Judgment (33 page)

“So this is all kismet? Are you telling me the unflappable Meyer Dempsey suddenly believes in fate?”
 

“Fate, force, coercion,” said Kindred, his voice more like Meyer than Meyer. “He’s saying it doesn’t matter. You didn’t even know where the Ark
was
, Cameron. Look at the string of coincidences that led to our discovery. Your father gave you a vague hint. Then, after Benjamin was gone, the thought kept rising in your mind, of a place you’d seen once decades earlier. You powwowed with Clara and figured it out as if it were obvious. We homed right in on it without undue delay or opposition. Despite the Astrals causing the Heaven’s Veil scream and us knowing we were racing them to the finish line, we still managed to get there first at our oh-so-human sub-light speed. And where were the Astrals when we arrived? How about the
Mullah?”
 

“We saw dead Mullah guards,” Cameron said, thinking back. But he didn’t want to think of that day ever again. The emotions were too intense, still so raw after five long years.
 

“Killed by who, Cameron?” said Meyer. “And where were the rest of them? The Mullah’s
mission
is supposedly to curate our connection to the Astrals. Together with the Knights Templar, their job was to shepherd the Ark. So wouldn’t you think there should have been more of them?”
 

But none of this was making sense. “The Mullah have been chasing us for the key. My father and I first ran into them when … ” Cameron glanced at Jabari then touched the
mau
under his shirt with tentative fingers. “Years ago. They’ve
always
been in the way. Always tried to stop or capture or kill us.
Five years,
Meyer! For five years, they’ve blocked us at every turn. They don’t want us to open the Ark. They want to keep us from it.”

Jabari picked up the paper then spoke once Cameron’s confused and angry glare seemed to grant permission.
 

“At the Initiate,” she said, “we had a slightly different conception of the Mullah. They weren’t protectors of the Ark so much as custodians. Their purpose wasn’t to
prevent
Astral contact so much as
facilitate
it. So yes, they stole the archive. They tried, perhaps, to take the key from you at the beginning. But recently our feelers have the impression that the Mullah’s position has shifted — again from preventing to facilitating.”

“What does that mean?” Cameron asked.

“It means that once upon a time, I think the Mullah would have felt it was their duty to stop you. But now, they’ll do anything to help you turn that key — or, if you try and turn away, to
force
you.”

“But why now? What’s changed?”
 

Jabari looked from Cameron to Kindred and Meyer. The two men subtly nodded, affirming Cameron’s impression that all of this had been discussed, and that once again he was late to the party.
 

“If I had to guess, I think things may have gone past a point of no return,” she said, “and now, it’s too late to stop the inevitable.”

Peers was on the dusty lawn, at night, with a great white light above, when the knock came. He could feel cool air on his scalp, where it was exposed by his dreadlocks. He could feel the grit of sand underfoot, though it was held mostly in place by stubborn desert grass. The light was blinding: a cone of brilliance in the middle of an otherwise black night. The grass beneath the light seemed bleached white. The woman entering the light wasn’t even covering her eyes, gazing up at the mothership as if spellbound.
 

The knock repeated. From the house behind him? Peers wasn’t sure. But it broke the vision, and for a second he could feel something heavy in his hands even though he was looking down, at the nighttime ground, somewhere outdoors, and could plainly see that his hands were empty. The woman was still looking vacantly upward at the Astral mothership’s opening belly. And now there was a young man running toward her, panicked, his feet moving full out. He tripped and fell. The woman rose into the air, her arms stretched out like Christ on the cross.
 

Piper Dempsey, back when she’d been using that name.
 

And the man on the ground, looking in this particular memory like little more than a kid? That had to be Cameron Bannister — his body thinner and almost adolescent-looking, his hair long on top in a way that was probably once a hallmark style, his skin not as desiccated by arid wandering as it was today.
 

Cameron yelled out for Piper as she ascended. The sound was raw, real, visceral down to the marrow. Peers was
there
. He watched Piper vanish, the mothership close its belly, the giant sphere move away. Then it was dark again, and on the open lawn between the house and a building bunkered inside a cliff, it was just Cameron and Peers. And the intrusive sound of knuckles rapping on wood, which didn’t even make sense.
 

“Shit,” Peers muttered, his empty hands coming up, weight seeming to fill them. The sensory dissonance was baffling his brain, knocking it about like a violent kick. Finally he found the trick of perception that allowed him to see past what the memory sphere was showing him, and then again he was a man sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, cradling a metal ball in his open hands.
 

“Peers?” a voice called from the door, knocking again.
 

“Just a second!”
 

He scrambled upright, wondering how long his visitor had been knocking while he’d been sitting, exploring the recorded past. He’d been trying to learn how to use the sphere as much as he’d been specifically snooping through its records. He had to pose a question before it could answer, but Peers didn’t know what he wanted to learn. So far, about two-thirds of the memories had shown himself, Cameron’s group, or both. The thing might hold a disproportionate number of Peers-or-Cameron scenes, but it seemed more likely that Peers could mostly only think in terms of his current group. He didn’t know what the Astrals may have done outside of what he already knew as touch points and didn’t seem to have total control of his mind. He kept unintentionally inserting people he knew into the inquiries, asking questions more specific than he’d intended.
 

And the thing had definite limits. He’d asked a few of the obvious big questions:
What happened when you visited the Ancient Egyptians?
and
Did you build Stonehenge?
among them.
 

