Judgment (13 page)

“The Cairo ruins still seem in need of restoration, making the area practically impassable at speed, and certainly not by an armored bus,” she said, pointing at the papers in front of her for all to see. “The Nile is patrolled by what seem to be human-manned boats. I have to assume they’re under the dominion of the Ember Flats central government.”
 

She eyed Kindred. Lila turned her head to see the former viceroy nod.

“We already knew that the Abbas Bridge is the only Nile bridge still standing in the combined metro areas — Giza to Cairo — and miles to the north and south. Abbas itself is a highly trafficked, highly regulated checkpoint. That all means that Ember Flats is unapproachable from the east. So we can only make this long detour, here—” She traced a line on the map with her finger. “Around to the south, away from the Nile delta, through unincorporated, unregulated outlands. Make sense?”
 

Heads nodded.

“The desert to the south and west is pocked with tiny outlaw governorships — yes, like my former employer’s, only with a lot less order and civility — that are rumored to be little more than competing clans who’ve undergone a rapid selection process, like evolution in a hurry.”

“What’s that mean?” Lila’s eyes ticked toward her daughter, who was paying more attention than Lila wanted her to. But it’s not like Clara could be protected from the truth, and never really had been.

“It means that only the most brutal survive,” Jeanine said. “The clans are, as far as we can tell, entirely men. Unless you count their slaves. Which, by the way, is the reason they’re all here — all these warring clans, hanging out in the desert beyond Ember Flats.” Jeanine looked at Clara but didn’t flinch. She spoke to Lila and Piper in her most no-bullshit of voices, as if meaning to shoot straight for their own good. “They live off of spoils tossed from the city. Best we can tell, banishment is Ember Flats’s primary method of punishment . They steal the women, and eat the men.”
 

Lila felt the wrap around her body. Was it better to be eaten than held and raped, assuming she’d be dead before the captors realized her gender? She wondered if maybe Jeanine’s grenade solution wasn’t, in the end, the best way to go.
 

Charlie, beside Jeanine, took the ball and continued the lecture.

“Just as we’d assumed, Peers’s images show that the Astrals have irrigated far outside the old valley. They don’t seem to have bothered to grow palm trees around the pyramids, but they’ve reincorporated them into their urban sprawl. See here, and here. The footprint is mostly Old Giza, but Ember Flats proper stretches well into the previously arid region we’ve classically associated with ancient Egyptian society. The Great Pyramid is here. The Sphinx is here. And this” — he traced his finger in a lazy loop, hitting map markers — “is the Fibonacci spiral. They seem to have centered Ember Flats on the old blueprint from their last visit. You’ll see new development here, here, and here.”
 

“What really matters to us is this artery.” Jeanine moved her finger to a line at map’s lower corner, leading into Ember Flats. “Faiyum Desert Road.”
 

“I’ve been on that road,” Cameron said.

“I’m sure it’s changed since you last saw it,” Peers said. “When Aubrey and I came to the city five years ago, the Astrals were using this old stretch as its major supply artery — for anything that the humans insisted on moving without Astral help, I imagine.”
 

Lila felt herself nod. The same thing had happened in Heaven’s Veil. The Astrals could probably have waved a cosmic magic wand and made the city shape itself to their ideal, but humanity had grown a lot of pride since the old days. In what felt like a gesture of pity, she remembered her father (the man she’d thought at the time was her father, anyway) negotiating human building in addition to all that was being done by shuttles and motherships.
 

“They were still dealing with a lot of rebel activity at the time,” Peers continued. “So it seemed they’d done massive earthmoving along the sides of the road, a few hundred yards distant, to make it into a valley. The shuttles were able to efficiently patrol the edges from the air to protect the road so that none of the human raiding parties could reach the supply caravans before they could spot them and take them out.”
 

“But as with everything, the Astrals seemed to have stopped humoring Ember Flats once people quit constantly fighting,” Charlie said. “The city stopped using the roadway. They seem to have abandoned it, probably because shuttles can easily bring whatever they need. It’s fallen into disuse. We watched the road for a while before leaving the Den and didn’t see a single legitimate supply vehicle.”
 

“Legitimate
vehicle?” Piper said, her eyebrows knitting.
 

Jeanine swept the big map aside and replaced it with a greatly magnified image. Lila saw the same valley roadway, now scattered with what looked like small, out-of-focus black and silver rectangles of various sizes.

“This bit of forgotten road, if you haven’t connected the dots,” she said, “is the stretch known as Hell’s Corridor. It’s the only intact and passable route to Ember Flats that’s not already claimed by one of the clans. Because it was patrolled by superior Astral forces for so long, no one clan was able to claim it.”
 

“What are all these little rectangles?” Lila asked.
 

“All
of them claiming it.” Jeanine laid several magnifications atop the road valley image, clearly showing the rectangles to be highly modified vehicles, each one as frighteningly armored and armed as their bus. Poking from the tops of the vehicles and surrounding them in loose groups were colored dots that Jeanine seemed to have put on the image for some reason.
 

“What do the dots indicate?” Piper said, pulling one forward and squinting.
 

“They don’t
indicate
anything. You’re looking at people’s heads.” Jeanine turned the image around, seemed to consider something, then returned it.
 

Lila looked again. All of the colored blobs were more oblong than circular, but they were all sorts of colors: white, blue, orange, red, green, teal, more.

“I almost wish the resolution on the Den’s equipment wasn’t so good,” Jeanine went on. “But it looks like the rumor mill got it entirely right. The clans all shave their heads then paint themselves in their clan’s color. This is as a big dustup was forming, but we clicked through images as it unfolded. When dots of different colors get near each other, they start to disappear. We think it’s the clans killing each other then stealing the bodies for their own … use.”
 

