Othersphere (6 page)

“I haven't been able to keep him out of my mind.” Ximon's voice was hushed with humiliation. He bowed his head. “Although I pray for strength.”

His shame sounded very real, but again, all we had to go on was his voice, which he used like an instrument—or a weapon. It was yet another reminder, as if I needed one, that he could not be trusted.

Caleb put the call on hold. “That's how it was when I was taken over by—whatever it was,” he said. “It knew everything I knew.”

True, that creature had spoken of Caleb's regret at not being able to return to me. It had also promised to swallow our moon and drink its blood. Now that I'd seen the veiny surface of the moon in Othersphere, it all made some weird kind of sense. But that didn't prove Ximon was telling the truth.

“All that proves is that he knows a lot about these things from Othersphere. You heard him. He's got two thousand years of Tribunal research to call upon. He's counting on my desire to help people to lure us all into some other trap. I'm not falling for it this time.”

Caleb looked uneasy. “He'd never humiliate himself to you like this unless something was actually wrong—something to do with Othersphere. You're from Othersphere, and Morfael's actually been there. You two are the logical people to come to.”

“With all their research, the Tribunal's got to know nearly as much,” I said.

“But he can't go to them,” London said. “The moment the other Bishops and whatever get a whiff of any otherworldly demons around him, they'll kill him.”

“No!” I said. “He's so clever. Don't you see? That's what he wants you to believe. Remember how I fell for everything he told Lazar? He knew that would win me over. He knew it would draw me to the particle accelerator and get us all there so he could infect us with that virus that would've cut us off from Othersphere. At least that didn't happen, but . . .”

“Siku died,” November said. London put a hand on her shoulder, but she yanked it away. “Dez is right—Ximon's a liar and a murderer. I vote that we let him think we believe him, arrange to meet him, and kill him.”

“After we get the information we need to bring Amaris back,” London said.

Arnaldo narrowed his eyes, calculating. “If he's lying about this demon, then he's got to have more of that twine, or a map, or some way to open up the veil and locate Amaris.”

“We get that from him . . .” I said.

“And we get her back,” Lazar finished.

“It's a plan,” I said. Everyone had spoken except for one. “Caleb?” I asked. He was in this now, with the rest of us. “What do you think?”

“I want Amaris back,” Caleb said. “But there's more going on here than just a trap.”

“Caleb's vote doesn't count,” November said. “Sorry, handsome, but you gave that up when you ditched us.”

Caleb opened his mouth to retort, and then shut it again in a hard line.

“Or if it does count,” Arnaldo said, his voice reasonable, “he's outvoted. This time we lay the trap for Ximon.”

“Good,” I said. I'd wanted Caleb to agree with us, but when he didn't, I felt a weird, shameful satisfaction when my friends put him in his place. And it just felt good to be doing something, anything, to get Amaris back. “I propose that we let him think we buy his story and make him agree to meet us. He'll think we're there to exorcise this demon, but instead we capture him, go through all his records and his stuff for clues, and force him to tell us the real story.”

Everyone but Caleb nodded slowly. “Tell him we need a phone number where we can call him back with details,” Arnaldo said. “We might be able to use that to track him.”

“Cool,” I said. “I'm going to play it like we're still skeptical but open to a meeting, so it doesn't look like we did a complete one-eighty.” Arnaldo pressed the hold button again. “Okay, Ximon. We've discussed what you've told us. I'm not completely convinced, but my friends think you might be telling the truth, and we've got to take the chance on you to get Amaris back.”

Ximon exhaled a breath so big, it sounded like he'd been holding it for days. “I . . . thank you. I promise you won't regret this.”

“I already regret it,” I said. “Give us a number where we can reach you. We'll find a spot to meet up with you that works for us.”

“I'm not far from Livermore,” he said, and gave us a phone number.

I got up, moving toward the computer to disconnect the call. Caleb grabbed my hand to stop me. “One more question, Ximon.” His touch sent an electrical jolt through me. I pulled my hand away. But Caleb was focused on his father. “What does this demon want from you so badly that he's willing to shove Amaris into Othersphere to force you to give it to him? We destroyed your particle accelerator. What else have you got?”

