Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) (23 page)

“Tora, I h—have to. I d—don’t think he c—can swim.” Their speech was slow and halting and London didn’t have time to argue at all, much less through the tight, rusty working of their tired jaws. She turned to move back the way they’d come, but Tora threw herself on her, knocking them both into the dirt, dusting them with a little puff of desert.

London grunted with the fall. “Tora! Get off!”

Tora dug her fingers into the wet fabric of London’s shirt. “N—no! You don’t understand,” she stammered.

London rolled over and found the glint of a sliver of moonlight reflected in Tora’s eyes. “What don’t I understand?” she whispered.

Tora sighed. “He’s not t—there. He never made it.”

London blinked. “Never made it? You mean, he didn’t jump? He didn’t make it off the cliff?”

Tora shook her head and little spatters of water from her hair dotted the rock. “No. I mean, he never made it out of the room.”

London gave a little gasp, bewildered. She instinctively reached into her pocket to feel for the geode piece he’d given her, to search for the truth in Tora’s words, but it was gone. She must have lost it in the fall.

“I’m sorry, London,” Tora said, her voice hoarse. “He was right behind me when they got him. I turned just in time to see. The bees were so thick, there was nothing I could do. They held the regiments back a bit, but someone pushed through and Zen was the first one they reached. He was last because he’d waited a moment to press his weight against the door, to give us even a second longer to get ahead.”

London felt all the air rush out of her at once. Zen was still back there somewhere…in Tycoon custody.

LONDON CONCENTRATED UNTIL she could feel the pool shrinking, sucking back through her into the Astral plane from where it had come. She couldn’t leave it, in case the men attempted to follow them. And now that she knew Zen wasn’t there, she had to try to cover their tracks and
unwarp
as easily as she’d warped.

It worked, she could sense it, but there was no telling how many men, if any, had made the leap in after them. They could be drudging up onto the bank now, sloshing their way toward the rock that sheltered her, Kim, and Tora.

“We have to keep moving,” London said, hating the words as she spoke them.

They were all exhausted and cold. Kim had gone from dead white, to a sickly green, to a sallow pasty color. Unlike the girls, he hadn’t known how to contort his body as he entered the water. He’d tucked his knees and smacked into the pool like a cannonball and was likely to suffer some serious bruising from the force of his impact, on top of nearly drowning. His eyes shot daggers at her now but even he knew she was right.

“The truck,” Tora whispered. “If we can make our way around the mesa to the camp entrance we can find where we left it.”

London shook her head. The truck would be no use to them anymore. “No. There’ll be regiments crawling all over that mesa. They will have found the truck already. We’re going to have to foot it out of here.”

“Where?” Kim managed. It was little more than a croak. London thought he sounded more like his Other, Atel, than himself.

London peered out into the flat stretch of crumbled wasteland before her. The silhouettes of spiky desert grasses broke the open expanses between the alien mesas, but little else. There wouldn’t be another camp for miles. Another anything for that matter. Except…

She turned to Kim. “You were right. We’ve worn out our Outroader welcome. There’s little they can offer us at this point anyway. But there’s one network of people we haven’t tried.”

Kim shook his head, a slow roll against the rock where he was leaning. “No clue who you’re talking about.”

“Scrappers,” London said. “They’re the only other people even remotely outside of full Tycoon control.”

“Like Ernesto?” Tora whispered, her green eyes full with remembered terror. Ernesto was the king Scrapper of Capital City. He was also head of the notorious City Central gang, the Tigerians. It was his dirty work that had caused Degan and Pauly’s deaths, by Tycoon order. And he’d tracked the rest of them too, nearly raping London in the woods outside Tora’s camp. It was his truck they’d stolen and were now being forced to abandon.

London frowned and pushed down the bile rising in her throat at the name. “No. No more gangs. Just straight-up Scrappers. The houselands and cities are full of them.”

Kim laughed silently and humorlessly, his chest jostling under his wet clothes in noiseless fits. “Where are we going to find those? There’s nothing for miles to draw a Scrapper.”

London smirked. “I beg to differ, old friend,” she mused, pulling one of several books from her pack.

