Judgment Read online

CHAPTER 5

  “Stop and wait,” said the man with dreadlocks.

  Cameron looked at Jeanine, their lights extinguished, crouching in the dark. They’d ducked away from the pursuing Astrals, turning back to the lower floor where they’d lost Piper and the others following the strange man’s appearance. He hadn’t seemed surprised to see them. He was wearing the same desert robes reported by Jeanine. But this man was definitely not Mullah.

  “We have to go back down,” Cameron said.

  “Down?” He actually laughed. The man had a broad, dark face and seemed like a Middle-Easterner, but his speech was clipped and precise — far higher English, Cameron thought, than his own. “From where you shot the alien? No, I don’t believe so.”

  “I didn’t — !”

  Cameron raised a hand to cut Jeanine off. They didn’t know who this man was, where he’d come from, or what he wanted with them. Giving him clues that might lead to the Pall — possibly still an ace in the hole — seemed like a terrible idea.

  But the dreadlocked man either didn’t hear her, or didn’t care.

  “Listen,” he said. “You’re lucky to have got away from there. I wasn’t sure how I was going to extract you and your others without the distraction.”

  Meaning the gunshot. Jeanine looked up, but again Cameron’s eyes silenced her.

  “Our others. That’s what I’m talking about. We have to find them.”

  “No worries. My friend was in the opposite tunnel. I followed you; he meant to go in after them.”

  “They could be in trouble.”

  “You were the ones in trouble, my friend. Still are.” He seemed to perk his ears, listening for alien sounds echoing through the hallways.

  Cameron flinched. Something cold touched his bare arm. It took him a moment, in the dark, to realize it had been the wet nose of a dog sitting silently by his side. A large black lab that seemed to belong to their new guide. But the dog required no instructions and behaved like a human. Cameron wasn’t sure if the animal was shepherding their group of three or herding it. It seemed calm enough, but Cameron wondered if that would change if he tried something the dreadlocked man didn’t want, like fleeing in pursuit of his friends.

  “I have a vehicle outside. It is sufficiently hidden. You were not going to escape on foot, as we saw you come. I am fairly confident that my friend has already ushered the rest of your people from the lower level. Go back now, and you will only increase your chances for peril. I am a competitive man. If my assistant returns with a greater percentage of those he was charged to save, I will be disappointed. So please, stay close. Even one of you getting eaten takes my record down to 50 percent.”

  Cameron’s brow furrowed. He looked past Jeanine’s questioning face to the man’s, but his head was still forward.

  “Why are you doing this?” In Cameron’s mind, nobody in the modern world acted out of kindness. They’d seen oppression in Heaven’s Veil, tyranny in Roman Sands, and nothing but defensive selfishness everywhere else they’d gone. To Cameron, these caves were supposed to be a hideout for their group and their group alone. Piper held the naive belief that they might find people here — and that if they did, those people would welcome their presence instead of killing them outright as threats.

  “My dog likes you.”

  Beside Cameron, the dog licked its lips, watching him with big, placid brown eyes.

  “Come. The way is clear.”

  The man walked. Cameron followed first with Coffey behind him. The dog, true to the man’s words, padded along silently at his side as if on a leash.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Peers.”

  “Is that a first or last name?”

  “I prefer the allure of a single name. Like Madonna.”

  “What?”

  “Basara,” Peers said.

  Cameron assumed he’d just been given the man’s last name, though he could have it backward. Neither order was more obviously correct.

  “Come. We need to keep moving.”

  Jeanine gripped Cameron’s arm. Their quarters were too tight for her to say anything unheard, but the grip and her eyes broadcast enough.

  And Cameron attempted to silently answer: What’s our alternative? Being killed by Astrals?

  As if in answer, a sound percolated through the stone, its direction impossible to pinpoint. Tunnels went up, down, and to all sides. Echoes formed a soup.

