Judgment (35 page)

The next day passed.
 

Then the day after that.
 

Clara still hadn’t been found.

Piper stalked the halls, searching for remnants of emotion. Sometimes she took Meyer with her because he’d walked the fine line between Astral and human. Sometimes she took Kindred because he was even more plugged into the Astral collective (or at least, he felt it at times even if it defiantly barred him), and walking with Kindred awoke a different part of Piper than time with Meyer. It was odd: The men were identical in every measurable way besides temperament, and Piper had bedded down with and been married to both — individually at first, then in the strange but also strangely fitting three-way bigamist’s paradise they’d tried after she’d found herself with duplicates. And yet her relationship with each now felt distinct, like a before and after, though neither was better or worse.
 

Sometimes, she walked the halls with Lila, and often felt the strongest clues. Even with Lila, what Piper felt of Clara was like little more than a scent left behind — cinnamon tea brewed long ago in one spot, with its aroma still lingering — but finding those clues was better than nothing. Better than lying around in bed all day; better than watching videos in her room or together with the others in one of the lounges; better than accepting the staff’s offers of massages and time in the hot tub to release tension. Better, even, than sex — though Cameron dealt differently than Piper, and she didn’t blame him. Their few tumbles had taken her mind from troubles for a few minutes even if she’d been too distracted for climax.
 

There was a time when Piper would have sat back and accepted the situation: Clara was being held by unfriendly forces; those forces couldn’t be found or reasoned with, in part because everyone felt sure there was a traitor among them; the chance to fulfill the ransom and free Clara was still a day away, so there was, practically speaking, no point in fretting. But that was then, and this was now. Piper was no longer that woman. She’d been little more than baggage when Meyer had dragged the family across the country to his Axis Mundi, and she’d been a mostly complicit dishrag during her two years as queen of Heaven’s Veil. For five years after she’d faced lean living, deathly challenges, heartbreak, and horror. Some of the people once dearest to her were dead. And she’d reached her limit: no more would join them.
 

Maybe Clara was unreachable. It certainly felt that way when she prowled the palace, entirely unimpeded by Jabari, her people, or the Astrals. But she wouldn’t just sit and wait to see what happened. She wouldn’t accept massages and mud-cake facials. She wouldn’t betray that little girl by giving up, or sighing and saying, “We’ll have to wait and see” like everyone else seemed to be.
 

Piper seemed able to extend her emotional antennae — that curious sense of extended empathy she’d been growing while Kindred and Meyer were nurturing their hybrid mind — further out when she walked with others. But mostly, she walked alone.
 

Piper stopped. Inhaled. There was nothing, literally, on the air, but she closed her eyes and allowed herself to feel the breath sliding inside her. She tried to empty her mind, to let the sense/scent come to her. And she thought, as Piper always did in the wing where they all stayed, that she could indeed feel a lingering trail of Clara’s essence. But it might also be all in her head; she might be fooling herself into believing something she desperately needed to.

But with her eyes closed and her mind on her breath, Piper could almost feel a sense of Clara passing, as if she were scampering by on silent feet. And a feeling of …
 

Companionship?

Fellowship?

But no, it was subtly different. This was sort of like a game. Maybe like a game of leading and following. Like hide and seek.

But the feeling was already gone.
 

Piper resumed walking. Through the kitchen. Through the second entrance to the kitchen and into the construction area. The project wing was very human. Piper saw boards and cinderblocks and bricks and compressors and buckets of cement and compounds. There was a large padlocked tool trailer just beyond the window, accessible through a closed door. The kind of thing she might have seen on any construction site before the world had ever heard of the Astrals. Before —

(It’s this way)

Piper stopped midstride, then slowly turned. The sense of something nearly heard or seen or felt, like an apparition’s whisper, called her back into and through the kitchen. Back to the hallway. But it wasn’t just Clara’s emotion — someone else had left something behind.
 

Two people.

The first was at an angle, at a featureless wall. The feeling Piper seemed to sense was as flat as the wall and floor beneath it. If sensations had color, this one was black. Or white. Or perhaps colorless and clear like a glass of distilled water. She could almost feel it, and yet its vacancy offered presence.
 

Confused, Piper followed the other, all too aware that she was probably full of shit and grasping at straws like an idiot. Meyer hadn’t even understood why Piper did yoga beyond its physical benefits, so she’d explained the sense of integration or spiritual calm it gave her. He’d definitely never have understood Piper’s preoccupation with her many New Age interests, so she’d kept them out of sight on her Vellum. But sometimes, at night, she used to swear she could rise above her body. It was mind-trick bullshit, but she’d always wanted to believe, and often chose to. The difference, Piper suspected, might be semantic.
 

This felt like that. Like something the old Meyer would laugh at — something that was nothing. But still she walked, trying to calm her mind, reminding herself that she’d guessed correctly more often than not in recent months, about hidden emotions and motives. And hey, wasn’t that what all those New Age authors said? That we were all one, in a big energy collective?
 

And if that was too hard to believe, hadn’t she and Cameron shared thoughts after passing through those twin lines of monolithic stones? Hadn’t Lila sworn she could hear unborn Clara speaking from the womb back at the Axis Mundi, and hadn’t Heather been sure she’d been able to hear Meyer — or possibly Kindred? Didn’t the Astrals communicate with their minds? And hadn’t Cameron and Charlie both said that ancient societies — of humans, not Astrals — were supposedly psychically connected?

If all of that could be true, Piper wasn’t about to beat herself up for trying to help — even if it meant hoping to find Clara using what amounted to Scooby Sense.
 

