Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (21 page)

They may have been followed. Tracked by the mothership or shuttles despite their care at staying low and keeping the open sky eclipsed. Raj might be bringing the first drop of a flood. He’d had viceroy access for a few minutes there, before Meyer had shown up. He might have received a message directly from the Astrals, and the weapon on his belt might even have an Astral-ordered bullet inside it, meant for him.
 

“Where is Jons,
Christopher?” Raj repeated.
 

“In his office.” Christopher didn’t point, but his gaze did.
 

Raj turned and headed for the open door. When he arrived, Christopher tried to shoot Jons a warning:
Treat this one differently. Something has changed.
But the chief saw Raj before he saw Christopher, and where Chris had contained himself, Jons openly laughed. The big man’s cavernous chest made a booming sort of guffaw, rich and dark like a thunderhead.
 

“You finally say the wrong thing to Ms. Hawthorne?”
 

Christopher turned to watch Raj’s profile, sweat threatening to form on his scalp. He saw Raj scrunch his lips. He didn’t retort, or answer, issuing a demand without pause.

“Where are they?”

Jons’s face became serious. This was his castle, and he wasn’t used to being pushed about by skinny little assholes.
 

“Who?” Jons replied.
 

“Cameron Bannister’s group.”

Jons finally noticed Christopher beside Raj. A telltale look passed between them and, it seemed, wasn’t lost on Raj. Jons, like Christopher, was probably trying to remember what he was officially supposed to know. They’d been sent to the gate, and then all hell had broken loose once the Titans started throwing uncharacteristic punches.
 

“I have no idea,” Jons said.
 

“No idea what I’m talking about?”
 

“I know what you’re talking about. The people come into the city. Don’t puff up your chest to me, little man.”
 

Christopher hoped that was right. Officially, without information they weren’t supposed to have, did they know people were supposed to be coming in? That they were dissidents? That the group was supposed to include Cameron?
 

“So where are they?”
 

“I told you. I have no idea.”
 

“You’re the chief of police.”
 

Jons stood in one heavy motion. His giant black hands clapped the desk’s surface. Satisfyingly, Raj flinched like a man afraid of being hit — probably because he so recently had been.
 

“And you’re the grand poobah of the motherfucking mansion guard! So why don’t
you
tell
me
? Maybe you can let us know what happened out there. Why those Titans lost their shit. Why — ”

Raj looked blindsided. “What happened with the Titans?”
 

But Jons was on the offensive, coming around the desk now, not slowing.
 

“They just
let the rebels go
instead of picking them up. You want to tell me
that
, you’ve got the viceroy’s ear? Takes one or two peacekeepers to catch anyone they want to grab in the open. Maybe a few more Titans. But this time — ” Something furrowed Jons’s brow as if he’d just recalled it. He looked at Christopher, asking an unspoken question. “And what the shit was happening to those Titans, anyway? To their skin and bodies?”
 

Christopher felt himself blink in shock. He’d pushed that away, losing it in the frenzy of shuttling their wards away and fearing capture themselves. By the time he’d thought back to events in the square, he’d convinced himself that hadn’t happened — especially given how blocked their view had been from the group’s rear. He hadn’t really seen Titans seem to form scales, their eyes to change color, their hands to grow claws and their mouths to bloom needle-like teeth and begin to glow. It felt too surreal, except that now it seemed Jons had seen it too.
 

“You’re saying they
escaped?”
Raj’s voice was thick with unbelieving accusation.
 

“Of course they escaped! Where the hell have you been?”
 

Raj looked caught between righteousness and supplication. Should he be angry at being excluded or timid because he was so far out of the loop that he was embarrassing himself?
 

Raj looked hard at Jons, who stared just as hard back. He seemed to be weighing a decision. Finally, he reached it, grabbed Christopher by the arm, and shoved him into the room. Given Raj’s own precarious state, Christopher was amazed he’d been able to manage.
 

“Christopher is a dissident,” Raj said. “You don’t have
them?
Arrest
him
. Then make him talk.”
 

“What the fuck are you jawing about, Gupta?”
 

“I have proof.”
 

“Show me,” Jons challenged.
 

Christopher could see doubt in the big man’s eyes. Doubt in himself, in the ability to hold his own farce, maybe in his ability to shuttle off another via the Underground Railroad when he’d already let two escape.

Raj hesitated. Christopher wanted to exhale, but Raj’s eyes flicked directly at him. Jons had called his bluff. Either there wasn’t proof after all, or there was a problem with what he had.
 

“Come back to the house. It’s on the CC system. On my tablet.”
 

“I got more shit to do right now than going to your place for home movies. You got something to say, you bring it to me.” Jons saw the opportunity to twist the knife deeper and did. “Come to think about it, you got something to prove, why didn’t you bring this
evidence bomb
with you?”
 

“I didn’t think of it,” Raj said, his voice turning slightly pouty.
 

“Who beat you up, Gupta?” Jons demanded, moving in for the kill.
 

“That’s not your concern.”
 

“Was it Dempsey?”
 

Raj said nothing.
 

“Mmm-hmm. I heard about that. You turn on the big man then try to kill him. Somehow, someone takes pity on you instead of tossing your ass into one of my cells, and you keep running around trying to cause trouble instead of quitting while you’re miraculously ahead.” Jons nodded. “Yeah. I think in the viceroy’s shoes, I’d have kicked your ass, too.”
 