  They moved through the nexus, past an obvious upward staircase, and to another upward staircase farther on. Each of Peers’s turns had purpose as if he knew the place well. It took long minutes before they reached their first hint of daylight, and several times Cameron had been sure, based on sound, that Peers had been leading them into a den of purring Reptars. They stopped and went, ducked and trudged forward. Whenever they paused, the black dog sat at Cameron’s side and looked up at him.

  Peers was first up the next stairway, same as the other times, but now he stopped, peeked back down, and seemed to think.

  “What is it?” Jeanine asked.

  “Tell me you are accomplished runners,” Peers said. “You needn’t be marathoners, per se, but perhaps you enjoy a sprint over shorter distances. You know. For fun.”

  Instead of answering, Cameron moved past Peers and peeked up the staircase. There was a large anteroom in the rock. Past that was the cave’s front entrance, and abundant sunlight beyond. They had maybe twenty yards to cover, and that wasn’t a problem. The thirty or more Reptars milling the area’s recesses were.

  “Just a straight jaunt through the center, don’t you think?” Peers said, rustling his robes as if to loosen his joints.

  “You can’t be suggesting … ” Cameron began.

  But then Peers shot up the steps. The dog nipped Cameron’s heel; then they were running. Every black alien head turned, rising from a semi-crouch and turning to follow.

  They could never make it. Not in a thousand years. The way was clear up top, but they’d be in the wide open. Reptars were faster than people in a straight sprint. They’d be pinned seconds after arriving topside. Then the Astrals would steal the archive key or kill them. Probably both.

  But when Cameron arrived in the sun with Peers, Jeanine, and the dog ahead of him, he saw Piper standing off to one side. A reinforced vehicle that had once been a Honda Accord screamed toward him from the other side.

  Cameron dodged just in time. The car missed him by two feet at most then gunned hard at the cave entrance. There was a crunch, a bang, and a visible poof of white airbags as the car’s front end smashed into a hole in the hillside. No glass shattered; the car had no windshield or windows.

  A thin man was unbuckling, pushing at the deflating airbag and extricating himself from the smashed vehicle with amusing delicacy. When he finally jumped from the trunk end to the ground, Cameron saw that he had a small mustache and was wearing a crash helmet.

  Peers took Cameron and Coffey by the arm and led them toward Piper and the others — who, it turned out, were standing in front of what looked like an armor-reinforced urban tank that might once have been a city bus. He nodded toward the man with the helmet.

  “That’s Aubrey,” Peers said. “But I wouldn’t talk to him right now. He’ll be peeved about losing his car whether he volunteered it or not.”

  “But—”

  Toward the bus’s door. Shoved inside while the man called Aubrey shooed Meyer, Kindred, and Clara in from an added entrance on its other side.

  “You’d better have your ticket out and ready to be stamped,” Peers told them.

  Up the steps. Into what was, yes, indeed a converted bus armed with gun turrets. Studded with spikes and wrapped in razor wire.

  “I’m just kidding,” Peers said. “We don’t stamp tickets anymore.”

  The engine revved as the man with the mustache plopped into the driver’s seat. Peers stood beside him, holding a vertical handrail. The bus lurched. Swung in a half circle. Then peeled out through ancient stone streets and
hills while the Astrals poked futilely around their new prison’s plugged hole, their spherical silver shuttle hovering without a pilot nearby.

  After the rattling streets gave way to open roads, Cameron finally peeled his eyes, steeped in terror, from the windows.

  Then he turned and saw that someone was already sitting beside him.

  It was the dog.

  CHAPTER 6

  The travelers wouldn’t sleep.

  That didn’t surprise Peers. When he and Aubrey had first made their way out of London, in the occupation’s earliest days, a charismatic man named Saul had taken them into what turned out to be more cult than caravan. Peers hadn’t slept for the first night they’d been in Saul’s too-good-to-be-true protection, nor had he slept on the second. Not since university had he stayed up for so many hours, and the longer he’d stayed awake, the greater his paranoia. Sleep was the enemy. If he’d lowered his guard, something awful would happen. But as luck had it, something horrible had happened anyway, and the next day Peers and Aubrey were back on their own with blood soaking their clothing and hands.