“You stole those!” Tora said but Kim beamed with pride.

“Good girl,” he managed before dissolving into silent laughter again.

“Obviously,” London began, tucking the book back into their pack, “they’re not going to know to come here. So we’re just going to have to go to them. Mesa City can’t be far.”

Suddenly Kim started, black eyes wide, and Tora whispered to London, “Are you crazy? You want to go back behind the walls?”

London huffed. “I know, it sounds nuts. Just hear me out. The last place they are ever going to expect us to be is inside one of the walled cities. I’m not saying we can stay forever. Of course we can’t. But it can buy us some time. And we’re going to need supplies to strike out on our own. For now, Mesa City is probably the safest place we can go. We can hide, we can trade, and we can think behind the walls. Beyond that, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out along the way.”

In her mind, she added silently,
I just need some time, Zen. Give me a little time and I’ll figure something out. Be strong.
She didn’t know if Zen would trust her to rescue him. After all, they’d failed Rye miserably. But she wasn’t going to let that happen again. She just needed time to think and a place to let Kim rest and recuperate.

Tora pursed her lips and nodded. Kim, too.

“Great,” London said, wiping at the dirt that had settled over her sleeve and hand when Tora tackled her. It smeared into a long brown line after mixing with the moisture on her skin.
Not bad,
London thought.
I like me in brown.

Tora had been gazing out into the lonely landscape. “How are we ever going to get to Mesa City without being spotted?”

London looked at Kim’s sallow face and Tora’s bright hair and then back to her own hands, one ghostly white and one now sandy brown. She grinned. “I have an idea.” Then she began clawing up handfuls of dirt and spreading the muck all over herself, particularly around her face and over her hands. It was cool and soothing to her stings which were already beginning to swell. She’d scraped three stingers out of her hands with her nails, two on one and one on the other, another from her cheek, and one more from her neck. It had only been a matter of minutes since she’d left the hive behind, but already her stomach was cramping and a cough was beginning to burble up from her constricted chest.

She didn’t want to say anything, with Kim looking so weak and Tora’s eyes full of worry every time she looked at him, but right now London was just praying she made it to Mesa City at all. If the Tycoons didn’t get her, the bee stings just might.

“What are you doing?” Tora asked, horrified, as London covered herself in dirt smears.

London dumped a handful over Tora’s head, spreading it through the strands as she pulled down. “What you’re about to,” she said. “You need to cover up that yellow hair. And Kim needs to cover his face and hands good, like me.”

Tora backed away, swatting at London’s dirty fingers. “Why?”

London coughed, trying to pretend she didn’t notice the wave of dizziness that took her, making her head spin as she answered Tora. “Camouflage.”

THE SUN BAKED the desert dirt to their skin, making a crust of browns and reds all over them, like an exoskeleton. Even the pack, an undyed canvas weave, had been generously coated in mud. It looked disgusting and felt pretty gross too, but so far it had worked. They criss-crossed the desert from one mesa to the next, hiding in thick tufts of high grass or under the stony arms of the plateaus whenever the whir of helicopters sounded nearby. Eventually, they stopped hearing them altogether. As London suspected, their trackers never believed they would move this far northwest because only one thing lay in their path, Mesa City.

She scratched miserably at her puffy, left hand, fat with swelling from the two stings it suffered. Dirt caked under her nails and London groaned. Three white stripes, swiftly turning to a glowing pink, were revealed beneath the layer of dirt.

“Stop scratching,” Tora nagged.

“I know, I know. I keep forgetting,” London defended herself. As strained and tender as the flesh near her stings was, the itch was a million times worse.

She was lucky though. Only last night they’d thought she was a goner. They’d dashed from one patch of grass to the next, making their way toward a large mesa with ragged, stacked walls in the distance. The in between was slow and risky, unprotected as they were in the open range. All the while, London could feel her chest growing tighter, her breaths more labored. Her stomach was knotted painfully and the cough was getting worse, but she pressed on. Tora struggled with Kim, supporting him partially under one shoulder as they ran together up ahead, a three-legged shadow in front of her.

