Chameleon Moon

by RoAnna Sylver

  “Go?” Zilch’s voice was sharp and edged with panic as they stepped forward, hand immediately on his shoulder. “Slow down. Breathe. You need rest.”

  “No, no, I have to go…” he turned around, shaking his head, but his hands curled into the loose black fabric of Zilch’s outer layer as he did. He pulled them close again, but now his eyes were shut, and he looked like he was suffering deeply instead of overjoyed as he had been a moment before. “I—I know now. I know how it all ends.”

  “How what ends?” Zilch reached out for him, but now he was taking slow, reluctant steps back. He wasn’t looking at Zilch anymore, but down at the ground. “Chimera?”

  “Into the fire,” he whispered. He still didn’t look up, as if suddenly it would be too painful. But he was slowly nodding to himself as if he’d figured out the most important riddle of his life, and almost looked like he was faintly smiling. “Just like we planned.”

  “No!” Zilch rushed forward shockingly fast. But it was too late. Regan faded away, blending in with the shadows and ash. Evelyn sprinted after him too, but he scrambled away. He evaded both of them, slipping away into the smoky dark before her eyes.

  “Damn it, Regan!” Evelyn came to a stop, feeling sick. She didn’t know who she was furious at now, him for dropping a bombshell and disappearing, or whoever had taken him over, and taken him away. Maybe both.

  But now Evelyn Calliope felt powerless. It wasn’t for the first time this week or even this night, and she if she never experienced this least-favorite feeling again, it wouldn’t be too soon. Regan was gone and the street was silent. And Zilch was still here, looking as powerless as she felt—but more than that. Hopeless. Devastated. Exhausted beyond words.

  “What are you doing here?” she finally asked, not unkindly. “You and Regan know each other? You must,” she reflected. “Or else that really… really wouldn’t make much sense.”

  “We… yes.”

  “And I take it he just remembered something?” He had said something about Zilch being a piece of the puzzle. She just hadn’t expected quite this central a piece.

  “I told him not to go tonight.” Zilch’s voice sent shivers down her spine regularly, but nothing compared to the grim note of fatalistic warning she heard now. “I was right.”

  “Zilch… what just happened?”

  “Hans said he would make us walk through the fire.” They were still staring at the empty alley where Regan had disappeared, and Evelyn didn’t need familiarity with their unusual expressions to see their helplessness. “I didn’t think Gabriel would make him do the same thing.”

  “You know them too?” It wasn’t just the names she recognized. Clarity cut through her confusion like a flash of light. But Zilch didn’t reply; they didn’t even look at her. “Walking through the fire? That’s it, isn’t it? Regan loses his memory. Then all of us end up back at the Turret house, where Liam is trying to put out the fire too—and where ‘Hans’s just happens to be after ten years! It’s connected!”

  “He can’t go down there,” Zilch whispered. “He doesn’t even have a gas mask.”

  Evelyn’s burst of triumphant energy softened. “We’ll get him back. I promise.”

  “Thank you.” Zilch turned around now and started walking down the dark street back toward the Turret House, much faster than she expected someone their height and proportions to be able to move. Evelyn followed, past a burnt-out streetlamp and smoke billowing out a grate, and a cat whose green eyes flashed briefly in the dark, before it turned and ran the opposite direction. “First, we need to find the others. Then I’ll tell you everything. If Regan doesn’t get to wear a mask… Hans doesn’t get one either.”

  Rose wasn’t good at slowing down. Before their lives had become this strange nonstop rollercoaster of chases and confrontations and surprises, it had been… quieter. But she’d still always been reading or experimenting with a new plant or medicine, or working with someone in need to improve their life. Or working to improve her own life. A bullet, while nowhere near lethal, did slow her down at least. She supposed she should take the opportunity to rest, but it wasn’t easy.

  Especially not when she had a mystery on her hands.

  Hans. Poison. Attempted murder. The thought was terrifying, but after everything that had happened very recently and very fast, nothing should surprise her anymore. At least she knew the people she cared about were safe—although this particular mystery, like everything else in the past several harrowing days, might not be satisfied until it sucked them into its grasp.

