Judgment (14 page)

Peers wondered why he was arguing the point then realized that he was terrified, too. The ravine-shaped funnel ahead was empty, but it wouldn’t stay that way. And even if they made it all the way through, then what? Every city Peers had seen and every city the new group whispered about had been worse than the last. The Astrals were building in all the capitals, according to satellite images in the Den. It was so efficient, slave labor seemed the only explanation. Just like in the days of pharaohs. Ember Flats wouldn’t be a picnic. Fantasies of walking to the Ark or to the viceroy’s mansion suddenly felt exactly like that:
fantasies
.
 

“Not yet,” Jeanine said.

“Clara’s just a kid. Just because she said—”

“Clara’s not just a kid. She’s Lightborn.”
 

“That just means she’s advanced and sensitive.”
 

“Kindred and Meyer would tell you the same thing. You can see it in the way they skulk around, the way they won’t meet your eye. It’s not probable that at least some of us will die if we do this. It’s inevitable. So I have to ask, why do it? Why fight a losing battle? There’s no shame in walking away.”
 

No,
Peers thought.
There’s no shame.
But if they didn’t try for Ember Flats once this close, how would he look at his reflection in whichever chipped and filthy mirrors he might find in what was left of the world? And how long could he really expect to keep on breathing if they turned away now?

But Peers didn’t have to answer. Didn’t need to convince her, even though he himself was more uncertain than ever. He didn’t believe in the powers of the Lightborn. They were simply less jaded versions of readers and psychics. But still he felt a cold hand pressing against his spine as if the future was really already written.
 

He didn’t need to give his conflicted opinion because Jeanine spoke first.

“You’re sure it’s there,” she said, staring forward.

“The Ark?”
 

“You aren’t just guessing. Listening to the same rumors we’ve all heard. You have proof.”
 

“I have photos. Recent ones.”
 

Jeanine sighed. The Corridor ahead remained far too empty. As was the land around them, back where they could still see the horizon. Some people said the cannibal tribes had made themselves comfortable in the ground they called home, burrowing tunnels over the years using scavenged Astral equipment, honeycombing the sand and rock like nests of ants. Ahead, not five miles distant, they saw the Ember Flats skyline. Stone pyramids joined by blue glass. Old temples met with new ones of rock and metal. The modern city lay beyond, closer to the Nile. But the true capital was here. The mothership, hanging just off to the side, giving the city its sunlight. Ember Flats protected an area that included both irrigated soil and arid sand, but it was in the desert that Viceroy Mara Jabari and her government made their traitorous homes. Peers could feel eyes upon him as they sat indecisive at the artificial valley’s mouth. The only thing keeping the clans at bay was the knowledge that other clans were eyeing the new prey as well. The only thing keeping them temporarily safe was the fact that they were in such a fragile abundance of danger.
 

“When the Ark shone into us at Sinai all those years ago, I felt as if it was judging me even back then,” Jeanine said. “But do you want to know something funny? I’ve felt ever since as if it left the seed of a challenge inside me. As if it’s been watching with condescension to see if I have what it takes to meet my summons.”
 

“What happened at Sinai?” Peers asked. Several of the group had alluded to that day, but each time it felt like a slip. They were hoarding a secret that they’d agreed to bury forever. This, here and now with Jeanine, was the first time he’d ever heard anyone break the covenant and speak so openly. It had the feel of a dare. Or, to use Jeanine’s word, of a person rising to a challenge.

“Make you a deal, Peers. If you and I both make it through the next fifteen minutes or so, I’ll buy you a beer and tell you the whole story.”
 

Peers, despite his turbulent emotions, managed a small smile. “And if they don’t have beer in Ember Flats?”

“They’re living in pyramids. They must be on some mind-altering drug.”
 

“Not two minutes ago, you were arguing that we should turn around and not look back.”
 

“Yeah, well.” Jeanine sighed again. “I guess I don’t like the idea of some alien device thinking it got one over on me for all of eternity.”
 

“Deal, then.”

Jeanine slapped Peers’s offered hand. Then her face snapped back to serious.
 

“Start the clock,” she said.

Christopher was peering through the bus’s slats, listening to its idling motor thrum like a heartbeat, watching a vulture settle near a canted road sign written in Arabic like an omen. His eyes on the tall boy with the thick eyebrows standing at its side, staring back him.

He jumped when Lila set a hand on his shoulder. His head smacked the overhead rack. Instead of luggage, it held boxes of ammunition they’d all helped pull from the Den’s stores. It was pointless. The run would be quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. The idea of anyone but Jeanine competently reloading a military weapon in the hot mess of panic, as the bus bounced over ruts, was absurd.
 

“See anything?” Lila asked.
 

Christopher returned his eyes to the road sign. He saw the vulture, but Trevor Dempsey was gone.
 

“Nothing,” he said.

Lila was looking at him funny. Her mouth made a curious little shape. She raised one hand and brushed hair from his forehead.
 

“What?”
 

“Nothing,” he repeated.
 

“Chris … ”

“I’m just jumpy, Lila. I think we all are.”

