Judgment (8 page)

They saw no other vehicles despite the rumors of this land being a hotspot. They saw no shuttles. They’d have easily been visible from space. Before the Astrals had recalled the shuttle Kindred used to ferry them across the ocean, they’d at least had the benefit of traveling like the aliens. Nowadays, expeditions required stealth, stowing away in known and innocuous vehicles. Nowadays it required luck. Why Astral eyes had no interest in this death wagon, Piper had no clue.
 

But they reached a cliffside without incident, then both men were leaving the bus to raise a camouflage drape. There was some sort of a stronghold beyond, and to Piper it looked like something hollowed out and made to work rather than something discovered. There were large metal doors, inexpertly jammed into the rock, edges crumbling around the periphery. There was a mass of circuitry half hanging in a small alcove to one side, not even properly bolted down. Thick cables ran from the back. And judging by the spotlights — dim in the daytime — that had lit with their approach, the place had plenty of power.
 

Aubrey drove the bus through the entrance as the doors peeled open, killing the engine once they’d entered a cavernous, hollowed-out space like a garage missing its front, spilling out into what could only be described as a massive cave. But this wasn’t like Derinkuyu, thousands of years old and etched by time. This was something natural, recently expanded, and held up from collapse by what seemed to be nothing more than positive thinking.
 

Peers did something more at the panel, and the doors closed behind them. He rushed back and dropped the camouflage drape, scampering through the doors before they sealed. Piper was reminded of their bunker under Meyer’s old Axis Mundi, back when there’d only been one of him. That bunker was polished, not roughly assembled as this one appeared to be. But then again, look how it had turned out.

Peers reappeared at the bus door then climbed the three stairs to stand at the front of the long aisle like a guide about to give excursion instructions to a group of tourists.
 

“Welcome, my friends,” he said, “to the Den.”
 

They watched Lila, Piper, and Clara file out. They were preceded by Christopher (who seemed to feel a manly need to protect them and go first) and Jeanine Coffey (who, as the group’s fiercest member, seemed to resent Christopher’s gallant but misguided chivalry). Charlie and Cameron took the rear, discussing Benjamin’s research and wondering aloud what this place was or had ever been. Peers’s Den was too large, Charlie said, to have been carved with human tools, its throat held open without visible girders. But they only mumbled, and Cameron shooed Charlie from behind, seemingly as concerned with appearing rude as with getting to the bottom of whatever truth might be waiting.
 

Then Kindred, upon setting his feet on the Den’s rough rock floor, yanked Meyer back and began speaking fast and low. He spoke to Meyer without thinking — Peers had been told that when the two of them went deep; their dialect was practically another language. A shorthand with higher context, silent but forever present between them. Piper had told them as much during their failed triad marriage. Sometimes Kindred wondered if it wasn’t the impossibility of three-way love that stymied Piper’s heart so much as a conviction that she was being deliberately excluded from what passed between her husbands.

“This is Astral,” Kindred told Meyer.
 

“Are you saying — ?”

“Peers isn’t Astral. I would know.”
 

“And Aubrey?”
 

“No.”
 

“Nocturne?”
 

“Not the dog.”
 

“Where is it?”
 

Anyone listening would probably assume Meyer was asking for the dog’s whereabouts, but Kindred saw a deductive flash inside his mind. It wasn’t really telepathy so much as the product of identical brains reaching uniform conclusions.

The Pall. Where is the Pall?

“I haven’t seen it.”
 

“Can’t you feel it? You’re one of them.”
 

Kindred hit Meyer lightly in the chest. It wasn’t actually an assault. It was another of their two-bodies, single-mind bits of shorthand. Sometimes Kindred felt that he wasn’t really himself; he was half of a larger whole. The truth, he suspected, was that both things were true.

The jab said,
I’m not Astral, and you know that because you’re half of me, so stop being an asshole because it makes me half an asshole, too.
It felt to Kindred — and to Meyer, according to the times Kindred sampled his thoughts — like slapping your right hand with your left when it reached for a cookie it wasn’t supposed to take.
 

“I can’t feel it. I’ve never
felt
it.”
 

“Do you think
he
felt it?”
 

Meaning the other Meyer. The first copy, before Kindred’s creation. The Meyer whom Raj had shot dead, whose unfurling humanity and conflicting emotion had first torn into the Astral consciousness. Divinity believed it had purged the troublesome human doublethink from the Astral stream before creating Kindred. But that’s not what happened. The rift remained then spread. Five years had been plenty of time for the Astral hive mind to occasionally face its emotions with all the tools of a moody adolescent.
 

And
it had created the Pall. The waste squeezed from Meyer Dempsey’s mindstream was supposed to have gone nowhere, but it hadn’t. Those “problematic” emotional bits had become their own thing, refusing to die. Once outside the Astral collective, those leftover bits had taken shape. But the Pall, like everything, had changed since Sinai.
 

Kindred and Meyer (and the conjoined thing that emerged as Kindred-Meyer) sometimes wondered if the Pall was now something new. Something that spoke to the archive like the scream through Heaven’s Veil’s death.
 

