Judgment (42 page)

Peers looked up, a thought dawning. “The tunnels. There used to be tunnels all over, deep down. Far under the sand, restored by the Mullah.”
 

“How do you know that?” Jeanine asked.
 

Peers rushed on, ignoring her.

“I
know
, Ravi. The Mullah say they must be here when judgment comes, when the Ark is opened. But I can take her away. I of all people. I can take them
all
away, any who remain in the house. Even Dempsey if he returns.
Especially
Dempsey! You must see the signs; you know at least part of this has to be true.
The King,
Ravi! ‘Out of two, one.’ Meyer Dempsey and his clone, together, must be the King the scrolls speak of! The Mullah won’t show him the old tunnels, but they’re the only way out. He must escape. You
know
it! So how, if not with my help?”
 

“What the fuck are you talking about, Peers?” Jeanine said.

Peers was shaking his head, walking forward, all the old Mullah legends coming back like he’d read them yesterday.

“Let me take them, Ravi. You’re serving destiny by forcing the Ark to open. So let me serve it next. Meyer and Kindred did all of this for Clara; they won’t leave without the girl, so we need to find her before he returns.
The scrolls say the King survives!
Put the puzzle together, will you?”
 

Ravi looked uncertain. The gun lowered a little but not nearly far enough to leap for and grab. Jeanine was still staring as Peers let his Mullah all hang out. Still he pressed on, imploring the kid with hard eyes.
 

On the screen, Jabari stepped down. Meyer, with his blue tie, appeared in her place, and in Peers’s higher mind, the entire human race seemed to sigh.
 

“You can’t know he’ll be chosen as the King,” Ravi said.
 

But Peers knew he had him; the kid was on the ropes.
 

“I was young and stupid once. I did something nearly as dumb as you’re doing right now. It lost me my family and friends, all of whom turned away and cast me out. I know you think you’re doing what’s right, and that nobody else will do it if you don’t step in. What’s done is done, for better or worse. But don’t make it worse. Tell me where to find Clara. Tell me where the other Mullah have her.”
 

“You … ” Ravi stuttered. “The tunnels out of the city. You won’t be able to open them without an elder ring.”

“I’ve opened those locks before. You just need three points of conductive metal and … ”
 

“What locks? When? Where?” Now Ravi was unraveling. He was only a teenager, and now, as Peers kicked the bedrock out from under him, his panicked youth was showing.
 

“Here! In the palace!”
 

“The tunnel locks are ancient.”
 

“And years ago! Twenty years ago, on the most ancient locks of all, in the temple!”
 

Ravi’s frenzied expression gave way to one of study, of uncertainty.
 

“You opened a lock in the temple? Beyond the elders?”
 

“Yes! And I can get them through the tunnels if you’ll just make up your goddamned mind to—”

Ravi was shaking his head slowly, in disbelief. “No.”
 

“Don’t be an idiot! Let us go, Ravi! It’s done!” He jabbed a finger at the screen, where one Meyer Dempsey had joined another. The feeling of anticipation and warning in the air was like static, raising the hair on his arms. “You feel it, don’t you? Cameron will put the key in the Ark any second. You won, okay? You got what you wanted. None of this matters anymore.
Now let us go!”
Peers nudged Kamal with his foot. With any luck, the man would die before he awoke, the lucky bastard.
 

But Ravi was just repeating that one word, his eyes wide. He wasn’t denying Peers’s request. He was simply refusing to believe the dawning realization.
 

“No. No.”
 

“Ravi! Think!”
 

He went to the door. He opened it.
 

“The Fool,”
he hissed.
 

Then he ran, leaving Peers and Jeanine alone with a snoring Kamal.
 

It began as a whisper. Then it came at him like a wave.

Cameron held the key above the round indentation, recalling his grandfather’s ancient record player. Time to drop a platter, put the needle in the groove — then dance until the world ended.
 

But then he heard someone in the corner of his mind. It seemed to echo, doubled on itself as if shouted into a cavernous space, the reverberated shout then dialed down to barely audible. He remembered the monolith repeaters, remembered the way walking between lines of similar stones seven years ago had first connected Piper’s mind to his.
 

It was the broadcast. Meyer and Kindred had told the city about Heaven’s Veil, and the Astrals hadn’t cut it off. They’d let it go out.
 

It meant that the twin Dempseys hadn’t just told Ember Flats about the alien treachery, about the way viceroys had been replaced, about annihilating an entire capital to generate an emotional outcry that would let them triangulate on the Ark’s hidden location.
 

It meant they’d told every capital all of those things.

The whispered shout doubled in Cameron’s mind. It tripled. It felt suddenly like his hair was being lifted by a gentle breeze, though no wind was stirring. And still he looked toward the square with the key still mostly steady and held high, squinting into that invisible wind. It wasn’t just a breeze. It was the sigh preceding a storm: a forecast of something much stronger on the way.
 

Then it hit him: all the fear. All the anger. All the betrayal and grief and anguish. All the dredged-up memories. The breaking of trust, shattered like china on the floor. A million voices spoke at once, all in reaction, trying to make sense of something insensible, lost and floating, no longer able to find the ground below them.
 

But the thoughts and whispers weren’t for Cameron. They were for the Ark.
 

He could almost see it streaking past him now: faint veins of light soaring through the air — many in a gentle arc from the square; some from the sky itself, from half a planet away. They stirred Cameron’s hair in their passage and dove into the chest, building its energy. Building its indignation and fright and anger.
 

