Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (33 page)

Nathan looked to the table. To Heather, to the mess of glass on the floor. That had grabbed his attention and erased a few doubts. He kept his outward cool, but his heart rate had doubled, slamming against his ribcage.
 

Why couldn’t he see it, if something was there?
 

“It knows where they are,” Heather said. “If that’s where it means to go and we follow, it can get us to your people without being seen.”
 

Nathan looked around the room, feeling cold. When his eyes reached the door, he watched it ease slightly open, as if goosed by a draft.
 

“What is it?” Nathan’s tough skepticism was suddenly gone as he deferred to Heather.
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“How do you know you can trust it?”
 

Heather looked back.

“I don’t.”

CHAPTER 61

Cameron gasped. Piper gripped the cell bars beside him.
 

Two years hadn’t changed Lila much. She looked at Cameron while Jons held most of her attention. Their eyes exchanged a silent hello, but he’d only seen the small girl with Lila in dreams.
 

“Lila!” Piper said.
 

The girl — now woman, really — pushed past the police chief and away from the skinny cop. Jons dismissed the officer as Lila went to Piper, holding her hands. The girl stayed at the door, holding her eyes on Cameron.
 

“Why are you here?” Lila’s gaze flicked to Jons.
 

“He’s on our side,” Piper said.
 

“Terrence sent me. Told me to tell Captain Jons that something is happening with the Apex.”
 

“We knew that,” Christopher said.
 

Lila released Piper’s hand, and inched toward him — a greeting without a proper salutation. She shook her head, unsure of whom she should speak to, then chose a mixture of Piper and Jons, her eyes sliding between the two.
 

“Something else. Terrence says the Apex is an antenna. He says to tell you it’s preparing to broadcast something. Something big.”
 

“What does he want us to do about it?” Jons said.
 

The girl was still staring directly at Cameron, still near the now-closed door. She wasn’t impatient or eager. She was simply there. Cameron was having the hardest time figuring her out. She had a little girl’s pudgy look but held herself like a scholar.
 

“I don’t — ” Lila began.

“You have to destroy it,” the girl cut her off.
 

Lila beckoned, then the girl left the door and hugged Lila’s leg.
 

“Clara, why are you here?” Piper asked, looking up at Lila.
 

“Clara?”
 

He’d said it too loud. Everyone in the room stopped and turned to look at him.
 

“She’s … ” Cameron squatted, meeting the girl closer, almost eye to eye. “Clara, how old are you, honey?”
 

“Two.”
 

“You’re … big.”

“You act so surprised, Mr. Cameron.”
 

“How do you know who I am?” He looked up — at Lila, at Piper, even at Jons.
 

“She insisted,” Lila said, finally answering Piper. “I didn’t want to bring her, but I couldn’t find Mom. And Dad … ”
 

“Meyer?” Piper said.
 

“He’s different now,” Lila said.
 

Clara’s eyes stayed fixed on Cameron, patiently waiting for the adults to finish so she could answer. After a moment of quiet, she said, “Because I’ve seen you before, silly.”
 

“You have?” Cameron looked up, but Lila shook her head: How could Clara have ever met or seen him? She’d been born and raised in Heaven’s Veil, and he’d only come once before — to the square, before his rapid, violent extraction.

Cameron looked back at Clara. The girl was still waiting patiently for him to get his head out of his ass. To stop playing this game where they pretended they’d never met.
 

“What is the Apex doing, do you think?” Slowly, with resistance, Cameron’s mind was assembling a familiarity profile of the girl. He wasn’t used to including information from his dreams. Had she spoken of the Apex? No. She’d talked about something else that was wide at the base, narrow at the top. Not a pyramid, but a mountain.
 

“They can’t find it, Mr. Cameron. Now that they know you were only playing, they’re going to turn on the searchlight. They don’t
want
to, but they think they have to.”
 

Cameron looked up at Jons and Christopher. “Searchlight?”
 

Both men shook their heads. When he turned back to Clara, she looked patient: allowing the silly man to ask people who couldn’t possibly know anything when the person who did was right there in front of him.
 

“What’s the ‘searchlight,’ Clara?”
 

Again, Cameron looked up at Lila, but this seemed like news to her. Piper had said that Clara was strange and precocious, but he’d had no idea, and apparently her odd knowledge bled out on a need-to-know basis.
 

“It’s how they can find the chest.”
 

“You mean Thor’s Hammer?”
 

“That’s not what
they
call it,” Clara said, wrinkling her nose — a childlike gesture, reminding Cameron who he was speaking with.
 

 
Cameron reached for his satchel. Jons had rushed them into the cells for show. But he hadn’t searched them or confiscated belongings, and Raj had been too giddy with victory to notice when Jons had pushed them behind bars unprocessed.
 

Cameron slid the stone disc out and held it delicately in front of Clara, like a plate.
 

“This,”
Cameron said. “Is this a part of the … ” he glanced up at Jons for help then got it himself, “ … the ‘chest’?”
 

She nodded. “They lost it. They want to find it.”
 

“We lost it too,” he said.
 

Instead of speaking, Clara smiled.
 

There was a booming outside. The walls shook. Dust sifted down from the ceiling.
 

“What the fuck was that?” Jons said.
 

