by Laura Legend
Except for the dark circles under her eyes, Cass almost looked like herself when she emerged from the bathroom in a towel and a puff of steam. Zach handed her the similarly dark, layered clothes he’d picked out for her from her closet and sent her back in again.
Cass reappeared in a couple of minutes. “Okay,” Cass said, cinching her belt. “Let’s go then.”
“Sure,” Zach countered. “Just one last thing: you’ve got to close your eyes for thirty minutes and get some rest.”
“Zaaaccchh,” Cass resisted, her voice trailing off in exasperation, “we’ve got to go. We’ve got to find Miranda.”
“Yes,” Zach agreed, “but you’ve also got to be worth something when we get there. Otherwise, we’ll just get eaten or, you know, become vampires ourselves. Both of which are bad.”
He eyed the bed in the corner of the room and opted for the couch instead. He sat down and patted the spot next to him. “Just thirty minutes. Sit down here with me and close your eyes for half an hour and then we’ll go.”
“Fine,” Cass said, tired of arguing. She plopped down on the couch and curled up next to him, her head resting on his shoulder.
“Good. Now close your eyes.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to sleep. I’m way too wired to sleep. In fact, I’ve barely slept for months.”
She snuggled closer, closed her eyes, and tried to find somewhere more comfortable to lay her head than his bony shoulder. Gravity decided for her. Her eyes fluttered shut and she was basically snoring before her head hit his lap. Zach pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and draped it over her. He smoothed her still damp hair, squeezed her shoulder, and bent to give her a peck on the cheek. As he leaned in, Cass murmured something in her sleep, turned toward him, and brushed his lips with a kiss.
Cass slept for more than twelve hours. It was ten at night when, finally, she stretched and opened her eyes. Zach was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop. A ping indicated that he’d been messaging someone. The only light in the room can from the street and the glow of his screen. Cass sat up, tossed the blanket onto the back of the couch, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Zach leaned back in his chair and flipped on the kitchen lights.
“You look human again,” Zach said.
“I feel human again,” Cass said, echoing his judgment.
Her head felt clear—the white, chaotic noise that had clouded her mind for weeks had receded. She rolled her shoulder in its socket with only a hint of soreness. She couldn’t even be upset that he’d let her sleep so long, not when the results were so clearly what she needed. If we’d left from Zach’s apartment, I was so far gone I’d be dead by now, Cass realized. The first vampire we saw would have kicked my butt.
“Dr. Riviera, you’re hired,” Cass exclaimed.
“Excellent. My next prescription is for actual food. Sit down.” He plated a giant omelet for her and added a tall glass of orange juice. When he pulled the juice out of the fridge, she saw that he’d restocked it while she was passed out on the couch. Also, the apartment was, in general, suspiciously clean and tidy.
Cass was ravenous. She shoveled it down. The more embarrassed she felt by her manners, the more Zach seemed to enjoy watching her eat. She sat back, patted her flat stomach, and tried, for Zach’s sake, to manage something like a burp. He was impressed.
“It turns out,” Cass said, “that all I really need to get along in life is someone to cook for me, clean my apartment, and tuck me into bed. All I really needed was”—Cass almost said “a mother” but instead, after a moment’s hesitation, said—“a wife.”
Zach laughed as he refolded her blanket and laid it neatly over the back of the couch.
Cass pulled on her socks and boots.
“Now,” she said, “let’s find Miranda.”
He gathered her dishes, rinsed them in the sink, dried them, and replaced in the cupboards. He glanced at Cass and the couch over his shoulder.
“First, the couch,” Zach replied. Cass started to shake her head vehemently, but Zach insisted. “It’s important. I promise.” Cass stared at him.
“Let’s start with this,” he said. “You tell me about the couch.” He looked so serious, eyes wide and pleading. She gave in.
“We’ve had it for years,” Cass started. “It’s been around longer than me. It’s been around longer than my dad. It was my mom’s in college. It feels like part of the family. Dad was happy, though, to send it with me when I asked if I could take it to my own place. Umm, what else? It’s very comfortable. But . . . it’s also weird. Like, sometimes it seems to move around the room on its own—a couple feet in one direction, or a couple feet in another. And sometimes I find things in it that I have no idea how they got there. Money, books, underwear, silverware, you name it.”
Cass fell silent for a moment. Zach waited for her to go on.