“I have proof against Meyer Dempsey, too.”
 

“Great,” Jons said. “So you just take that ‘proof’ against Meyer and your ‘proof’ against Chris, and you show it to Meyer. Try to convince
him
that he and his guard captain are a problem, because I sure as fuck don’t want to be the daddy you run to on this one.”

Raj looked like he might want to spar but seemed to realize that quitting was his only option. He made a face, threw hard eyes at Christopher and Jons, then gave his head a disbelieving, petulant little shake.
 

“You’re up to something here. And you won’t get away with it.”
 

Then he left without waiting for a response.
 

“Jesus,” Christopher said, “that was close.”
 

“Closer than you know,” Jons said. “He ain’t gonna give up. And judging by the fact that Dempsey seems to be back on his alien throne instead of supposedly helping out like Terrence said, he might be looking for someone to blame for this clusterfuck.”
 

“So what now?” Christopher asked.
 

“Now,” Jons said, “we hurry.”

CHAPTER 41

Piper peered out Grandma Mary’s window, keeping the slit between the drapes thin. The fabric was decorated with pictures of fruit. Piper wondered at that, as she wondered at so much of the house. There wasn’t a structure in Heaven’s Veil that was more than two years old, and construction had been managed with the scraps of humanity’s manufacturing sector. Where had these old lady drapes come from? And how had Mary achieved so much old lady ambiance, right down to the house that wasn’t as new as it should be?
 

But as interesting as the drapes were, it was the Apex behind them that drew Piper’s attention, pulsing like a beating heart.
 

Cameron spoke from behind, making her jump.
 

“Why is it doing that, do you think?”
 

“It always does that. But it’s faster now.”
 

“And the flash we saw?”
 

Piper shook her head.
 

Cameron sighed. He moved away from the drapes and into the kitchen beyond. Mary was elsewhere in the house. Piper didn’t know where. She’d been blasé when Jons and Christopher had shown up to hide them, and she was blasé now that they’d gone. Just two more houseguests that could get the home’s entire occupancy cut to shreds. No big deal.
 

Cameron sat in one of the kitchen chairs — classic old lady vintage, like everything else. Maybe a raiding party had gone to the homes that were here from before the occupation and stripped them clean. Some of those homes must have had old people.
 

Piper sat opposite him, their hands up on the small table, not quite touching each other.
 

“Do you trust them?” Hearing Cameron’s low voice, Piper throttled surprise. He was actually asking. Not discussing:
asking
. There was a difference. He was deferring to her, as one who knew more than him. When had their relationship changed? Had it been Cottonwood? After Benjamin’s death?
 

“Captain Jons and Grandma Mary?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

Piper thought before answering. She’d trusted in the past. But this felt more certain. She wasn’t sure what was different, but something definitely was.
 

The changed Apex.
 

The fight among Titans.
 

The grid Andreus had mentioned, projected as if beckoning for alien backup to arrive.

The changed game, from end to end.
 

“I trust them.”
 

She thought Cameron might ask further — perhaps inquiring as to
why
she trusted them and asking her to detail evidence of their honor when they’d been so thoroughly manipulated before — but he merely sat back, eyes straying toward the window and the pulsing blue pyramid beyond.
 

“How are we going to get in there?” he asked.
 

“I don’t know. Maybe we can’t, now.”
 

“If we can’t … ”
 

“I know,” she said. If they couldn’t get into the Apex, they were right back at the same old stalemate. The best guess put Thor’s Hammer below it, hidden more or less in plain sight, its activating core safely (for now) nestled in Cameron’s padded satchel. Benjamin had seemed to feel that they had to find the Hammer first and use the key to somehow turn it off, or put it to another use which, hopefully, would become apparent.
 

They couldn’t smash the key.
 

They couldn’t just walk away.

And even if they knew how to get out of Heaven’s Veil now that their mission had become harder, they couldn’t do that, either. Because Thor’s Hammer was here, in the throat of the lion trying to devour them.
 

“It’s so close,” Cameron said, again gazing.
 

“Maybe we can sneak.”
 

“They’ll be watching.” He shook his head, exhaling. “They were tipped off, Piper.”
 

“You can’t know that.”
 

“They were. They wanted to take us in. Maybe kill us. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t know where the Hammer was, and only wanted us to
think
they needed our help to find it.”
 

“Maybe they wanted to catch us, take the key, then force us to show them.”
 

“It’s too unsure. We could refuse.”
 

“Then maybe they figured that if we came back here to Heaven’s Veil, we’d only have done it
because
the Hammer was here.”

“Too unsure,” Cameron repeated. “Think about it. They hadn’t touched us before. They let us enter Moab then let us come all the way here. What’s the advantage in not letting us go until we couldn’t go anymore? Keep their distance, let us lead them right to it.
Then
grab us, take the key, and fire it up.”
 

Piper opened her mouth, but she had nothing to say. He was right, and she hated the implications. The Astrals had already shown they didn’t know how to find Thor’s Hammer. So unless they’d stumbled upon it by accident and assumed Cameron would be dumb enough to walk right into Heaven’s Veil with the key he’d been trying to conceal, the only other possibility was that someone had tipped them off.