But each time he asked something beyond the Astrals’ current visit, he came up empty. It was a record of
this
visit, and possibly only a subset of the total memories. Perhaps a sensory library that was common to other such spheres, Ember Flats history, and some random stuff that — at least as far as Peers’s inquiries had managed to plunge — seemed to revolve quite a lot around Cameron Bannister and his journey since Astral Day.
 

Was it because Peers was incapable of thinking outside his own questions, on a subconscious level?

Or was it because Cameron Bannister was more important to the Astrals than most people?
 

“Peers? We need to talk. Can I come in?”
 

It was Jeanine Coffey. And of course she couldn’t come in. He’d locked the door so he could sphere-gaze in private. Now he was scrambling to stash the thing like a teen boy hiding porn with his mother at the door.

“Hang on! I’m … um … not dressed!”
 

Peers scampered to his bed, where he’d used the spin rod for the blinds to pry back a bit of molding covering what seemed to be an unused electrical access. He crawled low and ducked under the bed. Fifteen seconds later the sphere was satisfactorily buried. He stood, his heart pounding and feeling exhausted. He hadn’t slept, other than the few minutes he’d managed before Nocturne nosed him awake to roam the hallways. The house had gone quiet a while after he’d excused himself from Clara’s vigil (after the Titans had made it clear that they could go to their own rooms but nowhere else), but instead of sleeping Peers had found a new hidey-hole for his prize and had memory-walked through the rest of his night. There was so much he needed to see. So much he wanted to uncover from within the sphere, and so little time.
 

He glanced at the clock.
 

Jesus, it was already after 8 a.m.
 

Peers yawned, brushed nonexistent dust from his clothes, then shot into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, and saw that he looked beat to hell.
 

He opened the door. Jeanine was in a large blouse he’d never seen, immaculately clean and ill fitting. At first he thought she wasn’t wearing pants, then he saw a small pair of loose shorts when she moved, concealed below the dress-like tee.
 

“Wow, you look like shit.” It wasn’t a judgment. Jeanine sounded almost concerned.
 

Peers considered countering. Although he hadn’t slept by choice — feeling the sphere’s clarion call through all five of the minutes he’d considered drifting off — chances were that everyone would look haggard today. Lila had been nodding off when Peers left and Charlie had returned to his room minutes after the general call. But Piper and Cameron had looked almost caffeinated. The Meyers seemed to have reconciled and were running calculations. Pointing out how strange it was that Jeanine didn’t look as bad as he did was tantamount to Peers saying she was a cold, callous bitch who could sleep no matter the crisis — a perspective for which, Peers thought, an argument could surely be made.
 

“Thanks,” he said instead.

“Rough night?”

“I’ve had better.”

“I was going to look myself. For Clara, I mean. Tell you the truth, I don’t entirely trust Jabari’s people to thoroughly search. They’re the ones who lost her, right?
Inside
the damned house. How does that even happen? Did you know they still haven’t found her?”
 

Peers hadn’t, but he wasn’t surprised. The Mullah had Clara. He had no proof, but to him it was obvious. They had built the mansion; they had stolen and then repurposed the sphere, which seemed to have kept right on recording Astral thoughts even once in human possession. There were Mullah in the house right now. Peers was even reasonably sure he knew who one of them was. So yes, if Clara had gone missing and Jabari seemed honestly shocked, the Mullah had probably taken her. Of course even sincere searches were coming up empty. Peers knew better than most how well the Mullah could hide.
 

But looking at Jeanine, Peers thought it was good that she was practicing this little update routine on him before delivering the news to anyone else. She was as delicate as a dull jigsaw. If she’d announced Clara’s still-missing status to Lila in the same dropping-a-rock way she’d announced it to Peers, the poor girl would be in hysterics.

“I didn’t know. That’s terrible.”
 

Jeanine’s gaze moved to the right and left, as if she might spy Clara in the corner, where everyone had conveniently forgotten to look. Her tongue moved below her lower lip, exploring.
 

“I just walked past Lila’s room. Doesn’t sound like she’s taking it well. So, can I come in?”
 

Peers stepped back.
 

“You don’t have any pants I could borrow, do you? Or shirts?”
 

Peers eyed Jeanine up and down. She managed to look stunning despite her rat’s-nest bedhead and ill-fitting wardrobe.
 

“I don’t know if they confiscated my backpack because they thought I had weapons hidden in my clothes or if they just wanted to do my laundry, but all I had was what I wore in … and then when I woke up, after sleeping in this stuff I found, even those clothes were gone.”
 

“So you came to borrow pants?”
 

Jeanine sat in a chair beside the dresser, where Peers had temporarily stored the sphere before running back out the night before. “I don’t know who to talk to.”
 

“Piper and Lila, maybe? They both seem about your size.”
 

“Not about pants, Peers.”
 

“Oh.” Apparently that issue was closed without a solution.
 

Jeanine seemed more agitated than usual: less distant and hard, more jittery. Maybe this was what she looked like in captivity. It sure wasn’t what she was usually like when nervous, as far as Peers had seen during their brief time together. But then again, she didn’t have her guns or her knives or anything with which she might fashion a shiv. Even the mirror and window glass couldn’t be broken into a blade — he knew; he’d tried, with thoughts of Jabari’s throat in mind. That left Jeanine mostly defenseless, with only feet and fists for protection in the face of an unseen, unacknowledged threat.
 

“Look me in the eye, Peers. Will you just …
here?”
She pointed at her eyes.
 

Peers looked. Her eyes were brown and surprisingly soft.