Judgment (29 page)

And worse, her usual ability to sense emotions was making the soup of sensation thicken around them. She could feel Cameron’s conflict: pushed into command of this excursion from a dead sleep, trying to keep fear at bay while doing his expected job. She could feel Piper’s wariness, and feel her father’s concern, touching in a most curious way. And she was sure, somehow, of what the others were feeling as her antennae raised: Charlie, studious as if he were asleep and dreaming of research; Jeanine, uncharacteristically surrendering in her unconsciousness — perhaps, Lila thought with embarrassment, to a sex dream she’d never admit upon waking. And Peers …
 

And that part was curious.
 

Lila kept looking at Cameron, Meyer, and Piper, shocked each time she made the circuit that Peers wasn’t with them. Because her mind kept becoming convinced that he was. She felt his absence in their quartet as if he’d been as stolen away as Clara.
   

She looked back. No, Peers still wasn’t with them. And yet part of Lila had been so sure he’d been back there, looking over her shoulder.

Cameron stopped when they entered the fireplace room from its other end and realized they’d made a big circle. They couldn’t have toured the entire mansion; they hadn’t gone nearly that far. But they’d seen neither hide nor hair of Clara, and the panic in Lila’s throat had brimmed to a fever pitch. She couldn’t feel her daughter at all.
 

“What now?” Piper asked Cameron.
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“We have to find her, Cam. Even if it’s nothing.” Piper turned to Lila and added, patronizingly, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
 

Cameron was looking around the dim, quiet room. He had no idea what to do, how to raise an alarm. Lila had something simple in mind: if nobody proposed an alternative in the next thirty seconds, she’d start screaming.

“Where’s Jabari’s room?” he asked.
 

“I don’t know,” Piper said.
 

“Meyer?”
 

“How would
I
know?”
 

“Kindred. Would Kindred know?”
 

“Why would Kindred know?”
 

“Can’t he talk to the Astrals? Can’t he sense things?”
 

“Not like that, he can’t.”
 

Lila felt her fist strike an end table. A crystal decanter clattered, its stopper jarred loose and almost hopping away. She wasn’t aware of moving her arm or her fist. It just happened, and everyone looked at her.
 

“Do something.”

“What,
Li?” Piper asked.
 

“Cameron. Do something,” she answered. There was an acid taste in her mouth. Her vision was swimming.
 

“I … ”
 

“He doesn’t know, Lila. Give him a minute.”
 

“Kindred. That’s as good a place to start as any,” Cameron said, staring at Piper as if she’d said something offensive.

Lila turned back to bedroom-lined hallway. “Well? Let’s go!”
 

“Which is his room?” Piper asked Meyer.
 

“I have no idea.”

Lila marched to her father, grabbed his arm hard, and dragged. When Meyer resisted, Lila trotted off on her own, her face set and her composure barely held in check. She made it halfway down the hallway and was about to start yelling for Kindred, for Jabari, for guards that might come to put her in chains — it didn’t matter, as long as this stupid goddamned house woke up and found her little girl.

“Miss Dempsey?” said a voice.
 

Lila turned. Kamal, Jabari’s attendant or assistant or whatever, was standing behind her. He’d popped up out of nothing, like a ghost, fully dressed as if for business as usual rather than a restful night, in a sober gray suit over an open-throated white shirt, his dark skin a deep contrast beneath.
 

“Oh thank God. Mr. … ” She didn’t know his last name. “Kamal, my daughter is missing.”
 

“Missing? Oh, dear.”
 

But he didn’t move. His hands were clasped behind his back as if waiting on her at a fancy restaurant rather than skulking the hallways in the dead of night.
 

Meyer, Piper, and Cameron arrived from the rear. They were rushing, and piled up one against the other when they saw Kamal facing Lila. His dark, bushy eyebrows drew together. Seeing harried faces on four of the viceroy’s guests at once, he seemed confused.
 

“Is everything okay?”
 

“No, it’s not
okay,”
Lila spat, her impatience coming out as rudeness. “My daughter is missing!”
 

“Please. Calm down. I’m sure she’s simply gone wandering. I assure you, the home is thoroughly monitored. We will find her.”
 

“Monitored? I haven’t seen anyone!” Lila felt herself slipping into panic. The further she slid, the less she cared about her composure, about embarrassing herself. “Where are the guards? How could a little girl possibly just—”

Kamal raised a hand to stop her. “Please. Allow me to alert security.” He pulled a small device from his pocket, tapped something on its surface, then returned it. Banked lights flickered around them, and within seconds Lila heard stirrings knocking down the long hallways.
 

Cameron moved beside Lila. “Did you know we were looking for her?”
 

Kamal shook his head. “No, of course not.”
 

“What are you doing out here, then?”
 

Piper put a hand on his shoulder. “Cam … ”
 

“It’s all right, Mrs. Bannister. I’m not often out and about at night. I’m tracking down a power outage.”
 

“I didn’t notice any power troubles,” Cameron said, looking around at the still-multiplying hallway lights.
 

“No, of course you wouldn’t. It’s a contained circuit. I was alerted to a surge in this area, and just recently a … hub? … seems to have failed. But I don’t want to bore you.”
 

Cameron looked like he was about to ask more, but Titans and human guards were arriving from both in front and behind, fully dressed and carrying sidearms, called from hidden bunkers like ants in concealed pockets. Kamal explained that Clara seemed to have “wandered off” but did so with a clear implication of urgency. Then he pointed and barked orders until the troops were off again. Kamal slipped the device from his pocket, glanced at its screen as if following his people’s movements, then stowed it again.
 