Lila turned at a noise behind her. Christopher followed her gaze. Jeanine was pressing buttons on a large LED clock that had, once upon a time, probably spelled out the name of the bus’s next stop. For reasons unknown, Peers had converted it to a multipurpose display. For the duration of the trip, it had been counting off their trip with kilometers traveled. The display had been counting backward from just under fifteen hundred — probably to give the passengers some sense of progress on the days’ long journey. It had almost reached zero, but now Jeanine was resetting it to read
10:00
. She stepped back and the clock suddenly read
9:59
, then
9:58
.
 

“I know we’re all nervous.” Jeanine tapped the clock. “But the good news is that we only have to be afraid for another ten minutes. Once time runs out, this will all be over.” She looked directly at Clara, and Christopher — the girl’s adopted father, in spirit if not on obsolete paper — felt a pang of intense guilt. This token and the associated pep talk was for all of them, but she was offering it mostly to Clara. The girl Christopher wasn’t protecting, and was shepherding into peril.
 

Nobody contradicted Jeanine to voice Christopher’s thoughts:
 

Ten minutes, unless the bus is tipped over and we have to make it on foot.
 

Ten minutes, unless Ember Flats is just as bad inside as it it outside.
 

Ten minutes … unless we’re all dead in five.
 

She went on, framing the talismanic clock like a seasoned leader. It was a battlefield commander telling a gutted soldier he’d be just fine, but even Christopher felt himself calming by degrees as the seconds ticked in peace.
This isn’t so hard, just nine minutes and forty seconds left to go.
Then movement caught his eye, and he looked through the slats, again at the road sign.

Now Lila was standing there, with an enormous dark red stain on the front of her shirt, intestines sliding out of her abdomen with the languor of cold syrup.
 

Christopher rubbed his face.
 

And then it was Clara, equally dead.
 

His hand found Lila’s. He squeezed it, and Lila — the real Lila — looked over at him. The bus was rolling forward as Jeanine’s pep talk concluded, and as he glanced back, the road sign and the macabre figures waiting beside it like zombies at a bus stop fell out of sight.
 

“I thought of something,” Christopher said. “The Pall. The Pall is still out there, and it will help us.”
 

Lila seemed to take heart. She actually brightened.
 

No reason she shouldn’t. Lila hadn’t seen what their puzzling companion had shown him, and wouldn’t wonder how those particular visions implied assistance rather than amusement from its place on the impartial sidelines.

They came like locusts.
 

Aubrey, behind the wheel, put the hammer all the way down. Peers must have done something to the engine, or else buses in this part of the world had greatly improved their speed since Cameron had last taken one with his father. He felt the titanic thing rattle, shimmy, then finally find a sweet spot in resonance where everything stopped shaking as it if it might fall apart. Cameron held tight to one of the side-mounted guns, using the weapon as much for stability as defense. There was some sort of hopefully impenetrable glass above the gun’s point of rotation, giving Cameron a fairly clean view of whatever he intended to kill. It was tinted slightly blue, and if they weren’t being surrounded by hotrods covered in spikes and painted skulls, he would have asked:
So, Peers, is this an Astral windshield? Do you prefer it to human acrylics or polycarbonate?

But there was a convertible thing that was probably once a Jeep ramming into their side, cutting the air with the screech of squealing metal. The innovative clan of red-painted bald men had done in life what James Bond movies had been doing in film forever and dressed their wheels with footlong spikes. The bus tires were shielded, so the spikes could only rake the metal, just as the spiked once-a-Jeep scratched long, warbling notes of protest into the armor plate along the sides.
 

Cameron swung the gun to fire, but the driver hit the accelerator. The car jolted forward as if from a shot of nitrous, easily dodging its swing radius. Then, with practiced precision, the red men were effortlessly jockeying into position, grabbing the bus’s sides and climbing aboard.
 

Shots fired from above. Singles, probably a pistol. A red blur fell past Cameron’s blue-tint windshield, and the bus gave a great lurch as if over a human-sized speed bump. A woman screamed, and then there were more shots. Cameron turned, but Kindred was right behind him, glaring.
 

“Don’t leave your station. Don’t you fucking dare.”
 

“They need help!”
 

He looked up, but there were still three sets of legs visible beneath the open pop-ups as the bus lurched and veered. Cameron could see the black modified seat belts, tethering them to the platforms as the bus jumped. The front set of legs belonged to Christopher. The rear — the most important position, to handle the pursuit — was Jeanine. Charlie sat in the middle. The position was supposed to be Lila’s, but she was inside, tasked with handling a mounted weapon. She’d been shaking too hard when the bus began rolling, and despite the side gun’s vital importance and Lila’s less-than-ideal experience handling anything like it, Jeanine had swapped on the grounds that given an unmounted weapon, she’d kill half their group in friendly fire. Charlie — similarly inexperienced but methodical to the point of sterility — had taken her place.
 

“We’ll shift you if you need shifting!” Then, “The lance, Cameron!”
 

But the long lance protruding through the slats — the one Cameron had been clearly instructed on using to knock boarders from his gun in the event he couldn’t shoot them off — had already been yanked through the slats. The cannibal who’d grabbed it — painted green, his face covered beneath the paint in jet black tattoos — was climbing topside, toward Jeanine. There was the chatter of an automatic weapon from above, and the man, with Cameron’s lance, struck the dirt.