Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (8 page)

Piper blinked in the sun, telling herself that her eyes were on the ship and lab, not the shadow with no substance. Not the thing she felt compelled to watch even though it made her flesh crawl, because not knowing where it might be was so much worse.
 

Piper jumped when Charlie came up behind her.

“Charlie!” A few breaths. “I didn’t see you there.”
 

“It occurs to me that the situation may be different than we imagine.”
 

Piper waited for more. There was none.
 

“Why’s that, Charlie?”
 

“Benjamin said that the Templars left clues like a scavenger hunt. I can’t read runes and I don’t have his history background, so I tended to take his word.”
 

Again, Piper waited. Then she said, “Okay.”
 

“But the photo you saw, which we assume was taken in a buried temple below the Heaven’s Veil pyramid, said, ‘Device missing.’ Meaning it was taken away, again supposedly by the Templars. There were instructions, written by humans and meant to be read by other humans of the same mindset, leading to a location inside Cottonwood Canyon. But the instructions were to the plate in Cameron’s satchel, not the missing device itself. The key to start it up rather than the thing that needed starting.”

“Charlie said that Benjamin knew where Thor’s Hammer was. He didn’t actually say, though. The way Cameron tells it, he thought it was a big joke.”
 

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. That it
would
be a joke. The Templars took the key. They hid the key. So where is the Hammer? Why split them up?”
 

“Maybe it’s like hiding the gun in one place and the bullets in another.”
 

Charlie was looking at the ship. Maybe at the shadow, too.
 

“There’s more missing here than their device,” he said after a long moment.
 

“Hey, you two,” Cameron said, beckoning. He’d raised an awning on the RV’s side and had been sitting in the shade, a long power cord running from the vehicle’s interior to a folding metal chair Cameron had fashioned into his outdoor office. The setup made Piper uneasy. They were taking the ship far,
far
too much for granted. Charlie could talk all day about how this was all a shell game with each side trying to outwit the other without actually hiding, but to Piper it was more like tumbling dice. Driving away from the mothership might keep them safer or it might not, but sitting so close was spitting in fate’s eye … like Benjamin beneath it all those years ago.

Piper came forward, flanked by Charlie. Andreus and Coffey, watching them gather from a distance, came into the shade to see what was going on.
 

A collage of photos showing the blue pyramid being built in the middle of Heaven’s Veil lit Cameron’s screen.
 

“I didn’t know where to start,” he said. “Dad knew a lot about many things, and he’d spread his interests across the globe. I tried searching this drive for Thor’s Hammer, and found a lot of results. A
lot
of results. He’s been fiddling with the theory forever. But I don’t see anything concrete — just mentions of ancient doomsday weapons from religious texts, rumors, stories of vengeful gods who came from the sky. There’s so little in common between the stories — other than weapon or plague or
reset
itself — that nothing stuck out. So I set them aside. Anything before Astral Day is suspect. Too much has changed. So I started looking only at documents that mention Thor’s Hammer since that time, in the last two-plus years.”
 

Nathan looked at Charlie. “Shouldn’t you be doing this rather than Cameron?”
 

“He said I knew where it was,” Cameron said, a trifle shortly. “On the ride to Cottonwood.” He looked at Piper and related what she’d just told Charlie.
As far as historical jokes go, it’s a doozy.
 

“So where is it, Professor?”
 

Cameron shook his head. “Somewhere we went together, I guess. But we went so many places. We went to Giza. We went to Aztec and Mayan settlements, to Turkey, to the Painted Desert. We saw the Olmec heads, all over Europe, the Rose Stone. I was like luggage to my father. He had places to go, so my mom and I went too. After a while, she stopped going and stayed home. That was the beginning of the end, and I’d chosen my father by default because he kept dragging me along. When she finally left him, I was in the middle. So I spent a long time turning my back on what now, I’m supposed to see as obvious.”
 

“Egypt,” said Andreus. “That seems logical.”
 

“I guess we’ll hop on a plane,” Charlie said.
 

“There are ways.”
 

“Especially when there’s so much evidence to support such a long, dangerous trip.”
 

“Hey,” Andreus said, his brow pinching, “you were the one who said they want us to find it.”
 

Cameron raised a hand for calm. “When we were at Cottonwood, their little spy device went inside my satchel. It saw our key.” He nodded toward the mothership. “So what’s stopping them from taking it?”
 

“They tried to take it from you plenty in the mountain,” Andreus said.
 

“I think they were angry in the mountain.” Behind Andreus, Grace had emerged from the RV. He nodded toward her. “And what Grace said about their behavior in the lab proves it. In two years, we’ve never seen them react impulsively … until then. Reptars will rip people apart, but they do it efficiently, like duty. Titans smile. Everything is always precise and intentional. But we surprised them in there. We caught them with their intergalactic pants down — surprised them enough that they broke from what was precise and intentional and showed us their shape-shifting trick. But where’s that anger now?”
 

He looked at the mothership.
 

“Back to sensible. Back to waiting and watching. Seeing what we’ll do next, because they have all the time in the world.”
 

Cameron gestured to the laptop screen.
 

“I know how my dad was. He got excited, and he wasn’t good at containing his enthusiasm. Or at sitting on problems while dying to solve them.”
 

Piper looked at the images, not understanding.
 

“How often, once we discovered that little BB watching everything we did, did Benjamin ask to borrow your signal detector, Nathan?”
 

