Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) (30 page)

“It’s perfect,” London beamed. “I mean, we do have the sleeping sickness after all.”

Kim slapped a palm against his forehead. “What the hell was in those donuts?”

“It’s not the donuts, Kim,” London said as she neared the alley corner and peeked around. Sure enough, the telltale swing of flashlights and headlamps was steadily drawing nearer.

“You’re mad,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You’ve gone completely insane.”

“Crazy like a fox,” London agreed.

Kim shook his head. “London, listen to me. We can’t do this. They’ll know us. They have to. And then what? You think they’re just going to let us march back into New Eden like we own the place?”

“They won’t know us,” London whispered. “We’ll shift.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Kim was pacing now. “Not that. I’m not skittering off to nowhere-land with the Beekeeper. We’ve never even tried shifting before and we can’t hold it from here to New Eden without some serious repercussions. Besides, Tora can’t do it.”

“That’s why you’ll give her your charm. She can slip in undetected. Like you did with Denton. Tora’s our wild card. The charms can work for others, just like Elias’s bracelets.”

“And us?” Kim asked. “How long can we hold a shift before we boomerang into the Astral’s nether-reaches?”

London sighed. “We only need to hold it when they’re watching. Just long enough to get in the truck. Once we’re inside, we can let it go. None of the dreamers in there know about us.”

Kim didn’t look convinced, but the truck was nearing and London was going, with or without him.

Tora pulled Kim to her and gave him a gentle kiss. “I can do it,” she said. “Let me.”

Kim sighed. “If anything happens to you…either of you.”

“It won’t,” Tora assured him. “You’re both strong enough for this. London is right. It’s time.” She held out her hand, palm open. “Give me the marble.”

Kim pulled it from his pocket and passed it off. “You just have to—”

“Will it. I know,” she said. And then she was gone.

“Tora?” Kim whispered, spinning.

Next to them, her voice sounded. “Shhh. I’m right here. Your turn, the truck is getting close.”

Kim looked at London and she nodded.

“We could have just done this last night and skipped the whole Scrapper hostage thing,” he murmured.

“Hadn’t thought of it yet,” London told him. “Now shift.”

“I always did want to try blond,” Kim said, and with a ripple, his face was gone, replaced by the softly rounded, thin features of what appeared to be something like a younger, more handsome Linus. A head full of cropped blond hair replaced his jet lengths.

“Your tattoo,” London reminded him, and Kim’s new face gasped.

“Oh right!” he said, erasing the trigram as though it had never been at all.

London took a breath and closed her eyes. She could feel the Astral drop over her like a veil forming itself to her skin, only it wasn’t her skin anymore. It was a golden brown, freckled along the tops of both arms. And her hair was a deep red, auburn with carrot streaks, straight and smooth as stained glass. A fringe of bangs fell into her now blue eyes. It was the face of a model she’d seen in a pre-Crisis magazine once, down in the tunnels. She hoped her body matched. It would be nice to have a little more curve than usual. She wondered where Kim got his face. Probably the television. Something from his BBC stuff, no doubt.

“For something so dangerous, that was way too easy,” she whispered.

“And perfect,” Tora whispered next to them. “Now go!”

They bolted from the alley into the street and straight into the flashlight beam of a night guard.

“Whoa! What do we have here?” he asked, turning to his companion. The truck stopped dead. “Looks like a couple of night walkers, Carl.”

Carl eyed them both. “Don’t you two know about curfew?” he asked.

London swallowed and looked at Kim.

Carl chuckled. “Course you do. Why else would you be slinking around right before dawn? Thought you could get out of the city, huh? Spread your sickness over the desert like a plague?”

London shook her head. “N—no. It’s just…we just—”

“Save it,” Carl said, shining his flashlight straight into her eyes. “You been sleeping much?”

London opened her mouth to answer, but Carl quickly began pushing her around toward the back of the truck. The other guard was doing the same to Kim.

“Let the Tycoons’ figure out what to do with you,” he said, pulling open a heavy door with squealing hinges.