“We will find her for you, Miss.” Kamal tipped his head slightly, almost a half bow. “The west wing is under construction, accessible past the kitchen. Nothing dangerous, you understand — no boards filled with screws lying around, no nail guns hooked to running compressors, nothing like that. I assure you it’s quite safe. But if I had to guess, she may have gone that way. The in-progress work is very …
cool.”
He said the word as if it were foreign to his lips. “Even Ravi isn’t immune to its charm.” He gave Lila a small, warm smile.
 

“Thank you.” And as she said it, here in the light, Lila felt suddenly stupid. Of course Clara was investigating the construction. They hadn’t seen the passage off the kitchen; they’d looped back and ended up in the living room or sitting room or whichever room held the fireplace. But it made sense. Much more than Clara vanishing into thin air or being abducted by people who needed their group’s cooperation and trust, who hadn’t even bothered to lock their doors.
 

“It’s no problem.” The device in Kamal’s pocket blipped, and he took it out to look.
 

“Did they find her?” Piper asked.
 

“No, this is an alert from the engineers. The power-surge incident I mentioned. I’ll send someone to your room to update you on the search for your daughter the minute we have one to give. Or you can retire to the grand room by the fire if you’d like.” He tipped a nod. “If you’ll excuse me.”
 

He turned to go, leaving Lila still baffled but feeling calmer beside her father, Piper, and Cameron. But after five or six steps he turned and faced them again.

“Actually, if you’d like, there’s an access point for one of the house monitoring systems in the same room where I’m headed now. It’s an Astral design, quite ingenious. I can’t guarantee that anyone saw your daughter because this part of the system taps into Astral minds and none may have spotted her, in which case we have other means. But if you’re interested … ?”
 

Lila was. Only once moving did she stop to wonder what the Astral record might show if something really had gone wrong … and the Astrals had been responsible. But the thought barely had teeth. For weeks now — and especially since they’d entered Ember Flats, where Titans and humans worked side by side like friends — she’d shed much of her fear. The Astrals hadn’t truly threatened their group for months, maybe years. During that time, the Mullah had been a much bigger threat — and thankfully, there’d be no Mullah here in the Capital of Capitals, let alone in the viceroy’s home.
 

“This way.” Kamal turned one corner and then another, not stopping until they reached the door where Lila almost thought she’d seen light earlier, the one marked
Utility Closet.

The alert blipped on the big screen in Peers’s room, across from his bed. It could be used to watch videos or even that compelling news stream (some raw, some stylized and filtered), but in their half day in the palace, he’d seen alerts as well, like the one that had summoned him to the fireside discussion with Jabari. If the alerts were specific to a room’s occupant, you could tap the screen or speak your acknowledgement aloud. If you didn’t respond after a while, the alert would make itself more obvious with an audible reminder.
 

But Peers wasn’t asleep. He wouldn’t need a chirp to wake him so he could read the alert. He was still breathing heavy, sweating, wondering if he’d actually got away clean. But he still didn’t acknowledge receipt of the message because the alert was summoning him back to where he’d just been. And if he appeared before Cameron, Meyer, Kindred, and the others with a sheen of nervous sweat, eyebrows would raise. Particularly Cameron’s. He already wondered how Peers had ended up with such clever devices and was able to understand Astral technology so well.
Because I grew up studying it like my life depended on it
probably wouldn’t dampen suspicions.
 

He moved quickly into the bathroom, knowing he could blame some of the time required by a reluctance to wake. But if the alert were true — if Clara really had run off and the whole damned house was rising to search for her — he wouldn’t have long. Eventually, they’d knock on the door, if for no other reason than to see if the girl was in his room.
 

Peers was in the bathroom when he heard a light scratching.
 

He went to the hallway door, cocking his head, then recognized the sound and opened to Nocturne. The dog slipped inside, wagging his tail, panting up at his master.
 

“Run yourself out, did you?”
 

The dog sat.
 

“Go to bed, idiot.”
 

So he did. But as Nocturne made three small circles to knead the dog bed conveniently provided by the house, Peers remembered the flash of limbs and hair he’d seen just before entering the utility closet, just around the corner ahead, where the dog had gone. Had that been Clara? Almost for sure. So she was fine, and with any luck they’d find her before Peers even finished composing himself. Then they’d broadcast a retraction alert and he could get some sleep, his telltale flushed skin and gobsmacked eyes safely hidden under covers until morning.
 

He returned to the bathroom, ran water, and splashed his face. With his eyes closed, he saw the cave in Sinai’s belly. It had all been so real. He’d smelled the gun smoke, heard the wheezing involuntary exhale as Grace died from Cameron’s gunshot — leaking lungs drowning in her own blood — and been as awed by what followed, he supposed, as the rest of them.
 

The bursting energy from the Ark as it recorded a new deed in need of judgment: a man killing a girl — by accident, yes, but the shot had been fired in defense of a previous murder.
 

The mental, timeless replay of events as Grace died: the Ark showing them all (not just Cameron, it seemed) the events in which they’d been complicit. Another nail in their coffins.
The bullet entering the girl’s chest, exploding out the back. Her shocked, almost betrayed expression as she felt the kiss of lead. The panic in her eyes. The loss of focus as she expired.
All of it played over and over on a loop, ten times at least, in the space of a second. Everyone in the cave that day carried those internal visions — and now Peers, thanks to the sphere’s immersive memory, would as well.