by Sean Platt
Well, fuck her. She was Heather’s daughter, but if Lila didn’t believe, fuck her. This wasn’t a joke, and nobody — even the Queen of Mean, hiding from Meyer’s creepy doppelgänger in one of the small houses — thought it was funny. If she’d been trying to have a laugh, then okay, Heather could see Lila’s point. But she wasn’t.
Meyer was dead.
And now he wasn’t.
Not only was it crap to blame Heather for simply stating facts; it was dismissive of all that she’d suffered. Was it Lila who’d had to watch her father die — to let Raj kill Meyer, to add insult to mortality? Nope, that had been Heather. And was it Lila who had to face off against … against whatever the shit that was in there? Nope. Again, that honor had fallen to her.
And now she was being blamed for her horrid experiences? For her trauma? For being forced to endure so much terrible, gut-wrenching crap in one day?
Yeah. Lila was Heather’s blood and the apple of her eye, but right now: Fuck. That. Bitch.
The jolt of righteous anger made her feel better.
Heather stepped out onto the porch. She still felt nervous, still unsure. Not long after Lila had stormed off with Clara (who’d wanted to stay; that was another reason for FUCK LILA right now), the security lights had buried the lawn in darkness.
Then there’d been some sort of enormous commotion from the home’s front, from past it. Like out near the gate.
Not long after that, there’d been a ruckus in the house itself. Heather looked up now, seeing a window open and a light way up on the fourth floor. She knew that place well. That’s where she’d gone with Terrence then been trapped and tied up by Lila’s cunt of a husband. That’s where Meyer had done the thing that had — and she was sticking to this version of the story, though it hurt more — got him killed.
Again, by Lila’s cunt of a husband.
Maybe he was a cuckold. The odd, irreverent, irrelevant thought gave Heather a jolt of glee. Clara didn’t look like Raj at all. Usually, those foreigner genes were dominant as hell, but Lila had squeezed out a blonde with blue eyes. It would point to Heather’s failure as a mother if Lila had been playing the field of dicks and only telling Raj this kid was his, but it would also strike Heather as more awesome than disappointing if true.
The fourth-floor window was quiet. That must have been where the crashing had come from, though; the noise had been sharp, and no other windows were open. No other lights on this side (notably: Trevor’s, which also hurt) were lit. Terrence was burning the midnight oil, with Raj whipping him to undo what he couldn’t — what he probably wouldn’t undo if he could.
Yes. Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she couldn’t just sit around and let … well, whatever it was … happen. Throughout her life, Heather had always faced adversity in one of two ways: Either she’d run and pretend she didn’t care or face it the way someone would fight while a camera was on her. Heather had a reputation as “feisty” in Hollywood before Astral Day, but really it was all a performance. When her adversaries got reasonable and discussed resolution, she always folded. Without a fight worthy of the front page, Heather’s soft center just wasn’t strong enough.
No more.
Some weird crap was happening here, and for once, she wouldn’t be the wiseass who made jokes and did nothing.
Meyer Dempsey had, it seemed, never stopped loving her.
Whatever it was inside the house wasn’t the man she once adored.
She owed it to him. To Meyer. To his memory.
Heather crossed the grass, her fists clenched.
CHAPTER 33
When the lights came back on and the tumult from above finally settled, Lila let Clara go. Her daughter hadn’t wanted to be held in the first place. Lila told herself she was protecting her child. But really, she was looking for a teddy bear to squeeze.
With the lights on and Clara gone from her arms, Lila walked to the window.
Grid power was still off. She plucked her phone from the end table and verified that there still wasn’t service. Outside, she could tell that the less superficial networks — used by the city’s bones and even the Astrals, she suspected — were probably still out as well. From her room, she couldn’t see much more than she’d managed on the ground, except a scattering of cops running hither and yon, not at their proper posts inside the house grounds, not coordinated at all. She could see the Astral shuttles patrolling like people would without leadership: more or less randomly — every man (or alien) for himself.
But the generator lights were back, just like in the house. Even the lights not connected to the grid had winked out, before returning.
“You feeling okay, Clara?” Lila said.
Clara was curled up on the floor with the blocks and toys that had so recently and so intensely interested her. The purple scarf, which had seemed to play an important role in the game, was lying discarded to the side. Clara’s power was like the city’s, it seemed. Bright one moment and dead the next.
There was a small baby blanket, too small for her daughter last year, on a low shelf. Lila grabbed it and draped it over what little of Clara it managed to cover.
“Yes, Mommy, you should go.”
Lila realized she’d been thinking about her father. It wasn’t surprising, given what had happened or what she’d been recently mulling — not even including the face-off with her mom across the lawn. But still she hadn’t noticed until Clara spoke, and she couldn’t help hearing those words as a suggestion about Dad. Or maybe permission.
“Go where, Clara?”
Her daughter was already sleeping, looking for all the world like an ordinary two-year-old.
CHAPTER 34
Heather expected to find Meyer in his office. His life had been defined by work. That was who he had been. It was, until he’d died, who Meyer was even today.
So it surprised Heather when she walked through the big dining room’s east doorway and saw him bleeding all over the formal table, wrapping his hand in gauze and tape.