“I don't know the details yet,” Ximon said. “But he's very interested in the files on a project I abandoned a few years ago in order to concentrate on the accelerator. I felt it was too dangerous, too likely to rip the veil between worlds completely.” He took a deep breath. “It involved construction of the world's most powerful laser.”

CHAPTER 4

While Morfael vanished and the rest of us made popcorn, Arnaldo pulled up a Google map of Livermore, California, on one screen of his laptop, and a program he and Lazar had created to track incoming Skype calls on the other. I kept wishing I could get a moment alone with Lazar, to talk about the fact that his brother, and my ex-boyfriend, was now back at the school. But it had been hard enough to get time alone on an ordinary day, let alone a day Ximon rang us up on Skype.

Lazar had never heard about his father's supposed plans to build a powerful laser. “Either he's lying, or it was something he worked on when I was too young to hear about it,” he said.

“It's probably a lie,” I said. “But he could be throwing little bits of truth into his overall lie to keep it real.”

“Who cares?” London was impatient. “Exactly where and how should we meet up with him?”

We talked about it till all the popcorn was gone and November brought out the ice cream. We couldn't do it too near the school, or we'd risk giving away its location. I voted for a spot near Ximon's old particle accelerator, where the veil was thin and my ability to destroy technology was enhanced. The Tribunal relied on guns and other machinery, so if I could help disable those tools, it would help keep us safe.

“I think I found him,” Arnaldo said, the blue light from his laptop screen washing out his bronze face.

Chairs scraped back, and we gathered around Arnaldo's screen. “Thanks to Lazar sharing what he learned from the Tribunal, we can track calls to our computer to a precise location. Check it out.”

London's half-blond hair brushed my cheek as we both leaned in to look at Arnaldo's monitor. It was weird to see the brothers so close together, with just November between them, doing the same. We saw an overhead satellite shot of a suburban neighborhood, complete with tree-covered medians and an even grid of streets with the occasional graceful curve thrown in to keep it from being completely boring.

“Fourteen ninety-one Cherry Drive.” Arnaldo pointed to a small red dot on the grid. “Here's the street view.” He clicked the mouse, and the screen switched to a shot of a wide driveway next to a narrow, evenly cut green lawn fronting an ordinary two-story suburban house, painted tan, curtains obscuring the few visible windows in the upper story.

Arnaldo cued the street view around to show a neatly paved road, and on the other side, some narrow parkland with gravel paths and neatly spaced trees. Through their trunks you could see another street just like this one on the other side of the park, peppered with identical houses.

“That's not one of the safe house addresses I know,” Lazar said. “What city is it in?”

“Livermore, California.” Arnaldo zoomed out to show us a wider view, which included the 580 freeway and the word “Livermore” to the left.

“So he's not just ‘near' Livermore,” Caleb said. “He's right in the middle of it.”

“Rich folks live mostly in Livermore,” November said. Her family owned a chain of pawnshops throughout the Bay Area. “Haven't spent much time there because it's boring. They've got an old Spanish mission, like everyone else. It used to be farmland, now lots of tech types working and living there.”

“What's this brown patch?” London circled an area to the east of the Cherry Drive address.

“Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” Lazar said, before Arnaldo could reply. “It's a hub of research and development for the U.S. Department of Energy, various universities, and lots of tech companies. They do experiments on everything from cyber security to plutonium research.”

“Nuclear fun again.” November shook her head. “How do you know all this?”

“Because Livermore Labs was labeled Code Yellow by the Tribunal's Threat Assessment team.” Lazar took in our blank gazes. “That means it shows a detectable level of damage to the membrane between universes—to the veil. Code White means there's no damage detected, then yellow, then orange, then red.”

“What did they label the area near the particle accelerator?” I asked. “Red?”

He nodded. “Red, and technically off limits, to keep out anyone who wasn't authorized. It's the only red area in the Western U.S., thanks to all the nuclear detonations, although Los Alamos almost qualifies. That's orange, along with the nuclear energy facilities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre and, of course, the oak tree in Dez's old neighborhood.”

