by Sean Platt
Openings widened. Openings closed. They were in the middle, surrounded by ten colors of warring factions charging toward them, with them, alongside them, distractedly away from them. Only confusion held their favor.
Christopher felt a hand tap his shoulder. Clara and Piper were on his sides, holding on as the bus bounced and swayed, neither paying him any attention. Christopher looked forward again, but the moment he did he felt another tap.
He moved back, looking around, curious.
And that’s when he saw the final passenger. The one who hadn’t boarded the bus, though Christopher had seen him on the roadside.
“Trevor?”
Trevor smiled.
But of course, it wasn’t Trevor.
Shouting. Clanging metal. Gunshots. But somehow, time had stopped for Christopher, and all was quiet.
Trevor’s sides puffed. His facial features became indistinct. Even his clothing seemed to dissolve. For a second, Trevor became half-human, half-smoke, then solid again.
The Pall, wearing its Trevor mask, raised its hands and turned them as if around a wheel, in a driving motion.
Then it made both hands into a tight ball and whipped them rapidly apart, like something exploding.
It made the driving motion.
It made the exploding motion.
And Christopher understood.
CHAPTER 20
Lila watched the crowd. She heard the shots and the screaming. Smelled the reek of fear in the air as Jeanine said to Kindred, “Time to use the car.”
“No. It’s pointless.”
“We’re getting flattened!” She looked back at Cameron. “Open the emergency hatch in the middle of the floor. Climb down into the—”
“I said no!” Kindred barked.
The bus lurched. Was kicked sideways. Lila’s eyes fell on the huge knife switch that had electrified the bus earlier, but Peers was right beside it, shaking his head. That either meant It won’t work a second time or It’ll burn us alive if we use it again, but the simple gesture made Lila’s gut sink as time ticked away. It was over. They weren’t going to make it. They’d be enslaved at best, and likely eaten alive. She suddenly felt all girl as if her body wrapping fooled no one. Suddenly Jeanine’s grenade strategy made a lot of sense. Lila only hoped she’d been polite enough to bring suicide for them all.
Jeanine said, “Cameron, there’s a low, flat escape vehicle attached to the bottom of the bus just below the hatch. Peers showed me. Take the satchel and—”
“No, goddammit!”
Jeanine turned on Meyer like a striking snake.
“There’s no way out! Do you hear me! You don’t even have your sky view anymore! You can’t predict your way out of a no-win scenario!”
“Jeanine,” Meyer said.
“Fuck both of you!” She shoved Meyer in the chest. Then Kindred. Her face was flushed, furious, eyes brimming. “Strategize this: We’re fucked! All we can do now is get Cameron into the city!”
The bus was noticeably slowing. Cameron seemed to have shut the pop-ups when Jeanine, Charlie, and Christopher had come down, but up top Lila could now clearly hear —
Wait. Christopher. He’d been right beside her a minute ago.
“Cameron, take the Ark key, and get into the escape car. Peers said it drives like a go-kart. They’ll be focused on us.” Her features hardened. “Especially when we detonate the bus behind you.”
Eyes spun to Peers.
“They won’t notice your little car when the whole fucking thing goes up from the C-4 in the luggage compartments.”
Lila’s attention snapped. She felt suddenly cold, knowing this was serious, this was real — this was finally over.
Jeanine continued, her eyes strained and reddening. “The escape car is really low, only big enough for one person. You can probably get under half of their wheels. The Ember Flats gates are wide open. The clans must know not to enter, but you can! With luck, once we blow it, there’ll be enough confusion that you’ll be able to—”
“No, Jeanine!” Meyer held her arm, which tried to strike him.
“Clara,” said Lila, swallowing. “Send Clara.”
Cameron nodded. “Yes. That’s it. Send Clara.”
Banging from above. Banging from the sides. Charlie shouted from behind the wheel; Lila watched the speedometer drop to 30 kilometers per hour, lower.
“It can’t be Clara!” Kindred shouted. “It has to be Cameron. It has to be — !”
Jeanine pushed herself away from the others. Drew her sidearm. Pointed it at Cameron’s chest, flicking it toward the others in warning. The jostling bus didn’t falter her aim.
“He’s right, Cameron. It has to be you. Now go.”
“Jeanine, I can’t just … ” Lila watched him swallow, noticed his control slip a notch. “Dammit, Jeanine, I can’t. Not after Grace! Not if I have to go into the city and stand in front of that thing and — !”
She cocked the gun as the bus’s front collided with one of the vehicles, slowing its forward march to a crawl.
“I’m sorry, Cameron.”
He turned. Slowly. But then he stopped, and Lila realized why when she looked down and saw that the floor hatch had already been popped, and that whatever had been under the bus was gone.
Two of the luggage compartments were open as well, loose wires dangling.
And both were empty.
CHAPTER 21
The explosion sent an earthquake through the bus floor. For what felt like solid seconds, Cameron thought the world beneath him might open to swallow them whole. But the tumult wasn’t ahead or underneath them — a bright flower that was partially orange flame but mostly brown sand. Vehicles seemed to pop up and tip over not far away. Machine parts rained. And Cameron knew that he’d finally shed his old life once and for all. Benjamin had Charlie, but Cameron came into this with Dan, Vincent, Terrence, and Christopher, who was now gone for reasons unknown.
