mess across from her.
“Kamal?”
“So I am still as beautiful as I used to be,” Kamal said, his words somehow unaffected by his fat lip.
Mara ushered him in, glanced through the hallway, and closed the door. She secured everything she’d unfastened then took his arm as they descended into the bunker. Kamal had a significant limp and fell down the stairs nearly as much as he was stepping.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I walked into a wall.”
“Were you out in the city? Were you attacked?”
“Your visitors did this. I never want to run a bed and breakfast again.”
“Which visitors?”
“Jeanine Coffey.”
“Jeanine did this to you?”
“I misspoke. I meant it was a gang of big, strong bikers.”
Mara ushered Kamal to a couch and eased him onto it.
“Do you n
eed a … ?” She stalled, not knowing how to end her sentence.
“How about some Flintstones aspirin?”
“How can you make jokes at a time like this?”
“I’m a hilarious person. I can’t control it.”
Mara sat opposite Kamal. He seemed intact, just painfully ugly. Jeanine had done a number on him, but he wasn’t acting like anything was broken.
“Where were you?” Mara asked.
“Bitch knocked me out. I woke up a few minutes ago, and everyone had left. Then I went to the window and saw. Checked the feeds and saw more. So your State of the City didn’t go well?”
“Not so much.”
“And the Ark?”
“Cameron opened it. That didn’t go well, either.”
“And the girl?”
“Clara? I don’t know.”
“They thought I was Mullah. That I’d taken her. Just because I’m Muslim? That’s racist.”
“What happened?”
“Ravi, I think. Hard to tell with all the unconsciousness, but our secondary surveillance got most of it.”
“Ravi is Mullah?”
“I think. Shoulda known. He’s Muslim.”
“So why did Jeanine beat you up?”
“Because she’s a bitch. Please tell me she’s down here so I can punch her in the vagina.”
“She’s dead.”
Kamal looked genuinely sorry. “Oh. That sucks.” Then: “So who’s here?”
“Just me. Charlie didn’t make it. Or Cameron. I don’t know what happened to most of our staff, including the insiders, but I think Reptars chased them out of the palace before they could assemble.”
“Cowards.”
“I was still with the Meyers. Ran into Piper and the younger one. Lila, the girl’s mother? Then Peers Basara ran up at the last minute, and we came here.”
“Peers?”
“Yes. And I think you’re right about him. He had something in his pack that he wouldn’t show anyone. Talked about escape tunnels but wouldn’t say how he knew.”
“Mullah?”
Mara nodded. “That’s my guess.”
“He and Ravi should hang out.”
“But I still don’t think he’s dangerous. I wouldn’t have let the others go with him if I had.” Mara realized she wasn’t fully explaining. Her mind was moving a mile a minute. There was so much Kamal might have missed. He hadn’t asked about the bloody footprints in the bunker, but that didn’t mean he knew about their new plumbing issues.