Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) (16 page)

“Hey,” Tora said as she struggled.

“We’re not ready to go,” London shouted.

“Too bad,” Ash muttered.

Kim darted forward. “Get your hands off of her!” But Ash held his machete out to keep Kim at Bay.

“Don’t make me cut you down to three,” he said, deadly serious.

Kim stopped short, fuming.

Elias did not meet London’s eyes, but ducked back into another room and returned with three extra jars of honey. “Three jars—three days,” he said aloud. “And I read the women.”

Ash lowered his blade and spied the gleam in the jars. Elias drove a hard bargain. London figured those three golden jars would be hard to refuse.

Ash looked to his wife. “Sara?”

But she only shook her head.

Ash turned back to Elias. “Seems your company has her spooked.”

“Then I can read her when they’re gone,” Elias suggested. He looked at Sara. “I know you have questions since you lost the little one. You can return when they leave.”

Sara’s eyes glistened with unshed tears, but she consented with a brisk nod. Elias was good at this.

“Fine,” Ash said with a look at the guard, who quickly let go of Tora, her knotted red bracelet still in tact around her wrist. “Three days only. I’ll come at sunset the day after tomorrow. They can leave by nightfall.”

Elias nodded slowly and Ash, his women, and his guard all filed out, leading the burro with them.

“That was close,” London let out as she breathed a sigh of relief. She sat down in a nearby chair and leaned back. “We better get to it. You have a lot to tell us.”

But Elias scowled. “No. Now it is my turn for questions,” he said with a sage grin.

“Isn’t that what your Oracle is for?” Zen shot back. “Thought you had all the answers.”

“Not all,” he amended. “But many.”

London realized that as much as this meant to them—finding Elias—for the rogue Otherborn, finding them must have been as big an event. After all, the man claimed to have spent a lifetime on the road, searching for others like himself. And here four of them had just shown up on his doorstep. Curiosity burned in his eyes. They needed a lot from him, but they were going to have to give a little, too.

IT DIDN’T TAKE long to fill Elias in on the bones of their story. Over warm cups of herbal tea served in pottery mugs, they told him about how they’d come to remember themselves, find the Astral, leave Capital City, and get tangled up with the Tycoons. He was pensive as they spoke, asking questions here and there when something didn’t add up or some detail was left out. Everybody took turns answering. Only Zen didn’t say much.

At last, Elias said, “It seems it was a good thing for my mother to have abandoned me after all. I think—I think I was better off being reared outside the city walls.”

London and Tora both stirred at this. They each knew their own pain of abandonment. “Do you ever miss her?” Tora asked. “Your mother?”

Elias shook his head. “I did not know her. Not like you. In the Mulva camp, I was looked after well by several older, childless women. They are the closest thing I’ve known to a mother.”

“What about your dad?” London asked. “He didn’t want you?”

Elias shrugged. “I doubt he knew anything about me, but it’s impossible to say for sure. The women in Mulva said I screamed at night for months on end as a babe. It was everyone’s guess that this is why my mother gave me up for dead. Only later, after I knew my true self, did I begin to understand why I was so miserable as an infant. This adjustment, this body, has not been easy for me. Especially after so many years untethered in the Astral. ”

London tried to hide how unnerving his confession was to her. She tried not to remember his body covered with bees and his voice reverberating with a thousand individual buzzes. “My father gave up on me, too,” she said as if to change the subject. “If it makes you feel any better.”

Zen caught her eye after she said it and she immediately wished she hadn’t. It made her feel vulnerable. She could never talk about her dad without revealing all the pain surrounding his loss underneath the words. But she was grateful to see the old familiar softness in Zen’s eyes instead of the flint shields she’d been given for the last day and night.

Elias did not speak for a long moment and then he said, “It doesn’t bother me to have been neglected by my parents. I don’t think I form attachments here in the normal way. Some things about me did not make the shift entirely.”

He gave London a gentle smile. “I can see it is not the same for everyone.”

“The
shift
?” Kim asked. Slowly, the cogs of the conversation were turning and changing hands. It was their turn again to pick Elias’s brain.