The moving clans screeched around them, more distracted than when the drone had crippled the lead truck. Wheels squealed, collisions ignited around them in a circle. The entire jam seemed to pulse and open like a heartbeat, but it was too little, too far. The explosion had probably been big enough to clear a patch beyond their current fix. But the bus’s front was still jammed against a clan vehicle, and they were still sown in.
“Floor it, Charlie,” Cameron said.
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“There’s a hole farther up now. Look at them. They think we have allies.”
And it was true. Swarms of cars were suddenly uncertain. Heads in the trucks and other vehicles were looking up, backward, toward the sky. Something kept them out of Ember Flats through those big open gates, and that meant that even the horde feared whatever the capital had inside. There was an uneasy truce, and Christopher’s act of heroism had reminded every clan. This wasn’t just all of them versus one helpless bus. There were other forces in play, with explosives at their disposal.
“Come on, Charlie. Floor it.”
“There’s nowhere. Look. See?”
“Get up,” said a voice at Cameron’s side: Lila.
“Get up, Charlie!”
Charlie, shocked, shifted aside. Lila sat, dodging Aubrey’s corpse without a thought. Her eyes were streaming, but she seemed not to have noticed. She’d lost her father, lost her brother, lost her mother, lost her husband, recovered her father with another to spare. Now she’d lost Christopher, and the wound would be deep. But now, in those big, brown eyes, Cameron saw only determination and absolute, total fury.
“Do you even know how to drive a—” Charlie began. But Lila had slammed the bus into reverse and jockeyed it into what had seemed a minuscule gap in the rearview mirror. Charlie fell over Aubrey’s legs, banging his head.
Lila steamed forward. Hit a truck broadside. Consulted her mirror and saw that painted clansmen were streaming up from behind on foot, eager to take what they’d finally felled. Cameron saw a smirk touch Lila’s lips. S
he put the bus in reverse again and swung around so she was backing right at them. The thump, when she struck the truck again, was muffled as if bodies were pinned between the vehicles. But she didn’t immediately move forward again. Instead she floored the accelerator, pressing harder.
“Lila, there’s nowhere to—” Charlie said as he moved to regain his feet. But there was somewhere to go; the mob of vehicles had left a gap near the embankment. Charlie fell again as she struck it, protesting, pointing out that it would tip if she tried to climb it. And the bus nearly did, but then Lila swung the big wheel the other way, down the embankment after five seconds’ climbing, teetering on the edge of balance but sliding past the forward group’s edge, slamming into the area cleared by Christopher’s blast. The place was like the heart of a missile strike, debris blasted out equidistant in the pattern of a star. More cannibals on foot had stormed into the space, and it sounded like popcorn as they struck the speeding front bumper. The bus leaped as it crushed them below its Permaflate tires, and then their path was suddenly clear.
Lila didn’t stop the bus until she’d crossed an invisible line past the Ember Flats gate, striking a wall made of sandstone or clay, shaking everyone aboard to their feet in a resounding and metal-rending crash, flooring the pedal until Cameron rested a hand on her shoulder and said she could stop.
Behind them, the multicolored clans lined up at the border, their faces furious. Fights sparked from clan to clan, realizing they were surrounded by enemies. They warred for mere seconds before an Astral shuttle floated overhead and a ray incinerated enough men at the front to scatter the others.
Cameron’s hand was still atop Lila’s hunched shoulders. On her curved back. He wouldn’t move it. He knew it had to stay.
“He saved us, Lila,” Cameron said. “We made it. We’re safe.”
Lila’s shoulders hitched slowly at first then shook uncontrollably as she wept.
CHAPTER 22
After the throttle stopped revving from Lila’s foot on the gas and Cameron killed the engine because something mechanical seemed to have broken, with only half the drive wheels still spinning and the front end of the bus wedged into the wall, all eyes turned to Kindred.
“What now?” Cameron asked him.
“This is Peers’s mission,” Kindred answered. His logic had run out. As had Meyer’s, where their minds touched. Kindred was no longer the conjoined thing they formed together; he was again just Kindred, and Meyer was again just Meyer. Inside, Kindred was still the man who’d led Heaven’s Veil as viceroy after the mothership had returned him to the Axis Mundi, after he’d hitched himself to Heather, had two children, then divorced and married Piper. In Kindred’s mind, the memories were continuous and wholly his own. The factual knowledge that claimed otherwise was impossible to reckon. Deep down, Kindred would never believe those memories and experiences didn’t belong to him — even though it was obviously true.
The others were looking at him for guidance as if he had all the answers. As if he knew more about Ember Flats and what came next than the satellite images and outland rumors had shown them. As if his sometimes-connection to the Astral collective made him one of them, when in fact, he was only a man, same as always.
Kindred looked back into the bus for Clara. He hadn’t noticed her for some time, and for a horrible moment he was sure they’d lost her in the collision with the sandstone wall, if not before.
