Judgment

by Sean Platt

  It’s not real, Peers told himself. But the Cameron Bannister who’d spoken — a bit younger and less weathered by experience — looked plenty real. Peers was a member of his party. As solid, true, and in the moment as the others. Just like Cameron, the Meyers (one emaciated, half-dead), and Piper. Just like Lila, carrying a toddler because she’d chosen exploration over the more perilous option of staying behind in the shuttle. Just like Jeanine, Christopher, and Charlie. There was another girl, too: someone Cameron didn’t recognize — tall and athletic-looking, pretty despite her dirty face and hands, wearing plain shorts and an old tee, blonde hair pulled back into an unraveling ponytail.

  “Are you sure?” Piper asked.

  Cameron looked back at the group, and Peers could see false certainty climbing onto his lips. No, he wasn’t sure, but he was unwilling to admit it.

  Two-year-old Clara, shoving out of her mother’s arms to balance on chubby little toddler legs, answered in a curiously adult voice.

  “He’s sure.”

  Cameron nodded at the girl, and Peers felt some odd sense of understanding pass between them as if she were reading his mind as faithfully as (or more faithfully than) he was reading it himself.

  They found the Ark at the short passage’s end. It seemed to glow even in the gloom. Throbbing as if overfilled. Peers could sense electrical menace in the air as if someone, somewhere, was violently angry.

  “There,” Charlie said, pointing. “That’s where the key goes.”

  It seemed almost too obvious. Cameron was carrying a different satchel, but its purpose was the same. His hand slipped beneath the flap and removed the ceramic key, then he stood frozen with trembling hands.

  “Go ahead,” said the blonde, seeing him hesitate.

  “Something’s not right.”

  “This is what we came here to do,” she said.

  Cameron turned to Charlie, but Charlie only said, “Grace is right. Let’s get this over with.”

  “So you feel it too,” Cameron said, interpreting Charlie’s Let’s get this over with as meaning they all felt the same odd sense of sickness that Peers felt in his gut. It was like stepping into a place that’s borne witness to murder. A horrible deed hung in the air like a corpse dangling unseen from a hook above, its tongue black, body bled dry, eyes desiccated so they dangle from their optic nerves like tiny piñatas.

  Charlie said nothing. He looked at Christopher, who turned to Jeanine.

  “Who brought this here?” Cameron said. “Why is it unguarded? The Astrals can fly so much faster than we can. Why aren’t they here yet?”

  “You remember what we talked about, Cameron,” Charlie said. “It’s not a bomb, but it’s still going to go off if you don’t turn that key.”

  “Why have they stopped chasing us now that they’re zeroing in on this archive? They could take the key. They could start it up themselves.”

  “It’s about choice. We decided it’s about choice.”

  Cameron’s face firmed. The key slipped back into the satchel. He licked his lips, bug-wide eyes staring at the golden chest.

  “Whatever this does, I don’t know that I want it unlocked. I can feel it.”

  Something slid from the Ark’s upper corner and dropped to the floor. It looked like a tiny drop of light, like a leak not entirely contained. The drop formed a tiny pool, and the pool shot into the group’s center, scattering them like roaches. They moved back, toward the small chamber’s edges. Peers lost track of some of the party as he himself, falling for the illusion, staggered back as well. And then in the room’s center, the tiny pool spread. Twin geysers seemed to spew upward, and the spray became the shimmering shape of a human. A moment later the shape became a solid man, dressed in black with coal-colored hair, a prominent nose, and hawklike eyes. In the middle of his forehead, a dripping red wound the size of a golf ball.

  Cameron staggered back, tripping over a protruding rock. The black-jacketed man came forward, his eyes hard, his face running red with seepage from the open wound.

  “What is it, Cameron?” The man had an accent that Peers, who’d spent most of his life in the UK, easily placed — Irish through and through but tempered by time away from the homeland. “Didn’t you hear what Charlie said? It’s about choice, isn’t it?”

  Cameron fumbled at his side, drawing a gun.