“Use how?” Clara asked.
 

Lila took Clara by the shoulders, held her close, and used her eyes to beg Jeanine’s silence.

“Nobody occupies the corridor,” Peers said. “I’ve been watching it the entire time Aubrey and I have been at the Den. They only enter it like this to fight, and nobody enters it on one side without another side heading in. So they keep an eye out, but it’s usually empty. If we’re fast enough, we can maybe squeak through.”
 

Meyer and Kindred both looked at Jeanine. She shook her head. Lila sensed that a question and answer had silently passed between them. Part of Jeanine’s response seemed to have been,
But let’s not mention that.

“We should go around,” said Cameron.
 

Meyer shook his head. “We can’t. We’ve run all those scenarios. The bus won’t have sure enough traction anywhere but here.”
 

“Then we leave the bus. We go in on foot.”
 

Kindred spoke, and Lila knew he was answering as her father’s other mental half. “The scenarios predict far less success if we slow down and offer multiple targets. Some of which are … less equipped than others.”
The scenarios.
The pair was always running scenarios, and their logical conclusions never seemed to be wrong. He’d looked at Lila and Clara while saying the last. It was insulting but true. Carbine or not, she’d be easily overtaken the minute the cannibals arrived and sent her into a panic.

“Can we get our hands on another shuttle?” Cameron asked, looking at Kindred.
 

“No. We’re lucky they weren’t in the shuttle I originally commandeered when the collective called it back.”
 

“Multiple vehicles.”
 

“We have the best chance of success with a single target.”
 

“Multiple vehicles could draw pursuers off of the one we most need to get through the Corridor. So they won’t all be on us at once.”
 

Meyer looked pained and sympathetic at once. “And who goes in the decoy vehicle, Cameron? It can’t be you. So whom do we choose to die?”
 

“Besides,” Jeanine said, “even assuming we could get more vehicles, which I don’t see how we can, there are plenty of clans watching the valley to overrun two cars, three cars, whatever. Our best shot is with a blitzkrieg run. All eggs in one basket, put the pedal to the metal, and drive like hell.”

Cameron looked at Peers and Aubrey then Charlie. He seemed to decide whether he should say something then finally did. “I thought you said the Astrals
wanted
us to reach the Ark.”
 

“That’s only a guess,” Aubrey pointed out. “It’s in no way certain.”

“And there’s no ‘us,’” Peers added. “You’re King Arthur, remember? If anyone is supposed to reach it, it’s you and you alone. But even then it feels far from a guarantee.”
 

“Because the Astrals can’t control the clans outside Ember Flats and clear us a path?” Cameron shook his head. “I don’t buy that for a second.”
 

“Because it’s a test,” Charlie said.
 

All heads turned toward Charlie.
 

“We’re here to be judged, remember? We open the archive, and we open humanity’s case file. But won’t
the way we try
tell the Astrals a lot about us? If we don’t make it, they’ve learned something about this group, as representatives who carry the key. But if we don’t make it, do they really care? Maybe someone else will pick up the key and try to open the archive instead. Or maybe the Astrals will render judgment without bothering to have a trial, if that’s the analogy. After all, if a defendant doesn’t show up to defend himself, he loses by default.”
 

The bus was quiet. Cameron turned to Lila and Piper with his lips pressed together, his expression grim.

“This is why you have to stay behind,” he said. “This is why it’s stupid for you to come.”
 

“Maybe,” Peers said. “But then again, if this is all part of a test, might our faith matter to the archive? Maybe it’s interested in which choices we make about life, death — and, not to be trite, but … sticking together until the end.”

Lila crossed her arms over her chest. The gun, on its strap, nestled against her.

“Cameron and Clara are going, so I’m going. If you want me to stay behind, you’ll need to tie me down.”
 

Piper put an arm around Lila’s shoulders. “Me too.”

Cameron gave what Lila thought was a pointedly sexist sigh as if to say:
Women
.

“We’ll all be fine,” Piper said. “You’ll see.”
 

Kindred looked away. So did Meyer.

Clara said, “Not all of us.”
 

The bus idled at the end of a long road, at the Corridor’s southeast end, where embankments the Astrals had built to shelter the road were barely twin mounds at the sides. Ahead, the terraformed walls grew, offering protection from anyone attempting to overtake a passing convoy from the sides.
 

Or — for any convoys passing without the benefit of an Astral guard on the raised shoulders — offering an impossible corner.
 

“You’re sure this is a good idea?” Peers looked over at Jeanine, who was surveying the scene from one of the bus’s pop-tops using pre-Astral-Day binoculars.

“It’s a terrible idea,” she replied.
 

“Then you’re sure this is the
only
way.”
 

“If you want to get to Ember Flats, yes. But that’s a question worth asking: Are we sure we
want
to? I don’t know about you and Aubrey, but we’ve spent five years moving slowly and steadily away from the place. Fifteen hundred kilometers later, I’m not entirely convinced we haven’t just wasted a lot of time and fuel. It’s not too late, Peers. We could turn around. No point in throwing good blood after bad.” She lowered her binoculars, and Peers saw something curious on the pretty woman’s hard face:
fear.

“We haven’t spent any blood,” Peers said.
 

“You spent your son. Meyer spent his. Cameron’s father. Clara’s father. Meyer’s ex-wife, Heather. My old boss’s daughter. And those are just the big ones.”
 

“I meant on the detour from where you were to where we are now. Nobody’s died. No one’s been hurt. We have no sunken costs in term of life or limb.”