Judgment (4 page)

“That’s not Piper,” Jeanine said.
 

But of course Cameron had figured that out. Piper had been wearing a pair of scavenged jeans and a sweater that was coming unraveled at the sleeve. The woman ahead of them was in a pristine white gown, like Piper used to wear while living in Heaven’s Veil.
 

“Hey,” Cameron said.
 

Piper turned to look at him.
 

“I hate when you do that.”
 

With a relaxing breath, Piper dissolved into the boiling, multicolored smoke that they’d come to know as the Pall’s default shape. Unlike Astral shapeshifters, the Pall could become a mute version of anyone it touched. But it required tremendous energy, and freaked everyone out — especially Meyer.

Jeanine was still frozen on the steps.
 

“Come on,” Cameron said. “It wants us to follow.”
 

Still with her gun out. Still poised to move upward, toward the exit. “It’s going to lead us deeper into the tunnels.”
 

“It’ll protect us. It wouldn’t call us if there wasn’t a reason.”
 

At the end of the hallway, the Pall’s smoke became a large, malformed appendage, like an enormous reaching hand, and beckoned again.

Jeanine sighed and stepped down, moving to follow. “It’s like taking directions from Lassie,” she said.

Meyer or Kindred — or Meyer and Meyer, as Piper thought of them, even now — were ducked low in a chamber across the squat, brown-rock hallway. Piper could feel their energy just as she could feel Lila’s beside and behind her.
 

The Meyers were strange, even after years of knowing them both — even after years spent trying alternative relationships, where she was
with
them both. They weren’t like twins: two brothers who happened to share identical genetics. They were like the same man, split in two. It had never felt like Kindred and Meyer shared her. It had never felt any more polygamous than it would feel to love one man,
and
his reflection.
 

But it must have been different on some level because even though they were the same man, they also
weren’t
. And still, even now with her heart beating and peril so familiar in her veins, Piper could feel them appraising their situation. Could feel each man’s reaction — the same yet nearly opposite. Fused into one thing, bickering like an old married couple.
 

The sense didn’t reach Piper in words. It came as a gatling blast of emotions.

Yes.

No.

Up.

Down.

Told you so. Told you this was a bad idea.
 

Told you so. Told you this was a good idea.
 

But the warring and yet somehow integrated contention coming from the Meyers changed nothing. They were still pinned down. Still trapped.

Piper turned to Lila. Clara was beside her. In the past, Lila would have been tightly holding her child, but those days were long behind them. Now Lila was upright, concerned but not panicked, seeming eighty instead of still in her twenties. Piper imagined they must all seem that old, and thought as much whenever she looked in a mirror.
 

And Clara, beside but not entangled with her mother, seemed unfazed as ever. Calm, unaffected, almost jaded, just like the other Lightborn child they’d run across. Once an anomaly, Clara’s strange prescience and adult demeanor now seemed
almost
normal. Odd to believe there had once been a world where Clara appeared precocious. A world where seven-year-old girls still played with dolls and didn’t hint at hidden eternal knowledge.
 

“Why did they stop attacking?” Lila asked.
 

Clara shrugged. She got her flashes, but the girl didn’t know everything. Heaven’s Veil had changed her. Maybe destroyed the source of her power’s sharpest edge. And encountering the Ark at Mount Horeb, Mount Sinai? That had changed them all.

“I don’t know,” Piper answered when Clara didn’t.

“They came in like gangbusters,” Lila said. “I figured we were toast.”
 

Yes. Piper had thought that, too. Even Charlie had yelped like a frightened dog when the Reptars swarmed down from above. Most of ancient Cappadocia was supposed to have been abandoned in favor of the cities, at least as far as they’d heard across the outlands. The buried Turkish stronghold of Derinkuyu had dawned on Cameron like a benevolent bolt of lightning. If nobody had claimed it, the place would be the perfect place resting spot or semi-permanent residence. Or if a community had formed in Derinkuyu, as many rumors claimed, that would be even better. But they hadn’t found a community of human border dwellers or a hive claimed by Astrals. They’d found an empty shell. Until they’d made their way to the bottom and invaders descended.

There was movement from across the chamber. Light was scant, especially with half their lanterns and lights muted during their flight from the Astrals, so what came looked like a shadow. But it was only Charlie.
 

“Christopher ran up.”
 

Piper waited for more. But Charlie had said the unhelpful thing and was now waiting for her response, oblivious to the fact that those three simple words had offered nothing meaningful. Even years spent touring the Astral capitals and smaller outposts (some as bad as Heaven’s Veil, most worse, and much of the badlands between uncrossable) hadn’t softened Charlie.
 

“Up where?”
 

“To the stone door.”
 

“He didn’t … ”

Charlie’s eyes, in the semi-dark, speared Lila like a sword. She stopped speaking as if chastised.
 

“Of course not. The door weighs eleven hundred pounds even if it weren’t cemented in place. I wasn’t going to help him close it, and neither were the Meyers.”
 

