Judgment (17 page)

Charlie, shocked, shifted aside. Lila sat, dodging Aubrey’s corpse without a thought. Her eyes were streaming, but she seemed not to have noticed. She’d lost her father, lost her brother, lost her mother, lost her husband, recovered her father with another to spare. Now she’d lost Christopher, and the wound would be deep. But now, in those big, brown eyes, Cameron saw only determination and absolute, total fury.
 

“Do you even know how to drive a—” Charlie began. But Lila had slammed the bus into reverse and jockeyed it into what had seemed a minuscule gap in the rearview mirror.
 
Charlie fell over Aubrey’s legs, banging his head.
 

Lila steamed forward. Hit a truck broadside. Consulted her mirror and saw that painted clansmen were streaming up from behind on foot, eager to take what they’d finally felled. Cameron saw a smirk touch Lila’s lips. She put the bus in reverse again and swung around so she was backing right at them. The thump, when she struck the truck again, was muffled as if bodies were pinned between the vehicles. But she didn’t immediately move forward again. Instead she floored the accelerator, pressing harder.
 

“Lila, there’s nowhere to—” Charlie said as he moved to regain his feet. But there
was
somewhere to go; the mob of vehicles had left a gap near the embankment. Charlie fell again as she struck it, protesting, pointing out that it would tip if she tried to climb it. And the bus nearly did, but then Lila swung the big wheel the other way, down the embankment after five seconds’ climbing, teetering on the edge of balance but sliding past the forward group’s edge, slamming into the area cleared by Christopher’s blast. The place was like the heart of a missile strike, debris blasted out equidistant in the pattern of a star. More cannibals on foot had stormed into the space, and it sounded like popcorn as they struck the speeding front bumper. The bus leaped as it crushed them below its Permaflate tires, and then their path was suddenly clear.
 

Lila didn’t stop the bus until she’d crossed an invisible line past the Ember Flats gate, striking a wall made of sandstone or clay, shaking everyone aboard to their feet in a resounding and metal-rending crash, flooring the pedal until Cameron rested a hand on her shoulder and said she could stop.
 

Behind them, the multicolored clans lined up at the border, their faces furious. Fights sparked from clan to clan, realizing they were surrounded by enemies. They warred for mere seconds before an Astral shuttle floated overhead and a ray incinerated enough men at the front to scatter the others.

Cameron’s hand was still atop Lila’s hunched shoulders. On her curved back. He wouldn’t move it. He knew it had to stay.
 

“He saved us, Lila,” Cameron said. “We made it. We’re safe.”

Lila’s shoulders hitched slowly at first then shook uncontrollably as she wept.
 

After the throttle stopped revving from Lila’s foot on the gas and Cameron killed the engine because something mechanical seemed to have broken, with only half the drive wheels still spinning and the front end of the bus wedged into the wall, all eyes turned to Kindred.
 

“What now?” Cameron asked him.

“This is Peers’s mission,” Kindred answered. His logic had run out. As had Meyer’s, where their minds touched. Kindred was no longer the conjoined thing they formed together; he was again just Kindred, and Meyer was again just Meyer. Inside, Kindred was still the man who’d led Heaven’s Veil as viceroy after the mothership had returned him to the Axis Mundi, after he’d hitched himself to Heather, had two children, then divorced and married Piper. In Kindred’s mind, the memories were continuous and wholly his own. The factual knowledge that claimed otherwise was impossible to reckon. Deep down, Kindred would never believe those memories and experiences didn’t belong to him — even though it was obviously true.

The others were looking at him for guidance as if he had all the answers. As if he knew more about Ember Flats and what came next than the satellite images and outland rumors had shown them. As if his sometimes-connection to the Astral collective made him one of them, when in fact, he was only a man, same as always.
 

Kindred looked back into the bus for Clara. He hadn’t noticed her for some time, and for a horrible moment he was sure they’d lost her in the collision with the sandstone wall, if not before.
 

But no, she was right there: shorter than the rest of the group but standing within it. Clara was seven years old — but in other, subtler ways, she was the oldest among them.
 

“Any idea what we should do now?” Kindred asked her.

“I don’t know” she said.

Lila was still crying, still filling the pregnant silences with the sour sounds of grief. Piper went to her, relieving Cameron, and squatted to lean in and whisper close. Clara didn’t move to comfort her mother; Kindred imagined that would come later. Instead Clara stayed where she was, eyes locked with the man who masqueraded as her grandfather.

The crash had popped the unbreakable windshield from its seals. Smoke or vapor poured from the stopped engine. The bus didn’t seem to have airbags; they’d all survived the crash without a cushion. They were lucky to be alive, past the gates after driving through hell.
 

The accordion door to the driver’s right had also popped out of place. Still feeling expectant eyes upon him, Kindred moved toward the door and peeked cautiously out into the street. And it
was
a street, of sorts; the sandstone wall Lila had struck appeared to be the back of a very broad, squared-off building whose face was away from them, looking into the city beyond.
 

It seemed they hadn’t entered the city after all — just these long, peripheral outskirts. The open gates had let them into an empty space like that between rows of barbed wire fence surrounding a prison. The surface below Kindred’s feet, as he stepped out, appeared to be concrete or finely crushed stone. It formed a road that led off in both directions around Ember Flats’s periphery, between the outer wall and an inner one made from the backs of buildings. The inner wall, like the outer one, was topped with razor wire. If this was a prison, this no-man’s-land would be where guards would march on patrol.
 