He looked up. He seemed to smile, feel the grin on his lips, then consciously fight to keep it down. It was a confusing sequence of actions, and seeing it unnerved her.
“Heather,” he said.
Lila entered the dining room from the other end, through the west doorway, before Heather could respond. Her mouth hung open. She looked at her father then her mother. Heather saw remonstration. Of annoyance. Maybe of hatred.
That was a cruel, sick joke to tell me he’d died, she seemed to say.
Heather opened her mouth to reply, but then Lila rushed forward and hugged Meyer around the middle.
His hands went up. His destroyed, dripping right hand brushed Lila’s side, painting her with a broad stroke of crimson. She hugged him while he waited, holding up gauze and disinfectant, dark blood trickling down his arm. A wad of paper towels was on the table with the rest, soaked.
Lila released him, her eyes wet.
“Hey,” he said, forming a smile. “What was that about?”
Instead of replying, she hugged him in an encore. Then she released him again and said, “I love you, Daddy.”
A strange, defenseless look crossed his features. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
“Mom said you were dead.” She looked hard at Heather then back at her father. She seemed to realize what a strange thing that was to say to someone who seemed so healthy (other than one smashed hand), but she forced her next words behind it. “She said Raj killed you.”
Meyer gave a dismissive little laugh. “Well, he didn’t.”
Heather came forward, skirting the table. She looked at Lila.
“Don’t look at me like that, Lila. You heard Raj. You saw how bloody I was. Don’t act like this was all a big joke. And don’t you dare act like you were right, seeing as I told you he was alive again.” She paused. “Except that like I said, he’s dead.”
Heather could hear herself, knew how ridiculous she must sound. Alive again. And Like I said, he’s dead. Yeah. Those we
ren’t things a crazy person said. It was positively shocking that Lila didn’t believe her every word.
It was impossible to talk with Meyer between them, with him dressing his wound in the middle of the formal dining room instead of somewhere logical, like a bathroom. How had this little display even happened? They didn’t store gauze in the dining room. He must have run somewhere for it then brought it here. Or he’d started to clean this strange new wound (and forget that mystery for a second) before getting suddenly hungry.
Heather grabbed Lila’s arm and dragged her aside, to the room’s end, as if Meyer might not notice them standing there talking about him.
“I wasn’t lying to you, Lila.”
“Mom … ”
“I told you he died. He did. I saw it happen. He wasn’t breathing. His eyes were open. It was over.” She blinked back tears, realizing how strange it would be to cry over the death of a man who was, in most people’s opinions, standing five feet from her now.
“I know you thought that, but — ”
“And then I told you he was back. I told you to go in and find him. I was telling you the truth then, too.”
“Mom, I know how you are, and I just — ”
“This isn’t funny to me, Lila. I haven’t been screwing with you. You need to believe me. That’s not … ” Heather stopped, hearing herself. She was about to say, That’s not your father. And when it had been just Heather and Meyer in the room, that had been easy to believe. But now she wasn’t just seeing Meyer through her own eyes. She was seeing him through Lila’s, too.
What, did she think he’d been body snatched?
Was it really that hard to believe what he’d said earlier, now that she really thought about it? After knocking Raj out cold, she’d seen a shuttle coming. She sat on the stones, sobbing over what she’d thought (perhaps erroneously) were Meyer’s final breaths. The shuttle’s approach was the reason she’d run, fleeing in futile circles before realizing Dorothy was right, and that in an alien-colonized city, there really was no place like home. She’d assumed the shuttle would arrive, see what had happened, and cart him away. Maybe finish Raj off for her. Or perhaps give pursuit, knowing Heather was a saboteur, and a potential murderer.
But maybe that’s not what the shuttle had done.
Maybe it had fixed him, even though he’d been technically dead.
After all, when people drowned, CPR could revive them minutes later. When they flatlined in ambulances and emergency rooms, countless TV shows had proved that a crash cart could bring those people back.
Yes, he’d been dead. Shot through the heart or lungs or God knew what else. Diced inside. But maybe the aliens been able to fix the damage and re-fire his system.
“That’s not what?” Meyer said, looking right at her.
Heather said nothing. Lila’s hard eyes softened. Heather exhaled, her shoulders dropping, defensive tension draining from her frame.
Heather thought Lila might cry, for reasons unknown — for the stress if nothing else.
Or maybe she’d walk out, still annoyed by her jackass mother’s antics.
But instead, Lila hugged Heather, too.
Behind her, Meyer smiled.
He continued to wrap his damaged hand.
Because even though Astral technology had healed a bullet through the chest, it somehow wasn’t available to fix a tenderized fist.
CHAPTER 35
When Charlie came around the RV, Nathan had parked himself in a folding lawn chair at the vehicle’s front, kicked back with a beer that had to be at least three years old. The moon had emerged and Nathan had no idea what time it was, but in this shitty folding chair he’d enjoyed the feeling of sitting under the sun on a summer day. Possibly while swatting flies and bitching about welfare.
“Send your drone,” Charlie said. There was no hello. There was only a command.