But this wasn’t fear Piper thought she could feel. This was interest. Almost
obsessive
. And really, the intensity of that compulsive, shocked curiosity was a bit much for a seven-year-old girl, even as precocious as Clara was. So it was someone else. Someone adult, who’d felt something strong and compelling in this very same hallway.
 

Was Clara the object of that obsession? A chilling thought. Piper could almost imagine some creep stalking the girl through the halls, mere feet behind her without the girl knowing, his arms finally reaching out in disturbing lust when she was most remote and vulnerable and …
 

But no. She’d stopped in front of the utility closet. Where Kamal had taken them to peruse security footage, before he’d realized the surveillance system was down.

“Hello, Piper.”

Piper almost jumped. She turned around, heart racing, hand on chest, unable to hide the depth of her scare. She felt suddenly guilty and ashamed, as if caught masturbating.
 

But the man behind her was unmoving, standing with his arms at his sides, a somehow-still-intact, somehow-still-unfashionable short-sleeve dress shirt tucked in over brown slacks. His hair had grown long during their wandering but now was freshly cut, trimmed back to something horridly boring. His glasses were perched in their normal place, bug eyes assessing her from beneath them.
 

“Charlie. You scared me.”

“What are you doing out here?”

Charlie looked like he was trying to speak, but no words came out. Then there was a curious electronic sound — like an amplifier experiencing feedback issues — and Charlie started mid-sentence.
 

“Really does know what she’s talking about.”

“What?”
 

“You don’t trust her, do you?”
 

“Who?”
 

There was another of those curious noises. Charlie blinked, then said, “Jabari.”
 

“I trust her enough.”
 

“But not all the way.”
 

“You’ve heard what she wants Kindred and Meyer to do. Do you really think that’s wise?”
 

“I don’t honestly have an opinion,” Charlie said. “I’m impartial.”
 

“Cameron told me the Mullah note said he needed to open the Ark. But what have we done? We’ve just been sitting around.”
 

“Waiting for the State of the City address.”
 

“One doesn’t have to do with another.”
 

“They all feel that the best chance of opening the Ark without undue … interference? … is to make sure attention is focused elsewhere. All of Ember Flats turns out for the State of the City.”
 

“But we’re wasting days.”
 

“The Mullah will wait. They’d agree with Jabari’s thinking.”
 

“How could you possibly know that?”
 

Charlie touched his chin. “Funny thing. In the past, the amount of information the Ark has needed to collect must have been much less than it is now. Not just smaller populations but smaller minds. The way it’s had to work this time must be so inefficient, don’t you think? These days you keep so much of your brains out on the Internet.”
 

“The Internet is gone.”
 

“True. So where are your brains now?”
 

Charlie was always strange, but this was particularly odd. Where did he keep
his
brain, if he was going to talk in second person?

“If I were the archive, I’d be confused,” said Charlie.
 

“What’s that mean?”
 

“I don’t know. I’m confused.”
 

“Charlie … ”
 

“When you went to the Ark before, did it surprise you what came out?”
 

“Did it surprise
you?”
Piper said, tiring of his posturing. He’d always been like this. Superior, putting himself one step ahead.
 

“Actually, yes. I felt almost vindictive. Which is strange.”
 

“What do you want, Charlie?” Piper wanted him to leave her alone so she could go into the utility closet and spend some time feeling its aura. Chances were excellent she’d simply leave ten minutes later feeling like an idiot and knowing nothing, but it beat double-talk with King Awkward.

“You’ve been to court, haven’t you? With Meyer.”
 

“Once. Why?”
 

“The judge. Was she … stoic?”
 

“She was normal. She was a judge.”
 

“Hmm. If you’d gone in and she’d been wildly emotional, do you think that would have mattered?”
 

“What?”
 

“Would you have pled your case differently if the judge was manic? If she was depressed?”
 

“I think we’d have requested a new trial date if the judge had been unstable.”
 

“Do you think she’d have made mistakes?”
 

“You mean in the verdict? I don’t know, Charlie; it was an intellectual property thing with Quirky Q, and it took half the ‘trial’ just to explain what the hell my business was about, and even then—”

“I’ll bet,” Charlie said, finger to lips, “a judge who was used to being calm and impartial — but who suddenly found him- or herself dealing with too much emotion and too much confusing evidence … I’ll bet that judge would render a …
sloppy
judgment.”
 

“Okay.” Now literally tapping her foot. “Did you need something?”
 

Charlie’s eyes blinked back from thoughtful to present. He opened his mouth, but again nothing came out.
 

She rotated to the utility closet. “We’ll talk later, Charlie. Go get a glass of water.”
 

“Jabari wants Kindred and Meyer to make their appearance in front of Ember Flats while Cameron is sneaking over to open the Ark,” Charlie said, his voice forcing Piper to turn back toward him. “But if the archive reacted with anger before, maybe it’s best not to give it a big, loud background of emotion elsewhere in the city. She wants to create a distraction, but maybe instead all that commotion will be like a bunch of noisy kids screaming while you’re trying to think. And maybe … ” He began losing his voice in spurts, like intermittent laryngitis. “Works so that … Meyer and Ki … tomorrow.”
 

“What’s wrong with you?”
 

Charlie said nothing, not smiling. Very like Charlie, but at least he was finally leaving her alone.
 

“And yet the more riled up it is once Cameron opens … sure, it’ll be tense and furious, but maybe it’ll be like that judge having a bad day, and make unfortunate mistakes.”
 

 
Piper didn’t know what to say, so she turned back to the door as if to remind herself that it was still there. She touched it then decided she was no longer feeling all that woo-woo. Crusader or not — determined not to quit like the others or not — Piper still got plenty tired, and Charlie’s infuriating, obtuse presence had, as always, exasperated her into a puddle. She wanted to take a brief nap and come back later.
 

She turned back to Charlie.