Othermoon (26 page)

As his friends hesitated, Caleb rolled his thumb over one of the blue buttons in his
hand. “I’m told the cold takes longer, but doesn’t hurt as much. The fire is faster,
but, oh”—he smiled, selecting a red button—“the pain is terrible.” He fitted the button
into the band of his slingshot.

“All right, all right!” Dooley moved away from the wall. “Don’t hurt us, and I’ll
take you to the mainframe.”

I relaxed slightly. Convincing him had been easier than I’d anticipated. Maybe too
easy. Dooley’s eyes were shifting left and right, but I couldn’t tell if that was
from anxiety or because he knew more than he was telling us.

“Excellent choice,” Caleb said, aiming the slingshot at his head. “My trigger finger’s
itchy. You came
this
close.” He stretched the band back, released it, but as the button flew, his hand
shot out to catch it in midair.

Sweat was dripping down Dooley’s temples. “I’ll cooperate.”

“Part of me wishes you wouldn’t.” Caleb cocked an eyebrow at the huge wolf still menacing
the man on the floor. “Isn’t that right, London?”

She barked in the man’s face, then whirled and lunged at Dooley, coming within inches
of his arm as he flinched backwards.

I wanted her to jump up and rip his throat out. I wanted to shift and sink my own
fangs into his neck. The thirst for it rose up from the dark heart of me, and that
was nearly the end of them all. My hand brushed the hilt of the Shadow Blade, and
a still tranquility cloaked my wild thoughts.

“If you lead us into a trap, there will be consequences,” I said. “As a scientist
no doubt you know the thinness of the veil here brings out the more . . . untamed
side of the otherkin. Step very carefully.”

“I will,” he said, jowls shaking.

“Good. Lazar, bring the woman back in here. Dooley, out into the hallway.”

Dooley grabbed a robe from the foot of his bed as he scuttled out of the room, London
at his heels. Lazar picked up the goo-bound scientist and set her gently back inside
the room. We all backed out, then shut the door.

I took the Shadow Blade and sliced into the lock. Its wires hissed. Dooley saw Siku
looming at the end of the hall, decorated with a rat and an eagle, and he shied away.
Lazar had to catch him by the shoulders to steady him.

I kept my voice light. “I believe we need your handprint to get us through that door
at the end of the hall, Mr. Dooley. If you please.”

“Okay.” He shuffled slowly toward Siku, pressing against the wall to keep a few precious
inches between himself and the bear. As he squeezed past, Siku grunted and pawed the
ground, claws rattling.

Dooley leaped about five feet in the air and shot forward, slamming bodily against
the door and pressing back against it, as if trying to push through it. Trembling,
he turned to punch in the code with shaking fingers, pressing his sweating palm up
against the sensor.

The door clicked open. Dooley laid his hand upon it, but Lazar said, “You don’t move
unless we tell you to.”

“The door to the mainframe’s the second on the left,” Dooley said through trembling
lips.

“Anyone in there?” Caleb tossed his slingshot end over end to catch it by the handle.

“No! Not that I know of.”

I looked up at Caleb. “Come with me.” It sounded awkward and weird, too much like
a command. “Please.”

His black eyes ran over me. “Just a soldier in your army, General,” he said. “Let’s
go.”

My heart contracted at his cold tone. The gulf between us was larger than ever. The
loss of him washed over its edge and threatened to take me over.

I remembered Morfael’s warning about the effects of Othersphere and put my hand on
the Shadow Blade’s hilt. Its centering touch allowed me to straighten up and walk
past the others to the door. I paused, listening at the crack for a moment, and then
pushed it open.

Another thirty feet of hallway lay half-lit before me, with two doors on the right
and the left. I knew Lazar had never been to this part of the complex before.

I was taller than Dooley by several inches. I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling
his damp sweat soaking through his robe. “Tell us what’s behind each door,” I said.

“On the right there’s a closet and the lab.” He pointed to the first and second doors
on the right. “On this side, the bathroom and the computer room.” He pointed to the
left. “The mainframe’s in the computer room.”

“How do we access the tunnels of the particle accelerator itself?” Caleb asked.

“There’s a door inside the computer room, on the right-hand wall,” he said.

“The computer room, please.”

With my hand still on his shoulder, Dooley walked tentatively toward the second door
on the left. Caleb walked right behind me, then Siku and his entourage, Amaris, London,
and Lazar.

