Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  The apartment wasn’t far, right next door. The terrace onto which she’d fallen was one floor below her own.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t thinking clearly. The Tribe would be watching the apartment above all things, if they weren’t camped out in it. She hoped Tyler would know that too.

  She started fashioning a sling out of the rags, tearing them into strips and tying them together.

  Certainly they hadn’t caught him. If they had, they would be yelling for her—Come out, we have your son! What if they had been yelling and she was too unconscious to hear? Measuring the sling and deciding she needed to add another rag, she wondered, could you be too unconscious, or were you either conscious or unconscious, no degrees?

  Beth! Stay focused!

  She thought the pain would keep her sharp, she’d heard it did. But hers muddled her mind, made her want to lie down and sleep it off.

  Think of Tyler, then. He needs you.

  She put the circle of rags around her neck and slipped her arm into it, wincing at the needles each little move sent coursing through her veins. She stood, found the mop, and pulled it out of the bucket. It was dry, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She pushed the head into the floor, angled the handle, and stomped on it. It took three stomps, but it finally snapped. She felt the broken edge, sharp, like a serrated chisel. They might laugh as they shot her or cut her down with their swords, but it was better than swinging at them with her one good hand.

  She was thinking about the gun again . . . and aspirin. Tyler was smart enough to stay clear of the apartment; she didn’t expect to find him there, but she was weighing the risk-to-reward of going there for the gun and aspirins.

  Sounded like a cheesy gangster movie: Guns and Aspirins.

  Focus!

  She opened the door, slipped onto the terrace, and found herself looking up at the apartment. She couldn’t see the window, but the roof over the portico wasn’t reflecting the glow of a light inside. Didn’t mean anything. Of course they wouldn’t turn on the light if they were waiting for her.

  Tyler first, she told herself. But her arm throbbed and her head pounded. And she felt sick—yes, mostly with worry for her boy, but how much of her nausea was the result of pain?

  Forget the apartment. Find Tyler. Period. No negotiating. Done deal.

  Where would he go? She needed intel: He was small, could fit where adults can’t. He knew every inch of the monastery. He was being chased. He was scared. He wanted his mommy. That made him sound helpless, but he wasn’t. Besides everything else, he was smart and brave.

  He liked heights, from where he could look down on things, the compound, people. She looked up at the dome in the center of the Colosseum. Could you get inside it? She didn’t know, but Tyler would.

  He liked low places, into which he could scurry and hide. The tunnels, the wells. She had never been in the monastery’s catacombs, but Tyler had said Gheronda told him about them. Had he also shown him?

  Too many places . . . good . . . and bad. If it kept him safe from the Tribe, it was good, great, praise God! Even if it meant she couldn’t find him either. The bad part was she wasn’t going to not look, and that meant moving around the compound, exposing herself.

  Do something!

  She looked at the dome again, decided to start there. At minimum, the high vantage point would let her spot things she couldn’t from here: Tyler or the Tribe members. She went to the stone steps leading down to the courtyard. She’d have to cross it to the stairs by the apartments and take them up to a walkway. She changed her mind. She went to the opposite side of the terrace, stepped onto a two-foot-high wall, and holding her broken arm high, jumped across a gap to the railing outside the second-floor apartments. She grabbed the railing with her good hand, swung a leg over, then the other one.

  That felt good: she’d saved herself a few minutes and a hundred paces, every one fraught with the threat of being caught. Thinking, I can do this, she hurried along the second-floor walkway toward the Colosseum.

  [ 62 ]

  “I got eyes on her,” Toby said into the radio, binocs at his eyes.

  “Where?” Nevaeh said. She was in the Chapel of the Burning Bush, inspecting the altar to see if it had stairs under it, as so many did. She started for the door.

  “I think it’s her,” Toby said. “Might be the kid. I only caught a glimpse.”

  “Okay, doesn’t matter. We get the kid, we get her. Where?”

  “Second floor of the apartments, heading toward the Southwest Range Building. She’s out of sight now.”