“And sometimes,” she continued, “I get this really weird feeling like . . . like there’s nothing inside the couch. Like, literally nothing is inside the couch. A void. Like, if I pulled off the cushions I wouldn’t see the couch frame or the floor but just some kind of hungry, yawning abyss.”
She stopped herself, wondering how crazy she sounded. It’s a couch, dammit, she thought to herself, not an existential crisis!
Zach just nodded his head in agreement. Then, to her surprise, he said: “It seems like you basically already know what there is to know about your couch. You’ve just never taken it seriously. In a nutshell, the truth is that your couch is a kind door. It’s a kind of ‘portal’ to a part of the world where magic and vampires and such are taken for granted as part of the fabric of reality.”
Cass stared at him, her mouth slack.
“Grab your gear,” he said. “I thought you were in a hurry. It’s time to go.”
Well, what did you expect? she asked herself. It’s no weirder than vampires who only wear black leather being a real thing.
Cass grabbed her jacket and sword. Zach shrugged into his own jacket, pulled a cushion off the couch, and set it carefully to one side. Even from a few feet away, Cass could see that, inside of the couch, a narrow set of stairs descended steeply into darkness.
“Cassandra Jones,” Zach said, stepping into the couch, “welcome to the Underside.”
Chapter Ten
The walls of the tight stairwell were cold and smooth. Cass trailed her fingers along the side of the wall as she descended but, in the darkness, she couldn’t quite tell what they were made of—concrete? stone? The stairwell emptied into a long, narrow hallway. In the middle distance, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling and burned with a green tinged light.
Zach looked back to make sure that Cass had followed him down. She was right on his heels. She felt a little queasy, like her normal relationship to be gravity had been tweaked somehow, but nodded for him to go on.
Zach pressed down the hallway, Cass in tow. He seemed to know where they were going. About halfway down the hallway, adjacent to the hanging bulb, they passed a heavy, unmarked door.
Cass felt the door tug at her, call for her, and stopped. The door was flush with the wall. It had a lock for a key but no external handle. Cass grazed the lock with her thumb—it was extremely cold—then traced the edges of the door, from top to bottom, with her fingertips.
“Zach, what is this door?” she asked.
Zach turned back. He hadn’t realized Cass had stopped. He examined the door. He hadn’t seen it as he’d hurried past.
“To be honest,” he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a door like this in the Underside before. They are stairwells and hallways and huge hubs—but not doors like this.”
Cass pressed her ear against the door, but didn’t hear anything.
“We’d better go, though,” Zach prompted. “Now that we’re ready, it’s important to move as quickly as we can.”
Cass agreed and they continued at a brisk pace down the hall, hit a ninety-degree turn when the hallway forked, and then continued down an
other hallway that looked basically identical to the first.
“The basics of this place—of the Underside—are pretty straightforward,” Zach explained. “We don’t know who originally built it or discovered it, or how long it’s been around, but these days it basically gives those who don’t quite fit in with the everyday world a place to call home. Magicians, the Lost, the Turned,” he paused and looked back at her, adding, “Seers.”
Their hallway come to another “T” and, after a glance in both directions, Zach choose left.
“The Underside,” he continued, “is like a fourth spatial dimension appended to the everyday world. It doesn’t belong to that world and it isn’t constrained by the same rules or the normal laws of physics. The Underside does, though, at certain key locations, crossover with the everyday world.”
Zach reached back and took her hand, flashed her a crooked smiled, and they broke into a light jog. The end of their current hallway opened onto an array of bright lights.
“Sometimes, these crossover sites just amount to small portals like the one we used in your couch. Usually, portals like that have to be specially constructed. But, for the most part, these crossover sites mark places where the Underside pokes out into the Overside and occupies shared space with the ordinary world. There are a dozen such overlapping sites across the planet. These sites functions as ‘hubs,’ as small cities in their own right that are hidden behind the ordinary facades visible from the Overside.”
Zach gave her hand a squeeze.
“Hubs,” he said, “like this.”
They emerged all at once from their narrow hallway into an enormous domed space, filled with a twilight sky and the busy lights and sounds of a small city.
Cass’s jaw dropped, her mouth forming an involuntary “O.” They’d emerged in an alleyway. Cass took a couple of steps into the street and spun in a slow circle, head craned back, trying to take it in.
“Okay,” she said, trying to process this, “okay. Before I get too far in redrawing my internal map of the world, are there any other hidden planets or alternate dimensions I should know about?”