Dooley input the code into the lock in front of the computer room, and then pressed
his hand against it. As always, the door clicked open.

“This is going better than I thought,” Lazar said.

Caleb tensed as his half-brother spoke. “A little too well.”

I agreed with Caleb, but said nothing. So far our plan had gone with unaccustomed
smoothness. I was braced for the punch line.

The computer room was empty except for a series of huge computer monitors and linked
hard drives on shiny metal desks, dotted here and there with a file cabinet or a chair.
A palpable hum vibrated through the room like a tide, the whirr of many electronic
motors keeping themselves cool and running. In the far right-hand corner lay another
security door. If Dooley was telling the truth, that led to the tubes of the particle
collider itself. This was the control room.

“Log on,” I said, prodding Dooley in the small of his back.

“All right, all right!” He padded in his bare feet to the largest monitor and pressed
a button on the keyboard next to it. Lazar kept right by his side, gun at the ready,
but his eyes on the monitor. It sprang to life, showing a space for a password. Dooley
typed in a long series of keystrokes, and the view cut to a bright display of many
intersecting lines of yellow, red, and blue that looked almost like a galaxy as seen
through a high-resolution telescope.

Dooley went to hit another key, but Lazar caught his hand. “No. Don’t touch it again
unless we tell you to.”

I walked up, and pushed Dooley back toward Siku, then stared at the monitor. “Arnaldo,
I think we need you back.”

Dooley eyed the eagle nervously as he flapped off Siku to the floor and Amaris began
to pull spare clothes out of her backpack. “What. What is that bird going to . . .”

He flinched and stumbled back a step as Arnaldo shifted back into his human form,
using a desk for partial cover, got dressed, and walked over to examine the monitor.

“This display shows the results of a particle collision,” Arnaldo said, tapping the
keys. Dooley blinked nervously at his words. “They’ve already used the collider.”

I turned to Dooley, who was sweating profusely with Siku staring down at him. “So
you’ve used the accelerator already,” I said. “I think it’s time you stopped lying
to us, and so does Siku here.”

Dooley swallowed noisily, then nodded. “Yes, we’ve tested the collider at lower speeds,
and successfully smashed particles into each other.”

“Exactly what are you planning to do tomorrow to cut us all off from Othersphere?”
I asked. “And what does it have to do with our DNA?”

“DNA?” Dooley blinked, using the back of his hand to wipe off the sweat beads under
his nose.

I got in Dooley’s face, pulling his watery eyes back to me. “How, exactly, does this
machine cut us off from Othersphere?”

A fine tremor ran through his entire body. I could see his skin trembling. “Th—the
thinness of the veil here,” he stuttered. “It changes what happens in the collider.”

Arnaldo was squinting at the display. “Pre-strangelets?” He turned to Dooley. “You
think if you speed up the collisions you’ll produce actual strangelets?”

Dooley’s anxious face took on a startled look. Arnaldo had impressed him. The rest
of us kept our faces still, clueless. “I—I couldn’t say, really.”

Caleb strode over to Dooley, grabbed his lapel, and shoved him up against Siku’s furry
side. Dooley shrieked, trying to shrink away as Siku turned his head and gave him
a big wet sniff. November let out a piping cheep very much like a laugh.

“You will say,” Caleb said, his flexible voice low and deadly. “You’ll say it now.”

“Okay, yes! Don’t hurt me. We’re almost certain we’ll produce detectable strangelets,
but not the same kind other colliders might produce.”

Arnaldo was tapping the computer keys, moving into other files. Amaris handed Lazar
a flash drive, and he plugged it into the hard drive to start copying the information.

Arnaldo let his hands drop from the keyboard, and when he turned around, his face
was drawn and serious. “So the nearness of Othersphere will affect the properties
of the strangelets,” he said. “They’ll find all matter connected to Othersphere and
convert it. Into regular matter.”

“Y-yes.” Dooley dipped his head cautiously.

November let out a stream of chirps, waving her pink paws angrily. Arnaldo swiveled
in the chair and gave her a condescending look. “What that means is that the particle
collisions they do in this accelerator create subatomic particles called strangelets.
The strangelets will be strongly attracted to particles connected to Othersphere,
called O-particles. The strangelets will be drawn to the O-particles like magnets,
and when they touch, the O-particles will be converted to ordinary matter. That is,
matter unable to connect to Othersphere. They’ll also create more strangelets.”

