Extinction (5 page)

She didn’t know where the Mullah were or what they might be thinking.
 

Before, even when she’d had that strange feeling about Cameron and the city’s mood had soured like bad milk above them, she hadn’t been too concerned about her family and friends because she’d known they were fine and would — for at least the time being — remain so. But now she couldn’t sense any of them, either.
 

She couldn’t see or feel or hear her mother inside her mind.
 

She couldn’t feel Piper.
 

She couldn’t feel either of her grandfathers.
 

She could only feel herself.
 

That never happened. She felt acutely, intensely alone, as if she’d gone deaf and blind in unison and was being forced to navigate her world by touch.
 

She forced herself to breathe slowly, and stay calm.
 

Chill out, Clara. This must be how it is for most people every day. For Mom. For Mr. Cameron. For all your Mullah friends. Everyone but you and the other freaks seem to do just fine without a window into anyone else’s head. You’re fine.
 

She moved on, feeling as if she were groping through the dark.
 

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
 

Before long, Clara arrived at a section of tunnel she recognized. Only now the slab at the hallway’s end was open, and she could see muted fluorescent light beyond. She walked out, found herself in a more traditional-seeming basement, then moved up a quiet set of stairs. She was in a dwelling, also vacant.
 

She moved to the window. And that’s when it hit her.

The wave of intense emotion — not bubbling up from inside this time, as usually happened when she was alone and her mind traveled to those she cared about most. This was raw and forceful, beaten into her from the outside.
 

Now that Clara could see the city streets, she couldn’t help but feel them as well. The entire world, so recently quiet, was now stuffed full of noise. It was like the time she’d borrowed Uncle Trevor’s music player back in Heaven’s Veil then hit play without checking the volume. With her walls down and her sensitivity all the way up to catch any whiff of emotion, intensity from the streets was a tsunami of mental clatter. For a few terrifying seconds, it felt like it might blast the brain right out of her ears.
 

Clara winced, bit down on the feeling, and gripped the windowsill until she found herself able to breathe again. Then her muscles relaxed, and she looked out on the city, realizing she could see and hear and feel and sense and taste
everything
.
 

While she’d been playing games, Grandpa Meyer and Grandpa Kindred had made some sort of announcement. Clara could hear snippets of that announcement deep beneath the raw fear that rode on the surface. That’s what had started this all — or maybe more accurately, that had been the first in a chain of events that had caused whatever had gone wrong.
 

Betrayal.

Terror.
 

Confusion.
 

Meyer Dempsey was supposed to be dead, or at least disappeared. There was only supposed to be one of him — the one wasn’t far off from a modern Hitler or Stalin — two names Clara didn’t factually understand but knew plenty from mental context. But now there were two, and they were very much alive. Now Heaven’s Veil wasn’t his fault at all. Now blame belonged to the Astrals, and the aliens weren’t doing much to contradict the story.
 

The Ark is open.
 

The inner whisper made her flinch. She’d been there, at Mount Sinai. She’d seen what had come out. She’d known what it must mean. How had she missed this? Had the Mullah really kept her mind so occupied with the endless puzzles? Had they done it on purpose, to keep her blind?
 

But it was true: Cameron had opened the Ark. And what she’d sensed seemed to be true: The Ark was an archive of all humanity had done and said and felt and intended and explored and rejected and exploited and committed since the Astrals had left the last time. It was a record of humanity’s good and evil, and popping its top had called the Astrals to sort through the evidence and render their judgment.
 

The judgment was in.
 

And the verdict was
guilty
.
 

Ember Flats knew it. Even if the people couldn’t spell it out, they felt it in their bones.

Clara moved to the door. Looked up. And found that the presence she’d felt wasn’t all in her mind. She could see the enormous low moon exactly where she’d expected, for the last thirty seconds, to see it.
 

The Dark Rider.
That’s what the Mullah’s minds called it. The final Horseman. The bringer of death, the one Mullah legend said started the plagues.
 

Clara ducked back behind the door, closing it most of the way, as a Reptar patrol galloped by on their strange insectile legs: half-distorted black mammals, half
things
. The horror of seeing them was more immediate and visceral, less predictive. Knowing what was happening made it no less terrifying. Seeing the entire picture did not, Clara realized, make her any more prepared or unafraid to face it.
 

Clara closed the door, slumped against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor of the unknown stranger’s empty house. She didn’t feel special. She didn’t feel Lightborn.
 

She felt like a seven-year-old girl who wanted her mother.
 

Clara began to cry.
 

Then there was a knock on the door.

CHAPTER 5

Piper saw it coming, but there was no time to stop it.
 

Peers, in a dead sprint but looking behind him as if being chased, collided full-on with Kindred’s back. The pair didn’t crumple so much as slam flat onto the floor. Kindred managed to break the fall with his hands, but Peers wasn’t as elegant. His momentum rolled him along Kindred’s body like a stuntman toppling across the hood of a parked car. He ended up crashing shoulder first into the floor beside Kindred then sliding across the hardwood until he wedged into the corner where floor met wall.
 

Kindred was up in a second, every inch the intimidating physical specter Meyer — or his duplicates — always managed to be. Meyer himself was two feet away, his eyes also on Peers, his hands also raising to fight. It seemed to dawn on them both that Peers hadn’t tackled; he’d bumbled in like a fool. And as he was standing, rubbing his shoulder, his eyes were so wide, they were like giant white saucers with circles of spilled tea in the center.

“Meyer!” Peers blurted. “Thank God. You must come with me.”
 

“Where?”
 