“The spotlight,” Clara said. “They’re getting ready to turn it on.”
 

CHAPTER 62

Heather didn’t ask questions. She’d followed a spook out of her house, found a guy whose reputation was that of a barbaric warlord at the end of its pointed finger, then together the two of them had
lucked
past countless Reptar and Titan patrols to reach the fence — this time obviously following something Nathan couldn’t even see. So the whys, wheres, and hows of Andreus getting a security code from Meyer were small potatoes by comparison.
 

When the wave of energy (there was no better way to describe it; it was light and sound but mostly just
force)
rushed from the Apex pyramid, Heather barely cared. Shit might blow up soon. So what?
 

Andreus wasn’t as casual. He stopped with his hand on the small fence gate, his fingers hitting buttons on a touch screen. The code seemed long and complicated — as much pattern as numbers and letters. But Andreus did it easily, his mind having no problem with recall under pressure.
 

“What was that?”
 

“The pyramid.”
 

“What’s it doing?”
 

“There’s obviously no way I’d know the answer to that, but I could make up some bullshit. Can I interest you in some bullshit?”

Andreus was still frozen, now staring directly at the Apex. Staring
through
the shadow creature, from where Heather was standing. It had been putting out long tendrils, like horizontal columns of smoke. And even now, as if summoned, Heather could see people creeping forward from the distant gully.
 

When the Apex did nothing further, Andreus’s attention fell from it.
 

He turned to watch the forces approach. Opened the gate. And let the group of around fifty people — along with a few hand-wheeled motorbikes that would make entirely too much noise when started — into the small alcove behind buildings. It was an oasis of relative quiet near the main Astral traffic thoroughfare, protected but surrounded. They’d be safe here, so long as they didn’t move. And if this had been a trap from the start (to get Heather and Andreus’s soldiers all in one place for a tidy slaughter), then … well, frankly, they were fucked.
 

A brunette woman of around Heather’s height and build pushed through the crowd. Andreus seemed surprised to see her and embraced the woman before suddenly becoming awkward. Apparently, that wasn’t their normal manner of greeting, and Andreus wasn’t as imperturbable as he seemed.

He introduced the two women, ignoring the others. They were all settling in, jostling weapons, looking uneasy to be deep in enemy territory — or, if Heather understood Nathan’s story of his encounter with Meyer,
friendly
territory. The Astral/Republic arrangement struck Heather as a deal with the devil, and one where the devil never took his knife from your throat. Probably the reason Andreus was double-dealing so readily: if they’d threaten his daughter to gain his allegiance, the man’s nature was to bite, not to lie down or roll over.
 

“Why are you here?” he asked the woman he’d introduced as Jeanine Coffey.
 

“They got your drone. You told them to come.”
 

“I asked why
you
were here. Where are Charlie and Grace?”

“Same place we were when you left. A mile off the front gate.”
 

Andreus’s face changed. “You shouldn’t have left them.”
 

“They’ll be safe, Nathan. I had to come. I had to tell you something: Charlie says Thor’s Hammer isn’t under the Apex.”
 

Heather watched a frown form on his face. “I thought that might be the case,” he said. “How did you know the Republic was here?”

“I didn’t.”
 

“Then how — ”
 

This time, Coffey’s face pinched. She looked at Heather, seeming to decide if she wanted to share with an audience.
 

“The thing Piper saw. The thing she said was following us from Moab. It led me here.”

Andreus looked level at Coffey, glancing at Heather. Then he said, “Charlie is sure?”
 

Coffey nodded. “You know how he is. I was insulting him by even asking.”
 

“Then where is it?”
 

“He doesn’t know. But he says the Apex is important for another reason, and that’s why Benjamin was studying it. We assumed he’d be researching Thor’s Hammer right before we went
after
it in Little Cottonwood Canyon, but based on what Cameron said, I think Charlie might be right and that there’d be no reason for Benjamin to research the Hammer’s location.”
 

“What did Cameron say?”
 

“That Benjamin already knew where it was. Like it was obvious. He thought Cameron would think it was obvious, too. But the joke was on him, I guess, since the next thing Benjamin did was to die.”
 

Heather felt a chill. She hadn’t known Benjamin Bannister. She’d never even met him. But she knew the name, she knew his son, and it seemed too many people were in mortal peril these days.

“And the Apex?”
 

As if on cue, the big blue pyramid flashed again. The second mothership’s energy beam seemed to have finished whatever it was doing — powering the thing up, perhaps — but when Heather looked toward the flash, she saw something on the horizon that chilled her blood: another two spheres approaching: motherships, possibly with their own bellies full of power, like giant batteries.
 

“It was interesting to Benjamin. That’s all Charlie knew.” Coffey’s gaze ticked up. The second mothership began to move away. The others were already closer.
 

Changing of the guard.
 

Nathan looked up, noting the arriving ships with a neutral nod.
 

“I think we might know more than Benjamin right now,” Andreus said, “and what we need to do next, if we won’t find the Hammer here, is obvious.”
 

All eyes turned to the Apex.
 

“The rebels have tried to destroy it a dozen times with no luck,” Coffey said.
 

“We’ll try something different,” Andreus said.
 

Heather watched him. In the corner of her eye, the shadow stirred, agitated.