  He understood why Cameron and the others didn’t sleep, and why the one they called Kindred seemed so uncertain of him. To Peers, Kindred looked exactly like Meyer Dempsey, Heaven’s Veil’s supposedly dead viceroy. That would have been fine if not for the group’s second Meyer Dempsey — this one simply called “Meyer.” But Peers thought he knew what this was. Astrals were shapeshifters. It seemed that Kindred had once been Astral, and was now stuck in human form. Surely he’d eye Peers with a raised brow, but no matter his suspicions he wouldn’t truly know anything beyond the fact that Peers wasn’t Astral.

  It would take time. And that was fine.

  A half hour expired, and the questions got started. They asked Peers how he knew they were in Derinkuyu when they really wanted to know why he was looking for them in the first place, especially the farther they got from the ancient Cappadocian city. Hours passed, and it was obvious that the honeycomb was far from Peers’s home base. Why had he and his assistant trucked all the way out to that specific point to rather coincidentally save them? If pressed, he’d tell them he knew they had the archive key, and that the Astrals were after it. But he wouldn’t say anything until he had to. Secrets had to be rationed.

  Evening slowly replaced afternoon. The crew became restless, unwilling to close their eyes despite obvious fatigue. Perhaps it was dawning on them that their saviors had captured them, too. They weren’t in chains and Peers wouldn’t use force to hold them, but those on the bus had entered a quiet standoff. While the vehicle was in motion, everyone on board was more or less stuck. All eyes seemed to be weighing the situation, frying pan versus fire. They could ask to get off, yes. But why? The outlands offered no cover, and Peers had given no reason to doubt his intentions.

  Except for his and Aubrey’s appearance being so highly, highly coincidental.

  Peers shifted attention between his new charges and the road. The Den was another half hour away, and the only customs or border patrols still in these parts were those that wandered everywhere, regardless of the old, pre-Astral map. And besides, he had help keeping this stretch clean, so Peers had little reason to worry. They’d be there soon — no need to press things beforehand.

  But something itched at him. Something that felt forgotten. He’d known the group’s composition, and they were all now in the bus. Kindred; Meyer; Cameron Bannister and his apparent wife, Piper; Meyer’s daughter, Lila; and her obviously Lightborn daughter, Clara. The blue-eyed man with the dark stubble seemed to be with Lila, and though Peers wasn’t good with names, he seemed to remember their brief introductions naming him Christopher. There was a stern-faced man in a button-up shirt and brown slacks named Charlie, and the hard-edged woman with the brown ponytail was the group’s militant: Janet, or something.

  And that was everyone. All the spotters had seen — everyone Peers had background on, if he cared enough to look.

  So why did he feel like something had been left behind? Something that might come back to bite him?

  And why, several times now, did he seem to see something in the corner of his eye, like an animal running along beside the bus?

  “You know us, don’t you?”

  Peers felt his attention snap. He looked down to see the little girl. Glancing back, he saw her mother watching them both from a few rows back. Clara was seated across the aisle from Peers, watching him with unconcerned eyes.

  “I do now.” Peers tried to affect a smile, but Lightborn gazes were so unsettling. Rumor had it they could talk across distances. Intuit the future. Peers believed it, too. In the past, Astral incursions had resulted in highly spiritual societies that connected mind to mind. Ironic that in the modern world it had taken drug users to open those particular doors to the aliens.

  “But you knew us before. You knew we were in those caves.”

  “We saw you go in.” Peers regretted the words as he said them. He was treating Clara as if she were a seven-year-old kid because she biologically was one. But Clara was big for her age, seeming almost preteen. And there was nothing naive or innocent about her eyes.

  “My mom didn’t want to ask you, but I know you won’t mind answering.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Why haven’t the Astrals followed us?”