“This is the only other one you need to know about . . . for now,” Zach said, winking.
Cass punched him in the shoulder.
“Owww,” he groused, rubbing the bruise.
“What else do I need to know, then, about this one?”
Zach picked up the thread of his explanation, keeping Cass at arm’s length in case she took another swing at him.
“Like I was saying before I was interrupted, the Underside isn’t constrained by all the normal laws of physics. For instance, the buildings that occupy crossover sites are much larger on the inside than on the outside. Entire Underside cities like this one unfold inside of what, from the Overside, look like normal office buildings or casinos or monasteries or whatever. Also, hubs often have allegiances and this particular hub is mostly aligned with the Turned.”
They worked their way out from the edges of the dome and into a main thoroughfare. The street was packed with people and vendors. There were a couple of rickshaws, but no cars. Most buildings were two or three stories tall, but a handful of buildings in the center were glass and steel office towers. In general, the place had the feel of a festive, cosmopolitan bazaar.
“There are two other things you should know,” Zach said. He slipped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer so that they wouldn’t get separated as they weaved through the crush. “The first is that, though these crossover sites are spread out across the world, the distances between them are walkable. We just left your apartment in Oregon and walked for fifteen minutes. But this hub, the hub we’re in now, overlaps with the Overside in London. If we stepped outside, we could have lunch in Hyde Park.”
Crap, Cass thought. I should have brought my passport.
“The second thing to know,” Zach continued, “is that the unusual powers manifest in the Overside by practitioners of magic—or vampires or seers—are grounded in and amplified by the weird rules that govern the Underside.”
They stopped in front of what looked like a bar or strip club. A neon sign outlining the figure of a women blinked and beckoned over the entrance. Next to the image, a scrawl of neon tubes spelled out “BOOBS”—but a section of the lights had burned out years ago so that, now, the sign just read “BO-BS.”
“There’s something about the Underside,” Zach concluded, “that is open to manipulation by mind. In the Overside, I can know the everyday world with my mind. But in the Underside, I can change the world with my mind. In the end, understanding your own powers will depend on understanding how they’re grounded in the weird rules of this part of the world.”
His voice trailed off. He saw Cass staring up skeptically at the sign.
“That’s all we’ve got time for now,” he said. “Stay close. And welcome to Bob’s.”
He pulled the door open and held it for her. Cass crossed her arms defensively across her chest and stepped inside.
The lights were dim and music blared. Cass had no idea what time of day it was in the Underside, but business was brisk. Most of it centered around the bar, but parts of it were clustered around the platforms, scattered around the room, that displayed the house dancers.
Surveying the space, Cass noticed that every one of the dancers was a man in his early twenties, dressed in nothing but a thong. This tuned her in to the fact that practically everyone else in the bar was a woman.
Whatever this place used to be, she thought to herself, watching the dancers bob and gyrate, it doesn’t look like an accident that it’s now called Bo-bs instead of Boobs.
Zach was at her elbow. He seemed a little surprised himself.
“Not what you remember?” Cass asked, giving him pinch.
“Uhhh, not exactly.” Zach said. “But it’s been awhile.”
He pointed across the crowded space toward a service door, and added, “We need to get to that door on the far side of the room. That’s where we’ll find the guy we’re looking for.”
Cass nodded. They plunged into the crowd and headed toward the door.
It didn’t take long, though, before Zach started drawing a lot of attention. The mood in the room was boisterous and loose. The party had been going for a while, a lot of alcohol had been consumed, and Zach stood out in the press of laughing and dancing women.
Whistles and cat calls started to follow them. Hands reached out to snag him. About halfway across the room, Zach got pinned against a post by woman with pink hair and black fingernails who growled at him playfully, snuggled up close, and slipped a hand up under his t-shirt to stuff a twenty dollar bill into the waistline of his jeans.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa ladies,” Zach said, his hands up. “Just passing through here. Not part of the show.”
But this mild protest just set up a howl of laughter from the knot of women who’d closed in around them. A dozen hands were raised in the air, waving twenties, trying to squeeze closer.
Oh hell, Cass thought, you’re too damn cute for your own good, Zach.
“Ladies!” Cass yelled, raising her sword in the air, trumping their twenties. “That’s all for now—he’s with me!”
Everyone stopped and turned to see what was happening. The music stopped and everyone went silent.