  Evelyn and Regan had gone down into the city for some undisclosed reason; Rose’s mind perked up at further intrigue but refused to connect them to anything actually sinister. Danae was holed up finishing her latest project—total fire invulnerability, she’d happily explained. It had done Rose’s heart good to see her actually excited about something. It was also good to see Jack off playing with Finn, with the promise that they wouldn’t leave the floor. Seeing Jack actually smile and laugh like a… like the child he’d been until recently, and still was, and would feel like again, had been the best thing she’d seen in a long time.

  Rose needed all the encouraging signs she could get. Ten years ago, her old friend Hans had fallen into a coma and disappeared. Now he’d mysteriously re-appeared, both in a bed upstairs and in the projection image she remembered. He’d always thought of himself as a ghost, in a sense, even if she disagreed—and now someone had tried to kill him in a much more literal way.

  Now Rose walked the House’s silent halls, eyeing the cameras and the locked metal gates, gently testing her range of motion, and trying to make sense of the questions swirling in her head. Somewhere in this place was a killer, or at least an attempted one.

  Rose’s priority was protecting her family, and this threat was too close, too deadly… but it raised questions. More than one person here seemed afraid of Hans.

  Why?

  “Miss Rose!” The quiet didn’t stay that way for long. She looked up to see Lisette and Wren scooting toward her, holding hands. “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better,” she said. It was the truth, but maybe not the whole truth. The pain from her injury had faded to a dull throb she sometimes actually forgot, and while she tried not to pick or poke at her self-made bandages of greenery or anywhere near it, she couldn’t keep herself from poking at unanswered questions. “Just trying to get used to moving again, looking around, thinking.”

  “Yeah, we do that too.” Lisette nodded easily. “This place is creepy at first, but once you get used to it, it’s kinda fun to explore. It goes on forever, all the hallways and doors and rooms. And there’s just Liam and Ms. Cassandra and Hans. Until Major Turret comes home, anyway, the rest of the house is his.”

  Rose kept in her gasp, but couldn’t hide the widening of her eyes and hitch in her ordinarily smooth step. “The Major still comes here?”

  “Yeah, it’s his House,” Lisette said, looking up at her as if confused why Rose wouldn’t have this common knowledge. “He’s not always here, but he drops in every couple of weeks.”

  “To see his son? Liam?”

  “No…” Lisette said, but didn’t elaborate. Rose let it go; her mind was racing already.

  “This explains so much,” she murmured. “The automated security, Liam’s paranoia. But why Hans? Why Cassandra? Why—oh, this would be so much easier if I could get past these!” Pushed to her limit by the past week, Rose aimed a frustrated kick at one of the steel gates. Her metal foot made a satisfying clang, but aside from that, nothing happened.

  “I know,” Lisette said in a sympathetic tone that suggested she was breaking out the bedside manner to handle an unreasonably cranky adult. Rose glanced down, recognizing the tactic in an instant, and she shot her a grin; it had been worth a shot. “Seriously, if it makes you feel any better, there’s nothing that interesting in there. That room used to be a study or something but they moved everything out. They store fake plants in there now. It’s a wh
ole room full of fake plants. There’s like fifty.” She exchanged a nod of assent with Wren. “So I guess that is kinda interesting. This house is wild.”

  “Wait,” Rose said slowly. “You’ve gotten past the gates? Not just the locked doors, but the metal gates too, past the security partitions?”

  “Yeah sure, they don’t stop us… from getting our jobs done!” Lisette giggled, only a little nervously, as if she’d narrowly avoided saying something else. “Even if Mr. Liam makes them a lot harder than they have to be.”

  “And, if I can ask…” she paused, chewing the inside of her chin. “What is that, exactly? What is it that you two do here?”

  “Oh! Um,” Lisette’s dark brown eyes widened, as if she’d just realized a new and slightly frightening possibility. “You don’t know?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “We’re here to…” Lisette trailed off. Sensing their friend’s near-crisis, Wren bumped her elbow until she glanced over, then nodded down at the medical scrubs they wore. “Hans! You know him, right? The coma patient upstairs?”

  “Yes, I do. He’s an old friend of mine, actually.”

  “Well, we’re here to take care of him! And Ms. Cassandra, she’s Miss Evelyn’s mom and Mr. Liam’s aunt.” Lisette nodded a couple times. “That’s why we’re here. We take care of them.”

  “That’s a big job,” Rose said with a warm smile. “But it looks like you two have it all figured out. You seem like the most responsible people I’ve met so far.”