  “Because we plugged them in with Aubrey’s car.”

  “Damn right we did,” Aubrey muttered from the driver’s seat.

  “But there should be others. They think in a network. Why didn’t they call to another shuttle and follow us?”

  “I assume we got lucky.” But Peers could hear the tone of his voice. This isn’t a child, he told himself. Not in any of the ways that matter.

  Clara appeared to chew on the statement. He’d never seen a Lightborn so close. Never had a conversation with one. Supposedly children born near Astral network hubs, in those vital early days, weren’t entirely impossible to find, though they were definitely rare. He’d researched, sure. But nothing could prepare him for Clara’s assessing stare. Some rumors said they could read minds. Was it true, or just more bullshit mysticism?

  “We’ve been lucky,” Clara said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I mean all along. Every day.”

  “Nobody’s lucky all the time.”

  “I suppose not,” Clara said. “My dad and grandma died in Heaven’s Veil. Lots of our friends, too. And it’s been hard since we left.”

  “I see.”

  Clara’s head tilted. Then, without accusation, she said, “See? You do know who we are.”

  “I do?”

  “Well, you’re not surprised that we came from Heaven’s Veil. Or that we crossed the ocean.”

  “Maybe I just hide it well.” Peers meant it as a joke, but the girl just kept watching him.

  “You don’t hide anything particularly well. I can feel your surprise.” Then the girl did something that made Peers jump in his seat. She reached across the aisle and touched the back of his hand.

  “If you let me in, we can get to know each other more easily.”

  With the girl’s words, Peers felt the most curious sensation, like someone palming his brain, squeezing it gently, curious about what was inside.

  “My mom doesn’t trust you … ” She trailed off, waiting for Peers to repeat his name.

  “Peers.”

  “Peers,” Clara repeated. But he was sure she’d known it already, and that this was a link in a long chain of subtle manipulation. Some of the region’s guerrillas were excellent at building false trust, and this felt the same. “She doesn’t trust you. But you don’t scare me, Peers.”

  “That’s good. I’m not a scary person.”

  “If you let me in,” she said as the gentle pressure inside his skull reasserted itself, “I can tell that to the others, and they’ll believe me.”

  Peers flexed a tiny interior muscle. He felt Clara’s probing mental hand forced back.

  “I’d really ra
ther not. Nothing personal. But I believe intentions are best demonstrated the old-fashioned way.”

  He thought Clara might protest — or possibly sound an alarm that their abductor was not to be trusted — but instead her body relaxed and the hand retreated, both from atop his own and from inside his mind. Then she was just another girl, half-slouched in the seat across from him.

  “It’s Clara, right?” he said.

  Clara nodded.

  “I’ll tell you a secret if you’d like.”

  “Do I have to keep it quiet?”

  “Only if you choose to.”

  “Then it’s not much of a secret, is it?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  Clara straightened, clearly interested.

  “I do know who you are. And I did know you were in that cave.”

  He thought Clara might react with suspicion, but she merely raised her eyebrows quizzically. Their voices were low, and the row behind them was empty. This truly was a secret for as long as Clara wished it to be.

  “I have friends who know far more than I do. I met many of them in England, while at Oxford.”

  “I’ve never been to London,” Clara said, somehow delighted by the notion of another strange land.

  “It used to be a beautiful place, like your Heaven’s Veil. And my friends, they shared many images when the Internet was still open and free. Some small computer networks — not many, but some — are still active. And my friends, they told us about you.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  Peers nodded toward the back of the bus.

  “That man there is Cameron Bannister. His father was Benjamin Bannister.”

  “He still has nightmares about his father.”

  Somehow Peers felt sure that she wasn’t speaking from conversations with Cameron or overheard nighttime voices but as someone who’d sampled those dreams in her mind.

  “Benjamin was an important man. He sent a lot of information to my friends. And so we know.” Peers paused, reminding himself that Clara had probably already figured out what he was about to admit. “We know about the key Cameron found. To the Ark.”