London peered inside as she climbed up. Slitted windows high in the walls of the truck let in what little light was just beginning to dawn. She couldn’t make out much, just the glare of Carl’s flashlight against the sets of eyes inside and a few startled faces. She counted quickly and realized there were at least ten people in the truck.

Behind her, Kim was scrambling in awkwardly, trying to give Tora the time she needed to clamber up as well. They moved to the back and found empty seats next to each other along the rows of benches bolted inside. London heard a noise, a small cough next to her and felt an invisible squeeze against her hand. Tora was with them.

No one spoke as the truck jolted forward and began it’s rambling pace up the wide streets of Mesa City, and it was just as well. In the quiet dark, London squeezed Kim’s fingers next to her and together, they let the façade of the shift slide off of them like sheets.

LONDON AWOKE WITH a start, the deep moans across from her filling her ears and wrecking her sleep. A boy, maybe ten or so, with a tuft of sandy hair was lying on his bench asleep, his head twisting back and forth as he emitted the telltale moans that must have given him away as
infected
. Next to him, several other people had scooted down, as though afraid to touch him and be twice doomed. Maybe they hadn’t noticed they were already in the quarantine truck.

London scowled at an older woman who looked terrified but should frankly know better. She got on her knees in the bouncing truck-bed, the cool of the green painted metal reaching her kneecaps through her pants, and shook the boy’s shoulder, then gave his cheek a little pat.

“Wake up,” she told him until his round eyes popped open, foggy with disorientation. He sat up, looking confused, and glanced around the truck. His pajamas were faux flannel, blue with little ducks on them.

She saw the rush of memory fill his face and the crush of defeat wash over him. His features crumpled, as if to cry, but he quickly wiped at his eyes and composed himself.

London had returned to her seat, both hands clutching the edge of the bench as she watched him. What the hell were they doing taking a child from his parents?

“You okay?” she asked him after a minute.

He nodded, his blue eyes reaching up to meet hers and darting away like a frightened animal.

“You were dreaming, that’s all. No big deal,” she said.

The woman she’d scowled at hissed in her direction. “How can you say that? It’s the sickness! He has it!”

The woman clutched her purse to her chest, the patent black of the reprocessed leather reflecting what daylight could reach them through the slits above. The air inside was warming, and already stuffy, and London was grateful for what little draft the slits allowed.

“By the looks of it, you have it too,” she said to the woman, whose tight dark curls were streaked with silver.

The woman huffed and turned her nose away as if London smelled bad.

London looked back to the boy. “Where are your parents?” she asked him.

“Home,” was all he said.

“Who—who turned you in?” She still couldn’t believe that they were taking kids from their families like this, though he appeared to be the youngest one on the truck.

His eyes met hers again, a flash of shame in them. “My dad.”

London sucked in air.
His dad
? His own dad? What were the Tycoons telling people about this sleeping sickness that would convince parents to turn in their own children?

London steadied herself and reached out to lay a hand over the boy’s. “Well, you should know there’s nothing wrong with you. They’re just dreams. Everyone used to have them before the Crisis. It doesn’t mean you’re sick.”

The boy looked at her and nodded, unsure. She felt a tiny pinch from Tora beside her.

“You shouldn’t be saying things like that,” Kim said quietly to her. “They’ll know we’re different.”

London shrugged. “I’m not gonna let a little kid whose parents abandoned him go on thinking he’s a pariah.”

The woman with the black purse and tight curls was watching them. “How do you know?” she snapped. “It’s a disease. Incurable. All there is to do is contain it.” Her voice was low and sinister. “Now we’re going to die. They’re exterminating us!”

London sighed and looked at the boy, so small hunched over in his duck pajamas, frightened by the woman’s words. She glared at the woman. “They’re not going to kill us. They could have done that back in the city.”

“Then where are they taking us?” asked another woman, whose dark eye makeup was smudged from crying. She was seated near the doors, her bony shoulders wrapped in a thin jacket.

“London, don’t,” Kim said, but she couldn’t imagine just leaving these people in their ignorance, with nothing to believe but the horrid stories the Tycoon’s had pumped them full of.

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “It’s a place near Capital City, for the dreamers, where they can keep an eye on us.” She didn’t want to get into New Eden and all the high Tycoon living that would be just outside their prison. “It might be a prison or a plant of some kind. But they’re not killing us.”