The thought made Kindred remember the shuttle that had dispatched the barbarians. It had sped off already and was nowhere in sight. The clans had remained, though — just beyond the open gate. They were standing back a handful of yards, staring at Kindred as he left the wreck, their eyes burning with hate. The bald men were grouped by color, but only in the most haphazard way. Blue-painted men were within reaching distance of teal-painted men, who on their other side were within reaching distance of black-painted men who looked like walking shadows. They knew not to come any closer. The shuttle had let the bus — not the cannibals — into the city’s outer edge.
 

One of the red-painted men, wearing an elaborate headdress of multicolored feathers, opened his mouth to speak. Kindred half expected a strangled barbarian shout, but the man’s measured and reasonable voice sounded like well-mannered words at a board meeting:

“We will wait for you.”
 

Kindred said nothing. He turned from the gate. He wandered back to the bus’s wreck and past it, until the street-like middle ground rounded a bend and the clans were no longer visible. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, only that he was compelled to scout the area. The sensation was like smelling the air — tuning in to the fact that he’d once had a purely Astral mind, that he’d communicated some with the Astral mind even when he’d been Meyer Dempsey, that he’d once had enough psychic sway to infiltrate the mothership and retrieve his donor. Kindred’s higher brain argued that he was human and couldn’t sense the Astrals any more than any other human. But he didn’t have to feel the Astrals. He’d be content to feel the Pall, which had always been somewhere in the middle.
 

And yet he couldn’t feel the Pall, and hadn’t felt or seen it for days. Perhaps they’d outrun it; maybe they’d left it behind somewhere between Derinkuyu and the Den and Ember Flats. It hadn’t taken a form and boarded Peers’s bus. It hadn’t made itself visible along the way, at least not that Kindred had seen. So where was it now? Was the Pall finally gone?
 

No, it’s not gone. It’s just not showing itself.

Kindred could feel its presence the way he could feel Meyer slowly closing the gap behind him. Between Meyer and Kindred — between the human and the Astral who’d become human — there was the Pall. It was as if the Meyer Dempsey who’d been shot dead by Raj was still around, his spirit now on both sides, somehow creating a link between their party and the Ark. That was the sense Kindred got, anyway, the reason he’d sided with Charlie to argue that the group needed to return and finish what it started at Sinai. Because Sinai was where the Pall had first begun to change, after it had found and touched its second source. That’s when it had stopped being an ally and had become something else, something in the middle. Impartial but helpful. Assistive. But always at a price.
 

“How do we get into the city?” Cameron asked.
 

Kindred turned from his thoughts to see that the entire group had followed him. The bus was still smoking behind them, its front stuck, its axles apparently shattered. They would be on foot from this point on, for better or for worse — and God help them if they needed to run through Hell’s Corridor again.
 

Piper, with her arm around a silent Lila, was watching the sky. “Where are the shuttles? Where are the Reptars?”

“Inside the city,” Charlie said.
 

Meyer came up beside Kindred. He felt their minds touch, felt the synergy. Logic unfolded like an unlocking puzzle box, and indistinct questions began to become likely answers.
 

“They should be patrolling out here,” Meyer said.
 

“And
inside.” Kindred nodded.
 

“Shuttles.”
 

“They could make circuits. There’s reason to.”
 

“The mothership?”
 

“Unessential.”
 

“Do you feel it?”
 

“Its presence. Not its intention.”
 

“There’s something. Something missing.”

“But the wall—”

“It’s just buildings.”
 

“But it’s still a wall.”
 

“A
barrier,”
Meyer agreed.
 

“The only thing we can think is—”

“Obviously. But why?”
 

Kindred jumped from Cameron’s hand on his shoulder.
 

“Maybe you two wouldn’t mind speaking in English?”
 

Hadn’t they been? Kindred could never tell the difference. But then again, it was possible that most of what he and Meyer had just discussed went unspoken, in their private dialect or otherwise, and had happened with their usual shuffling of mental images.

Kindred and Meyer both looked past Cameron, to Piper, to Lila beside her. Feeling the same shared thought at the same time, they both took a step forward — but seeing this, Kindred deferred. Meyer went to Lila and wrapped an overdue fatherly arm around her as Kindred held himself back, feeling his usual push-pull. It was ironic: Human Meyer’s captivity on the mothership and the ensuing emotional crash course had made him more empathetic than he’d ever been before — and hence it was the copy of Meyer, in Kindred, who’d become more
Meyer
between them.

“Sorry,” Kindred told Cameron. “We were just trying to theorize about the city’s makeup.”
 

“And?”
 

“I’d rather not say. It’s … in flux.”
 

Cameron rolled his eyes. Charlie spoke in his place.
 

“Don’t be obtuse. The gates were wide open. They let us walk right in, but we’re in the no man’s land instead of the city itself. You’ll forgive me, but this all seems very familiar.”
 

“You mean it’s like Heaven’s Veil.”
 

“Which makes sense,” Charlie said. “Similar defense plans for the capitals. Heaven’s Veil had outlaw badlands, too, though they weren’t as …
advanced
as what we just went through. There was the entrance corridor at Heaven’s Veil that was a lot like this one, and you had to go through the corridor to get into the city itself. But I also remember entering Heaven’s Veil.
Twice
. And each time, the Astrals stepped aside and let one of us waltz right into a trap.”

“This is different,” said Kindred. Beside Lila, Meyer nodded.
 

“How?”

“To be blunt,” Kindred said, still looking around, his mind still touching Meyer’s, still looking for evidence he could add to his deductive equation, “it doesn’t matter what we think because our course of action can’t change.”