Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) (31 page)

“Name?” the little man said impatiently.

“Huh?” London turned and peered at the man, his half moon lenses sliding down his oily nose.

“Name.”

“Oh…uh, Kit. Kitty.” London tried to smile seductively, she was wearing a model’s face after all, but the man didn’t appear impressed.

“Kitty
what
?”

She stared at his glasses. “Moon. Kitty Moon.”

The man huffed and pushed the lenses back up his nose, jabbing her name into the system on the sunken touch-screen in his kiosk counter. “You’re on the Mesa truck, right? Right,” he said, answering his own question.

London nodded dumbly, glancing over to Kim who was being escorted to a small crowd of people at the far end of the room.

“Age?” the man asked her.

London thought for a moment. How old did her shifted face look? “Eighteen,” she said slowly, hoping he would buy it.

He said nothing but stabbed this into the form glowing back at him from the counter. “Female,” he added with glance her way, “about 5 feet 8 inches.”

London started to panic as the doors opened before Kim’s group and they were slowly herded through them. She needed to make sure she got into that group.

“Weight?” the man asked.

“Excuse me?” London stared at him. “Isn’t that a little personal?”

“Strictly procedure,” the man assured her in a not-so-nice tone. “Weight?”

London stamped her foot. “I don’t know, uh, one-twenty?” Her heart sank as she watched Kim disappear behind his doors, his fake eyes glancing back at her once more.

The man looked down at his screen, pressing in her numbers.

London leaned over the counter. “Hey, where are they going?” she asked pointing to the doors closing behind Kim’s group. She prayed he could find a space in there for a quick change. She never thought about how long they might get stuck shifting once they got here.

The man glared at London. “Miss, please remove yourself from my counter. You will be slotted into the most appropriate testing facility for you. The other facilities are not your concern.”

“Testing?”’ she asked.

The man rolled his eyes. “Of course. We have several promising vaccine serums already under way.”

London frowned. Somehow, she doubted this.
More like reprocessing.
Pauly was right all along.

The man punched in a couple more things and then waited as the screen went blank. It glowed alive again after only a second or two, and instead of the form he’d been filling out earlier, the screen read
Facility Three.

“Facility three? What’s that?” London asked. “Is that the same one I just pointed at?”

The man ignored her. “You will be escorted.”

London slammed a hand on his counter, sending the picture on the screen skittering. “Hey! Answer me! Is that the same facility my friend went into?”

The man jumped back and gestured hurriedly at an approaching guard. “Three,” he told the guard, who was already shouting for reinforcements.

The first guard took London by the elbow and she slammed her heel into his foot hard. He grunted but didn’t let go. The next guard caught her from the other side and together they wrangled her away from the counter and towards a pair of doors that were one away from those Kim went into.
Not the same facility
.

London was prepared to make a big enough scene that she might be able to get away and scrabble down Kim’s hall. Then, she could shift and they’d never find her since they’d be looking for a redhead. That is, until she looked down and saw Melbourne waiting in the group for Facility Three, his sad pajamas hanging off him and his blue eyes wide with fear.

She stilled in the guards’ grip. “Okay. Okay! I’m calm. Just let me go.”

Cautiously, they loosened their hold on her, until it was obvious she wasn’t going to bolt or fight anymore.

London jerked away and scooted to Melbourne’s side. She took his hand in hers. “I’m fine,” she insisted and the guards stepped back, but they remained close, watching her warily until the doors to Facility Three opened wide to admit them.

ANOTHER LONG STERILE hall awaited, this one made of real walls and not fabric. Overhead, circular lights beamed down from inside the ceiling tiles, bathing every inch in fluorescence. It was almost painful for London to look at. A set of doors opposite them swung on their hinges where someone had passed through not long ago, three dim green crescent moons interlocked on each one in paint. She’d seen that symbol already, in white on the side of the pale green quarantine truck that had picked her and Melbourne up. It must represent the hazard of the sleeping sickness.