  “Got that, guys?” Nevaeh said, running past the burning bush now, behind the basilica, moving fast, using the boots. Before anyone answered she was already halfway up the alley beside the basilica.

  “I’m on it,” Phin said, and she heard the door of the family’s apartment, where he was waiting, slam open.

  Elias said, “I’ll circle the compound toward the back corner.”

  “Wait,” Nevaeh said, running past Elias. He was on the stairs leading down from the basilica’s front doors. Leaving him behind now, moving past the mosque. The boots were exhilarating. “Stay where you are, Elias. Keep the monks in the church. They get out, I don’t want to think of the damage they could cause.”

  The truth was, the mission would be over once they spread out into the compound. The monks had weapons, communications gear, knowledge of where to set up ambushes. The Tribe wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “Staying in front of the basilica,” he confirmed.

  “Jordan, where are you?” She reached the front of the apartments and jumped. She sailed over the stairs, landed outside the railing on the second floor, and rolled over it.

  Phin was at the far end, where stairs wound down to tunnels and up to the second and third floors of the Southwest Range Building. He turned when he heard her, shook his head.

  Jordan’s voice came through the radio: “I’m on the wall over the front gate.”

  “Go around the wall and get on the roof of the Southwest Range Building,” Nevaeh instructed.

  “Ten-four.”

  “There!” Phin said, pointing.

  Beth was running away from them, along the Southwest Range Building’s third-floor portico, her dark shape flashing past the columns, almost to the center.

  Phin raised his other hand, gripping a pistol, aiming it at Beth. He fired, just as Nevaeh shoved a shoulder into his side. The bullet shattered a lamp mounted to the wall five feet in front of Beth. She stopped abruptly, turned to stare. Started running again.

  “What are you doing?” Nevaeh yelled into Phin’s face. “I want her alive!”

  Phin’s glare could have devoured her. He snarled and disappeared into the stairwell, moving fast.

  Nevaeh leaped over the railing, dropped twenty feet, and landed on the ground floor. She ran in front of the Southwest Range Building, bounding over a flight of stairs. She was almost even with Beth, who’d passed the two wide central columns and was making tracks to the building’s far end—stairs there, an entrance to the administrative offices, a labyrinth of monk cells.

  A building blocked Nevaeh’s path. She pulled her feet together in midleap and came down flat on both soles. The boots’ pistons blasted down, propelling her onto the building’s roof. Two bounding strides, and she sailed over a gap and landed on the roof of the next building. She arced out, then swung in, running toward the Southwest Range Building. She leaped onto another roof, coming down on her soles, and shot toward the third-floor portico at a forty-five degree angle.

  And Beth was right there, her trajectory perfect for a collision.

  [ 63 ]

  When the railing collapsed under him and Tyler fell, he landed on the deck, smashing his face. The deck had jarred out, one side farther than the other. Now he sat in the corner nearest the wall, away from the missing railing. The platform canted away from the wall, the outside corner opposite him a foot lower. If he didn’t hold on to the railing here, he’d slide
off.

  His entire face hurt, especially his nose, which had gushed blood over his lips, chin, and chest. He’d wiped at it, but knew all he’d accomplished was to smear it across his cheeks. It had stopped bleeding a half hour ago.

  He’d been thinking about how to get down, figuring a way that didn’t involve riding the deck to the rocks below. He’d rather jump than crash down with the deck, its boards exploding and splintering around him, becoming as lethal as the fall itself.

  Directly below him was a buttress—a wedged-shape projection of stones built against the compound’s wall to support it. The top of the buttress was about twenty feet below him. If he hung from one of the deck supports, which ran from each outside corner diagonally to the wall, he could cut another ten feet from his fall. He’d tumble down its slope, but that was better than falling all the way to the ground. So it boiled down to a ten-foot drop onto a stone slope.

  If only he could build up the courage to do it.

