Judgment (7 page)

“If you let me in, we can get to know each other more easily.”
 

With the girl’s words, Peers felt the most curious sensation, like someone palming his brain, squeezing it gently, curious about what was inside.
 

“My mom doesn’t trust you … ” She trailed off, waiting for Peers to repeat his name.
 

“Peers.”
 

“Peers,”
Clara repeated. But he was sure she’d known it already, and that this was a link in a long chain of subtle manipulation. Some of the region’s guerrillas were excellent at building false trust, and this felt the same. “She doesn’t trust you. But you don’t scare me, Peers.”
 

“That’s good. I’m not a scary person.”
 

“If you let me in,” she said as the gentle pressure inside his skull reasserted itself, “I can tell that to the others, and they’ll believe me.”
 

Peers flexed a tiny interior muscle. He felt Clara’s probing mental hand forced back.
 

“I’d really rather not. Nothing personal. But I believe intentions are best demonstrated the old-fashioned way.”
 

He thought Clara might protest — or possibly sound an alarm that their abductor was not to be trusted — but instead her body relaxed and the hand retreated, both from atop his own and from inside his mind. Then she was just another girl, half-slouched in the seat across from him.
 

“It’s Clara, right?” he said.
 

Clara nodded.
 

“I’ll tell you a secret if you’d like.”
 

“Do I have to keep it quiet?”
 

“Only if you choose to.”
 

“Then it’s not much of a secret, is it?”
 

“That’s for you to decide.”

Clara straightened, clearly interested.
 

“I do know who you are. And I did know you were in that cave.”
 

He thought Clara might react with suspicion, but she merely raised her eyebrows quizzically. Their voices were low, and the row behind them was empty. This truly was a secret for as long as Clara wished it to be.

“I have friends who know far more than I do. I met many of them in England, while at Oxford.”

“I’ve never been to London,” Clara said, somehow delighted by the notion of another strange land.
 

“It used to be a beautiful place, like your Heaven’s Veil. And my friends, they shared many images when the Internet was still open and free. Some small computer networks — not many, but some — are still active. And my friends, they told us about you.”
 

“What did they tell you?”
 

Peers nodded toward the back of the bus.
 

“That man there is Cameron Bannister. His father was Benjamin Bannister.”
 

“He still has nightmares about his father.”

Somehow Peers felt sure that she wasn’t speaking from conversations with Cameron or overheard nighttime voices but as someone who’d sampled those dreams in her mind.
 

“Benjamin was an important man. He sent a lot of information to my friends. And so we know.” Peers paused, reminding himself that Clara had probably already figured out what he was about to admit. “We know about the key Cameron found. To the Ark.”
 

“Oh,” Clara said.
 

“That doesn’t surprise you? I’m doing my best with this secret, you know.” He put on a playful smile, but Clara only returned it out of obligation.
 

“Is that why you came? Have you been following us? Did you help us escape the Astrals because of the key?”
 

“Partially,” Peers said. “But there are other reasons. Your grandfather, there, for instance? He knows things that my friends might very much like to hear, about the Astrals.”
 

Clara finally laughed, pointing away from where Peers held his finger.
 

“That’s
my grandfather. The other one is Kindred.”
 

“See, Clara? This is why it’s good we’ve met.”
 

“Kindred used to be one of them. But they changed him. He’s let me in, all the way. So I know he can still sense the Astrals, but I also know he can’t go back, or maybe
wouldn’t
go back. His body could change if it wanted, but he’s human now in all the ways that count, and so he won’t ever do it. He’s angry, and would never join them again.”
 

“What’s he angry about?”
 

“The Astrals killed his son. My uncle. And they killed my grandma. He used to be married to her a long time ago.”
 

“But wasn’t it Meyer’s son? The human Meyer? And it was the human Meyer who was married to your grandmother.”
 

Clara shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. They’re the same person, inside and out. He’s the same as my grandpa. They
both
married my grandma. They
both
had a son who was killed.”
 

“That must make for strange family reunions.”
 

“They both were married to Grandma Piper,” Clara said, as if this explained the situation, or gave it a finer point. “And now that she’s married to Cameron, they both still love her.”
 

Peers decided not to pry. He should keep his distance from these people, hard as it would be.

“So that’s why you’re here.” Clara’s hands were folded in her lap and she’d looked down while speaking, as if some horrid realization had dawned, and turned her into a child again.
 

“Why do you feel I’m here?” Peers asked.
 

“To make us go back.”
 

“Back where?”

“To the Ark.”

“Back?”
Peers repeated. “So you’ve been there before? To Ember Flats?”
 

Clara’s brow wrinkled, looking as though she didn’t know where the Astrals had taken the Archive after they’d followed its scream to Mount Sinai, where the Templars had stowed it — probably with some sense of historical irony. But everyone knew the Ark was in Ember Flats. If the world had a logo these days, that was it: the Ark on its enormous stone plinth in the city’s center, waiting to be unlocked like Excalibur waiting to be pulled from the stone. Peers had friends who’d tried to protect the Ark in its old location, to beat the Astrals to it once it had screamed with Heaven’s Veil’s death, as a tidal wave of agony had rushed toward the ancient recording device. But you didn’t need to have seen it carted off to know its location. The Astrals weren’t hiding it. Anyone who could fight their way into Ember Flats could walk right up to the thing and touch it.
 