“So if the Tribunal releases these strangelets into the world . . .” Caleb began.

“They’d start converting the nearest O-particles, creating more strangelets, which
will find other O-particles.”

“A chain reaction,” said Lazar.

“Obliterating all O-particles from this universe.” Dooley lifted his quivering chin,
his voice tinged with pride.

“Cutting all the otherkin and objurers off from Othersphere,” I said, though it was
more like a question for Arnaldo.

“Yes,” he said. “Forever.”

The room got very quiet except for the hum from the computers. Arnaldo turned back
and began searching the files. “Somehow this is connected to our DNA. This says something
about a biological virus?”

BAM!
The door burst open. Two objurers lowered tranquilizer guns at us and fired.

One dart slammed into the back of Arnaldo’s chair. The other buried itself in Siku’s
side, right next to Dooley’s head.

Behind them were many more, all dressed in white.

CHAPTER 21

Arnaldo and I threw ourselves behind the nearest desk, scrambling for cover.

Lazar leveled his gun and fired. A splotch of red appeared on the forehead of one
of the objurers. He dropped.

Fangs bared, London leaped for the other man in the room. He yelped as he sprawled
on the ground, his gun flying.

Siku roared out and smacked Dooley in the head, sending him to the floor unconscious,
face bleeding. November, shrieking, ran along Siku’s back and yanked the tranquilizer
dart out of his side.

Amaris crouched to make herself less of a target and fired at a third man starting
to come through the doorway. She hit him in the center of his chest.

As he fell back, blocking the men behind him, Caleb pulled out his slingshot, armed
it with a red button, and fired it.

“Come forth!” he commanded, and the flying red disc morphed into a fiery sphere the
size of a basketball. It struck the man Amaris had shot. The man’s clothes burst into
flame. Then, with a whoosh, his entire body was engulfed in fire. The blaze swallowed
up the doorway as someone yelled for everyone to step back.

“Lava spheres,” Caleb said, with a grim smile. “Better than barrels of oil and matches
any day, eh, London?”

London’s muzzle was red with blood again. The man at her feet lay still. She gave
Caleb a fierce, joyous bark. With a thrill, I too remembered the enormous bonfire
of the first Tribunal compound we’d burned to the ground.

Stay calm, focus.
This was a different compound. It was under the ground, and we weren’t done with
it yet. The fiery doorway would only give us a brief reprieve.

“How’s Siku?” I asked, running up to him.

November threw the dart at Dooley’s body as I looked into the bear’s shining black
eyes. They were clear.

“You okay?” I asked. The Tribunal had needed three darts to subdue him when they’d
kidnapped him, but they might have improved their formula.

Siku huffed, nodding his huge head. I patted his bulky shoulder.

Beyond the burning doorway, I could hear someone yelling about a fire extinguisher.
Then, without warning, water burst from the ceiling. Cold drops soaked quickly through
my hair, running down my scalp, trickling underneath my clothes. I looked up to see
sprinklers raining down on us. Ximon had planned his facility well.

The flames in the doorway winced and retreated. Through the smoke, I could now see
figures in white.

“Get through the other door to the accelerator!” I shouted. “No time to download information.
We need to destroy this thing and get out of here!” The water, at least, would take
care of destroying their hard drives. But they had to have a backup server. We needed
to somehow dismantle the accelerator itself.

Bangs dripping into his eyes, Arnaldo looked furious. “Dammit! That virus information
was important!”

Amaris was already running to the door. “It’s locked!” she shouted.

Of course.
I moved toward Dooley’s body, about to ask for help with it, but both Caleb and Lazar
were already coming over. I gripped the man’s beefy shoulders as both of them came
to stand uneasily near one of his legs, hesitating. I stared at them angrily.
How the hell had it come to this?

Caleb’s hair lay in dark whorls across his forehead, drops circling his thick brows
and clinging to his black lashes as he avoided looking at Lazar. “We should just cut
off his hand.”

“He’s still alive,” I said. “No.”

Caleb glared at me. I stared right back until he looked away.

Water turned Lazar’s white shirt transparent, outlining his broad shoulders and narrow
waist. He had pushed his hair, a darker gold when wet, back from his face. He put
the gun in his waistband and grabbed one of Dooley’s feet, waiting for Caleb to take
the other.

