Judgment (20 page)

“Charlie,” Cameron said, turning to the scientist. “Think for a second. They could have beat us to Sinai. They
let
us reach it first. Then when the crowds came to the mountain, they moved it here, put it out in the open, then practically advertised so the world would know where it was. Why do they want us to reach the Ark so badly? And should we really do what they want us to?”
 

“We’ve talked about all of this,” Charlie deadpanned. “For
years.”
 

They could see the golden chest fully, maybe five feet off the surrounding ground, held high on its platform like something angelic. The Astrals had cleaned what was dull with dust when they’d found it the first time. The Mullah had guarded it in its old resting place but seemed to have done so through a closed door as if afraid to face or touch it, even without its activating key. Not that the Mullah had needed to worry when Cameron had come to open it, of course. They’d been dead when Piper and the others had arrived, killed as efficiently as if by an advance team of Astrals who’d come to clear a path for the crusading heroes — for King Arthur, by Peers’s analogy.
 

“There’s something wrong about this.
You
feel it, don’t you?” Cameron turned to Piper, and she saw something that broke her heart: he was absolutely terrified.
 

Jeanine held out a hand toward his satchel. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me the plate.
I’ll
do it.”
 

“It won’t work for you,” Peers said.

“That’s ridiculous.” She reached, but Cameron backed away. Then: “Just give me the key, Cameron.”

“It won’t work for you,”
Peers repeated, his patience obviously thin.

“Then Clara,” Jeanine said. “Clara’s Lightborn. She can do it.”
 

Lila pulled Clara close, holding the girl against her, eyes wide.

“It has to be Cameron,” Peers insisted.
 

Cameron snapped toward Peers, his fear now something sharper. “You certainly know a lot about this, don’t you?”
 

“I’m just agreeing with Charlie’s research.
Your father’s
research.”
 

“They’re just making guesses. Even
he’s
guessing.” Cameron jabbed a finger toward Kindred, who up until now had seemed to be leading them. Piper could feel emotion rising from Cameron like heat, plenty loud enough to register on her increasingly empathic senses. He was a drowning man who’d pull anyone down to save himself. It might be ignoble, but it was intensely, horribly, irrevocably human. Even Jesus had wished for someone to take the cup from his lips, and Cameron was only a grown-up boy.
 

“You,
on the other hand,” Cameron continued, again indicating Peers, “seem so goddamn
sure.”
 

Peers blustered. “I’m just following the lore and what the Den’s equipment revealed about—”

“The Den.
Right. That convenient place filled with Astral technology that nobody ever came to claim, or kicked you out of. Right in the middle of open land we were allowed to cross without interference.”
 

Peers suddenly puffed up, seeing all the eyes on him as the group’s lone outsider. “Say it, Cameron. Just say what you need to.”
 

Cameron jabbed a finger in Peers’s face, turning to Meyer, to Kindred, to Jeanine.
 

“He’s with them. He’s with them, and we all know it.”
 

“Bullshit!”
 

“You might even be one of them for all we know.”

“He’s not Astral,” Kindred said. “And neither is his dog.”
 

“Then you’re working with them.” He rounded on Peers, now very close. “What’s in it for you, Peers? What did the Astrals promise you? Will they let you kill the viceroy, so you can take her place?”
 

 
“Cameron … ” Piper could feel him unraveling. He was too angry, deflecting, panicking. This wasn’t about Peers. He simply made the best target.
 

“He showed up in Derinkuyu right as the Astrals pinned us down! Peers to the rescue! Doesn’t that strike you as convenient?”

“How dare you,”
Peers said, his voice narrow and dangerous. “My good friend lost his life getting you here. To this place that you
agreed
you needed to reach, for a second chance after whatever cowardice stopped you the first time you found the Ark at—”

“Don’t you fucking talk that way to me! Don’t pretend for one fucking minute that you know what you’re talking about!”
 

“Keep your voice down.” Meyer was looking around the courtyard, suddenly cleared. There were people at the periphery, beyond the buildings, looking in at them, wary.
 

“Go on, Cameron,” Jeanine said, noticing the same wary faces. “If it has to be you, it has to be you. So man up, and do it.”
 

Unbelievably, Cameron crossed his arms.
 

“Cam … ” Piper tried.
 

“No. Just … no. Fuck this. Fuck
all
of it. He’s wrong. They’re all wrong. You saw what it did last time. You
felt
what it did. This isn’t what’s supposed to happen. My father died to get this key.” He patted the satchel. “They certainly didn’t want us unlocking anything back then. Now they’re
waiting for us to
? And that doesn’t strike anyone as suspicious?”
 

“Goddammit, Cameron,” Charlie said. “If you don’t get up there soon, someone is going to show up and — !”

“What,
Charlie? What will happen? Will they stop us from opening the Ark? No. I don’t think so. Because, look:
it’s right there on a silver platter, like cheese in a trap!”
 

Jeanine shoved Cameron back then shot her hand into his satchel. A second later she was marching toward the raised platform, stone key firmly in hand.

Piper heard shuffling sounds behind her then a blur from all around. Jeanine paused, seeing it as well.
 

Human men and women with weapons, interspersed with Titan guards. Their leader appeared to be a thin black man who stepped forward and said to Jeanine, “Please, ma’am. Set that object down slowly, then raise your hands high where we can all see them.”
 

Jeanine’s eyes darted around the circle. They were outnumbered three to one, and she held the only weapons. But she raised the key rather than lowering it, her eyes seeming to say,
Let’s see what happens next.

