Judgment (45 page)

Peers was setting the sphere in the bottom of the backpack as his mind wondered,
What made Ravi run? What was he afraid of?

Peers felt a static charge rush through his fingertips, locking his muscles. He froze where he was, knowing he now couldn’t drop the sphere if he wanted to. Not now that he’d asked the right question.

The lights went out.

The sphere answered.

They heard and felt the explosion with Meyer, Kindred, and Jabari in sight. Lila barely knew where she was, but Piper seemed to have no such hesitation. After a few turns through the serpentine palace with her hand in Piper’s, Lila had asked her why she thought to find the others at all, considering they’d been across town minutes before, and now the town itself was burning. Piper had said, “I can hear them.” Funny thing was that Lila could almost hear them, too. But it wasn’t quite auditory. Like a voice behind a curtain, far away, calling her forward. Her fathers’ voices.
 

The trio ahead shook with the explosion, Kindred foundering and grabbing a hallway accent table for support. Lila staggered wide, barely staying upright. But Piper barely trembled; her face showed no surprise. She’d stopped and grabbed a doorframe a half second earlier, braced, absorbed the shock as if she’d known it was coming.
 

“They’re here already,” Mara said, looking toward the sound. “We may be too late.”
 

Piper shook her head. “No. It was Jeanine and Charlie. They’re gone. Whatever they did, they chose to do it. Cameron’s gone, too.”
 

Jabari looked like she might ask the most obvious questions, but there wasn’t any time for mourning or regret. Instead she said, “Do we know if he opened the Ark?”

Piper nodded. “Can’t you feel it?”
 

Lila broke free of Piper and rushed to the red-tie Meyer, unsure in the moment which it was. It didn’t matter. She hugged him hard then switched to the other.

“Thank God you’re okay. I thought—”
 

The man in the red tie — Kindred, Lila now saw — said, “Have you found Clara?”

Lila felt a second’s intense despair, but Piper interrupted her moment to answer.
 

“Clara is fine.”
 

“Did they let her go?”
 

“No. But she’s fine.”
 

“If they didn’t release her … ”
 

“It was a trick. The Mullah have her, but she’s not in danger.”

Jabari shook her head, eyes squinted. “Where are you getting this?”
 

“I can hear her.”
 

“Where?”
 

“Everywhere.”
 

To Lila: “What’s she talking about? Did something … ?” Then the viceroy kind of ticked her head sideways, an uncomfortable expression on her face — one meant to ask if Piper was losing her mind.
 

“Cameron did something,” Piper said. “That’s all I know. Now, it’s like I can hear everything.”
 

Lila looked to Meyer, who came forward. He took Piper’s hands, met her eyes, then nodded in a businesslike way and stepped back. He nodded to Kindred next, and Lila watched knowledge flow between them.

Jabari, observing the exchange, glared at each of the suited men in turn. “Don’t you two play coy on me now.”
 

Kindred answered. “I think all of Ember Flats has been able to sense the Ark on some level for hours now, maybe days. Maybe the whole world has been able to. But now that it’s open, it’s like the light’s been flicked on.”
 

“Meaning?”

“Every time in the past, the Astrals came expecting a planet that had learned to tap into its higher mind. This time, we surprised them. We hadn’t developed a higher mind at all, at least not consciously. So they used the rock lines. The henges around the capitals. And now there’s the Ark.”
 

“I thought it was an archive.”
 

“We gave Ember Flats something to be angry about. It’s feeding the Ark, and the Ark feeds that energy right back at us, repeated out into the other capital cities as a broadcast the Astrals haven’t bothered to kill. They’re
letting
us do this. Humanity gets angry, sad, full of despair, whatever. But instead of thoughtfully planning a response after learning about Heaven’s Veil, humanity chooses to fight and riot. You saw it. Hell, we barely escaped. It’s Astral Day all over.”
 

“What does Astral Day have to do with it?” Lila asked.
 

Meyer put a hand on her shoulder. It was almost condescending, but Lila let it be.
 

“Every time they test us, we behave poorly. We trample each other to get where we need to go. We fight and kill and steal. It happened that first day, when the ships came, and it’s starting to happen again. If the Ark is meant to record our responses and weigh our fate, I don’t know that we’ll pass.”
 

“Then why did you — ?”
 

Kindred interrupted, his eyes scanning the room, his tone decidedly less placating and sentimental than Meyer’s. “Because it cuts both ways. Now that the tempest is out of the box, the stalemate is broken. Piper’s already changing. Maybe, once the dust settles and humans find they’re more connected than they thought, there will be something we can do. But I don’t think things went our way. I can feel it from both sides: human, like Piper, and Astral. If this was a trial, we’ve already been found guilty. The lit-up human network seems to be pouring minds into the archive, but we can see each other more than ever through that same network.”

“Come with me,” Jabari said, breaking the mood that threatened to freeze them in place as the city burned. “We thought this might be coming.” She waved at Piper, Lila, and both Meyers. “Come on. All of you.”

“But Clara!” Lila said.
 

“She’s safer than we are, Lila,” Piper said.