Caleb’s eyes flicked from Lazar to me and back again, his face set. I wanted to yell
at him that now was not the time for animosity to get in the way, but I knew that
would only make it worse. He turned his gaze to the doorway. The flames there were
almost small enough to let the men through.

“I’ll cover the door,” Caleb said, moving swiftly to get between us and the milling
men in white. He pulled a blue button from his pocket.

Lazar shot him a heated look and grabbed Dooley’s other foot. What Caleb was doing
made tactical sense, but his real motivation came from distaste for me and Lazar.

Fine.
Bearing the fat man’s considerable weight, Lazar and I shuffled toward the other
door. Siku followed, carrying a bedraggled November and keeping his bulk between us
and the door.

The water continued to pour down, and I glanced back. The flames were dead, and the
men in white zigzagged through the door, guns pointed at Caleb. Before they could
fire, he snapped the button at them, calling out a single chilly note. A black cloud
of power shot from his outstretched hand and struck the button.

It shimmered like a diamond, and then shook itself, stabbing outward. A wall of icicles
appeared like a freezing monolith in the doorway. Shining daggers of ice speared the
two men in the way, knocking them bloody to the floor.

We neared the door. Amaris hastily punched in the code as I hoisted Dooley up. Amaris
grabbed the man’s wrist and lifted his hand to the scanner. The door snapped open.

Lazar and I put Dooley down, and I pushed the door open, peeking inside. No sprinklers
watered the metal staircase here. It descended into darkness. My eyes adjusted to
the dark as I stepped through the door, water pooling at my feet. The stairs jogged
down left and right twice, ending in an unlit room with two doors on opposite sides.
They didn’t have locks that required hand scanners, so I motioned Lazar forward. Siku
followed, the stairs barely wide enough to accommodate his huge frame, with Arnaldo,
London, and Amaris following closely behind.

I paused in pounding down the stairs to glance up, waiting for Caleb.

Lazar paused on the step above me, followed my glance, and said, “He can take care
of himself.”

I didn’t say, “Except when he’s trapped in a silver cage,” or “Except when a demon
thing from Othersphere takes over his body.” I’d helped Caleb through both of those
situations. Just because he wasn’t mine to help anymore didn’t mean I stopped wanting
to. Then I caught the swirl of his black coat as he slammed the door shut behind him.
It got very dark until Amaris snapped on a flashlight, gun still in her right hand.
Heartened, I continued down.

There wasn’t time to worry about which door to go through. The one on the right was
locked. I drew the Shadow Blade, inserted it into the space between door and jamb
and cut through as if it were pie. The knife’s edge grew more distinct as I pulled
it out. It liked eating through metal. I shoved the door open to see a few more metal
steps going down.

Beyond, a dozen objurers armed with tranquilizer guns were waiting. I had a second
to take in a large underground parking garage before all ten fired at me.

My cat-shifter reflexes had always been fast. I jerked the door shut as the tranq
darts thudded into it.

“They were waiting for us!” I said.

“It’s like they want us to go through that door.” Lazar was right behind me, pointing
to the door on the left. My heart sank. He was right. We were being funneled somewhere.
Ximon must have started grouping his people as soon as I cut the lock on his door.
He was out there somewhere nearby, directing all of this. But as long as wherever
he led us was close to the accelerator, we still might be able to shut it down. Then
we’d have to fight our way out.

“I’m worried about this virus,” Arnaldo said, a few steps up from me. “What if we’re
heading toward it and it somehow infects us?”

Above, an arm clad in white opened the door to the computer room. Caleb whirled in
a swirl of black, humming, and sent another ball of fire hissing at the door. It shut
abruptly as flames exploded all around it.

“Looks like it’s our only choice!” I said, slashing through the lock. “Go!”

Gun ready, Lazar kicked the door open and went in, reaching along the wall to click
on a light. It flickered, showing more stairs down.

“Clear!” he said.

Arnaldo and London visibly hesitated in the doorway. London’s hackles were up. She
turned her icy blue eyes on me, lip curling to show a bit of fang.

“If you smell someone else down there, bark now,” I said. “Otherwise, we don’t have
a lot of choices.”

Arnaldo said, “Come on, London,” and followed Lazar. She took a few sniffs, then went
after him. I breathed in relief. At least she hadn’t sensed more objurers in the immediate
area. I waited and let Siku, November, and Amaris go in before me. Caleb came last,
his normally dark eyes flaring a gold so bright they were almost neon.

