Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (36 page)

Still, he spoke to Clara as if she had no idea.
Come over by me, sweetheart. Take Daddy’s hand.
And Clara, to Lila’s immense relief, merely walked alongside him without claiming his offer.
 

Raj took the party’s rear. Thanks to their charade, only Jons had been wearing a sidearm. Raj had demanded and pocketed his weapon immediately. Jons had tried to berate Raj into subservience, but Raj seemed to have it all figured out: Jon’s complicity, likely from the start. Christopher and Lila’s affair. Their little band of resistance, spanning from Christopher to Terrence to Cameron to Piper to Heather … who, Lila realized, she hadn’t seen since that odd exchange with her father.
 

Dad
. Where was he? Raj had already tried to kill him once; he’d damn near succeeded, according to Heather. All bets seemed to be off. Raj was rolling some mighty big dice and going for broke. If right, he’d end the day atop the pile. If he was wrong, he’d pay for subverting Meyer, and the Heaven’s Veil chief of police.
 

Lila watched Raj slip Jons’s pistol into his belt then nudge the others ahead with his own. There was no discussion. No decision. No debate. Raj had already hit Christopher twice: once when he’d tried to lie as an explanation and once for no apparent reason. Piper went numbly along with her hand in Cameron’s. Lila wanted to bristle at that — she was her father’s wife, not Cameron’s girlfriend. But it looked as if she might be both. And so much had changed.
 

“Piper?” Lila tried to ask.
 

Her stepmother looked lost, eyes like saucers, blue surrounded by a startling white. Cameron wasn’t merely comforting her; to Lila, it almost seemed as if he was supporting her. She’d either aged or regressed twenty years; Lila wasn’t sure which. Her gaze was wizened, as if she’d witnessed too much. But Piper was docile. Compliant. Whatever she’d realized as Raj had rushed in, it was now trapped inside and eating her like cancer.
 

Lila could relate.
 

We knew Trevor would come out because that’s how he was
.
 

There was no reason for that simple, by-the-way mention to bother Lila, but it did. Piper was speaking of a time now two years gone. She was nervous; she’d been tossed in prison with no way out and wouldn’t be thinking eloquently. She’d clearly been recalling a repressed memory — possibly
supp
ressed by the Astrals. Lila had asked Piper many times about what it had been like to travel on the mothership. Piper’s answer had always been the same:
I think I was asleep.
But it turned out she hadn’t been. Now, Piper had recalled something that made her pale, that made her shudder in a numb way that had nothing to do with Raj’s pointed gun.
 

Because that’s how he was.
 

Piper and Cameron had returned to Heaven’s Veil. Piper had mentioned Charlie Cook and the maniac from the outlands who ran the Andreus Republic. Why hadn’t she mentioned Trevor?
 

Lila didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t have the mental bandwidth to consider the ramifications of that particular question. Her situation was dire enough. So yes, it must have been a slip. A misspeaking of tense. Trevor
was
that way two years ago merely because it was in the past. That’s all she’d meant because if anything had gone wrong, Lila would know by now. Hell, Clara would have told her.
 

At that, Lila relaxed. Yes, of course. Clara would have told her.
 

She tried to catch her daughter’s eye. Reached for her small hand — backward because Raj took the rear, behind Jons, Christopher, Piper, Terrence, Cameron, and finally Lila. Anyone could run. But right now, given Heaven’s Veil’s present state — and ultimately, the horrid truth that there was nowhere to go — all would stay put. Follow orders. And wait to see.
 

But Raj saw her hand move back. He stepped between Lila and Clara, gestured down toward his gun, and tossed his head to indicate that she best know her place.
 

There were no Titans outside the station. After finding none inside, Raj seemed desperate to reach the next place and see whom he might find to hear his complaint. But the streets were empty except for bemused human cops, clutching their duties by the thinnest of threads.
 

“Captain?” said one, watching Jons.
 

Jons could have told the cop to draw his weapon and arrest the Indian kid at the parade’s rear. But the captain seemed to see what Lila saw.
 

The cop didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on.
 

The police force finally had what it always claimed it wanted: dominion over at least this part of Heaven’s Veil without any meddling Astrals. But the reality was like a table without legs, and the cop seemed lost. Without Astrals to enforce the rules, who were the police? Familiarity had bred atrophy. If the cop tried to draw on Raj, he’d shoot. Whom he’d shoot (the cop or one of their party) hardly mattered.
 

Jons said nothing. Tried to give the kid — as that’s all he was, to Lila’s eye — a knowing glance. But then they were past, into silent streets with one weapon leading.
 

“Raj?” Lila asked.
 

“Shut your mouth,” came the reply.
 

“Where is my dad?”
 

Raj didn’t answer.
 

But when Lila looked over, Piper was staring right at her.
 

CHAPTER 67

“Raj, hang on. I need to — ”
 

“Don’t try
explaining
anything to me. I understand just fine.” He stared at Piper for an elongated moment. Raj knew what he wanted; he knew who were his friends and foes; he knew exactly where he had to go and what he needed to know. About those things, Piper could only guess, but the minute they’d left the station courtyard he’d shouted directions to Jons that had steered them toward the big blue pyramid.
 

The one place where Raj knew he could find Astrals in the city — because when you meant to complain about one boss, you had to do it to the
bigger
boss.
 

Toward the single place Piper had decided they absolutely should not go.
 

“They won’t listen to you. You don’t know what they’re doing.”
 