  “Oh, but you already did that, didn’t you?” The specter indicated his head wound. “Got me from behind, like a coward. Are you sure it was the right choice, Cameron?”

  Peers saw the absurdity yet wasn’t surprised when Cameron still raised his weapon.

  “You wouldn’t have gotten to these people if it weren’t for me,” the man said. “It was thanks to me that you accomplished your father’s little mission. Nobody cared who Cameron Bannister was; you could have shouted it from Dempsey’s roof, and nobody would have given a damn. No. But you were able to use me just fine, weren’t you? Because everyone, by then, cared who Morgan Matthews was.”

  “You’re not real,” Cameron said, crab-walking back to his feet, weapon still raised.

  “I’m not, am I?” the Irish man said with slow, almost drawling disbelief. “But I wouldn’t have been in there if I weren’t.” He ticked his thumb toward the Ark. “The fucking aliens just stuffed a bunch of other people into my box, and that after I’d taken the time to make myself known. But if you didn’t put me in there, who else would have?”

  Cameron looked at Charlie, his skin paper-white. The ghost named Morgan advanced slowly in his strangely fine dress shoes, no hurry at all.

  “There are no surprises in there,” he said, again indicating the golden chest. “It’s not the unknown that bothers you. It’s the known.” He touched his nose thoughtfully then cocked his head. “You already know what’s in your past, boyo. The only question is whether you’re sure you rid the righteous cause of a threat … or shot a man in the back of the fucking head who protected you and got what you needed to fulfill Daddy’s quest!”

  “Ignore him, Cameron,” said Piper from halfway around the circle. But she, too, seemed drained of blood.

  “Yes, ignore me, Cameron. Just like you’ve been ignoring me. Just like you’ve been ignoring Dan and Vincent and the others dead by your indifferent hand. Just like you turned your back on your father, before your actions killed him, too. Just like you’ve been ignoring the truth that you took a woman who lost her husband into your bed. How after you thought he’d returned, you kept right on fucking her.” The dead man put a splayed hand on his chest and affected a serpent’s smile. “Now, I’m not judge and jury here. But if I were, I’m not so sure you come out clean and washed when the balance is tallied.”

  Jeanine Coffey was to one side, making frantic gestures. She seemed to want Cameron to circle the ghoul or at least slide the key in her direction. But Cameron could see only the man in black. He was swallowing, blinking, blind to everything else. His gun was still held up at the end of a trembling hand. Then the man walked forward and pressed the barrel of Cameron’s gun into the center of his chest.

  “Come on, boyo. If you’re so sure you’ve done right, do it again. I’m just a jack-in-the-box. You know I’m not actually here; I’m just something you put into the file for later consideration. You watched me drip from the corner like snot. So if I’m not a man, why not do it again? Why not remind yourself why you did what you did in the first place, like a couple renewing their vows?”

  Peers watched Jeanine gesture more wildly then start forward when Cameron’s foot kicked the satchel backward. It skidded two feet on the smooth floor, but there was no way Jeanine could reach it without moving into the open. Peers watched as the others started to creep forward: Christopher, Piper, even terrified Lila. But the blonde girl, Grace, was the closest, and Peers waited, knowing the key would be recovered, that they’d already been scared off. He kept his eyes on Cameron. Watched the dead man push him back farther.

  “Do it, Cameron! You were righteous the first time. You never act ras
hly, do you? You always think first. And you’re also so good at admitting when you were wrong, or that you don’t know.” The man gave a sinister little grin. “If you’re so sure it was right to kill me in cold blood, prove it to yourself. This is your chance to do it all over again.”

  Cameron backed up. The dead man matched him, pressing him against the wall. Bits of blood and gore from his head wound dripped on Cameron’s fist as the gun pressed into his belly.

  “Do it, Cameron! Show me that you’re a man! Show it to yourself!”

  Cameron’s mouth was working, his breath coming hard. The man reached for the weapon with both hands, cocked the hammer behind the slide, gripped Cameron’s hand as if meaning to squeeze it down on the trigger.

