by Sean Platt
They were so angry. They just smashed and destroyed. Titans and Reptars both. Such … impotent rage.
It hit Piper all at once. All she’d been keeping inside since their trip through the guts of Cottonwood’s mountain. Through the dust and bugs and fetid-water sumps that washed her bloodstained clothes partially clean. She’d been strong. She’d even felt strong — for once and for all, no longer the old Piper Dempsey. This woman would never again be a passive city’s queen. The new Piper was an insurgent, a troublemaker, an incurable fly in the ointment.
But for the moment, she felt broken. For now, she needed to be alone, to let it settle. To get it out, like infection.
She sat in the back room, in a lonely upright chair. She turned off the flashlight, comforted by the darkness and discussion — more sounds than decipherable words — in the other room. This was a human place. They hadn’t cracked it. They’d been so, so angry when Cameron and Nathan had fooled them long enough to grab their ceramic key. But that anger, according to Grace’s story, had earned them nothing but a uniquely human emotion: frustration.
Piper let the tears come: for Trevor, for Benjamin, for her life with Lila, the changed Meyer, and perhaps mostly for herself.
When she was finished, Piper looked up in the dark, feeling clean.
And saw the thing across the room … watching.
CHAPTER 9
Heather couldn’t take it. Listening to Clara talk about her grandfather was too sad. She’d tried to spare Lila the uncomfortable duty of responding, stepping in to do so herself, explaining that Grandpa had gone away and wouldn’t be coming back. That had confused the girl, so Heather had, despite her disbelief in God, told Clara that Grandpa had taken a permanent vacation to a beautiful place that was better than this one. That last wasn’t even much of a lie, despite her atheism. Because really, what wasn’t better than Heaven’s Veil?
But Clara wouldn’t listen. Didn’t get it. She kept saying that they could just follow Grandpa — a request that made Lila visibly pale and Raj uncomfortable. The girl kept saying that she really wanted to find him, especially if he was on his way to somewhere idyllic. And, because she was Clara, she used that word, too: idyllic. A freaky child prodigy who spoke like a college student but still didn’t understand death. It was like a cartoon evil genius who happens to be a cat … and who, accordingly, can’t resist playing with a ball of yarn.
Heather left. Raj hadn’t ordered anyone to stop her, perhaps rightly deciding she was defeated enough to not be a flight risk. She’d left Lila and Raj’s apartment — the uncomfortable trio of confused child, distressed mother and daughter, and the murderer who’d caused all the trouble. The murderer was now in charge, and Heather found herself for once empty of insults. Apparently, she could only mock Raj when he’d done nothing to earn it. It was almost ironic.
On the way down the wide main hallway, Heather heard hard-soled footsteps rushing up behind her. She didn’t bother to turn. It could only be one person, and she didn’t particularly feel like talking to him. Details were Mo’s job, not Heather’s. He could arrange the funeral. She was beat and wanted to bunker in until the weight of Meyer’s death left her.
Which, right now, she didn’t think it ever would.
“Ms. Hawthorne?”
Without turning, Heather said, “Go away, Mo.”
“Have you seen Terrence?”
Heather stopped. Turned. Stared directly at Mo with all the irritation and condescension she could muster, which was admittedly little. She didn’t feel up to her usual sarcasm. Her middle felt scooped out, and now her top half was wobbling without support.
“Terrence? You’re asking me about Terrence?”
“Systems specialist. Tall black guy, with — ”
“Holy shit, Mo. I know who Terrence is. He lives next to me. I was shut into an apocalypse bunker with him. Maybe you remember the last hour or so, when Meyer sent him to go with the Astrals, and you sat here as arbiter?”
Mo looked almost defensive. He was good at his job and took pride in doing it well — and offense at any implication that he wasn’t.
“I know you know. Maybe if you’d just answered the question instead of preparing a witty rejoinder for once — ”
Heather resumed walking, ignoring Mo. He trotted beside her.