  A gunshot sounded, startling him. He scrambled to his feet, never letting go of the railing, and looked up. The gunfire had come from somewhere inside the compound. He prayed no one was shooting at his mother, and if they were that they were terrible shots. She was looking for him, he knew it. And because of that, the Tribe had seen her . . . and shot at her. It was his fault she was in danger. He should have found a way back in a long time ago. Instead he’d sat there feeling sorry for himself, thinking that getting off the platform alive was hopeless.

  He tried the door again, rattled the handle. He lifted himself over the railing—

  Don’t break. Don’t break.

  —and put his feet between the balusters to stand outside the railing. He lowered himself, feeling with one foot for the support beam. He was nearly hanging from the deck when his toes touched it. He’d have to let go of the deck and grab the support as he fell.

  One . . . two . . .

  He squeezed his eyes closed.

  You can do it! Come on!

  One . . . two . . . three!

  [ 64 ]

  Running toward the end of the Colosseum’s portico, Beth saw Nevaeh coming, flying at her from below—made all the more frightening by how her black form and determined face were caught in the glow of lights mounted to the outside columns, which switched on automatically at dusk. She would reach the railing in seconds, probably flip over it and be standing right in front of her. Beth could hear Phin behind her, closing the gap fast, clomping like a robot.

  Instead of trying to run faster—as if she could—past Nevaeh or spinning to face Phin, she darted toward Nevaeh, leaning out over the railing and pointing the business end of the mop handle at her, going for a center-mass impalement. Nevaeh’s eyes flashed wide, too late to do anything. Beth steadied herself, gripped the makeshift spear with her one good hand as though it were a lifeline, and braced the blunt end against her shoulder.

  Nevaeh sailed right for it—right into it. At the last moment, the point inches from her chest, she clenched it in both hands, ramming it into Beth’s shoulder, making her stagger back.

  If Nevaeh let go she could grab the railing, flip herself over. But Beth didn’t let that happen. She pushed forward, walking with the spear between them, shoved out with it, and let go.

  Nevaeh dropped, her body becoming horizontal, legs kicking, arms pinwheeling.

  Observing the speed at which Nevaeh had moved on the ground, bounded onto the buildings, and leaped to the Colosseum’s third floor, Beth figured the noisy boots she wore gave her legs super abilities. If they allowed such high jumps, they’d surely cushion a long fall—but they wouldn’t do Nevaeh any good unless she could get them under her.

  Nevaeh slammed back-first onto the roof of a building two floors below. A millisecond later her head and limbs struck down, all of them bouncing a little, as if to release the spray of gravel and dust that accompanied her impact. Her head sideways, showing Beth her profile, Nevaeh didn’t move.

  Phin’s clomping stopped. Sixty feet away, he was leaning over the railing, staring down at Nevaeh. The stunned look on his face put a brief smile to Beth’s lips. Very brief. He pulled back to glare at her, his hand flapping over a pocket on his hip, and she remembered the gun—not that he needed it with those boots, with Beth having nowhere to go he couldn’t reach in seconds.

  The building beside the one Nevaeh was sprawled on rose a floor higher and had been constructed closer to the Colosseum. Beth ran fifteen feet farther toward the end, climbed over the railing, and jumped. The roof was only six feet away and as many feet down. She hit and rolled, yelling at the pain in her arm, a Ninja’s throwing star spinning back and forth between her wrist and shoulder.

  She expected Phin to zip to her launching point and make his own leap to the roof. Watching as she got to her feet and scrambled toward the roof’s ledge, she was surprised to see him jumping the railing where he was. He disappeared levels below her and sprang back into view, rising almost what must have been thirty feet straight in the air, grinning. At the apex of his rebound he said, “I seeeeeeee you!” Then he dropped out of view.