“No. We went to the old place.”
 

“To Mount Horeb?”
 

Clara nodded. “Cameron and his dad thought of it as Mount Sinai, but yes.”
 

Peers was floored. The scholars had been right all along. The Bannisters had found the key where the Templars had hidden it, and they’d reached the similarly hidden Ark before the Astrals had triangulated on the Heaven’s Veil scream. Some claimed the Bannister group didn’t actually reach the Ark first, and that the Astrals had stepped out of the way to let them at it. Only the Mullah would have stood in their way, and if Clara was telling the truth, they’d actually made it.
 

They’d reached the Ark. They’d stood in front of it in its ancient resting place and the birthplace of its legend.

But if that was true, why was the key still unused in Bannister’s satchel?

Before Peers could ask for more, he he saw Clara’s hands knot more rapidly in her lap and a tear drip down her cheek.
 

She looked up. “Don’t take us to the Ark, Mr. Peers. Anything but that.”
 

He looked from the girl to the road ahead then toward the side of the bus where something again seemed to race past in the corner of his eye.

“We’ll be at my place soon,” Peers told her, his gut somehow troubled. “And then we can rest.”

Piper looked across the aisle at Lila then at Clara asleep against her mother’s side. Lila looked over, but the two women said nothing. There was a quiet spell over the bus.
 

Nobody seemed to know if they’d done the right or wrong thing in climbing aboard. There’d always been a 50/50 chance that the junker who’d ferried them to the ancient city would have stuck around as Cameron had asked, and those odds had grown substantially worse, Piper felt sure, when the shuttle full of Astrals had plopped its fat silver body down at the cave’s mouth. Maybe the aliens had killed the man out of hand. But more likely, he’d simply run back to his quasi-legal business and left their group stranded.
 

They were supposed to be able to live there. Either the underground city was occupied by the rumored community, or it was empty, in which case their motley crew would have made it home for a while — far enough from their troubles to almost forget them, never close enough to their old homes overseas to merit much fussing. Piper felt sure she’d die over here somewhere — maybe soon, or maybe in decades. Either way she’d seen the last of America. It was silly to let that bother her. There wasn’t any America anymore, anyway.
 

Piling into Peers’s armored bus had been their only option. He and Aubrey seemed like respectable enough men. Even the dog — Nocturne — had spent a good portion of the trip patrolling the aisles, licking hands to welcome the visitors, curled up on the floor beside Charlie, who turned out to have a surprising fondness for animals. Better with them than humans, anyway.
 

Clara blinked awake as if feeling Piper’s glance. Lila looked over as well. Piper didn’t need to see their eyes to sense their emotions. The feeling was bone deep.
 

“Have a good nap, kiddo?” Piper asked.
 

Clara nodded against Lila’s side. It would have been easy, in this moment, to believe Clara was just another seven-year-old kid. But it wasn’t Clara’s simple nod that stopped her. It was her own use of the word “kiddo.” An older one of her words — one she’d sometimes used with Trevor, back before the world had gone sour.
 

“Saw you talking to Mr. Peers before.”
 

“It’s just Peers, Piper.”
 

Piper let a smile touch her lips. It was so easy to speak to Clara like a child, but she seldom replied as one.
 

“What did you talk about?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

Piper turned to Cameron, on her other side. She was about to speak, but Cameron was already in her head.
 

“My gut says he’s safe,” he said.
 

“Think so, do you?”
 

“They let us keep our weapons. There are seven adults in our group and only two of them. And we still have … ” He trailed off, ticking his head toward the window, seeming to indicate the silent and only probably presence of the Pall outside. “That dog’s not exactly a killer, either. So if Peers intends to shanghai us, he’s not going about it intelligently. And he did get us out of there.”
 

“He could be Mullah.”
 

Cameron patted his satchel, which still contained the stone disk. “If he were Mullah, he would have already taken what we have.”
 

“You sure about that?”
 

Cameron’s hand moved to his chest. He probably didn’t even realize what he was doing, but Piper had spotted him doing it more and more as they retraced the old archaeological stomping grounds he’d once trod with his father. He was touching that charm he wore around his neck, the old coin with the square hole in its center, dangling from a leather lanyard. The coin Charlie had found in the tiny cache of Benjamin’s belongings, and Cameron had pounced upon like Gollum to his Precious.
 

“I’m sure.”
 

But he wasn’t. He didn’t know more than any of them.

Cameron took Piper’s hand. “All I know is that Derinkuyu was a bad end. If Peers says he has a hideout and wants to take us there, maybe it’ll be what we need.”

Piper wasn’t as sure. Derinkuyu hadn’t been a bad end until the aliens had poured inside it. And nothing about the encounter felt entirely right. The Astrals’ pursuit felt wrong, seeing as they’d already gone to the archive and then let them be. And the way they’d simply backed off, after pinning them in the caves? That didn’t feel right, either. The sudden and fortuitous appearance of their rescuers was another itch atop many. But as the Astrals worked with the remaining capitals and the mind network had strengthened, coincidence had become more the norm than an oddity.
 

Piper let it go, watching the parched land surrender to even more withered, shriveled desert. There were no gangs, no marauders, no pirate groups come to steal their precious weapons and fuel. But that was another question: Unless Peers had shady connections, how did he get the gas required to drive his rig?