“Don’t walk away from me. Your position here is honorary. Let’s not pretend that you hold any authority in this house when we’re facing a matter of Astral security and a threat to — ”
“Oh, shut the hell up, Mo.”
The hallway lights went out. There was only one window in this stretch, and the change made it surprisingly dark. To Heather, with her morose thoughts, the stone palace in darkness felt like a mausoleum. She stopped, feeling blind for the second it took for her brain to catch on.
Then the lights returned. Mo was staring at her, his face smug.
“Nothing but sass with you, huh? Maybe you don’t get what’s happening here. The entire Heaven’s Veil network is down, but it’s wider than we thought. The problem has wormed its way out onto the Internet. Not sure how. We think it might be repeating through the mothership. But of course they can’t tell me because they don’t talk, and the only way for an Astral feeb like me and the rest of humanity to get messages is the old-fashioned way, through the computer, which is down because the whole goddamned network is — ”
“Is that what’s happening with the lights?”
“The house has a generator, but the virus is in the home’s systems too. Which is why, until Meyer comes back, I need Terrence.” Moe said the last word as if he were teaching someone slow.
Heather blinked, her mind working to understand what he’d said.
“Terrence went with the Astrals.”
“He did?”
“You were here, Mo! We all came running down the stairs. Raj was yelling and shouting about conspiracy. Meyer — ” Heather swallowed past his name, “told you that Terrence had done something in the network center. You sent him off with the Titans!”
Or maybe not, Heather thought. Too much had happened since that long-ago time. Had Mo gone with Raj, Terrence, and the Astral guards? Or had he simply given clearance and walked away?
“I know what I did,” Mo snapped, his patience clearly thin. “But now I’m getting strange texts on Meyer’s phone. It was buzzing so much I heard it all the way down the hall.”
“I thought the network was dead.”
“They’re Astral messages. They sort of take over the phone, not like normal texts. They’re not good at messaging, either, and I don’t think the right hand knows what the left is doing. I can’t talk to them, and nobody with a brain — if they have brains — is talking to me. I just keep getting messages that say illuminating things like, ‘Terrence.’”
“What about Terrence?”
Mo held up a phone, apparently Meyer’s. Heather saw nothing on its screen, but Mo said, “I assume they’re asking where he is. I need Meyer to interpret, but … ” Mo rolled his eyes.
“Oh.”
“So you haven’t seen Terrence? The way these are coming through, it’s like he’s escaped.”
“No.”
“What about Raj? He’ll know.”
Heather tried to remember if Raj had said anything about Terrence. She didn’t think so. She’d been too busy being crushed by the thing nobody had told Mo Weir, obvious as it was.
“Raj is upstairs.”
“Fucking Meyer,” Mo muttered. “Now of all times to dip into one of his long Divinity sessions.”
Mo walked away, frustrated, having no clue he was now right hand to a dead man.
Meyer wasn’t in a session. Meyer was on a slab somewhere, taken away by the shuttle Heather had run from after clocking Raj and watching him die. She hadn’t wanted to stick around and Meyer no longer needed her, so she’d put feet to brick, having no idea at the time that she’d steer herself to Lila, right back into the hornet’s nest.
They’d taken him awa
y. Maybe to dissect their erstwhile viceroy, like a science experiment. And the humans? Well, Heather would inform them.
She watched Mo reach the stairway. Meyer didn’t need a right-hand man anymore.
Meyer didn’t need breath or food or air.
Heather blinked. In the split second, behind her closed eyelids, she saw him die on her lap, his lips forming those confusing final words. Words that did nothing to comfort her, though they certainly should have.
Love you.
Heather had thought she was empty. But no one was in the hallway to witness her shame, so she let the tears claim her.
CHAPTER 10
Cameron looked up from the laptop when Piper screamed.
The external drive’s cord still protruded from the computer’s side, its safety still undecided. Cameron hadn’t been foolhardy; he’d asked Andreus and Charlie if cabling the lab’s drive to a laptop from the RV would just allow Canned Heat to destroy another machine. No one knew the answer, so Cameron had flipped a coin. So far, so good … though picking through Benjamin’s research for an ill-defined answer was like trying to find a hymen in a whorehouse.