 
Lila said nothing as if he’d misunderstood. But Piper could feel her emotion, same as always, and yes, that had been her concern. Christopher wanted to close the door to keep the Astrals out. It’s how Derinkuyu had been designed, he claimed, but all Lila could think of was suffocation, of the door jamming and trapping them down here forever.
 

“He’s back,” Charlie said.
 

Piper waited a beat for more then said, “And?”

“He says they’re just sitting there.”
 

“Who?” Lila asked.
 

“The Astrals. Reptars and Titans. At the choke point. They’re not trying to force their way in.”
 

“They must think we’re heavily armed.”
 

“Because that’s stopped them in the past. Like the time in Roman Sands, when we still had Terrence’s big gun. They still came even when the gate choked with Reptar bodies.”
 

“Well then, why the hell do
you
think they aren’t coming at us, Charlie?” Lila demanded.

Charlie’s face froze. His bangs were uneven. He didn’t even use a mirror to cut his hair. It just came off then piled up into a sharp-edged bowl until he looked pre-Astral Amish.
 

Piper willed Lila to say nothing. Thankfully, she didn’t. The group had seen more than their share of arguments. There was Meyer against Kindred, Charlie against Cameron, Jeanine against everyone, and the unlikely spats where the sides were the group versus Charlie and Kindred. Charlie didn’t want to be on Kindred’s side any more than the man who was once Heaven’s Veil’s viceroy wanted to be on the side of Benjamin’s stodgy and unkempt right-hand man — who, he hadn’t forgotten, had urged many attacks on Heaven’s Veil before its annihilation. But Charlie and Kindred were alone with their desire to go back after the Ark. Back after the archive. Back, as things had settled, to the fearful city of Ember Flats, to face what they’d fled years ago.
 

The air seemed to thicken as if a fog were rolling in. At first, Lila thought the lights were dying. Her second thought was that the Astrals had turned from their usual brute force and decided to attack like old-fashioned human riot police: rolling tear gas canisters into the lower levels where they’d once thought they could make their home underground, attempting to smoke them out.

But then the building mist coalesced into a dense, multicolored, shifting cloud of smoke. Then the smoke pressed itself together, and Piper found herself staring into the face of Original Meyer’s late ex-wife, Heather Hawthorne.
 

Heather smirked but said nothing as she crossed to the doorway, toward the hallway whose end was thick with Astral soldiers that, if Christopher was to be believed, were merely waiting.

The Pall, as Heather, raised a finger and hooked it into a come-here gesture.

“I hate it when it does that,” Lila said.
 

Jeanine was stopped at a fork in the passageway, half-stooped under the low ceiling. Cameron came up beside her. As she shone her flashlight ahead, toward the rounded hallways, the spherical room portals, and the holes and grooves in the floor and walls, he got the curious sensation of exploring the interior nooks of a natural sponge.

“It went that way.” Cameron pointed to the left.
 

“I know where it went.”
 

Jeanine’s answer was so flat and inflectionless that Cameron gave her a moment. She was clearly processing something. Either that or being defiant for the hell of it — something Nathan Andreus had encouraged in his lieutenant even if it meant she heeded a troublesome mind of her own.
 

“We followed it this far,” Cameron said.
 

“I don’t take orders from the Pall.”
 

Cameron looked at Jeanine’s face, glaring at the twin passages as if deciding which to take, her jaw subtly working. If her hands hadn’t been occupied, Cameron knew she’d be chewing at her short, tortured fingernails. It was how she showed nerves even though the group’s fearless commando officially had none. For a second, he saw her as the woman she must have been before the Astrals arrival. She was thirty at most, and pretty beneath all the grit and strife that coated her in equal measure. She wore her need for vengeance — for Nathan, for their other friends, for all the massacred innocents in the Heaven’s Veil apocalypse — like armor. Without it, Cameron suspected, Jeanine Coffey might be beautiful. Or with it, maybe more so.
 

“We followed it, Jeanine. You agreed.”
 

“I don’t trust it.”
 

“It’s been with us for five years.”
 

“The Astrals don’t count time like we do. It could be a long con.”
 

But her words were bullshit. Jeanine didn’t believe this was a double-cross, here and now and out of the blue. The Pall had come from the Astral mind, like Kindred had come from the Astral body. But Kindred was one of them now, and so was this silent, dark, and mysterious thing — this
purged remainder from the mind
from the first dead Meyer clone, if Kindred was to be believed. Or, if Cameron listened to his instincts, raw humanity in its natural form. This was what they all looked like once forced through the Astral filter, deemed unworthy of inclusion in their mind and forced to escape as something new.
 

Jeanine was just scared of the unknown and of the way things had changed. Ever since they’d seen what they had through the Ark’s eye, their world had been different. It was no longer precisely humans versus aliens. The Astrals followed, yes. And sure, they killed. But despite Jeanine’s claim, Cameron increasingly felt more watched than stalked. More examined than hunted.
 

Before Cameron could say more, Jeanine turned to him. He saw fear in her eyes, knowing she must see the same in his. Not because they were in danger — they’d been in mortal danger for nearly a decade now. Eventually fear of death became the norm, and you stopped dreading it. This was something else.
 

“It’s never helped us, Cameron.”