Elias waved a hand. “I speak in error. Taking a host is not actually the same thing as shifting, but inwardly I often feel as though I am simply trying to shape myself according to this new species as opposed to really being…human.”

“What do you mean?” Kim continued. “What’s shifting?” He had taken off his dark red button down the night before and only thrown it over his t-shirt that morning. Now, he buttoned it up, apparently feeling the chill London had been complaining about all along.

Elias didn’t seem to notice. “To change the world around you—that’s what you call warping. It is permanent, no? If I soak this table top in water, to bend and curve the wood, it will stay like that. Warped. But to change yourself, your own appearance—that’s shifting.”

“That’s what Avery did,” London said before she could catch herself. Zen went stiff. She edged her dark, restless eyes in his direction and back to Elias. “When I found her in New Eden, she showed me her Other by appearing as she would in the Astral.”

“We are all more formless than we know,” Elias confirmed cryptically.

“That must be harder or something,” Kim said to London. “I mean, than warping. Can you do it?”

“I don’t know.” London had never considered trying to shift herself into another form.

“It’s much like warping,” Elias told them. “To do it, you must first be able to visualize the thing you want…or want to become. But there are, how do you say, setbacks.”

“Setbacks?” Zen asked, suddenly interested after Avery had gotten introduced into the conversation.

London tried not to notice, not to care, but she hated seeing how his feelings still raged over Avery. Just like in the Astral, when Avery accused Rye of hating London only because he still loved her, London felt like Zen’s sudden callousness toward Avery after seeing her was really a cover up for how deeply he still missed her and for how much whatever he saw that day hurt him.

Elias stared at Zen with an odd, keen glint. Like Tora, his eyes sometimes cut to the quick. “When we warp, the line between this world and the Astral blurs a little more. And for those like us, the line between who we are here and who we are there diminishes. It’s like placing a bag of ink into a pot of water and then poking holes in it. It gets harder and harder to separate ink from water and one can’t seem to tell anymore whether the water is infiltrating the bag or the ink is infiltrating the pot. We warp ourselves in the process.”

“And shifting?” London was almost afraid to ask. Elias was describing exactly what she’d been going through as more and more of Si’dah made the trip back with her from the Astral.

“Shifting, in a sense, accelerates the process,” he said with a knowing look. “There, we are infinite. We can move and shape ourselves however we choose. But here, there are rules to follow…
laws
.”

“Like the Tycoons and the president make?” Kim asked.

But Elias shook his head. “No. More like your scientists used to talk about.”

“You mean like gravity?” Tora said. “Physics.”

“Precisely,” Elias nodded. “Here we are finite. We, those born twice, we are bending those rules. There are consequences. Bend them too much and the pressure becomes more than we can sustain. Life creates resistance. And a shift can only be temporary at best. Try to hold it too long…”

London kept forgetting that Elias had seen Avery that night, too. He knew what she had become. He was explaining it to them. Even in the Astral, she was no longer strictly her Other—and neither was Rye. What was Avery teaching him? What were the Tycoons making him do?

London shuddered and tried to quell the fury that suddenly sprang up in her. Rye had forgotten about her. No, wait, how did Avery put it? He hated her now. What good were her defensive reflexes if he didn’t want her help? If he liked being Avery’s pet? The Tycoons’ plaything? Her nostrils flared and she did her best to take deep breaths without being noticed. She still wasn’t ready to disclose what they’d witnessed last night and for whatever reason, Elias was allowing her to keep mum for the time being.

But Zen’s gray eyes were all over her. Probably at first because he was searching for the signs of her recent alterations, but then because he noticed her reaction. London knew that look. There would be questions later. And could she blame him? Had she wanted any less when he came back from spying on Avery, loaded with anger and pain? She met his eyes for a brief second and wondered if she should just tell him. After all, they could be keeping the same secret.

“And then what?” Kim asked, interrupting London’s reverie and the strange exchange of looks she and Zen were sharing.

“And then you lose control,” Elias said quietly. “The Astral rebounds. And you…
slip.
”

“What’s a slip?” Tora asked with a gulp.

“A shift back…to the edge planes.”

