Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

thought.  
    “Where is Piper?”
    “Asleep.”  
    “But she was just … ” He let the sentence hang, knowing Charlie wasn’t socially adept enough to care. Obviously Piper wasn’t “just” anything. It had been light outside when he’d last seen her. Which had been less than ten seconds ago.  
    “There’s a problem,” Charlie said.  
    “Okay. What’s the problem?”  
    “Andreus sent out a drone. I wouldn’t have allowed it if I’d known.”  
    Cameron almost laughed. The idea of Charlie forbidding Nathan Andreus from doing anything was ridiculous.  
    “It works off a stored map, independent of satellite guidance. But without GPS, he says it could only ballpark, based on our believed position. So he programmed it to go high, spot from a distance, then zero in on the Heaven’s Veil lights. It was then supposed to fly lower, make a sweep, and return. There’s a homing signal it finds on this end when it gets close.”  
    “Okay,” Cameron said, still trying to shake the cobwebs from his vision — his strange certainty that he could do what he was proposing, based on intel from a little girl he’d never met and wasn’t entirely sure even existed. The dreamlike state was hard to shed. He’d apparently been steeping in it for much longer than the few seconds he’d imagined.  
    “So what was the problem?” Cameron asked.  
    “There were no lights at Heaven’s Veil.”  
    Cameron took his hands from the wheel, surrendering the farce of driving. If they took a wayward road to the wrong place, armageddon’s edge would have to wait for them elsewhere.  
    “The network failure?”  
    Charlie gave a small nod. “And perhaps I’m overstating. There were some lights, but it’s clear they’re conserving power. I can see some small dots of civilization on the footage. But it’s just a few floods. Most of the city is black. Except for the Apex.”  
    “What about the Apex?”  
    “We’ve never seen it at night. There was never a reason to. But with the rest of the city’s lights off, it’s clear that something is happening inside. And outside.”
    “Outside?”  
    Charlie fished a tablet from his shoulder bag. Cameron hadn’t noticed the bag, despite Charlie’s carrying it inside. Testament to how odd Charlie could be.  
    Charlie glanced at the wheel, saw it making minute steering adjustments on its own, then held the tablet so Cameron could see it. He started an already paused video and saw a shaky, green-tinted overhead shot of a city in the dark, most of its buildings unlit. The camera swooped higher, and Cameron could see the Apex, not just glowing blue but pulsing azure. There was a line protruding from the Apex’s top, like a string hooked high in the sky above.  
    “What’s this?”  
    “That’s what bothers me. This is an infrared shot, so I doubt this is visible to the naked eye — or it’s very faint if it is. But that’s not all of it. Look.”  
    Charlie skipped ahead. The drone was now flying over the area beyond the fence, where the artists had created their enormous stone carvings of Divinity’s various forms. Hulks of rock in the desert were difficult to see in the dark, but Cameron made them out with effort simply because of their size. They were so huge that the Astrals had clearly placed the source stones in place for the artists to carve. There were no high-rise cranes in Heaven’s Veil, as far as satellite footage had shown. Just buildings and fence and monoliths connected by narrow bands of light like the one streaming from the Apex’s top.  
    “Are those the statues outside the city?” Cameron asked.  
    “Yes.”  
    “What are these lines between them?”  
    “Either they’re being projected by the carvings themselves, or the Apex is projecting them. I think it’s the latter. See how this line, between this statue and this one, is broken? There’s a church steeple here — ” Charlie paused and scrolled the shot back to show what