by Sean Platt
They stopped at a door. Meyer knew he could open it with what felt like an Astral half to his mind, but he held back, knowing that would be showing too much. So he waited and watched as his guide projected. He heard the groupthought then watched the door dissolve and bead into the edges like liquid racing from the center. He entered alone, leaving his guide outside, and found himself facing a medic.
The medic held a box made of what looked like red glass. He held the box out, and Meyer …
(knew)
… guessed that he was supposed to put his hands inside.
Then the medic looked at Meyer and …
(asked a question)
… said nothing at all.
(Why did you do this?)
Because nothing was asked, Meyer didn’t respond. He kept his mouth shut. Pretended this was all strange yet fascinating. Allowed his wound to change, even though he was already suspecting that if he wanted it badly enough and understood his shape for what he wanted it to be, he could probably heal the wound himself.
Meyer withdrew his hands from the box. Held them up and observed them. He pretended to be shocked/surprised that such healing was possible then ran the fingers of each hand over the other for good measure. He smiled at the medic and nodded.
“Thanks.”
The medic nodded back. Then the door again melted away, and Meyer exited.
His guide was gone. Possibly because Meyer had already groupthought ahead, explaining to the guide in another’s voice that Viceroy Dempsey was gone, that he’d already taken a shuttle back. The Titan who’d flown him here wouldn’t wonder at the idea. Why would she? The collective knew. The collective always knew.
Meyer paused on the gantry. Because his human shape seemed to demand the ritual, he closed his eyes and slowly inhaled.
After a few moments, he seemed to remember. He remembered where he’d gone and never left. He remembered where, conflicting realities aside, he still was now.
A white room. Four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. And an immersion to keep him busy, healthy, and strong.
Meyer groupthought ahead, noticing a few others between his position and his destination, and gave them the idea to move elsewhere.
Then he walked along the gantry, recalling the way and seeing it for the first time, following a trod path and having no idea where he was going, seeing new and known in unison.
Eventually, he came to a door.
He knocked because it was polite.
Then Meyer went inside.
CHAPTER 60
Nathan found Heather Hawthorne to be different in person. That shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was. She didn’t strut while crossing the floor of the dark, empty store. She didn’t insult him with each passing second. She seemed scared yet strangely confident, not merely caustic and sarcastic. It all made sense, but Nathan had formed a mental image of this woman — had, in fact, kept recordings of a few of her specials on the juke at Andreus HQ — and it was so odd to see her here, now, talking about escape and shadows.
“What led you here?” he asked, sure he must have heard wrong.
“Never mind. I found you.”
“Were you looking for me?”
“I … ” It was as if she’d only now stopped to consider. Strange, the things that made unquestioned sense these days. “I guess not,” she finished.
“A dark shape. Like a big dog that seems to be stalking you.”
“It didn’t stalk me. It … ”
“Oh, forget it.”
“Heather.” Nathan gave her an even look. “Can I call you Heather?”
“Call me whatever the hell you want.”
“Heather, let me tell you a story.”
“Great.” Now she was rolling her eyes, turning away.
“I talked to your husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
“And he wasn’t exactly normal. Set off all my alarms. If I’d been able to sneak a gun into the house, I think I’d have pulled it out and kept it pointed. He didn’t come at me. But it’s like he’s insane. Especially after I told him … ” Andreus trailed off. He needed her focused right now, and she might not yet know. Meyer certainly hadn’t, and the results when he’d explained about Trevor had been … unsettling.
“Told him what?”
“About this,” he lied. “When I told him I sent a drone. I did it on a lark, sure I was just wasting the drone’s time when I might need it somewhere else. But then he … well, not him, but the aliens, I guess … told me that they hadn’t destroyed my camp after all. If they got the drone, they’ll be here. But I can’t reach them.”
“Reach who?”
“The Andreus Republic. My people. Dempsey got very interested in helping at the end of our conversation. Gave me a code that will open the fence without triggering an alarm. But here’s the problem, Heather. Would you like to know what it is?”
Heather said nothing, seeming to see the entire conversation as rhetorical.
“The problem is that the Apex is that way — ” He pointed to his left. “And for some reason, the Astrals keep putting down from their motherships over there.” This time, he pointed right. “Best guess, mainly because I haven’t seen death rays and explosions, is that nobody’s paying much attention to the perimeter and my people are hiding reasonably well. There’s a gully that direction, and they hide for a living, when they’re not fighting. Meyer pretty much said this, and I’ve seen the same: Right now, they only have eyes for the Apex. Which is part of this whole problem, but farther down the chain. Right now, I can open a gate with the viceroy’s code. But I’ve been waiting here for hours. The traffic back and forth out there stops sporadically, and I don’t have my drone or a spotter. I go to the gate, I’m just hoping to get lucky.”
“There must be — ”
“So, Heather, if you tell me that you think your spirit guide will get us to the fence, I’m understandably curious about what. The fuck. You’re talking about.” He metered the words precisely, tapping a dusty countertop for emphasis. “Does that seem fair?”