Nathan blinked as all eyes turned to him. Whatever he’d been expecting Cameron to say, that wasn’t it.
 

“A few times. How did you know?”
 

“I sorted everything on this drive by file modification date and began at the end, just to see what he’d been working on most recently. Say, after reading that Templar tablet. With your detector at his side, doing his thing whenever it told him he wasn’t being watched.”
 

Charlie crossed his arms beside Piper. He looked at the ship, and there was a small nod, as if something had suddenly made sense.
 

“The Apex,” Cameron said, still pointing at the screen. “The last subject of my father’s obsession was the blue pyramid in Heaven’s Veil. And seeing all these images and soundings and schematics makes me wonder: Why would the Templars hide the key in Little Cottonwood Canyon rather than Thor’s Hammer itself … unless they never intended to hide the Hammer at all?”
 

“You’re kidding,” said Andreus, realization dawning.
 

“What better
grand historical joke
could the Templars have pulled,” Cameron asked, “than to conceal the thing the Astrals lost — in the exact place they left it?”

Charlie was still staring at the mothership. At the energy beam connecting it to the money pit. He gave another small nod. “Vail,” he said. “Again.”

Piper followed Charlie’s gaze and saw the shadow.
 

It had come closer, as if to listen.

CHAPTER 14

Christopher didn’t listen. He went to see Lila first. Because, of course, that had been the whole idea.
 

Now that Meyer was gone — away in a trance with Divinity, according to Mo Weir, who hadn’t been given the memo — Raj was nominally in charge. It made sense. Who in the house outranked him? Who in the house (or, really, in Heaven’s Veil) could challenge him? Captain Jons, maybe. But Jons had his hands full with Reptar peacekeepers, and now this bullshit with the Apex’s power. Raj would be running the place before Jons knew what hit him.
 

For now, everyone was toeing the line. Christopher would do as ordered where his dick wasn’t concerned while the other guards licked Raj’s boots.
 

If Raj wanted snooping devices installed, he could do that kind of thing now. Meyer already had. That’s how he found out about the virus Terrence had unleashed onto the network, when it had been changing hands with … well, with Christopher. Raj had seen the recordings — right there on the house server, accessible with his plain old sysadmin access.
 

Raj went to the office down the hall. The last time he’d been in here, Heather had come in with some sort of vampy comedian routine to insult and distract him from what Terrence was up to — from what Meyer (and everyone kept forgetting this) had
let
him do. Meyer got what he had coming. Traitors got the broadsword. So it had always been; so it would always be.
 

Raj closed the door. Pulled out a tablet. And, of course, watched from the far end of Lila’s room as Christopher entered. The little bastard didn’t leave the doorway and kept checking the hallway, probably sure that the minute he unzipped, Raj would be there to cut something off.
 

Which was accurate.

But the door stayed open. Christopher stayed professional, save one telling, too-deep kiss. Clara was in the room while Lila and Christopher betrayed her daddy, back turned, her spooky internal eye surely wide open. She’d been withholding, too. She knew what the others were up to yet failed to tell her father.
 

Why was everyone against Raj? He was a good guy. Smart. Great at solving problems. He’d always tried to do the right thing. He’d stuck by Lila’s side, tried to keep her safe. But he just wasn’t goddamn good enough.
 

“Terrence is back,” Christopher told Lila on-screen.
 

Lila’s eyes, from what Raj could see, looked red. That bit of information cleared them enough to snap around, stare Christopher in the face.
 

“Back?”
 

“Upstairs.”

“Did he escape?”
 

“No. Raj has him. He’s under guard. Trying to undo what he did.”

“Mom made it sound like it wasn’t un-doable.”
 

“Who knows.” Christopher shrugged. “This is Raj we’re talking about.”
 

His skin prickled. Raj wanted to head down there, punch Christopher in the throat. He could do it, too. Get a few guards to hold him down then beat Christopher’s face off with his knuckles while his lover watched.
 

“How are you doing?” Christopher asked.
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“I haven’t heard anything. I ran into your mother. She said Mo is looking for him.”
 

“For Raj?”
 

“For your dad.”
 

Lila sniffed. The idea of an aide searching for his dead master seemed to strike her as especially sad. She sighed.
 

“What about Clara?”
 

“I can’t tell her. I just can’t, Chris. She’s adamant. Wants to go find him.” She sniffed again. “Wants to play.”
 

Lights flickered around Raj but also around Christopher and Lila. The tablet stayed on, as both it and the spy device ran on internal power. The signal was over the air, not the net.
 

“Terrence?” Lila said.
 

“The house has its own power. But it’s … infected somehow. The rest of the city is another problem. I’m headed to Captain Jons.”
 

That must have rung a bell for Lila because she sort of blinked then stepped past Christopher to peek into the hall. Like Christopher, she didn’t feel confident enough to close the door but did lower her voice and pull them deeper into the suite. Toward Raj’s listening device, as luck would have it.
 

“Do the police watch city security? Is that something Jons handles?”
 

“Some. Well … mostly?”
 

“You’re not sure?”
 

“It’s the outage. Terrence might be able to shunt some stuff around, but I doubt he’s trying. Or if he is, he’s hoping to reestablish a line to the others.”
 

Raj sat up straighter.
Line to the others?
This just got juicy.
 

“Can he talk to them? Can he get them a message?”