Judgment (26 page)

Clara was fine. She could be gone from her bed for a bit longer, and Mom would never know. And if she had to leave Nocturne here and go for help getting him back up, she could do that later. The tunnel wasn’t all that scary-looking. There were at least a few small electric lights. The walls were concrete and tile.

Nocturne barked, and Clara climbed down to follow him as he walked off into the dim.
 

Some time later, the passage through the wall automatically ratcheted closed behind her.
 

Below the doorknob, and a plate that read
Utility Closet
, three small triangles were carved into the wood. Peers probably wouldn’t have noticed them if he hadn’t been so tired — if the damned dog hadn’t dragged him out of bed. But he’d yawned at the right time; he’d let fatigue drag his footsteps down the hallway, and his lazy eye had grabbed the pattern. Even then, most people would have moved along, but not Peers. For him, the pattern of triangles was as instantly evocative as the scent of alcohol can be for those who’ve suffered a long hospital stay. Or, in the days before the Astrals’ arrival, the automatic alarm that screamed in people’s heads when a red-and-blue light flashes in their rearview.
 

He felt his heart quicken. It took less than a second before he felt himself tumbling backward in time, to his boyhood. He wasn’t in a mansion hallway; Peers was in a room sifting dust from the vaulted ceiling pouring sand like pounding rain. A kid with his hand on an ancient trigger, realizing he was deeper than he’d thought, or feared, or arrogantly decided. He was a little boy knowing he’d done wrong and fearing his father’s wrath. Knowing the stories of exile, that his own days among family and friends were truly numbered. He was a kid who’d always done mischief but who’d finally managed to do something irredeemable.
 

Peers blinked the torrent of emotions away. He’d buried all that. Long, long ago. He’d moved on. There’d been London. There’d been university. There’d been studies, always meant to replace what he’d once known in more intimate ways. There’d been the quest. He was a goddamned adult man now, with a Ph-fucking-D. Nobody was coming after him. He no longer needed to fear the belt, or the Tribunal.
 

But the symbol was there, true as the moon.
 

Peers looked down the hallway, toward where Nocturne had run off, then back the way he’d come. He was near enough to the last corner to step back and peek around it — the way was clear there, too. The house was quiet. He knew, based on what he’d heard after waking from his stupor, that the others’ rooms were near his own. But those rooms were now a full hallway back, not even visible. And during their brief tour, Kamal had told them most of the rooms were for visiting dignitaries, and thus were empty.
 

Still feeling watched — by a hidden camera or Astral device, perhaps — Peers squatted. He ran his fingers along the pattern, which at first he’d taken as dirt in an otherwise immaculate hallway. The carving was perfect as if stamped into the wood.
 

Three small triangles, upside down, arranged in a loose triangular pattern overall, with the tip pointing toward the floor.
 

He hadn’t seen that pattern in more than twenty years. After his exile to London, he’d seen its cousin. Kids around the world would have said the symbol looked like an upside-down, stretched-out version of the Triforce: a symbol from video games Peers hadn’t known, seeing as he’d grown up in tombs and sand dunes, playing hide and seek in ancient ruins. Today he’d say the symbol on the door looked like the Triforce. But back then, he’d wondered if it was coincidence that the good folks at Nintendo had created a symbol so similar to that of the Mullah. Mullah were everywhere, so why couldn’t they be in Japan?

Peers stood, feeling vertigo. The door was wood, not stone. It looked fresh enough to have been carved yesterday, not thousands of years ago. The mansion wasn’t ancient, or cobbled from other ancient sites.
 

No, whoever had carved that symbol had done it during the building — or perhaps the city’s — construction.
 

Whoever had carved it was almost certainly still here. And knowing the Mullah’s infiltration and placement tactics (like those of all the world’s great secret societies), that person would be someone in a position of authority, someone with sway and access. Perhaps even Mara Jabari herself. It was possible. Peers had been a kid back then, more interested in causing trouble than networking. He’d known only his clan.
 

It was too ironic. Peers had thought he was following Cameron Bannister, the way he’d followed his father. But maybe he was the one who’d been shadowed all along.
 

He stood. Looked around again. And opened the door.
 

The room, with the door closed behind him, was true to its word. It wasn’t a tiny broom closet with scant room to maneuver, nor was it palatial. There were some valves for water mounted to the concrete with half-round metal brackets, plus a mess of wires snaking in and out of network hubs. Even with the Internet dead, Ember Flats had its own little network. But like those in the other cities, Peers was willing to bet the system was deliberately antiquated, obsolete even by the standards of ten years before occupation. The Astrals could have wired Ember Flats to the nines, but that would defeat the purpose. This place had been built by human hands, possibly with Astral assistance. And so its tech capacity had been purposely retarded. You don’t strengthen a leg by offering a stronger crutch.
 

Inspired, Peers closed his eyes and tried to think of the others in his group. But no, his brain was still just an old hunk of wet flesh. It’d take a lot more than slow web access to force his mind to consider the collective unconscious as a viable alternative, if there even was such a thing.
 