“Look, if you don’t want — ”
She jumped midsentence, as if goosed. Then Heather turned her head to the side, eyes on the window.
Nathan spun, raising a long piece of metal he’d found on the floor. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for a proper weapon — one that wouldn’t have been confiscated at the gate. Dempsey had sent him out like a pilgrimage, free to go but carrying nothing. That had been strange in itself … but if Dempsey’s permission to go was the small act of oddball rebellion it seemed to be, why not give Nathan a gun to defend himself? He’d been lucky so far, but making the gate from here was impossible. Both corners were blind, and there was no way to peek from above: nothing more than a roll of the dice.
He watched the window, trying to see what had made Heather react so violently.
“Did you see something?”
“Hang on.” She raised a hand but kept her gaze forward, her manner precise.
“What? Reptars?”
“Hang on.” Again with the hand. Then, “Don’t move.”
The way she said it gave Nathan gooseflesh.
“I’m not looking outside. I’m looking at you in my peripheral vision.”
“You were looking at me a second ago,” Nathan said.
“It surrounded you.”
Nathan looked down, around, behind him. Heather was reminding him of Piper, with her own spectral sightings. Apparently, Meyer had a type: kooks who saw ghosts. But a large part of Nathan didn’t buy that. Whatever Heather saw, it was almost as if he could feel it.
“Where is it?”
“Behind you. Moving toward the door. Now back to you. It’s lost its shape. Like a mist.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think it wants me to help you.”
Nathan exhaled. “That’s the biggest sack of — ”
Without warning, one of the small tables upended, leaving the diner’s ground for a second before
crashing down and shattering a leftover glass. The sound, in the otherwise silent room, seemed tremendous. Nathan flinched, waiting for patrols to hear it and descend, but nothing happened.
“And I don’t think it wants to hear your cynicism,” Heather said, still with her head forward, still peering at him from the corner of her eye.
Nathan looked to the table. To Heather, to the mess of glass on the floor. That had grabbed his attention and erased a few doubts. He kept his outward cool, but his heart rate had doubled, slamming against his ribcage.
Why couldn’t he see it, if something was there?
“It knows where they are,” Heather said. “If that’s where it means to go and we follow, it can get us to your people without being seen.”
Nathan looked around the room, feeling cold. When his eyes reached the door, he watched it ease slightly open, as if goosed by a draft.
“What is it?” Nathan’s tough skepticism was suddenly gone as he deferred to Heather.
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know you can trust it?”
Heather looked back.
“I don’t.”
CHAPTER 61
Cameron gasped. Piper gripped the cell bars beside him.
Two years hadn’t changed Lila much. She looked at Cameron while Jons held most of her attention. Their eyes exchanged a silent hello, but he’d only seen the small girl with Lila in dreams.
“Lila!” Piper said.
The girl — now woman, really — pushed past the police chief and away from the skinny cop. Jons dismissed the officer as Lila went to Piper, holding her hands. The girl stayed at the door, holding her eyes on Cameron.
“Why are you here?” Lila’s gaze flicked to Jons.
“He’s on our side,” Piper said.
“Terrence sent me. Told me to tell Captain Jons that something is happening with the Apex.”
“We knew that,” Christopher said.
Lila released Piper’s hand, and inched toward him — a greeting without a proper salutation. She shook her head, unsure of whom she should speak to, then chose a mixture of Piper and Jons, her eyes sliding between the two.
“Something else. Terrence says the Apex is an antenna. He says to tell you it’s preparing to broadcast something. Something big.”
“What does he want us to do about it?” Jons said.
The girl was still staring directly at Cameron, still near the now-closed door. She wasn’t impatient or eager. She was simply there. Cameron was having the hardest time figuring her out. She had a little girl’s pudgy look but held herself like a scholar.
“I don’t — ” Lila began.
“You have to destroy it,” the girl cut her off.
Lila beckoned, then the girl left the door and hugged Lila’s leg.
“Clara, why are you here?” Piper asked, looking up at Lila.
“Clara?”
He’d said it too loud. Everyone in the room stopped and turned to look at him.
“She’s … ” Cameron squatted, meeting the girl closer, almost eye to eye. “Clara, how old are you, honey?”
“Two.”
“You’re … big.”
“You act so surprised, Mr. Cameron.”
“How do you know who I am?” He looked up — at Lila, at Piper, even at Jons.
“She insisted,” Lila said, finally answering Piper. “I didn’t want to bring her, but I couldn’t find Mom. And Dad … ”
“Meyer?” Piper said.
“He’s different now,” Lila said.
Clara’s eyes stayed fixed on Cameron, patiently waiting for the adults to finish so she could answer. After a moment of quiet, she said, “Because I’ve seen you before, silly.”
“You have?” Cameron looked up, but Lila shook her head: How could Clara have ever met or seen him? She’d been born and raised in Heaven’s Veil, and he’d only come once before — to the square, before his rapid, violent extraction.
Cameron looked back at Clara. The girl was still waiting patiently for him to get his head out of his ass. To stop playing this game where they pretended they’d never met.