Zen looked at Elias with fear in his face. “
Edge planes
?” The muscles along his neck tightened and feathered beneath the skin. “What does that mean exactly?”

“You disappear into the Astral, into the farthest, loneliest, planes. No one…no one knows where exactly.”

“But your body?” Zen asked.

“It remains.”

Kim stared at Elias, his beautifully angled eyes wide and round as walnuts. “You mean, a coma?”

“If you’re lucky…for a while,” Elias responded.

“And if you’re not?” Kim asked with arched brows.

Elias gave only one word in reply. “Death.”

THEY HELPED ELIAS put away his new supplies in a hollowed out pantry where he kept his honey stock and listened to him explain his
arrangement
with Ash. Elias insisted he wasn’t a prisoner because he could easily escape if he wanted to and often did, mostly for night walks in the desert air. He said that Ash knew that, but it made the Outroaders feel safer if they believed Elias couldn’t leave his abode and wander into their camp. The lock was purely for show. The Mesa campers were very superstitious, and they feared the old man’s unnerving mannerisms and unwavering insight. For protection and supplies, Elias kept the camp stocked with honey, and provided readings for Outroaders whose curiosity outweighed their fear, which apparently it did often.

“Take Ash’s wife, Sara, for instance,” Elias explained. “She’s secretly terrified of me, even more so of you, but a recent miscarriage has her desperate for answers. She’ll come for that reading, soon as you leave, mark my word.”

“And what can you possibly tell her that will do any good,” Tora asked.

“I can tell her only what the Oracle tells me,” Elias said. “But it’s what I can
give
her that will make the difference.”

“Give?” London asked as she chewed on her lip.

“A charm,” the Beekeeper said with magic in his voice. “Like your bracelet,” he added, pointing to Tora.

“How?” Tora wanted to know.

“Easy. Just like warping only…when you pull the ether through, you adhere it to an item. See?”

“No, I don’t see,” Zen said. His hostility was waning, but he still questioned Elias at ever opportunity.

Elias scowled at Zen. “You don’t want to see. That’s your problem.”

Zen turned away.

“So all those bracelets that Keziah wore, they really worked?”

Elias’s face lit up at the name. “Ah, Keziah! How long since I have seen her. And is she well? Safe?” he asked.

“She is,” Tora told him.

London had borrowed Tora’s jacket and was zipping and unzipping it over and over. She couldn’t wait to get Elias alone and talk about last night. It filled her with nervous energy. “What was with you and her anyway?”

Elias beamed. “She was my mate for a time.”

Kim made a face and Tora smacked him as discreetly as possible. London smiled in spite of herself. “That explains a lot,” she said under her breath. Old Keziah and her bits of string.

“I thought you couldn’t form normal attachments,” Zen reminded them.

Elias’s face fell. “No, I can’t. That’s why I had to leave. She wanted things from me that I am incapable of giving. But I was always fond of her.”

They’d been through another meal of cheese and honey and by now, London was beginning to hate goats. But she would always, always love bees.

“I’m exhausted,” London confessed with a yawn.

“I guess you are,” Kim said, wagging his brows. “Tough night in the Astral exploring unknown planes?”

London cringed. Zen was staring at her with a look that could scald milk. “It was just one,” she said casually, praying they would drop it. But of course, Kim was like a dog with a new bone.

“What was it like? The plane Elias took you to? Can we go?” He was about as eager as an excited puppy.

London looked at Elias and then down to the floor. He waited for her to speak. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” London said quickly. “Elias is tired and needs a break. Besides, it was pretty dull.”

“You’ve been there now. You can lead us,” Kim tried.

London sighed. “I just said I was exhausted, Kim. Not tonight.” London had no intention of revisiting the plane Avery and Rye called home without talking to Elias first.

Zen began tapping his foot loudly on the floor. “No, Kim’s right. If there are other planes, we need to know about them. Maybe that’s how Avery keeps figuring out where we are—how she’s spying on us.”

London pinched the bridge of her nose and tried not to notice the slight thickening that had happened there since Si’dah began seeping into her appearance. “I know. You’re both right and I do think that’s what’s going on. I— I just need some time, okay? I need a break. One night, please? That’s all I’m asking.”