Judgment Read online

  “Oh,” Clara said.

  “That doesn’t surprise you? I’m doing my best with this secret, you know.” He put on a playful smile, but Clara only returned it out of obligation.

  “Is that why you came? Have you been following us? Did you help us escape the Astrals because of the key?”

  “Partially,” Peers said. “But there are other reasons. Your grandfather, there, for instance? He knows things that my friends might very much like to hear, about the Astrals.”

  Clara finally laughed, pointing away from where Peers held his finger.

  “That’s my grandfather. The other one is Kindred.”

  “See, Clara? This is why it’s good we’ve met.”

  “Kindred used to be one of them. But they changed him. He’s let me in, all the way. So I know he can still sense the Astrals, but I also know he can’t go back, or maybe wouldn’t go back. His body could change if it wanted, but he’s human now in all the ways that count, and so he won’t ever do it. He’s angry, and would never join them again.”

  “What’s he angry about?”

  “The Astrals killed his son. My uncle. And they killed my grandma. He used to be married to her a long time ago.”

  “But wasn’t it Meyer’s son? The human Meyer? And it was the human Meyer who was married to your grandmother.”

  Clara shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. They’re the same person, inside and out. He’s the same as my grandpa. They both married my grandma. They both had a son who was killed.”

  “That must make for strange family reunions.”

  “They both were married to Grandma Piper,” Clara said, as if this explained the situation, or gave it a finer point. “And now that she’s married to Cameron, they both still love her.”

  Peers decided not to pry. He should keep his distance from these people, hard as it would be.

  “So that’s why you’re here.” Clara’s hands were folded in her lap and she’d looked down while speaking, as if some horrid realization had dawned, and turned her into a child again.

  “Why do you feel I’m here?” Peers asked.

  “To make us go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “To the Ark.”

  “Back?” Peers repeated. “So you’ve been there before? To Ember Flats?”

  Clara’s brow wrinkled, looking as though she didn’t know where the Astrals had taken the Archive after they’d followed its scream to Mount Sinai, where the Templars had stowed it — probably with some sense of historical irony. But everyone knew the Ark was in Ember Flats. If the world had a logo these days, that was it: the Ark on its enormous stone plinth in the city’s center, waiting to be unlocked like Excalibur waiting to be pulled from the stone. Peers had friends who’d tried to protect the Ark in its old location, to beat the Astrals to it once it had screamed with Heaven’s Veil’s death, as a tidal wave of agony had rushed toward the ancient recording device. But you didn’t need to have seen it carted off to know its location. The Astrals weren’t hiding it. Anyone who could fight their way into Ember Flats could walk right up to the thing and touch it.

  “No. We went to the old place.”

  “To Mount Horeb?”

  Clara nodded. “Cameron and his dad thought of it as Mount Sinai, but yes.”

  Peers was floored. The scholars had been right all along. The Bannisters had found the key where the Templars had hidden it, and they’d reached the similarly hidden Ark before the Astrals had triangulated on the Heaven’s Veil scream. Some claimed the Bannister group didn’t actually reach the Ark first, and that the Astrals had stepped out of the way to let them at it. Only the Mullah would have stood in their way, and if Clara was telling the truth, they’d actually made it.

  They’d reached the Ark. They’d stood in front of it in its ancient resting place and the birthplace of its legend.

  But if that was true, why was the key still unused in Bannister’s satchel?

  Before Peers could ask for more, he he saw Clara’s hands knot more rapidly in her lap and a tear drip down her cheek.

  She looked up. “Don’t take us to the Ark, Mr. Peers. Anything but that.”

  He looked from the girl to the road ahead then toward the side of the bus where something again seemed to race past in the corner of his eye.

  “We’ll be at my place soon,” Peers told her, his gut somehow troubled. “And then we can rest.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Piper looked across the aisle at Lila then at Clara asleep against her mother’s side. Lila looked over, but the two women said nothing. There was a quiet spell over the bus.