“It’s irrelevant,” Kindred answered. “It’s what drove the unspooling. It helps us.”
 

Meyer looked into Kindred’s eyes. The glance said a thousand things.

“But this place,” Kindred continued. “I can practically feel their hands on it.”

“The power, you mean?”
 

“The structure. The way it was built. The movement of giant objects, like the sandstone in the pyramids. There is no capital in Turkey.”
 

“Of course not.”

“But you agree this is recent.”
 

Meyer nodded. “It’s recent.”
 

“Why would they have carved it? Where does Peers draw his power from?”

“Generators.”
 

“Who refines his fuel?”

“He must trade for it.” Meyer’s manner had become clipped, short, much like the old Meyer. He was impatient; Kindred could feel it from the inside. But between the two of them, neither was in charge.
 

“He knows we have the key.”
 

“Of course he knows.”
 

“Do you feel that he wants it?” Kindred asked.
 

“Feeling is your thing.”
 

“But reasoning is
ours
.”
 

“I don’t know,” Meyer answered, running a hand over his salt-and-pepper beard. “I don’t have enough information.”
 

“You have all the same information that I do.”
 

Now Meyer seemed outright annoyed. The rest of the group had moved away, following Peers and Aubrey. Soon they’d be conspicuous in their absence.
 

“If you want to know so badly, call home to the mothership.”
 

Kindred didn’t bother responding. Meyer knew perfectly well that although Kindred could sense Astral hands and sniff out shapeshifters in disguise, he could only feel the collective in the slightest of ways. His jab was purely human — the kind of verbal weapon he’d often used when they’d been fighting for Piper’s primary favor, before they’d given it up and made the torturous decision to let Cameron offer Piper his hand.
 

“I need your half,” Kindred said.

“I have nothing to offer,” Meyer replied, his eyes still on the departing group.
 

“Does it make human sense to you, Meyer?”
 

“Does it make human sense to
you, Meyer?”
Meyer spat back.

“There’s no need to become emotional.”

“There sure isn’t,
Meyer.”
 

Kindred bit his tongue. He was as much Meyer as Meyer Dempsey himself. He knew, intellectually, that he hadn’t grown up as a human boy, that he hadn’t created and run several successful businesses or produced many major films, that he hadn’t loved Heather before loving Piper. Those things made logical sense, but he still didn’t believe them on the deepest level. And Meyer’s impatience, imperiousness, and temper was part of that same mental stew. Together, Meyer and Kindred formed a sort of mortal super-being. But that didn’t stop Meyer from being an arrogant cocksucker — or make Kindred want to resist being an arrogant asshole right back.

“I don’t sense danger,” Kindred said, forcing a slow breath, trying to find an elusive center. Piper thought it was both hilarious and adorable, but the two men had taken up meditation to soften the sharpest edges of their mutual tempers. It was the only way they could survive each other — necessary since each was more or less half of the other.
 

When Kindred looked at Meyer, he saw that the other man was also slowing his breath, to calm the argument just the same.
 

“I don’t necessarily assume danger either,” Meyer said. “But I do intuit a secret being kept. And I’d urge caution.”
 

Kindred couldn’t help but look back at the large metal doors — doors that Peers and Aubrey couldn’t have moved into place by themselves.
 

“Caution,” he repeated.
 

But even as they turned to follow the group, Kindred couldn’t help feeling that caution was futile. They were inside with the doors locked, one cave-born trap potentially traded for another.
 

The Den was intimidating.
 

Cameron tried to play it cool as if none of this were a big deal, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from looking around. And because the place was so massive — in area, yes, but also in height — his head had to ferry his eyes where they wanted to go. He surely looked like a slack-jawed tourist seeing the big city for the first time. It didn’t matter. The Den was fascinating. It demanded attention, and if he had to appear a naive dullard to take in all there was, then so be it.
 

Immediately, Cameron was reminded of the ranch his father and Charlie had built inside the rock face in Moab, Utah. The Den was stuffed with scientific equipment, all of it lighting up and flashing, occasionally beeping and churning, vast wet benches like the one Charlie and his assistants used to man while searching for evidence of panspermia. Peers told the group as he toured them around that he’d been obsessed with aliens since before aliens were a genuine thing — and that, too, reminded Cameron of his father. He could imagine their dreadlocked leader in his desert robes like a Benjamin Bannister of a different flavor: drawn to ancient aliens sites, both men mildly (or clinically) obsessed with solving some of the world’s oldest mysteries. Peers told them about excursions in his youth to predictable sites like the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx, alongside lesser-known sites like Palenque, and modern-day curiosities like the Coral Castle and the Georgia Guidestones.
 

Cameron recognized every one of the names. He’d forgotten so much, but Benjamin’s notebooks — pulled from the same Bannister souvenir stash as the coin he now wore around his neck — helped him to remember. Part was practical: knowledge needed to defeat the Astral menace back when he’d believed that were possible. But most was penance, flogging himself with his father’s obvious, after-the-fact veracity, weighed heavy against Teenage Cameron’s skepticism, shame, and venomous resentment.