“The Lightning Tree?” I'd climbed the tree nearly every day as a child, only to learn later that I was probably drawn to it because it had a powerful shadow in Othersphere.

“Is that what you call it?” Lazar asked, and then looked a little shamefaced. “It's been code orange ever since the Threat Assessment team first found it, before I was born. So of course we planted cameras around it to keep watch. Father noticed your connection to it. . . .”

“And that's how you originally found me, shot me up with tranquilizers, and captured me.” I shot Caleb a look and found him looking back. He'd been the one to figure that out. As he pulled his gaze away again, I felt how much had changed since then.

Lazar cleared his throat. “It's the only code orange area that seems to have occurred naturally in this part of the world. There's a very old yew in Wales and a cyprus in Iran that are also code orange, I think. But most code oranges are because of damage human beings did to the veil one way or another. Meteor strikes, except for Tunguska, tend to be code yellow.”

“Tunguska must be code red,” I said.

“The reddest.”

“So why is Ximon now living next to a site filled with fancy technology that's damaging the veil?” Caleb asked.

November licked a dab of ice cream off her own nose and clanked her spoon down into her empty bowl. “Let's go and ask him.”

 

We called Ximon and told him we'd meet him at midnight the next night on the western side of the San Antonio Reservoir, about twelve miles from Livermore, to make our own assessment of him and confirm his story. He agreed without argument.

But that wasn't what we did. After much discussion, we agreed to get a few hours of sleep and left before dawn to make the eight-hour drive to his house on Cherry Drive.

Lazar and I got only a few moments alone in the computer room just before we left. He pulled me in and surprised me with a passionate kiss. It was reassuring to feel his lean body against mine, to run his thick blond hair through my fingers.

“Hey,” I said against his mouth.

He didn't let me pull away, wrapping his strong arms around me and kissing the tip of my nose “Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah.” I thought about just breezing past the whole Caleb thing, but that would only keep things awkward. “But it's weird with Caleb here, isn't it?”

“Just a bit.” He put his forehead against mine so that our noses touched. “He doesn't know about us yet, does he?”

“Well, I didn't tell him,” I said. Lazar smelled so good, so comforting, like clean laundry just out of the dryer. “I know I've been tiptoeing around you when he's here, and that's weird, too, and I'm sorry.”

He laughed softly. “Don't be sorry. I'm doing it, too.”

I pulled away a little to look him in the eye, keeping his arms comfortably around my waist. “Why do you care what he thinks?”

His eyes, a rich brown, crinkled in thought. He was only eighteen, but already small lines were etched at the corners of his eyes and between his brows. His life so far had not been an easy one. But the lines just gave his strong, handsome face a touch of character. I could already see the thoughtful, kind man he would be in twenty years. “Mostly to avoid more conflict for you. But there's this tiny little part of me that wonders what it would be like if we could just be . . . brothers. Or half-brothers, or anything other than enemies. I know it'll probably never happen.”

“But you can't help hoping,” I said. “I don't blame you.”

“Why do
you
care what he thinks?” Lazar asked.

I hesitated. I couldn't tell him the truth: that I didn't want Caleb to think poorly of me. Caleb had broken up with me because of Lazar. If he saw us together now, he might think I'd cheated on him. I hadn't cheated, but still. He might never get over it; we'd never be friends.
Or anything else.
“I'm so sick of conflict and pain and anger. I think I just want peace.”

He searched my face as if somehow it held an answer to an unspoken question. “I wonder if we'll ever get that.”

Then the door to the boys' dorm opened and we sprang apart, acting nonchalant as Arnaldo and Caleb passed by the open door to the computer room. We joined them as they headed up the stairs, careful to keep an arm's length between us.

The ride was quiet. Lazar drove, with me in the shotgun seat, and Caleb and Arnaldo behind us. November and London got stuck in the back with our equipment and two large bags filled with chips, pretzels, cookies, and soda.