  She knew this section of jumbled buildings. In fact, it was right over there that she’d found Tyler crying in the corner outside Father Jerome’s quarters only a few hours ago. The rooftops were of varying heights, stair-stepping down to the ground, if you knew the zigzaggy route to take. She dropped to her rump at the ledge and slid off, landing on the next roof-terrace four feet below. She started for the next ledge and stopped. She heard Phin land on the chapel roof behind her. She backed up into the recess of a doorway. Phin landed on the roof twenty feet in front of her, shifting his head around as he immediately bounced up onto the adjacent roof. The clomping noises of his landings came back at her after he was gone. The speed and jumping abilities of his boots were working against him: he was moving too fast to take a careful look at anything—or maybe he figured she wouldn’t pause to hide and he’d spot her climbing off the roofs, running.

  She ran to the ledge, slid over, and pressed herself to the shadowy wall as Phin leaped over her and kept going. She made her way to the ground and then the tunnel that went under many of the buildings, cutting diagonally toward the courtyard by the mosque. As she moved through the tunnel she considered her options. It was a short list: get out of the tunnel and move along the buildings, out of the lights, to the tourist information center in the compound’s northwest corner . . . it was always unlocked and contained closets and cabinets she could hide in until she could collect her thoughts and formulate another course of action. Or she could . . .

  Nope, that was it. She could not think of anything else to do, any other place to go.

  She saw the lighter gray of the tunnel exit ahead of her and slowed. She peered out: mosque straight ahead, basilica to her right. She was two steps out of the tunnel, heading for the mosque, when Elias—the old country singer-looking guy who chain-smoked and had made shrimp curry when she was the Tribe’s prisoner in the Paris catacombs—came walking toward her from between the mosque and the basilica. He must have been patrolling by the bell tower.

  She froze, not sure he’d seen her. He was in the light of the basilica’s external lamps, but she was beyond it . . . she hoped. He plucked the cigarette out of his mouth, tossed it down, and began swinging the barrel of a weapon toward her—odd shaped, long and thin with a canister at the end, tubes trailing around his side to his back, scuba tanks peeking up over his shoulders. She remembered: Elias was the guy Jagger had said used a flamethrower to stop him and Owen in the catacombs. She spun and darted back into the tunnel.

  Elias’s voice reached her before she hit the first junction: “She’s in the central tunnel.” He was obviously using a radio. She heard a whoooooosh, and the tunnel behind her around a lazy curve lighted up. Heat washed over her back. She rushed through the light at the first junction, into the right-hand tunnel, and stopped. No, the other tunnel was longer, darker, more serpentine. It offered less of a chance for Elias to fix a fiery bead on her
. She backtracked and went the other way, hearing Elias almost to the junction, thankful for the silence of her bare feet.

  She brushed her fingers against the rough stone walls, feeling the changing textures as she went from one of the buildings that formed the tunnel to the next. Almost there, a plan already in mind—she’d work her way around Elias and end up where he’d spotted her. Up ahead she heard clomping. Someone coming into the tunnel. She stopped, started back. The smell of cigarette smoke and gasoline reached her before the quiet steps Elias was taking—not as noisy as the person coming at her from the other way. She pushed herself against the wall, nowhere to go. It was the darkest part of the tunnel, utter blackness, but that wouldn’t matter when they converged on her.

  She had to run toward one of them, thinking at first she’d rather face Elias than that freak Phin. Then she imagined Elias getting off a stream of fire before she reached him, her body becoming a rolling mass of flames and stopping as a smoldering ash pile at his feet. Phin it was.

  She took three quick breaths—Run, as fast as you ever have, run . . . right past him . . . or into him . . . knock him over . . .

  Another sound, close: a click. The scuff of a shoe on the stone floor.

  She gasped, louder than she intended.

  A light flashed on, blinding her.

  [ 65 ]

  A few feet to her right a penlight flashed on, wavering in someone’s hand, pointed away from her, then panning quickly. It shined on her and snapped off. Feet rushed at her, arms wrapped around her, turning her, binding her to a body pressed against her back now. A hand covered her mouth. All of it before she could take a breath, let alone scream. Minty breath blew over her ear. “Shhh.”

  The man—his size and strength making him a man in her mind—pulled her in the darkness, walking backward. They bumped into a wall, slid along it, and plunged back quickly. He swung her around. She felt a breeze and heard another click.