She thought she was going to make it. The jagged edges of the mesa they were aiming for loomed up in her field of vision, but as soon as it had, they blurred and faded and London knew all too well what was happening. Her head swam and her tongue felt thick as cotton in her mouth. She tried to call out to Tora and Kim but the sound of engines in the distance, drawing closer, drowned her out. Her voice had grown too faint for even her own ears. When she went down, she figured it was the end of the road for her.

She dimly remembered the tug on her arms as Tora dragged her into the sheltering shadow of the slope, and the feeling that her shoulders might just dislodge beneath the strain. But even that was fuzzy around the edges, as though she wasn’t sure if she was remembering or imagining it. There was only the incessant craving for air and the dry desert night in her throat as Tora held her mouth open and kept her tongue lolled to one side so she could continue to suck tiny, straw-thin, wisps of air into her burning lungs. In between her own desperate struggles to breathe, Tora would occasionally clamp her mouth over London’s and blow hard.

It eased, gradually. And the trucks never came near enough to spot them. Once she and Tora were certain she could breathe well enough again, she was allowed to sit up. Tora covered her in her reprocessed jacket and London slumped down on her shoulder and fell into a brief and fitful slumber until the Seer woke her a little while later, just as the sun prepared to crest the horizon and the predawn chill crept into the air.

They’d been moving ever since.

Now the fear of death had flown with the night’s moon, and with the sun came the swelling and the rash. Her middle fingers on her right hand throbbed with ever step and she could feel that her jaw jutted out strangely to one side where her cheek was swollen. Her shirt collar rubbed incessantly at her neck, close enough to the sting to make the itch there absolutely maddening. But every time she scratched, she wiped off more of the camouflaging mud and made them just a little more vulnerable to anyone looking for them.

Tora rolled her eyes at London. “After surviving last night, I am not about to let us get caught because of your
itching
,” she warned. “Cut. It. Out.”

In spite of herself, London smiled. Kim was dragging on the other side of the Seer, a little tired and a little weak, but gaining strength with every step. “Why don’t you pick on him? He’s nearly as useless as I am.”

Kim grinned at her. “Trust me,” he chimed in. “No one looks as bad as you do right now.”

London scowled, then laughed. She gave Tora a serious look. “You saved my life. Don’t think I’ll forget that.”

Tora shrugged. “And you saved Kim’s. Everybody’s a hero.”

“Where’d you learn how to do that,” London asked. “The breathing and everything.”

Tora flushed a little, the color springing up around her eyes where the mud didn’t reach. “I spent quite a bit of time with Abigail at the camp. She taught me a few things.”

“And the swimming?” London asked.

Tora smiled, mud cracking around her mouth. “There was a lake we visited sometimes in the summer when it would get real hot. It was worth the trek to spend a day cooling off in that water. The mosquitoes were insane there though. We’d always come back covered in welts.”

Tora eyed London then, her eyes narrowing. “What about you? How’d you learn?”

“I didn’t,” London said with a shrug. “I guess Si’dah did.”

“Can’t say the same for Atel,” Kim cracked and they all laughed a little.

“I think…I think it was also her in the Bayou Camp. When I, uh, stabbed Clark. I think she kind of took over,” London confessed.

“Well,” Kim said, kicking at a tuft of vegetation as they passed, “be sure and give her our thanks. You saved all our asses back there.”

Not all,
London thought with a pang of loss in her heart for Zen. But she smiled at Kim again, whose black eyes and mud-paste face made her think of Elias. “I wonder what happened to him?” she said aloud.

Kim and Tora blinked at her from their sun-baked desert masks.

“I saw Elias shift,” she explained. “Just before I ran back into the room. He shifted into a bee so the regiments couldn’t arrest him.”

“I thought he said that was dangerous?” Kim replied.

“Yeah well, so was the alternative. Some risks are worth taking,” London told him.

“We’ll have to get some rest tonight. Maybe we can look for him in the Astral. Make sure he’s okay and find out what he knows about Zen,” Tora suggested.

London agreed, her own words still trailing through her mind.
Some risks are worth taking…