But other than the pipes and valves and wires and a few mops, buckets, and brooms, the place was ordinary. Maybe the marks on the door had been a coincidence. Maybe someone
had
been trying to draw a Triforce, and the door had been mounted upside down.
 

Swallowing, Peers scanned the room. The Mullah did nothing by accident. Someone had marked that door just as someone had authorized the marked door being discreetly set into place. Just as someone had laid all the bricks; just as Peers — if he knew his old fellows at all — was certain the house must have concealed passageways and tunnels.
 

Don’t be stupid
.
The Astrals would know if tunnels were being put in.
 

But according to the story Clara had told Peers that first day, the Astrals hadn’t known when the Templars and Mullah worked to relocate the Ark. Sure, it had been moved centuries ago while the Astrals were away, but it made no difference that the mansion had been built right under the Astral eye. The aliens stayed out of human political affairs; Kindred had confirmed as much from his time running Heaven’s Veil. Once the roof was on the building, the Mullah and their famously tight-lipped workers would have been able to do as they wished. The Astrals could have forced their way inside for inspections, sure, but that would have made for bad human-Astral public relations — an even trickier balancing act this visit than in their prior ones.

The feeling of being watched escalated, and sent a chill up his spine.
 

Being watched by Mullah — who, being Mullah, would know exactly who Peers Basara was and had always been.
 

But also being watched by Astrals, the way the aliens had (again, according to Clara’s story) seemed to allow Cameron’s group to reach Mount Sinai then watched them discover the Ark.
 

Watched their approach.
 

Then watched them leave without doing what they’d come to do, off to wander the desert for five years rather than ever return.
 

What had happened that day? Why had they run?
 

Curiosity dug at his insides, but Cameron’s latest bout of suspicion meant it would be a while before Peers could ask anything without Cameron suspecting ulterior motives.
 

There was another Mullah symbol etched into the concrete block, just below a heavy-duty metal shelf bracket.
 

Peers touched it. Pressed it. Rubbed it like Aladdin summoning the genie from his lamp. He was tempted to say, “Open sesame” but thought he’d heard something elsewhere in the house a moment ago — maybe someone stirring for a late-night snack. He hadn’t done anything but felt intensely guilty. Old guilt, like bile in his throat.
 

I’m just standing around inside a utility room. Nothing wrong with that.
 

But whatever was bugging Peers was deeper down, under his skin like a parasite. He couldn’t place the reason, but staring at the symbol in the bricks made it worse. The last time he’d seen that symbol was …
 

Was …
 

Peers remembered his father. He remembered the fury. He remembered a sinking sensation that not only had he angered his family and friends but that what he’d done — however unwittingly — went even deeper. Toward betrayal, like a traitor.
 

He’d never understood what he’d done so wrong other than causing one hell of a mess out of (let’s face it) a bunch of stupid old rocks.

But then he remembered the blue disc.
 

He remembered his father’s face when he’d realized what Peers had done.
 

The hand — not the belt — had gone up to correct the disobedient boy. The flash of Father’s Mullah ring as the hand swung back for the strike had been indelibly engraved in Peers’s memory.
 

The ring.
 

There was a box of nails on one of the higher shelves. Peers reached in and retrieved three. Maybe he was wrong about this, and the strangely precise rings were merely symbols of membership in the secret society and nothing more. Or maybe the rings
were
keys, but the locks they opened couldn’t be fooled by picking tools as crude as nails.
 

But Peers didn’t think so. The Mullah had always been more about symbolism than practicality, more about ritual than rationality. Twenty years ago, he’d managed to open a door he shouldn’t have been able to open, and with no ring to do it.
 

He pressed the nails into the three triangular indentations, at precisely the same time.
 

There was a hard click, and one of the cinderblocks jumped forward an inch — revealing not the back of a cinderblock but a small, concealed drawer.
 

Inside the drawer was a perfectly round, perfectly smooth sphere of what looked like brushed aluminum. The size of a cricket ball covered with fine blue lines like a magnified circuit.

Feeling the same sense of
I shouldn’t do this
that he’d felt touching the blue disc two decades earlier, Peers took the sphere in both of his hands, finding a single pulsing tentacle-like wire protruding from its back, attached somewhere at the drawer’s rear.

“What are you, friend?” Peers whispered to the sphere, only half his mind noticing the rush of feet passing beyond the utility room door.

The lights went out.
 

The sphere answered.

“Cameron. Come on, Cam, wake up.”
 

Cameron blinked. Piper was above him, dressed in a robe, her face flushed and bothered.
 

“What?”
 

“Get up. Grab your robe.”
 

“Why?”

“Clara’s missing.”
 

“Missing?”
His eyes darted to the hallway past Piper. He spied Lila at the door, arms crossed, Meyer beside her.
 

“We don’t know where she is.”
 

“You don’t know where she is, or she’s missing?”
 

“That’s the definition of missing, Cameron!”