Raj scoffed. “I suppose you do?”
 

Piper glanced at Clara. She looked pretty and ordinary, as if this was all very matter of fact and by the book to the little girl.
 

“They’re doing something at the Apex. Cameron and me, we came in here to … ”
Oh, what the hell. What could it possibly hurt at this point?
“To find a weapon. Something the Astrals need.”
 

“Really.”
 

“When I was on the mothership, I could sense them. They’re like one mind.”
 

“What a great insight, Piper,” Raj said.

“But something went wrong. Things are different now. The weapon isn’t at the Apex, but it’s … ” Her eyes went to Cameron, even to Terrence. “The Apex is something else. What they’re doing, they weren’t supposed to do. It wasn’t in the original plan.”
 

“Really?” Raj stopped and turned, hands on hips. “And how do you know that, Piper?”
 

“I can feel it. I can … ” She didn’t want to say it. Not now. Not to Raj. “There’s something coming from the mothership,” she finished, knowing how lame she must sound.
 

Not something. Someone. A mind that shouldn’t be there. Someone I remember from recently, that I may not have actually seen for two years
.
 

“I can
see
what’s coming from the motherships.” Raj looked up at the energy beams.
 

Her patience snapped. She grabbed his shoulders — not to attack, but to make him see sense. How was this not obvious to him? Raj was blinded by his own self-pity, unable to see what was right in front of him. Over the past weeks, Raj had become like a dog with a bone. His position as the sole remaining human toady in Piper’s circle had become obviously pointless, but he refused to stop and think, to consider things from a new and obvious angle. In his mind, Raj was going to march right up to the nearest Titan and air his grievances then await his reward.
 

“We can’t be here! You don’t know what they’re feeling, what they might do, what’s boiling and about to — ”

Raj pushed Piper away. His stowed pistol resurfaced, leveled at her chest. His finger twitched. For a scant second, she imagined she heard a report. Felt the bullet kiss her skin. But he was only pointing, shaking, while the others backed away.
 

Cameron’s hands closed on her shoulders from behind.
 

“Just walk,” Raj said. “You’re not getting away this time.”
 

Piper walked.
 

She looked up.
 

It was all a lie. Every bit of it.

She remembered the way Meyer had looked, in that all-white room, when she’d spoken with him on the ship. The way her mind had melded into his every bit as easily as it had into Cameron’s on their trip from Vail to Moab. The way they’d worked together to find the best way to get the others out of the house before docking.
 

She remembered leaving him in that all-white room, coming down to the ground, her memories already retreating.
 

She remembered watching Meyer emerge from the ship with the Titans behind him.
 

Believing he was himself, when he very much wasn’t.
 

What was supposed to happen had gone awry. Piper could see that now — thanks to Meyer, thanks to all the others. Thanks to what was different this time.

They rounded another corner, and Malcolm Jons practically ran into the back of a big white Titan. One of hundreds, all surrounding the Apex.
 

Talking to it.
 

Helping to focus it.
 

Thor’s Hammer didn’t need to be at the Apex for them to find it. Not if something in the group mind made an illogical suggestion.
 

Raj pushed his way forward, through the outer line of Titans, shoving their muscular frames aside. Piper sensed movement from the rear; she turned and saw Clara running away as fast as her small, strangely adept legs would carry her.
 

“Who is in charge here?”
Raj shouted across the group.
 

When the black smoke returned, Piper felt as if it was welcoming her home.
 

CHAPTER 68

Heather squatted, her heart hammering, as the self-important shout rang across the gathering of Titans below. She tugged Jeanine Coffey down beside her.
 

“I just saw — ”

“We’ve seen it before,” Coffey said. “Titans can become Reptars. I assume it goes the other way around, too.”
 

Heather clawed herself mostly upright, again peeking out into the gathering. She felt like a woman who’d nearly stepped onto a rattlesnake then pulled her foot away purely by chance a second before it was too late.
 

But when she looked again at the placid white forms below, watching them turn toward the voice — Raj and others, it looked like — Heather didn’t see more becoming the black-scaled monsters as her mind had already imagined.

Instead, she saw the Titans flinching.
 

Then they started to swat — first at the air, as if bothered by flies, then at each other. The sight was almost comical.
 

“It’s back,” Coffey said.
 

Heather glanced up at Andreus, who looked puzzled, both by her statement and the disconcertingly chaotic scene unfolding before them. There was nothing to cause the commotion.
 

Then Heather turned her head. Watched from the corner of her eye. And saw it happen.
 

The shadow thing had spread wide, now slithering beneath the Titan group like fog. It covered their legs. It rose, burying them to the waists. It pulsed and swayed from group to group, inciting unrest. Near Raj, the Titan-turned-Reptar charged, rearing, looking for a beautiful second like it might bite Raj in two. Then one of the Titans tackled it, taking it down, into the black soup.
 

Fighting began.
 

When the blindness came, it was total, for Heather as for them all.
 

CHAPTER 69

Christopher’s hand found Lila’s before the sun died. Then the light was gone, and it was all she could feel.
 

“Lila!”
 

“I’m here.” She kept her voice calm, but it was as if her eyes had stopped working. She couldn’t see a thing. Whatever this was, it had come all at once. She’d thought she’d sensed motion in the corner of her eye, but when she’d looked toward the sparring Titans she’d seen nothing. They were fighting over a thing that didn’t exist. Waving phantom insects away.