Some of the people gasped at that, but no one refuted her. London looked at the boy. “What’s your name?”

“Melbourne.”

She smiled at him. “Do you believe me, Melbourne? That you’re okay? That you’re not sick?”

He shrugged. “I d—don’t feel sick,” he said finally, almost to himself.

“Because you’re not,” London answered strongly. She looked at everyone in the truck. “None of you are.”

“But I’ve seen them,” said the woman in the smudged eye makeup. “The night pictures. I tried to hide it for a while, but they wouldn’t go away.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re sick,” Kim piped up before London could respond. “It means you’re getting better.”

London grinned at him.

“So we were sick? Before?” a dark-skinned man next to the woman asked, sounding confused.

“Kind of,” Kim said. “We all were. The dreams aren’t a symptom that you’re getting sick, that’s only what they want you to believe. They’re a symptom that you’re getting well.”

“I don’t understand,” said the woman with the purse, whose grip was beginning to slacken.

London took a deep breath. They’d come this far, why not go all the way? “The Tycoons have been suppressing our systems, portions of our mind, with sedatives. They’re in the food, in our cigarettes and booze, in our water. Hell, they’re probably in our clothes and the air we breathe that blows out from the plants. They’ve been doing it for years, since the Crisis. That’s what keeps us from dreaming anymore.”

“How do you know that?” the woman snapped, her silver-streaked curls twitching with every jerk of her head.

“Because we’re Outroaders,” London lied, though there was some truth to it. “We’ve been following the progress of the sleeping sickness over the last few months. Our leaders have known about the sedatives for a long time.”

“Then how come some of us are doing it again, dreaming? If we were still being exposed to the sedatives?” the dark man asked.

“I don’t know,” London answered. She didn’t want to say it was her fault, and the truth was, the more she thought about it, the more she figured it couldn’t just be their fault. Maybe in some sense the Astral was contagious, but Denton said the sickness was turning up all over, from one coast to another. They couldn’t be responsible for all of those cases, could they? Maybe something else was going on, too. Maybe there was more to the timing of it all. She didn’t have enough pieces to reconstruct the puzzle yet, but she knew she would get them where she was going.

IF THEY PASSED New Eden, they would never have known. Even standing on a bench, London couldn’t see out of the tiny window slits over her head. When the truck finally stopped and the doors were flung open, the sight before them was anything but the sprawling houses and fragrant gardens she remembered.

London and Kim shifted carefully from the back of the line, reapplying their guises, just in case, and praying no one noticed. When she looked up, her red hair and blue eyes back in place, Melbourne was staring at her, but he didn’t say a word. She gave him a gentle smile and placed a finger over her lips. He nodded conspiratorially. London was beginning to like this kid.

She filed out behind Kim, feeling Tora breathing down her neck, into a long white tented tunnel, made of some synthetic material, the glare of the temporary lights standing every few paces inside blinding her eyes, which had grown accustomed to the truck’s dim interior over the course of the ride. Guards in black, posted along the tunnel, shoved them periodically to keep the line moving swiftly. Eventually, they passed through a set of open double doors into a midsize crowded room, where people were being questioned at kiosks and then jostled aside into varying groups.

“What is this?” Kim asked over a shoulder, his blond hair gleaming in the light. “I can’t hold this look forever.”

“It looks like they’re sorting us,” London replied. “Just a little longer, Kim. As soon as we get out of this room we can find a way to drop the shift. I doubt anyone beyond the entry point has been cautioned to look for us. Just be careful no one is watching. Stick to the back of the crowd.”

Kim approached the kiosk in front of them. A heavy woman with her hair wound up into some kind of papery hat was waiting behind the polished white counter. But London was suddenly tugged aside by a gruff guard. “Over here, this one’s empty,” he said.

She approached the kiosk and the tiny man with bifocals cautiously. She didn’t want to get separated from Kim but hopefully they could slip beyond the sets of waiting doors together after this. She trained her eyes on him, waiting for him to notice where she’d gone, and worrying about Tora in this crowd. But no one seemed to be bumping into invisible objects.