Lila felt her arm yanked hard as they went back on the move, now running with Jabari leading in her long, formal viceroy gown. Through the windows, Lila could see groups of people swarming past, fires burning, Reptars on patrol, shuttles flying by like in the early days of Heaven’s Veil. And what Piper and Kindred had said was true, now that Lila tuned in to her own heavy-handed intuition: She
could
hear the others out there; she
could
sense the mood; she
did
feel that heavy sense of a judgment gone wrong. Not as deeply as Piper seemed to, but the feeling was there. And below it all, she feared for her daughter. Not as a logical being but as a mother. No matter how you sliced it, Clara had been taken from her, and nobody knew where she’d gone.
 

They moved into an unknown hallway, through an unmarked door. The room was filled with screens and computers. It was like a tiny version of Peers’s Den, only in a room instead of a cave, using human technology instead of Astral.

Jabari was about to close the door when she paused, hand on the knob. Then, with the door still open, she walked slowly back into the hallway as if she’d spotted something and wanted to get a closer look. Across from the unmarked door was a gallery of windows. Outside, beyond a lush expanse of grass, Lila could see nothing but an outer wall and open sky beyond. There was nothing of the city from this vista. Were it not for the sounds all around and the murmurings in her head, this might be just another peaceful night in the Capital of Capitals.
 

Beyond, Lila could see something moving.
 

“Ms. Jabari?” Lila said, approaching her.

But Jabari was shaking her head.
 

“It’s too late,” she said.

A teen boy of about fourteen stood in front of Peers. It took a while to realize he was staring at himself.
 

There was a grating, a grumbling from somewhere behind him. A sort of shifting sound, nothing to worry about. Peers remembered it well, from when he’d
been
the boy in this vision. One of the big doors closing, or possibly opening. Judging by where they (both adult and boy) were standing, Peers was sure he remembered the day, and why the doors might be moving, though some typically stayed open and others closed, all seldom moved. Today the Mullah was rallying defenses, aware of an intrusion. The adults were scurrying about the tunnels like busy bees rallying to rise and sting.
 

And in so doing, they’d left the temple unguarded.
 

Well,
mostly
unguarded. Sabah, one of the elders, had remained at his station when the others ran off. Peers had watched him for a while, hidden, and only recently, as Adult Peers understood the timeline, had he taken a short break to relieve his bladder.
 

Watching now as full-grown Peers, he remembered his thoughts on that long-ago day, now around two decades behind him. He hadn’t meant to do anything, not really. But he’d been curious, as he’d always been, and you usually couldn’t even
approach
the temple, let alone enter. There were all sorts of pain-in-the ass adults milling about and telling nosy kids to get away, to mind their parents and whatever dumb tasks they were supposed to be doing. The kids had many chores. Peers had spoken to children from the outside world, who didn’t live in caves and holes in the ground, worshipping old scrolls and performing ancient rituals. He knew enough about the world beyond these stone walls to know that Peers was dealing with
slavery
, no more or less. Screw the adults and especially the elders. The soldier ants had to do all the grunt work, while those
in the know
held their secrets and chanted in circles, probably, laughing about how they ran things and could make others — most particularly Peers and his friends — do whatever they wanted.

All for the stupid temple. All for whatever was inside it. All because of the Horsemen — who, despite lots of rather over-the-top indoctrination, sounded like boogeymen. The kids were told that if they didn’t do their chores or listen to their parents, they’d be taken away when the Horsemen returned.
 

It was all such crap.

It didn’t help that Peers’s father had been an envoy to Cairo, to Jerusalem, to Damascus. It didn’t help that Father was an infiltrator, occasionally placed in high positions, meant to pull invisible strings for the Mullah. Father, when he was home, brought back stories. Said insidious, even blasphemous things that came to him from the world beyond the caves. Peers absorbed it all. He began to see the Mullah’s way of life in terms of Haves and Have-Nots, the way Father sometimes spoke when he thought the children couldn’t hear. And Peers, always curious, resented the fact that if he had to slave his days away, he couldn’t even truly know what he was slaving
for
.
 

Horsemen
. Horsemen, indeed.
 

So he’d gone to the temple entrance, just to see it. Just to be there without being bothered. And when Sabah stood and tottered his way off toward the latrine chamber, Young Peers had gone to the door. Touched it. Seen the way the stone had been perfectly milled so that door met jamb with no gap in between. Could you suffocate someone by locking them in the temple? Probably. But that was fine because as far as Father said, nobody ever went into the temple.
Almost never.
Once in a great while, one of the elders would go in to “consult the Horsemen.” Peers had his own thoughts.
 

Seeing as the whole Horsemen thing smelled like bullshit, that
had
to be where the best stuff was kept. All the games the children weren’t allowed to have. All the money for use in traveling and acquiring things, perhaps. All the forbidden material, which the elders kept for themselves. Maybe there were loose women inside, kept alive by air holes. And the elders entered to screw them.
 

Peers watched his young self creep forward, looking around for Sabah’s return. Despite knowing the outcome, Adult Peers couldn’t help a flutter of nerves. Sabah had stayed away long enough. Peers had got away with all of it — at least, for a while.