Still the key hovered, held above the keyhole by Cameron’s hands. He’d begun to shake, but he didn’t pull the key away. Some deep part of himself held his limbs in place like an iron fist. He’d been here before; he’d run once, when things had gone bad, and yet here he was again. If he ran this time, a small part of him felt sure he’d spend more years wandering, chased and fleeing, only to end up in the same place a decade older, no more sure than he was now.
 

Take a leap of faith.
 

But it wasn’t really Cameron’s voice. It was his father’s. And not the voice of the Pall in masquerade but of Benjamin Bannister himself.
 

It’s the wrong choice,
Cameron thought, the key still unmoving, six inches from the platter-like keyhole.
 

Maybe it’s neither right nor wrong. Maybe it is what it is.
 

It’s the wrong choice!

A wave of incoming emotion jolted him. He almost dropped the key then nearly wished he had. But did it matter? If this was destiny, the key could never break. It’d grip his hands, holding on until the deed was done.
 

The jolt rattled Cameron’s brain in his skull. Something clattered at his neck, and then there was a loose thing dangling just below his vision, tugging minutely at him.
 

Cameron looked down. It was the coin on the lanyard his father had given him: the thing Mara Jabari had called a
mau
.
 

And Benjamin’s voice inside his head — a voice from something above, something Cameron might have thought came from the realm of souls if he’d believed — said,
Are you absolutely
sure
it’s the wrong choice?

He waited for something to happen as the world screamed around him. As the indignation and torment from the capital buzzed by, making the Ark glow and shake as if in fury. He waited for an unseen hand to grip the key, tug it into its slot, and force the unlocking. He waited for a blast of air to unseat him again, tossing the key away to shatter. But nothing happened. Cameron’s arms were sure as they held the thing, neither urging him to mate key and hole nor pressing him away.
 

It was his decision alone.
 

The Ark was practically vibrating, reminding Cameron of furious hornets.
 

But he didn’t quite want to run. He didn’t want to leave. He was terrified out of his mind yet frozen in place, in the no man’s land between
this
and
that
.

“Tell me what to do,” he whispered.
 

Nobody answered.
 

Nothing answered.

He watched the keyhole. A circle with ridges at the edges to match the key. Turning it in Heaven’s Veil, Cameron often thought, had killed Heather. She’d sent him out, making his distraction. Then she’d stayed behind to die. Because of him.
 

This time, turning the key might kill nearly all of humanity.
 

And yet he couldn’t go. The stone’s faintly glowing circle shone up at his face, illuminating it, captivating him.

In his mind — this time as a memory — Cameron heard Benjamin’s voice. It had been the Pall speaking and yet somehow his father, too.
 

I’m proud of you, kiddo.
 

Cameron pressed the key into the keyhole.

A skim of metal slid from somewhere and covered it, locking his decision into place.
 

The very walls of the buildings around the courtyard seemed to shriek as the world cried out, as the ground shook, as the air filled with an ominous hum. Cameron felt a new mind join the others, sifting data, weighing with a grudge, dealing through humanity’s past with gritted teeth and absolute fury in its every mental movement.
 

He turned to run, but his hands seemed fixed to the Ark’s top corners. Nothing seemed to be holding them, except that he couldn’t pull them away. The glowing surface under his fingers felt like it was changing, molding itself to his touch in the same way the key had always felt so comfortable in his hands. His eyes saw no difference, but the feeling was that of new hands reaching out, intertwining its fingers with his own, holding tight.

It was the wrong choice,
Cameron thought.

He could already feel the archive’s fury beginning to boil. He felt himself bleed into the Astral mind as the Ark held him, making him complicit, making him part of this. As his mind reached out, he realized something wasn’t right. The archive wasn’t supposed to
have
any anger. It wasn’t supposed to be Morgan Matthews; it wasn’t supposed to present in prejudgment at all. But it couldn’t help itself, not now, not as the thoughts of the people across Ember Flats streamed into the thing he and the archive had conjoined to become. Inside his mind he watched oil mix with water, acid with base, fire with ice, matter with antimatter. The brew’s percolations reached a fever pitch as Divinity seemed to watch it all from above, from over Cameron’s shoulder.

The Ark was a wild animal stalked by a predator, terrified of the dark. A startled rattlesnake, coiled to strike. A roused mother, protecting its young. Its entire lid had slid into its sides, leaving the top open and churning, swirling down into an unfathomable void of human experience. To Cameron it looked like a brewing storm. Like death on her way.
 

Now run,
the Pall seemed to whisper in Cameron’s ear, though he saw it nowhere. The voice was somehow inside the Ark now, from its guts. From the primal infection that human emotion had wrought on what was supposed to be a simple, objective process.
Run back to Piper.
 

But as Cameron held the Ark, snippets of truth kept flitting through his mind.
 

The Astrals knew about Jabari’s exodus plan. They’d accounted for it. The Astrals knew whom they planned to spare and who would perish. There was no true future. There was only inevitability in Divinity’s mind. The balance of justice was weighted, and judgment — for most, at least — had been rendered while the archive’s guts choked on human poison, well before the top had been opened.

Guilty.
 

Cameron would run to Piper and Lila.
 

The Dark Rider, as the Astral mind knew the Mullah called it, would come.

Then they all would die.

There was no need for deliberation. No need for the jury to leave the room to deliberate. The equation was already solved. The way was already decided, already blocked. The Astrals knew about the Messiah. They knew about the Cradle. And three little people who’d already served their purpose meant nothing.