  Nobody seemed to know if they’d done the right or wrong thing in climbing aboard. There’d always been a 50/50 chance that the junker who’d ferried them to the ancient city would have stuck around as Cameron had asked, and those odds had grown substantially worse, Piper felt sure, when the shuttle full of Astrals had plopped its fat silver body down at the cave’s mouth. Maybe the aliens had killed the man out of hand. But more likely, he’d simply run back to his quasi-legal business and left their group stranded.

  They were supposed to be able to live there. Either the underground city was occupied by the rumored community, or it was empty, in which case their motley crew would have made it home for a while — far enough from their troubles to almost forget them, never close enough to their old homes overseas to merit much fussing. Piper felt sure she’d die over here somewhere — maybe soon, or maybe in decades. Either way she’d seen the last of America. It was silly to let that bother her. There wasn’t any America anymore, anyway.

  Piling into Peers’s armored bus had been their only option. He and Aubrey seemed like respectable enough men. Even the dog — Nocturne — had spent a good portion of the trip patrolling the aisles, licking hands to welcome the visitors, curled up on the floor beside Charlie, who turned out to have a surprising fondness for animals. Better with them than humans, anyway.

  Clara blinked awake as if feeling Piper’s glance. Lila looked over as well. Piper didn’t need to see their eyes to sense their emotions. The feeling was bone deep.

  “Have a good nap, kiddo?” Piper asked.

  Clara nodded against Lila’s side. It would have been easy, in this moment, to believe Clara was just another seven-year-old kid. But it wasn’t Clara’s simple nod that stopped her. It was her own use of the word “kiddo.” An older one of her words — one she’d sometimes used with Trevor, back before the world had gone sour.

  “Saw you talking to Mr. Peers before.”

  “It’s just Peers, Piper.”

  Piper let a smile touch her lips. It was so easy to speak to Clara like a child, but she seldom replied as one.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing.”

  Piper turned to Cameron, on her other side. She was about to speak, but Cameron was already in her head.

  “My gut says he’s safe,” he said.

  “Think so, do you?”

  “They let us keep our weapons. There are seven adults in our group and only two of them. And we still have … ” He trailed off, ticking his head toward the window, seeming to indicate the silent and only probably presence of the Pall outside. “That dog’s not exactly a killer, either. So if Peers intends to shanghai us, he’s not going about it intelligently. And he did get us out of there.”

  “He could be Mullah.”

  Cameron patted his satchel, which still contained the stone disk. “If he were Mullah, he would have already taken what we have.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Cameron’s hand moved to his chest. He probably didn’t even realize what he was doing, but Piper had spotted him doing it more and more as they retraced the old archaeological stomping grounds he’d once trod with his father. He was touching that charm he wore around his neck, the old coin with the square hole in its center, dangling from a leather lanyard. The coin Charlie had found in the tiny cache of Benjamin’s belongings, and Cameron had pounced upon like Gol
lum to his Precious.

  “I’m sure.”

  But he wasn’t. He didn’t know more than any of them.

  Cameron took Piper’s hand. “All I know is that Derinkuyu was a bad end. If Peers says he has a hideout and wants to take us there, maybe it’ll be what we need.”

  Piper wasn’t as sure. Derinkuyu hadn’t been a bad end until the aliens had poured inside it. And nothing about the encounter felt entirely right. The Astrals’ pursuit felt wrong, seeing as they’d already gone to the archive and then let them be. And the way they’d simply backed off, after pinning them in the caves? That didn’t feel right, either. The sudden and fortuitous appearance of their rescuers was another itch atop many. But as the Astrals worked with the remaining capitals and the mind network had strengthened, coincidence had become more the norm than an oddity.

  Piper let it go, watching the parched land surrender to even more withered, shriveled desert. There were no gangs, no marauders, no pirate groups come to steal their precious weapons and fuel. But that was another question: Unless Peers had shady connections, how did he get the gas required to drive his rig?

  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.”

  CHAPTER 8

  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.