Cameron half stood, almost dropping the machine to the floor. But at the last second he pinned it to his legs just as Piper emerged from the back section into the lantern’s glow, rushing, glancing back, her eyes wide and frightened.
“There’s something here,” she said.
Andreus stood from beside his daughter. He was carrying a rather large and intimidating-looking weapon Cameron had never seen. He pointed it after Piper, already taking tiny steps to protect what he’d found.
“Reptars?”
Piper shook her head, her breath heavy.
“Titans.” Andreus said it like a lukewarm warning. Just a few days ago, Titans had seemed like powerful pets. They were nothing to be feared because they could only hold you tight. That opinion had changed since Cottonwood. If Titans could become Reptars, then no Astrals were safe. They might all start life as the unseen shape some called Divinity then become one Earthbound form or the other, free to switch behind the curtain as required. And there might be more. There might be other forms. Other talents. Other dangers.
“I didn’t see what it was.”
“You heard something,” Andreus said, his barrel still raised.
“No. I saw it. It didn’t make noise.”
“No purr. No footsteps.”
“Nothing.”
“What did it look like?”
Piper paused. To Cameron’s eyes, she looked almost caught. “I … I didn’t really see what it looked like.”
“What did you see?”
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Try.”
Piper shook her head. Her chest rose and fell in rhythm, eyes flicking around like a nervous bird’s. She looked more afraid of the dark than scared of Astrals. The lab’s atmosphere was getting to her — or, more practically, the fact that Astrals were closer than comfortable, floating overhead.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really see it … directly, I guess. Just out of the corner of my eye.”
Andreus looked like he was about to ask more, but Cameron stepped in.
“I saw something outside.”
“Okay. What was it?”
“It’s like she said. Corner of the eye.”
“‘Corner of the eye’ isn’t a shape. It’s how she saw it. So, what? You saw it exactly the same way?”
It sounded strange, said that way. Cameron didn’t answer. He looked at Charlie for help, knowing there wasn’t any point. But Charlie surprised him again, as he’d done when they’d come inside and when he’d offered to run back to the RV for hot tea.
“I’ve seen it too.”
“Okay. Then what does it look like, Charlie?” Andreus sounded annoyed. He and Coffey were practically shaking their heads, irritated by the flighty civilians losing their shit on his precision operation.
“I haven’t seen the thing. Just its shadow.”
Piper’s head flicked toward Charlie. “Yes. It was like a shadow.”
“Jesus,” said Coffey. “You’re literally afraid of your own shadows.”
“It wasn’t my shadow,” Piper said, her voice suddenly anything but timid. “It moved when nothing else was moving, including me. And I could feel it … ” she swallowed, “ … watching me.”
“Pull yourselves together. We have a job here.” Andreus lowered his weapon. “Holy shit. You people.”
Cameron wasn’t having it. “Stop being an asshole. You were the one who discovered them watching us last time.”
Andreus yanked his signal tracker from his pocket. “With this! Which shows no signals, no presence at all! And we detected a thing, not a ghost!”
“I can feel it watching us,” Piper said.
Andreus rolled his eyes, turning, flopping onto the couch.
She looked into the lab’s darkest end. Cameron followed her gaze. Of course, there was nothing. Until there was: a fold of shadow making a shape, with pits for eyes. But it was like trying to see a hidden picture in a jumble of shapes, and when he blinked, he lost it.
“There.” The moment he pointed, the thing was gone.
“I don’t see it,” Piper said.
“It’s not there anymore.” Cameron shook his head, blinking forcibly, trying to see what had gone missing. Piper was right: He could feel its eyes on him. If it had eyes. If it even existed.
Andreus stood. With the mothership making no moves overhead, he’d run back to the RV for supplies. He’d returned with a backpack, and in that pack had been a heavy four-cell Maglite. He speared the darkness, the beam landing exactly where Cameron thought he’d seen the shadow thing reform. Nothing moved, but there was nothing in the beam, either.