“I don’t like this,” he said. But he went through the door. I followed and shut it
behind us.

The steps went down, back and forth, and farther down. The walls that rose around
us were earth, plastered over and whitewashed, not unlike the walls of our school.

As we descended, my skin prickled with something darker than static electricity. It
was tugging at me, inside, wanting me to not just go farther down, but somehow to
go farther in. I’d had a similar feeling out in the forest when the animals came to
me—a sense of infinite possibility, of magic, if I just stepped through.

A cement floor appeared below, but the stairs didn’t stop, heading down through a
mesh trapdoor. Amaris shot the hinges off with two clean shots, as footsteps clattered
above. More objurers giving chase.

Arnaldo shoved the door aside, and down he went.

As soon as he passed through the trapdoor, an earsplitting buzzer went off. Arnaldo
hesitated, halfway through.

“I was wondering when we’d hit an alarm!” I shouted over the claxon. Way up the stairs,
flashlights swiped through the dark. Flashes of legs in white pants were running down
after us.

“We could fight them on the stairs here,” Amaris screamed.

“No. We have to keep going!” Caleb could make his voice loud without shouting. “We
have to find a way to disable the accelerator.”

“There has to be a backup server,” Arnaldo yelled over the din. “If we can access
that, we can hack in and set up some kind of self-destruct.”

I caught everyone’s eye, and we were all agreed. Down we went.

The space closed around us. The beam of Amaris’s flashlight showed we were in a tunnel
of concrete. The steps ended on an asphalt walkway with the curved wall of the tunnel
on one side and a thick metal tube about four feet in diameter on the other. As far
as the light shone, the tunnel curved onward in both directions, the metal tube glinting.

“Looks like we found the particle accelerator,” Arnaldo bellowed, catching his breath
as we all paused at the bottom of the stairs. The alarm kept on with its dreadful
clamor. “It probably goes on like that for miles.”

“Just a mile and a half,” said Lazar, his voice also effortlessly loud. “According
to the blueprints. It circles around and comes back here.”

“Are there other exits?” Caleb’s voice was terse. I knew what he was thinking. Were
we trapped hundreds of feet underground in a circular trap?

“Not that I know of,” said Lazar. “But they never let me down here, and the blueprints
I saw could have been purposely inaccurate.”

“How the hell do we destroy it?” asked Arnaldo at top volume, walking over to run
a hand over the metal surface of the tube. “I don’t see any computers. Wait. Look,
there!” He pointed.

“What?” Squinting in reaction to the blasts of sound, I followed his finger to see
small holes in the ceiling that had tiny pipes jutting out of them. “What are those?
They look like spray nozzles or something.”

Caleb was looking too, eyebrows drawn together. “You said something about a virus?”

The alarm beat down on us. I bowed my head, the racket banging against the inside
of my skull. It was maddening. As a cat-shifter, my hearing was extremely sensitive,
although the blare was enough to drive anyone insane.
It has to stop. I can’t think. Make it stop . . .

Arnaldo shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Goddamn it! I can’t think with this
noise!”

Fury reached its black tentacles out along my every limb, extending out beyond my
skin....

“Enough!” I screamed.

The alarm died in mid-honk.

Blessed silence fell. I took a deep breath.
Much better.

I looked up to see Caleb eyeing me in surprise. Lazar looked wary. In fact, everyone
was staring at me.
Did I do that?
Could my anti-tech-fu work without even touching the machine involved? It had never
occurred to me to even try. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. . . .

Arnaldo’s face cleared in the blessed quiet. Then a realization hit him. His eyes
widened with dismay. “That’s got to be it. They said something about a virus. DNA
plus strangelets from the accelerator. I could be wrong—but they could have altered
our DNA and used it to genetically engineer a virus. A virus aimed at us.”

“Welcome,” said a familiar voice, channeled through a speaker. Fluorescent lights
winked on along both sides of the tunnel, illuminating our haggard, sweating faces,
the metal tube, and a window ten feet wide and three feet high set into the side of
the tunnel opposite us.

Behind that window stood a handsome older man with a thick head of pure white hair
and perfect blue-white teeth that flashed as he smiled at us through the thick glass.
Ximon.

Near him two men in lab coats were busy with some shiny equipment. One said, “The
injectors are ready, Your Grace. We will go on your mark.”