Nathan looked to Coffey for support, but she must have gone inside. The lawn chair next to him was empty, its garishly colored straps of woven plastic fiber exposed to the cool nighttime air instead of safely concealed by her ass.
“It’s malfunctioning,” Nathan answered.
“Let me look at it.”
“It’s so malfunctioned, you can’t even look at it.”
Charlie stood still, staring at Nathan through his thick glasses, his bushy brown-and-gray beard doing nothing to make him look softer or less angular. Charlie didn’t have particularly large eyes, but they always seemed to be sticking out, accusing the person they were watching of idiocy.
“The lights have been on for a while now,” Charlie announced. “Still just the generators. The drone might be able to spot them and go unseen if you got it close before. We need to know if they went toward the Apex. If they’re on target.”
“I don’t think they are,” Nathan stared.
Charlie stared.
“Are you going to ask why I think they’re not on target?”
“Why?”
“Because the Astrals probably chose to arrest them instead. It was inevitable.”
“We decided that the chances of arrest were low. That’s why we did this.”
Nathan swigged his beer. “Ah. Yes. But that was back when we thought the Astrals would need our friends to show them to Thor’s Hammer because they themselves didn’t know where it was.”
Charlie’s stare faltered. So he was human after all. “What are you talking about?”
“I dropped a message to Meyer Dempsey. Told him that two people were entering the city and that they were carrying the key to something the Astrals were very interested in, inside Cameron’s satchel.” Another sip. The beer tasted like gasoline.
Nathan tipped his beer at Charlie. “Oh. And that what the Astrals were searching for was almost for-sure under the Apex after all, just in a different chamber, and that if they scanned down there for stone matching the unique kind used in the key, they’d probably have no trouble fi — ”
Nathan stopped talking when Charlie, showing agility never before seen in a scientist, leaped forward and rolled them both over the chair, onto the ground.
Nathan had thought Charlie might try to hit him, but he hadn’t expected his fervor. The quickest and easiest way to let Charlie in on the situation was this ripping off of the Band-Aid, so Nathan had come ready to parry. But Charlie was stronger and more lithe than he appeared to be, and Coffey wasn’t around. Nathan was pinned in seconds.
“You turned them in?”
Nathan raised his leg, fast and hard. The knee struck Charlie in the balls, and he rolled away, moaning. Then, as Nathan righted the chair and brushed himself off to stand, Charlie hobbled over and tried to hit him. This time, Nathan was ready. But still, Charlie’s effort — stepping up with his boys crushed — was admirable.
The fight was over in less than thirty seconds. The scuffle pulled Coffey from the RV, but there was no longer a need. Nathan and Charlie were both leaning against opposite awning supports, panting. Two men past their youth, scrapping like teenagers.
“What’s going on here?” Coffey demanded, eyeing them both.
“I don’t think he likes my plan,” Nathan said.
Charlie lunged again. This time, Coffey was in the middle. She did little other than extend an arm but must have hit Charlie because he staggered and again found his place in the corner.
“You sold them out to save yourself,” Charlie said.
“Sit down, Charlie.”
“You’re a selfless, brutal — ”
“Sit down, Charlie,” Coffey repeated, pushing her chair toward him. “Let him explain.”
Charlie seemed both shocked and darkly satisfied by Coffey’s lack of surprise over the duplicity. His eyes were wary as he slowly sat, his body tense.
“We’ve been through this song and dance before,” Andreus said. “Man walks to gate. Man is allowed to enter. Then man does what the Astrals expect, hoping he’ll somehow be allowed to leave when he’s done, and of course that’s not how it happens. Last tim
e, the Republic managed to get in there and take them out, but even that shouldn’t have worked. If they hadn’t specifically wanted us to get away so we’d get to take Piper to Moab, my people would have been fried as they’d rolled across the land between here and there. Think about it. Why has your lab been permitted to survive, even today? Because they needed Benjamin. After his death, they needed Cameron to go through his father’s research, and of course they need that power outlet on the property. Our truce is the only reason my camps haven’t been destroyed.”
He paused. Chances were extraordinarily slim that the Republic, which didn’t have the strategic significance to the Astrals of a Moab laboratory, was still in existence.
“Or had a truce, anyway,” Nathan finished. There should probably be emotion there, but he didn’t want to go looking. He’d managed to find Grace. That was enough. “We only truly fooled the Astrals once. Don’t tell me you can’t see the difference.”
Charlie was still watching Nathan with his big bug eyes.
“Cameron’s plan wouldn’t have worked. Somehow, he was supposed to do the exact same switcharoo we did in Cottonwood? It was absurd. Maybe the standoff would have held until they’d entered the Apex, which the Astrals would likely have allowed them do. But they’d have been watched. By Reptars, if it’s true those little BB things don’t work with the network out. He’d basically have had a guard on his tail the entire time. They’d have taken him the minute he reached the Hammer. Maybe Benjamin figured out what the Templars pulled off better than the Astrals, but I’ll bet they know how to use their own doomsday weapon just fine. There’d be no more need for Cameron or Piper. They’d have taken the key and turned it on. Then we’d all be fucked.”
“So you turned them in to save your skin,” Charlie said.