Andreus stood, keeping his eyes on Cameron. Coffey stood with him, pulling a slightly smaller Maglite from her pack on the floor.
“This is me being a martyr for you all,” Andreus said. “We’ll look for your spook. And in the meantime, you’re going to pull as many drives as you can fit into that oversized pack I saw in the storage room. You think something’s after us? Fine. We’ll leave, analyze what we get somewhere that gives you fewer scares. This place is a graveyard anyway.” He must have thought back to Grace’s story because then, quieter, he muttered, “Literally.”
Cameron looked down at his own laptop. At the drive cabled to it — arguably the only one they’d need: a 100TB drive filled with Benjamin’s hodgepodge, disorganized research. Charlie’s records were definitely neater, but Cameron couldn’t shake the feeling that grabbing as much information as possible was overthinking the issue. Benjamin had seemed sure on the drive over that he knew where Thor’s Hammer was hidden — and perhaps more importantly, he’d implied it should be obvious to his son. That told Cameron he either knew or he didn’t. The rest was details.
“Five minutes,” Andreus announced.
He and Coffey headed into the darkness, guns and flashlights ready.
CHAPTER 11
Piper didn’t want to look at Nathan or Jeanine. A schism was forming, with Andreus and Coffey on one side and Cameron, Charlie, and herself on the other. Grace was something else — somewhere in between. Or perhaps more accurately, something like a suitcase. Belongings that one side held close, away from the other.
Piper desperately missed Trevor, enough that the thought was an arrow. She missed Lila and Clara. She missed Meyer, as he’d once been. She understood the desire to protect her own, and if she had those precious last seconds with Trevor back, she’d grab his weapon and yank him into the tunnel even if keeping him inside meant barring the door with her body. But what she saw with Andreus was different. Grace had run from him, and now he seemed unwilling to let her do it again. He’d hold her close, not with love, but with force if necessary. For her own protection. Because, in the big picture, of love.
But the roundabout nature of his affection was twisted, damaged, wrong. Piper didn’t like it. She didn’t like
the way Andreus seemed to be wrestling for control of their group, the same way he’d recently commanded his Republic. She didn’t like the way Coffey, who was always armed, stood by his side like a good lieutenant. And she didn’t like the way her girlish fears had handed Andreus and Coffey more ammunition — more proof that the kid, the scientist, and the arm candy woman were unstable, and probably silly. Fools who needed protection, even if they didn’t want it.
Once in the sunlight, the feeling of being watched by the shadow felt far less pressing than it had in the lab. But Cameron had already told Piper that he’d seen something before they’d gone inside. It wasn’t just her. Or the dark that had got to her.
They were being tailed. Somehow. By something they couldn’t see — or, more accurately, couldn’t see directly. It was almost there but not quite, always present but somehow absent.
Once away from Moab with their horde, Piper found Cameron sitting on a rock while Charlie culled Benjamin’s data. Cameron was approaching this far more metaphysically than even Piper would have. He seemed sure that the data mattered, but not in finding Thor’s Hammer. It would help them reach the weapon, but finding was already within him. Benjamin had told him as much before dying, laughing at his son’s lack of vision.
Piper looked at Cameron’s profile. His stubble was almost a beard — but not really because Cameron’s face still belonged to a teenager. His perpetually young look made the stubble more odd than rugged.
She followed his eyes to the mothership above the ranch, now in the distance. Even from here, it was massive. A silver moon that had grown full too near the ground, its swelling metal belly seeming to hang like something pregnant.
Piper said, “If you stare at the ship long enough, the answer will come.”
Without moving his head, Cameron replied, “I’m not staring at the ship.”
She sat beside him. He was, indeed, looking directly at the ship.
“What’s it doing here, Cam?”
“Suckling. Recharging. I don’t know. Can you see the beam coming from the stone arch my dad was always checking out?”