Not long ago, it would have been Caleb driving with me at his side, and Siku next to November. The bear-shifter's absence was like a black hole in the group, sucking away any desire to talk. Where there once had been anticipation of danger pulling us together, there was now a cloud of vague conflict and tension pushing us apart. Maybe this raid on Ximon would dissipate that cloud.

I pushed doubt away. Caleb was the only one really mad at me, and that was for personal reasons. November blamed me a bit for Siku's death, but she'd agreed with me that Ximon was lying about being possessed, and she'd eagerly pushed us to go on this raid. Because Ximon's man had shot Siku, November wanted Ximon dead or captured more than any of us.

And at least a few things hadn't changed. London, Arnaldo, and Lazar had all readily agreed to my plan. If it worked, the biggest threat to the otherkin would be neutralized.

Lazar drove seated in a much more upright, alert position than Caleb had, often casting me a sideways smile and asking me unnecessary questions to fight off the soul-squashing silence. I couldn't help smiling back and keeping the conversation going, grateful to him, ignoring the black cloud of disapproval emanating from Caleb.

For the last six weeks Lazar had been in our classes at Morfael's school, honing his ability to recognize and draw out the shadows of objects, something his father had told him was the devil's work. Objurers were only supposed to suppress shadow when they found it, never call it forth. Lazar had struggled at first against his early training, but after a couple of weeks, he got kind of giddy at all the shadow he saw, and at his ability to manipulate it. He'd sneaked up on me and tried to make me shift into being a tiger one day. I'd been forced to yell a contradictory note to stop him from succeeding.

He became a bulwark against my despair at the loss of Siku. I'd actually been able to laugh. And Lazar's face had lost its debased, guilt-stricken cast. He made jokes, usually very clean ones, and volunteered to babysit Arnaldo's young brothers when we, the older shifters, were sent out on assignments too advanced for them, and irrelevant to a caller like Lazar.

Cordero and Luis enjoyed learning how to repair the refrigerator or build an elaborate fort out of bales of hay and tree branches. We'd come back from class one day to find that the boys had constructed their own Monopoly set using cardboard and colored pens. A bemused Lazar had never seen one before, and they were teaching him all about real estate, the hard way. I had a strong vision in my head of how Lazar would be with his own sons—bemused, loving, so careful to be the opposite of his own father.

And he flirted with me, always opening the door for me, helping me when it was my turn to clean the kitchen or take out the garbage. Every time he did it, my spirit would lift, my pulse would speed up. November made sarcastic comments about it in the girls' dorm room at night, but I didn't know how to respond. I missed Caleb so much I ached. Lazar's attention sometimes made me forget that ache. Maybe I wouldn't go through my whole life alone. Maybe I wasn't a complete failure at being a girl, and a girlfriend.

Then during our first week after Siku's death, during an exercise where Morfael made us wade upstream through an ankle-deep creek, feeling for places where the veil was thin, I'd slipped on a mossy rock. I would have fallen and gotten completely soaked, except that Lazar was instantly at my side to grab my elbow with a firm, steady hand, the other hand on my waist.

It was the first time anyone had touched me since the night Siku died. I'd had good crying sessions with Mom via video conference, but at school we were all just wandering around in our own isolated haze, going through the motions. Now here was a warm, living person holding me, keeping me from falling, supporting me.

I nearly collapsed right into him. I'd nearly asked him to pick me up and carry me away to somewhere safe, somewhere that grief didn't drip from every word, where no one mourned or blamed.

Instead, I fumbled to gain my footing and slipped again, falling hard against his chest. The contours of his body were strangely familiar under my hands, but he smelled different from Caleb, more like soap and amber than thunderstorm. I'd wanted to wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his neck, to pretend, for a moment, to find comfort there.

His heartbeat had sped up; his hands tightened around my body. His pupils dilated, and he smiled. Our faces had been close, our lips inches apart, and the ache inside me had changed from a great dragging weight into a light, soaring, burning thing.

We hadn't kissed. It was too soon for that. He'd set me carefully on my feet, laughing. We navigated that river side by side, steadying each other. And as we walked back to the school, he took my hand.