Othersphere Page 6

  “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.

  As long as it succeeds.

  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.

  We strolled like that until we reached the school. We even let go at the same time, just before we walked inside. I’d spent the rest of the day quietly smiling to myself. It had progressed slowly from there, with him always patient, deferring to my reticence, but hinting at better things to come.

  Until yesterday. I blushed just thinking about it, wondering what would happen next.

  What would Caleb do if he found out?

  The thought dragged at me. The others in the school had eventually figured it out. But no one had said much. We were all preoccupied with loss. Grief had drawn a boundary of silence between us. Except for me and Lazar.

  Lazar still hadn’t given any outward sign we were together, but Caleb was no fool. He might already suspect. I tried to keep my responses to Lazar’s chatter as innocuous as possible as we drove. If Caleb left because of me being with Lazar, then it would really be my fault that the group of friends, the team, had disintegrated.

  And I couldn’t imagine never seeing Caleb again.

  We reached Livermore late in the afternoon, stopped off for some fast food, and coasted slowly down Cherry Drive after dusk.

  It reminded me a bit of the neighborhood where I’d grown up in Burbank. The trees here were smaller, the houses newer, and thus even more cookie-cutter than I was used to. So 1491 only differed from 1493 and 1495 because it had been painted a lighter beige and had a familiar white pickup truck parked in the driveway.

  “That’s one of the trucks we saw last night,” I said.

  “Then we’re going in,” London said, shooting Arnaldo a look.

  “Reconnaissance is ready,” Arnaldo said, pulling his sweatshirt over his head.

  “Yeah, yeah, me, too.” November rolled up the bag of candy she’d been dipping into for the last hour and stashed it.

  We parked around a bend in the road, waited till an SUV filled with kids in soccer uniforms drove by, and let Arnaldo and November slip out. Arnaldo’s eagle form was too large for him to shift completely inside the car, so Lazar slid the moonroof back. Arnaldo stood up on his seat, bare chest poking out of the roof, and, with a tremble of air, shifted.

  I could just see a gnarled yellow talon holding the edge of the open moonroof. Then his fierce head, covered in snow-white feathers, poked down, and he fixed us with one shining golden eye.

  “Okay, okay,” November said. She kept talking, but after a brief pause, the words became squeaks. What had been a girl in the back seat in a fatigue jacket and skinny jeans became a pile of clothing and crumbs. A lump under the jacket moved, chittering, and November’s little pink nose peeked out, her gray-and-white whiskers bristling. London opened the door for her, and November leapt onto the strip of grass next to the sidewalk.

  Arnaldo lifted his head and with a flap of his huge brown wings, rose from the roof of the SUV, shoving it away with his powerful feet.

  “He’s awfully big for the suburbs,” London said, craning her neck to watch the eagle fly toward number 1491 Cherry Drive.

  “But federally protected,” I said. “The worst thing that happens is someone sights him and they think, ‘Cool! The bald eagle is really coming back.’ ”

  “Unless Ximon has infrared cameras on his roof,” Caleb said, his voice bland.

  “Unlikely,” Lazar said, even more neutral. “They aren’t cheap or easy to install discreetly, and it’s not like he had time to take any with him when he ran off.”

  “And if they set off an alarm, they set off an alarm,” I said.

  London stepped out of the car. “Time for us to go.”

  We followed her out of the SUV and split up. Caleb and London strolled back around the corner toward the front of 1491, while Lazar and I headed in the opposite direction to go around the back. There was no alley behind the houses here. They sat back to back with another row of houses just like them, separated by a tall wooden fence. So we would have to move a little faster and do more climbing than our friends.

  Lazar took my hand. Nervous, I glanced over my shoulder before we rounded the corner to see the long dark line of Caleb walking next to the loping, lanky form of London, the blond top half of her head faintly green under the streetlights. Caleb turned at the last moment to look back our way. I yanked my hand out of Lazar’s; then we turned the corner.

  Lazar was staring at me. “I need my hand,” I mouthed to him. But his face was blank. Did he realize I’d pulled away because of Caleb?

  “Testing,” I said, a finger to the receiver in my ear. Lazar had fashioned headsets for us a few weeks back, and we’d practiced using them in a few classes. Now that I could channel excess energy into the ground, I could keep it from shorting out. Probably. Caleb had refused to wear one, as if the fact that it came from Lazar and the Tribunal tainted it.

  “I hear you.” London’s voice was tinny in my ear. “We’ll wait for your signal.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to Lazar. “Let’s get ahead of them. Count down.”

  We picked up the pace to a slow jog. “One,” Lazar said under his breath as we passed the first house on the street parallel to Cherry. Fourteen ninety-one was the fifth house from the corner, and with the lots all the same size, we knew we co
uld enter its backyard with confidence, as long as we counted the houses on this parallel street properly.

  We counted down silently. “Five.” We slowed down in front of the fifth house. The lights were off upstairs, but the opaque glass near the front door was glowing. Dinnertime in house five.

  The coast looked clear. We walked normally onto the lawn toward the fence protecting the backyard, and then stooped low as we moved in front of the opaque glass by the front door. The dark, weathered wooden planks of the fence only came up to my cheekbones, so I stood on my toes and glanced over it. A black four-legged form lying nearby looked up from the bone it was gnawing and barked.

  “Oh, crap,” I said to Lazar, who was right behind me. A thump from the other side of the fence announced that the dog was on its hind legs, paws up on the fence.

  “Then we go through that yard.” Even taller than I was, Lazar looked over the fence easily and pointed at the sixth house next door.

  “Frances! Quiet!” a man shouted from the fifth house.

  The dog, a lion-maned creature with jet black eyes, fur, and tongue, kept barking. Frances was no fool.

  “Let’s be quick.” I moved over a few feet to the fence guarding the sixth house’s backyard. There were no lights on in this house, not even a porch light. My pupils were adjusting as I reached up and put a foot against the fence to leap over.

  “Here.” Lazar bent down and put both his hands under my foot, like someone helping a jockey into a saddle.

  “Okay.” Caleb rarely helped me that way, knowing I could handle myself, but a little extra push couldn’t hurt. I put my sneakered foot on Lazar’s hands and pushed off.

  Lazar used his hands like a springboard and I vaulted clear over the fence in almost a standing position.

  His help threw off my balance a little, though. I had to roll when I landed. I got to my feet just as I saw, right in front of me, the black water of an unlit swimming pool, unreflective beneath the overcast night sky. I teetered on the edge, and then pulled back, silently thanking my cat-shifter reflexes.