  “Do it.”

  “Fuck you,” Cameron muttered.

  “So you do have balls!” He laughed. “Then do it. Or are you second-guessing yourself? Do you have regrets? Because I’ll warn you, there’s a whole lot more where I came from … if, that is, you’re not quite as sure as you thought that you’ve always done right.”

  He nudged Cameron again. “Do it, Cameron.”

  “No.”

  “Do it!”

  Peers jumped as the gunshot echoed through the tiny chamber. Blood spurted from the man’s back, but before he fell and burst back into light, he smiled.

  “One last regret for the road, then,” he said.

  The man was gone.

  Beyond him — between Cameron’s smoking gun and the Ark, which was beginning to leak light and shake on its platform — Peers could see what the man in black had meant when speaking of final regrets.

  Grace was clutching her chest, bleeding from the gunshot.

  The air began to fill with mist leaking from the archive.

  And an appetizer’s worth of judgment followed.

  CHAPTER 36

  They walked the hallways first. Cameron took the lead while Lila stayed back a few steps with Piper and her father, keeping a respectable distance from her husband’s emotional balancing act. They were in a strange place, in someone else’s home, in the middle of the night. They didn’t know where anything was, or where people stayed or slept. Yet they were on the trail of something that a panicky voice inside Lila — more a knowing than the usual kind of meaningless worry — insisted more and more convincingly was worthy of panic. Cameron made sense, logically speaking: Clara liked to explore, and the girl, from a young age, had always shown a healthy disrespect for the rules. Of course she’d gone wandering, and of course it was no big deal. But Lila could tell it somehow was. And worse, she knew Cameron and the others could feel it, too.

  But Cameron was keeping his face straight and his steps reasonably paced. He wasn’t raising an alarm in deference to the hour and their status as guests. Still, tension hovered above their little troop like a storm cloud. If Cameron didn’t break his sensible mask and start panicking soon, Lila thought she might go ahead and do it for him, until someone tied her down.

  The hallways were empty. Clara might have ducked into a room, but none were open other than their own, which they double checked before leaving. They found the kitchen (one of them, anyway; Lila got the feeling there were several), but Clara wasn’t there, either. The kitchen was fully stocked with snacks — and yet no boxes were disturbed, no cabinets open, no crumbs on the floor. They passed four marked public bathrooms, paired in two sets of men/women, and they peeked into each, calling Clara’s name in urgent whispers. Lila thought she heard noises over and over, but each turned out to be only nerves, and once she thought she’d seen a blue light beneath a door that looked like a control room or a broom closet, but when she looked back it was gone and Cameron was still striding ahead, feigning confidence. Her mind was playing games.

  And worse, her usual ability to sense emotions was making the soup of sensation thicken around them. She could feel Cameron’s conflict: pushed into command of this excursion from a dead sleep, trying to keep fear at bay while doing his expected job. She could feel Piper’s wariness, and feel her father’s concern, touching in a most curious way. And she was sure, somehow, of what the others were feeling as her antennae raised: Charlie, studious as if he were asleep and dreaming of research; Jeanine, uncharacteristically surrendering in her unconsciousness — perhaps, Lila thought with embarrassment, to a sex dream she’d never admit upon waking. And Peers …

  And that part was curious.

  Lila kept looking at Cameron, Meyer, and Piper, shocked each time she made the circuit that Peers wasn’t with them. Because her mind kept becoming convinced that he was. She felt his absence in their quartet as if he’d been as stolen away as Clara.

  She looked back. No, Peers still wasn’t with them. And yet part of Lila had been so sure he’d been back there, looking over her shoulder.

  Cameron stopped when they entered the fireplace room from its other end and realized they’d made a big circle. They couldn’t have toured the entire mansion; they hadn’t gone nearly that far. But they’d seen neither hide nor hair of Clara, and the panic in Lila’s throat had brimmed to a fever pitch. She couldn’t feel her daughter at all.