Single doors to either side were set into each wall, slitted windows fitted high into the panel, just like on the truck. London was desperate to get a look inside the rooms they concealed, but didn’t want to fall behind or get manhandled by the guards again, so she simply passed by with a glance. With Melbourne clinging tightly to her and the overhead lights revealing every detail of the hallway and her ill-fated companions, she didn’t dare attempt the shift back. Not yet. But she was growing increasingly worried about holding it.

Unlike warping, where she pulled something through the Astral into the physical dimension and it remained of its own accord, shifting required a sustained attention and energy to hold the image in place over one’s true form. It was what she had done to their truck when they were fleeing the Ag district, without ever realizing it. Pulling the Astral through and holding it up like a mask of reality. Different than the stairs she’d made outside Elias’s hive, or the water, in that those she simply grabbed and tossed out, where they were held by the force of their own being.

It was the difference between knitting the energy around her into something new, as one can take string and yarn and needle and fabricate these materials into a whole new item, and reflecting it as something unique, wherein the reflection cannot exist without the constant presence of the item being reflected. Once done, the blanket or shawl required no further effort on the part of its maker to exist. But a reflection fades as soon as the original image drifts away. It can exist only so long as the original holds it there, by strength of force to hold itself before the point of refraction. In this case, she had to hold both herself and the Astral, the mirror as it were, steadily in place, and the effort was draining.

Shifting the truck had been so much easier. The truck was lifeless, it put up no fight or fuss. But it seemed her life force, the very thing which separated her from the truck, was betraying her, consistently struggling to rearrange itself as it knew it should be. And the effort to hold it against its will was weakening her resolve. In response, the Astral grew in strength, in order to hold the façade. She could feel the pressure of these warring energies building behind her effort, the image becoming more tenuous with every passing moment, the Astral more fierce. She needed to release the shift before it released her, carrying her soul on the rebound.

They neared the double doors and passed through in silence. Her group, about twenty or so, many of whom must have arrived on different trucks, simply shuffled steadily forward, looking about mutely, their shame and fear staying them like shackles. This hall T’ed the other one and the guards on either side directed them to the left. The stark white walls they’d just seen fell away and were replaced by a thick glass-like material. Maybe an epoxy of some kind. London couldn’t tell for sure. It had all the clear perfection of glass with none of the obvious fragility. Behind it were rooms, or cells more like, holding victims of the disease like themselves. Their own clothes were stripped and replaced with facility-issue garb, a pale green reprocessed material, stamped across the chest in white with the three interlocking moons.

Many watched them pass with dull eyes and no motion, apathetic and resigned to their fate. But a few others actually got up and moved to the panels, pressing their faces and fingers against the material, no doubt searching for the familiar features of friends or family among the new recruits. One desperate woman even pounded her fist against the glasslike wall, her mouth open and moving as she yelled, but from where they were only inches away, not a sound could be heard.

They stopped momentarily for the guard in front to open a door. He ushered the first few men in line inside, a total of four, and closed the door behind them. London noticed the clicking sound as it locked of its own accord, obviously programmed to do so each time it closed. The doors were set into slender opaque panels, frosty white, so that their mechanisms and circuitry were not displayed. Across from each one, against the far wall, a molded toilet and sink were exposed, little sliding curtains the only privacy afforded for dressing or going to the bathroom.

They passed another cell adjacent to this one, occupied by two bright blond heads that glowed under the ceiling lights. London almost faltered as she saw their faces, so close to one another at the wall, peering out at her. She knew those faces, remembered them, and her heart broke to see them here. Kayla and Crow, from Ag. Had she done this? Had her presence somehow tainted them? With so many regiments stationed in and around their home, it wouldn’t have taken long for word of their dreaming to reach the proper authorities.

London smiled wanly at the little faces, all alone in their cell, and almost gasped when Kayla raised a hand to wave at her. Surely the little girl didn’t recognize her? Not while she was shifted. London convinced herself it was only a friendly wave to a new crop of strangers being inducted into Facility Three, but something in her still shivered at the smile on the girl’s receding face.