But no, she was right there: shorter than the rest of the group but standing within it. Clara was seven years old — but in other, subtler ways, she was the oldest among them.
“Any idea what we should do now?” Kindred asked her.
“I don’t know” she said.
Lila was still crying, still filling the pregnant silences with the sour sounds of grief. Piper went to her, relieving Cameron, and squatted to lean in and whisper close. Clara didn’t move to comfort her mother; Kindred imagined that would come later. Instead Clara stayed where she was, eyes locked with the man who masqueraded as her grandfather.
The crash had popped the unbreakable windshield from its seals. Smoke or vapor poured from the stopped engine. The bus didn’t seem to have airbags; they’d all survived the crash without a cushion. They were lucky to be alive, past the gates after driving through hell.
The accordion door to the driver’s right had also popped out of place. Still feeling expectant eyes upon him, Kindred moved toward the door and peeked cautiously out into the street. And it was a street, of sorts; the sandstone wall Lila had struck appeared to be the back of a very broad, squared-off building whose face was away from them, looking into the city beyond.
It seemed they hadn’t entered the city after all — just these long, peripheral outskirts. The open gates had let them into an empty space like that between rows of barbed wire fence surrounding a prison. The surface below Kindred’s feet, as he stepped out, appeared to be concrete or finely crushed stone. It formed a road that led off in both directions around Ember Flats’s periphery, between the outer wall and an inner one made from the backs of buildings. The inner wall, like the outer one, was topped with razor wire. If this was a prison, this no-man’s-land would be where guards would march on patrol.
The thought made Kindred remember the shuttle that had dispatched the barbarians. It had sped off already and was nowhere in sight. The clans had remained, though — just beyond the open gate. They were standing back a handful of yards, staring at Kindred as he left the wreck, their eyes burning with hate. The bald men were grouped by color, but only in the most haphazard way. Blue-painted men were within reaching distance of teal-painted men, who on their other side were within reaching distance of black-painted men who looked like walking shadows. They knew not to come any closer. The shuttle had let the bus — not the cannibals — into the city’s outer edge.
One of the red-painted men, wearing an elaborate headdress of multicolored feathers, opened his mouth to speak. Kindred half expected a strangled barbarian shout, but the man’s measured and reasonable voice sounded like well-mannered words at a board meeting:
“We will wait for you.”
Kindred said nothing. He turned from the gate. He wandered back to the bus’s wreck and past it, until the street-like middle ground rounded a bend and the clans were no longer visible. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, only that he was compelled to scout the area. The sensation was like smelling the air — tuning in to the fact that he’d once had a purely Astral mind, that he’d communicated some with the Astral mind even when he’d been Meyer Dempsey, that he’d once had enough psychic sway to infiltrate the mothership and retrieve his donor. Kindred’s higher brain argued that he was human and couldn’t sense the Astrals any more than any other human. But he didn’t have to feel the Astrals. He’d be content to feel the Pall, which had always been somewhere in the middle.
And yet he couldn’t feel the Pall, and hadn’t felt or seen it for days. Perhaps they’d outrun it; maybe they’d left it behind somewhere between Derinkuyu and the Den and Ember Flats. It hadn’t taken a form and boarded Peers’s bus. It hadn’t made itself visible along the way, at least not that Kindred had seen. So where was it now? Was the Pall finally gone?
No, it’s not gone. It’s just not showing itself.
Kindred could feel its presence the way he could feel Meyer slowly closing the gap behind him. Between Meyer and Kindred — between the human and the Astral who’d become human — there was the Pall. It was as if the Meyer Dempsey who’d been shot dead by Raj was still around, his spirit now on both sides, somehow creating a link between their party and the Ark. That was the sense Kindred got, anyway, the reason he’d sided with Charlie to argue that the group needed to return and finish what it started at Sinai. Because Sinai was where the Pall had first begun to change, after it had found and touched its second source. That’s when it had stopped being an ally and had become something else, something in the middle. Impartial but helpful. Assistive. But always at a price.
“How do w
e get into the city?” Cameron asked.
Kindred turned from his thoughts to see that the entire group had followed him. The bus was still smoking behind them, its front stuck, its axles apparently shattered. They would be on foot from this point on, for better or for worse — and God help them if they needed to run through Hell’s Corridor again.
Piper, with her arm around a silent Lila, was watching the sky. “Where are the shuttles? Where are the Reptars?”
“Inside the city,” Charlie said.
Meyer came up beside Kindred. He felt their minds touch, felt the synergy. Logic unfolded like an unlocking puzzle box, and indistinct questions began to become likely answers.
“They should be patrolling out here,” Meyer said.
“And inside.” Kindred nodded.
“Shuttles.”
“They could make circuits. There’s reason to.”
“The mothership?”
“Unessential.”
“Do you feel it?”
“Its presence. Not its intention.”
“There’s something. Something missing.”
“But the wall—”
“It’s just buildings.”
“But it’s still a wall.”
“A barrier,” Meyer agreed.
“The only thing we can think is—”
“Obviously. But why?”