  “What now?” Piper asked Cameron.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to find her, Cam. Even if it’s nothing.” Piper turned to Lila and added, patronizingly, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Cameron was looking around the dim, quiet room. He had no idea what to do, how to raise an alarm. Lila had something simple in mind: if nobody proposed an alternative in the next thirty seconds, she’d start screaming.

  “Where’s Jabari’s room?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Piper said.

  “Meyer?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Kindred. Would Kindred know?”

  “Why would Kindred know?”

  “Can’t he talk to the Astrals? Can’t he sense things?”

  “Not like that, he can’t.”

  Lila felt her fist strike an end table. A crystal decanter clattered, its stopper jarred loose and almost hopping away. She wasn’t aware of moving her arm or her fist. It just happened, and everyone looked at her.

  “Do something.”

  “What, Li?” Piper asked.

  “Cameron. Do something,” she answered. There was an acid taste in her mouth. Her vision was swimming.

  “I … ”

  “He doesn’t know, Lila. Give him a minute.”

  “Kindred. That’s as good a place to start as any,” Cameron said, staring at Piper as if she’d said something offensive.

  Lila turned back to bedroom-lined hallway. “Well? Let’s go!”

  “Which is his room?” Piper asked Meyer.

  “I have no idea.”

  Lila marched to her father, grabbed his arm hard, and dragged. When Meyer resisted, Lila trotted off on her own, her face set and her composure barely held in check. She made it halfway down the hallway and was about to start yelling for Kindred, for Jabari, for guards that might come to put her in chains — it didn’t matter, as long as this stupid goddamned house woke up and found her little girl.

  “Miss Dempsey?” said a voice.

  Lila turned. Kamal, Jabari’s attendant or assistant or whatever, was standing behind her. He’d popped up out of nothing, like a ghost, fully dressed as if for business as usual rather than a restful night, in a sober gray suit over an open-throated white shirt, his dark skin a deep contrast beneath.

  “Oh thank God. Mr. … ” She didn’t know his last name. “Kamal, my daughter is missing.”

  “Missing? Oh, dear.”

  But he didn’t move. His hands were clasped behind his back as if waiting on her at a fancy restaurant rather than skulking the hallways in the dead of night.

  Meyer, Piper, and Cameron arrived from the rear. They were rushing, and piled up one against the other when they saw Kamal facing Lila. His dark, bushy eyebrows drew together. Seeing harried faces on four of the viceroy’s guests at once, he seemed confused.
r />   “Is everything okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay,” Lila spat, her impatience coming out as rudeness. “My daughter is missing!”

  “Please. Calm down. I’m sure she’s simply gone wandering. I assure you, the home is thoroughly monitored. We will find her.”

  “Monitored? I haven’t seen anyone!” Lila felt herself slipping into panic. The further she slid, the less she cared about her composure, about embarrassing herself. “Where are the guards? How could a little girl possibly just—”

  Kamal raised a hand to stop her. “Please. Allow me to alert security.” He pulled a small device from his pocket, tapped something on its surface, then returned it. Banked lights flickered around them, and within seconds Lila heard stirrings knocking down the long hallways.

  Cameron moved beside Lila. “Did you know we were looking for her?”

  Kamal shook his head. “No, of course not.”

  “What are you doing out here, then?”

  Piper put a hand on his shoulder. “Cam … ”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Bannister. I’m not often out and about at night. I’m tracking down a power outage.”

  “I didn’t notice any power troubles,” Cameron said, looking around at the still-multiplying hallway lights.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. It’s a contained circuit. I was alerted to a surge in this area, and just recently a … hub? … seems to have failed. But I don’t want to bore you.”

  Cameron looked like he was about to ask more, but Titans and human guards were arriving from both in front and behind, fully dressed and carrying sidearms, called from hidden bunkers like ants in concealed pockets. Kamal explained that Clara seemed to have “wandered off” but did so with a clear implication of urgency. Then he pointed and barked orders until the troops were off again. Kamal slipped the device from his pocket, glanced at its screen as if following his people’s movements, then stowed it again.