“I’ll smash it,” she said.

“Go ahead. Just don’t touch your weapon.”

Titans and humans inched forward. Jeanine raised the key higher, but they didn’t hesitate.

Beside Piper, Kindred slowly shook his head. Then as the guards reached Jeanine and began to carefully confiscate her carbine and pistol, she simply lowered it, letting the ceramic plate hang at her side.

Piper went to her knees when asked then put her hands behind her head. The armed men and women produced rather ordinary handcuffs, and thirty seconds later everyone was wearing silver bracelets except Nocturne and Clara. The guards frisked the group, this time including Clara, and took a knife from Peers.
 

They each received a pair of escorts and were led out of the courtyard onto a strangely stable levitating platform.

Except Nocturne, trotting behind Peers without escorts, his tongue out and tail wagging.

Meyer blinked himself awake, suddenly aware of a strange sensation on his face.
 

He was confused by everything: the room he found himself in, the scented tinge of the air, bearing the pleasant tang of cinnamon, and definitely the wet sandpaper stir on his cheek, accompanied by a dark cloud in his peripheral vision. But most of all Meyer was confused because he didn’t remember falling asleep.

He rolled his head on what seemed to be a pillow, fighting for clarity. He blinked again and realized that the big black cloud was Peers’s dog, licking his face.

Meyer raised a heavy arm to shoo the dog away, but Nocturne stopped on his own before he could. Then he turned and walked through an open door into a lit hallway, his errand apparently complete.
 

“It’s a good thing Raj isn’t here,” said a thin, helium voice from behind him.
 

Meyer rolled over. Heather was sitting on a padded armchair, her posture like a man.
 

“If Raj
were
here, that dog would have been dinner a long time ago.”
 

Meyer considered pointing out that Heather’s racism didn’t even make sense but didn’t bother once he remembered that you couldn’t talk Heather Hawthorne out of being Heather Hawthorne, no matter how inappropriate she was. And also, Heather was dead.
 

“Don’t ask if this is a dream,” Heather said. “That’s like something Piper would say, not you.”
 

Meyer opened his mouth.
 

“Maybe we’re on drugs,” Heather said, preempting him. “Maybe the alien invasion never happened, and we’re lying on the ground, totally high, back at the LA house.”

Meyer rolled back to look at the hallway beyond the door. There was an elaborate sconce made of what looked like brushed aluminum. The top was blue glass like the Astral pyramids. He was in a king-sized bed with too much comforter amid a mountain of pillows. Lights were low, but the illuminated hallway gave him plenty to see by. The room was like something in a palace. Or like something in the mansion that Kindred had ruled in Heaven’s Veil while pretending to be Meyer. Not that Meyer had ever seen that particular mansion.
 

“They told me you were dead,” Meyer said.
 

“I never fucked him, you know. Either of them. The one that Raj killed or the one they sent in afterward. I’m sure all three of you fucked Piper, but isn’t it nice to know there’s still at least one thing you got that the other Meyers didn’t?”

“How did you survive? I thought you—”

“You want to know something interesting, Meyer? The last time the Astrals came here, they found people who were connected thanks to their societies, their natural human bonds.
Each
of the last times they came, actually. So they worked with us and made everything better. By the time they judged and left us behind, survivors mostly lost the trick of communicating without words. But the skill was always there. They trusted that we’d get it back — and that maybe the next time, when we did, we’d get it right. So as much as I laughed at your Mother Ayahuasca and the collective unconscious bullshit, maybe you were sort of right. I mean, the Astrals did manage to peek into our world through your eyes.”
 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Of course I’m
dead
, Meyer. Did your Heather ever talk about ancient societies and the collective unconscious?”
 

Meyer closed his eyes then rubbed them. He heard Heather laugh mockingly before he opened them again.
 

“Next thing, you’ll ask me to pinch you. You’re acting li—”

There was a minute buzz, and Heather suddenly stopped talking as if she’d been cut off clean. Her lips kept moving, but no sound came out. She spoke mutely for another thirty seconds or so, words buzzing and popping like a broadcast trying to break through interference. And then Meyer had it. He was speaking to the Pall, except the Pall didn’t make sounds.
 

“I thought you didn’t talk?”
 

“Please,” the Heather/Pall said. “Did I
ever
stop talking?”
 

“You know what I mean.”
 

“I —’e —lways know wha—” Heather’s words buzzed in fragments. Then, her voice returning, she grimaced at what seemed to be leaving her mouth. “Well,
that
sounds like shit, doesn’t it?”

“Why are you here? Where have you been?”
 

“Do you miss me?” Heather asked.

“Of course.”
 

“Not Heather.
Me.”

Meyer squinted, not understanding.
 

“I’m not always a plume of multicolored smoke, Meyer. And I’m not ever really Heather, or Piper, or any of the other forms I take. I sample them all. From … ” She made an all-encompassing circle in the air as if indicating the universe itself — or perhaps the collective unconscious the Astrals had trained ancient people into learning to use. “From
here
. But you know what I really am. Don’t you, Meyer?”

“Kindred calls you a remainder.”

“Hmm. A remainder of what?”
 

“I don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean.”
 

“Sigh,”
she said, actually pronouncing the word instead of making the noise. “And you used to be such a smart man.”
 

Meyer forced himself to sit up, if for no other reason than to clear his head. The thing talked like Heather, like it knew things only Heather would know — right down to whom she had slept with. But how could that be, if Heather was gone, or if the Pall was reflecting Meyer back at himself?