They made four more stops before coming to what was to be her cell. London had carefully tugged on Melbourne’s hand to draw him to the very back of their crowd, hoping for a chance to release her shift, though one never came in this prison of glass. Eyes were on them through their whole long procession. But it seemed her effort had not been in vain, for when they reached the final door, there was only she and Melbourne left to enter it. The guards slid the door open for them and they passed through the slender doorway one at a time. London was relieved to see there was no one else waiting inside. Melbourne was her sole roommate…for now.

The door slid back and clicked tight, a tiny red light set in the opaque panel indicating it was locked. London stood at the corner just behind the doorway and held her breath. When the last guard was out of sight, she bolted for the toilet and pulled the curtain, letting the red hair and blue eyes fall away with relief.

Pushing the curtain back, she stared out at Melbourne, who sat on one of the narrow beds across the little room and watched her. The people in the adjoining cell didn’t seem to notice her or Melbourne and were busily tossing aside their own clothes for the garments supplied on the bed.

London approached her bed and fingered the green patient garb, tightly woven of pressed reprocessed fiber. There wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to put that on.

“How do you do that?” Melbourne asked, stripping off his shirt and donning the new one, rolling up the too-long sleeves.

London looked past him anxiously to the people in the adjoining room, but the walls were soundproof, she knew that much. “Just a little trick I learned…from dreaming.”

“Wow,” Melbourne said and smiled. “Could I learn that too?”

London grinned at him. “Maybe. It takes a lot of practice.” She knew it was impossible for Melbourne to shift, since he wasn’t Otherborn, but she liked the idea of giving him something positive to hold onto about dreaming. “But you can’t tell anyone,” she added. “Or it won’t work.”

Melbourne nodded. “I won’t.” He cuffed his facility-issue pants neatly and laid his old pajamas in a heap at the foot of his bed. “Aren’t you going to change?” he asked her. “I won’t look. You can even go behind the curtain.”

London laughed softly. “I don’t intend on staying long.”

DR. RAND HAD a swath of reddish hair pulled tight into her papery hat, where it was neatly covered. Her small eyes were set a little too close for London’s taste, but she refrained from saying anything about it.

“So, Kitty and Melbourne, hello,” she greeted them cheerily. “I’m Dr. Rand. I’m just popping by to greet all our new patients and give you a little rundown of what’s expected here at Facility Three.”

Melbourne smiled and London lay back on her bed, crossing her feet at the ankles.

Dr. Rand continued. “You’re going to need to change into your patient wear while you’re here. I’ll take all your other clothing items with me.” She smiled at Melbourne, then frowned at London. “I see you haven’t changed yet, Ms. Moon. Is there some problem with your patient wear?”

“Not that I know of,” London replied, stroking her dark waves casually. Dr. Rand had popped up so unexpectedly that she hadn’t the time to pull a shift, but it was probably just as well. She couldn’t conceive of trying to hold that face to her own every time the doctor was present and as it was, Dr. Rand didn’t seem to know anything about her. Otherwise, she would have recognized London right away.

“Right,” Dr. Rand said. “Well then, maybe you can change after I leave and I’ll pick your other things up later,” she said, her lip raising slightly as she eyed London’s present state, black fitted reprocessed pants and an oversized blue button-down over a white tank to hide her scars. Punctuated by her thick-treaded, black lace-up boots. All were pretty worse for the wear.

London just smiled.

Dr. Rand went on. “It is important for you each to pick a bed and stay in it at night. We have orderlies who’ll be coming by to make sure everyone’s well secured and strapped in for sleep.”

“Strapped in?” London asked.

Dr. Rand cleared her throat. “We like to monitor signs of the sickness at night. It helps us determine which serums may be effective as well as how the disease progresses.”

London studied Dr. Rand. Her white coat fell to mid-calf and buttoned down the front with three, large green buttons. In her arms, she carried a touch-screen, more advanced than the butterfly-hinged netbook London had waited so long to obtain, its faint green glow lighting her pointed chin and dimpled cheeks. “Are you going to feed us?”