“There’s a way out. There’s … ” His eyes went to Jabari. “She has a plan. I need to get you out of here.”
 

Meyer’s eyes narrowed.
“You?”

“We know about the escape plan, Peers,” Piper said. “But Mara says we can’t make it.”

“We can make it,” Kindred mumbled.

Jabari sighed. “You’ll just hold umbrellas over your heads and run there, I suppose? Hope the giant ship that knows your name doesn’t notice or care?”

“We have to hurry.” Peers kept looking backward, as if still fearing the arrival of whatever had him running. “Come with me.” He tugged at Meyer’s blazer. Meyer, disgusted at the base gesture, shook him off with disdainful eyes.

“We’re not leaving without Clara.”
 

All heads turned toward Lila. Piper — and the others, apparently, judging by the group’s puzzled looks — had forgotten she was there.

“Of course we’re not.” Piper looked at Peers but cast much more meaningful looks at Meyer and Kindred in the doing. “Peers? We’re not going anywhere until we find Clara.”
 

“The Mullah have her. Come. We have to hurry.”
 

“We
know
the Mullah have her,. That’s why we need to find her. Cameron did what they wanted. So they’ll let her go. Right, Piper?” Lila’s look was pleading, begging for knowledge Piper couldn’t possibly have. Though she did, sort of — after Cameron’s mental presence had vanished from her mind, she’d had an intense flash of emotional knowledge. She’d known he was gone, and that Clara was safe. But now she couldn’t access the feeling or be sure that Clara was still safe, let alone where she might be. And she hadn’t a clue as to the Mullah’s intentions. Trying to restore her flash of empath’s sight was like trying to move a new limb: she could do it, but not entirely on purpose and certainly not reliably.
 

She’d sensed Clara, a little.
 

She’d sensed the city, a lot.
 

But now she could still feel Ember Flats, and the Ark summoning some sort of power. But she couldn’t feel Clara. Where had she gone? Was she still okay?
 

Peers saved her from responding, cutting off Piper and ignoring Lila.
 

“Come. Hurry! There’s a new ship. It’s — ”
 

“I think we figured that out,” Kindred said.
 

“Its purpose is to
destroy
. It’s their wrecking ball. We can’t be here when it starts doing what it came here to do. Do you understand? There are not several of these large ships. There is only one. And it’s here, right above us. Ember Flats is where it all begins. We can’t be underneath it when Armageddon arrives!”

Piper was sensing something new from Peers. There was fear, yes. And urgency, for sure. But there was something else as well. He’d been keeping one secret, she saw, and now he was keeping another. It was guilt atop guilt, and the deepest layer was miles thick. The kind that had gripped Peers by the spine, to never let go.
 

What had he done? She narrowed internal eyes, trying to flex that new limb. But focus eluded her. Piper’s mind was too preoccupied with what he’d said about Ember Flats, about plagues. And about what she’d seen — or, more accurately, had stopped seeing — about Clara.
 

“We are safer in here than out there,” Jabari said.
 

“We are
annihilated
in here, whereas out there we at least have a chance!” Peers was practically heaving, his body language pleading. Piper wondered again at his intent. He seemed more than eager to leave. This was somehow personal. If nobody listened, Piper sensed, Peers would fight tooth and nail until they did.
 

He was behaving as if he needed to right a terrible wrong. As if this was all his fault. She could see it in his manner and sense it in his emotions.
 

“Peers?” Piper asked. “Do
you
know where Clara is?”

“They’ve made their judgment already,” Peers rushed on. “Now they’re stirring panic to squeeze out the last of our poison — to make sure there’s no corner of us they haven’t seen. Meyer and Kindred’s announcement made everyone angry, and now all of that rage is streaming into the Ark, adding to what they know and believe about us. But it won’t hold for long. Soon it’ll all be shaken out. They’ll return to their ships, and the lottery will start. We can’t count on that. Not for all of us.
We have to get out!”
 

“Where are you getting this information, Peers?” Meyer asked.
 

“It doesn’t matter!”
 

“It matters to me.”
 

“There’s no way to move unseen,” Jabari said. “We will be safest below.”
 

Peers turned to Lila, then Jabari, then Piper.
 

“Please,” he said, his voice softer. “You
must
trust me.”
 

“But Clara … ”
 

“The Mullah didn’t leave that note, Lila! Ravi did. Jeanine and I got him to confess. There’s no time to explain. But she’s fine. I
know
she’s okay.”
 

“How can you possibly know that?”
 

“Piper thinks the same thing,” Kindred said. “She said that Clara is safer than us. Going is our only sensible option. We might not get another chance.”
 

“She’s your granddaughter, Dad!” In Lila’s emotional state, she didn’t seem to know which Meyer she was addressing.
 

“She’s fine, Lila!” This time, it was Meyer.
 

“Is that what your superbrain tells you? You two being Sherlock?”
 

“Honestly? Yes. Based on what we know, getting out is our best-possible scenario. We’ll circle back once the big ship is gone. If Peers is right, it’ll move on eventually. We can get Clara then. She and Piper both seem to have …
something
. We’ll find her if she’s as safe as everyone seems to think. But we can’t find her if we’re dead.”
 

Lila turned away, somewhere between angry and terrified. Piper felt a jolt watching her, wondering if she should speak up. She’d felt Clara was plenty safe when this started, yes. But they’d been paralyzed with indecision, watching Ember Flats implode through the windows and gate, for the better part of an hour. Did the fact that she couldn’t really feel Clara now mean she was having a hard time finding the levers on her new psychic gifts? Or did it mean that Clara had moved out of safety and into peril?