“What is the Apex doing, do you think?” Slowly, with resistance, Cameron’s mind was assembling a familiarity profile of the girl. He wasn’t used to including information from his dreams. Had she spoken of the Apex? No. She’d talked about something else that was wide at the base, narrow at the top. Not a pyramid, but a mountain.
“They can’t find it, Mr. Cameron. Now that they know you were only playing, they’re going to turn on the searchlight. They don’t want to, but they think they have to.”
Cameron looked up at Jons and Christopher. “Searchlight?”
Both men shook their heads. When he turned back to Clara, she looked patient: allowing the silly man to ask people who couldn’t possibly know anything when the person who did was right there in front of him.
“What’s the ‘searchlight,’ Clara?”
Again, Cameron looked up at Lila, but this seemed like news to her. Piper had said that Clara was strange and precocious, but he’d had no idea, and apparently her odd knowledge bled out on a need-to-know basis.
“It’s how they can find the chest.”
“You mean Thor’s Hammer?”
“That’s not what they call it,” Clara said, wrinkling her nose — a childlike gesture, reminding Cameron who he was speaking with.
Cameron reached for his satchel. Jons had rushed them into the cells for show. But he hadn’t searched them or confiscated belongings, and Raj had been too giddy with victory to notice when Jons had pushed them behind bars unprocessed.
Cameron slid the stone disc out and held it delicately in front of Clara, like a plate.
“This,” Cameron said. “Is this a part of the … ” he glanced up at Jons for help then got it himself, “ … the ‘chest’?”
She nodded. “They lost it. They want to find it.”
“We lost it too,” he said.
Instead of speaking, Clara smiled.
There was a booming outside. The walls shook. Dust sifted down from the ceiling.
“What the fuck was that?” Jons said.
“The spotlight,” Clara said. “They’re getting ready to turn it on.”
CHAPTER 62
Heather didn’t ask questions. She’d followed a spook out of her house, found a guy whose reputation was that of a barbaric warlord at the end of its pointed finger, then together the two of them had lucked past countless Reptar and Titan patrols to reach the fence — this time obviously following something Nathan couldn’t even see. So the whys, wheres, and hows of Andreus getting a security code from Meyer were small potatoes by comparison.
When the wave of energy (there was no better way to describe it; it was light and sound but mostly just force) rushed from the Apex pyramid, Heather barely cared. Shit might blow up soon. So what?
Andreus wasn’t as casual. He stopped with his hand on the small fence gate, his fingers hitting buttons on a touch screen. The code seemed long and complicated — as much pattern as numbers and letters. But Andreus did it easily, his mind having no problem with recall under pressure.
“What was that?”
“The pyramid.”
“What’s it doing?”
“There’s obviously no way I’d know the answer to that, but I could make up some bullshit. Can I interest you in some bullshit?”
Andreus was still frozen, now staring directly at the Apex. Staring through the shadow creature, from where Heather was standing. It had been putting out long tendrils, like horizontal columns of smoke. And even now, as if summoned, Heather could see people creeping forward from the distant gully.
When the Apex did nothing further, Andreus’s attention fell from it.
He turned to watch the forces approach. Opened the gate. And let the group of around fifty people — along with a few hand-wheeled motorbikes that would make entirely too much noise when started — into the small alcove behind buildings. It was an o
asis of relative quiet near the main Astral traffic thoroughfare, protected but surrounded. They’d be safe here, so long as they didn’t move. And if this had been a trap from the start (to get Heather and Andreus’s soldiers all in one place for a tidy slaughter), then … well, frankly, they were fucked.
A brunette woman of around Heather’s height and build pushed through the crowd. Andreus seemed surprised to see her and embraced the woman before suddenly becoming awkward. Apparently, that wasn’t their normal manner of greeting, and Andreus wasn’t as imperturbable as he seemed.
He introduced the two women, ignoring the others. They were all settling in, jostling weapons, looking uneasy to be deep in enemy territory — or, if Heather understood Nathan’s story of his encounter with Meyer, friendly territory. The Astral/Republic arrangement struck Heather as a deal with the devil, and one where the devil never took his knife from your throat. Probably the reason Andreus was double-dealing so readily: if they’d threaten his daughter to gain his allegiance, the man’s nature was to bite, not to lie down or roll over.
“Why are you here?” he asked the woman he’d introduced as Jeanine Coffey.
“They got your drone. You told them to come.”
“I asked why you were here. Where are Charlie and Grace?”
“Same place we were when you left. A mile off the front gate.”
Andreus’s face changed. “You shouldn’t have left them.”
“They’ll be safe, Nathan. I had to come. I had to tell you something: Charlie says Thor’s Hammer isn’t under the Apex.”
Heather watched a frown form on his face. “I thought that might be the case,” he said. “How did you know the Republic was here?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how — ”
This time, Coffey’s face pinched. She looked at Heather, seeming to decide if she wanted to share with an audience.
“The thing Piper saw. The thing she said was following us from Moab. It led me here.”
Andreus looked level at Coffey, glancing at Heather. Then he said, “Charlie is sure?”