  “We make a great team!” Wren gave her a nudge, and she smiled. When her friend took her hand, she automatically squeezed back. “Wren gets me. Our lives would just suck without each other.”

  “Still, it must be tough working in this big old house, taking care of grown-ups—I’m including Liam in this.”

  “Ha, yeah, he thinks he’s in charge here! It’s really kind of sad.”

  “I know, he never was the most perceptive.” Rose continued easily. “I wonder if he knows what’s actually going on here?”

  “He doesn’t even know what his dad’s doing with Hans.” Lisette folded her arms, young face taking on a look of profound frustration.

  “That would be a problem.” Rose spoke slowly, controlling both her growing excitement and rising sense of foreboding. Not for the first time, she had the feeling that these kids knew a lot more than she did.

  “And if—never mind.” Lisette shut her mouth. She exchanged a near-frantic look with Wren; they seemed to be trying to decide whether to tell Rose something.

  “What is it?” Rose prodded gently. “Maybe I can help.”

  The mysterious pair in front of her stood silently and very tense for a few seconds, eyes locked and seeming to have a silent conversation that bordered on panic. Finally, Lisette looked back up, looking somehow defeated and hopeful at the same time.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, voice shaking. Rose suddenly had the urge to wrap her in a tight hug. Her usual confidence had been shaken, and for the first time she truly looked fourteen, caught with her best friend in a storm of terrifying events, and very scared. “When Hans—when somebody—did you see how it happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose shook her head. None of the really important answers ever seemed to come to her when she needed them. “I was asleep. I know someone came in, and I know it was poison. I know someone injected him with something, but I didn’t see who.”

  Lisette nodded, biting her lip and looking about to burst into tears. She hadn’t let go of Wren’s hand, and held on very tightly.

  “Please don’t worry. I promise, I’ll help you through this,” Rose reassured them. “This is going to be okay. We’ll find out who did this, and we’ll make this place safe ag—”

  “This was our job!” Lisette cried at last. “We were supposed to keep Hans safe, and Ms. Cassandra safe, and watch Liam and make sure he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, and keep an eye on Major Turret, and see what he was doing, and if anything bad was coming! And we didn’t! We messed up, Hans got hurt, there’s someone walking around killing people here or—or trying to, and Turret’s still doing stuff and we don’t know what it is and we’ve been here forever and haven’t found out anything, and Garrett’s gonna be so mad!”

  “Oh, honey, no!” Even as her mind reeled from the rapid-fire revelations, Rose leaned down as fast as she could with the lingering pain in her wound to put both hands on Lisette’s shoulders. After a moment she turned to move one over to Wren’s—even though they, of course, hadn’t said a word, they looked just as distressed and near tears. “This isn’t your fault! None of this is your fault, please don’t blame yourselves. You didn’t do anything wrong. You tried your best, for so long, and you’re just kids! You’re kids, you shouldn’t be…” She stopped, eyes narrowing and mouth setting in a hard line. “You shouldn’t be here at all. Did you say Garrett? Garrett Cole?”

  Lisette and Wren both gasped, and held perfectly still. “No.”

  “Honey, it’s okay.” Rose gave both their shoulders a squeeze. “You can talk to me. I think I know what’s going on. Being married to Evelyn Calliope gives me a… unique perspective. Special clearance, you might say.”

  “I… we… okay.” Lisette whispered and let her head drop for a moment. Beside her, Wren looked away, hiding their eyes behind their long white hair. “Nobody pays attention to us because we’re kids, and Wren doesn’t talk. Nobody sees us, but we see everything. And then we take it back to Garrett. And then he saves Parole, and keeps everyone alive.”

  “You’re his spies.” Rose stared at them, heart aching. These kids’ eyes were old. They’d seen too much, they’d found out there really were monsters, and they didn’t all live under the bed.

  “Not very good ones,” Lisette mumbled. “We’ve been here for like six months and we still can’t find out what Turret does when he comes home. All we know is Hans used to be stuck behind one of those big metal gates in a restricted part of the house—one of the parts we can still get to. Then Liam brought him out and put him in a normal room, and started actually going to see him like they were friends. Major Turret comes home sometimes and does stuff in the wings we can’t get in. He’s got some kind of field set up, we can’t poof there.”

  “Poof?”

  Lisette shrugged, like she hadn’t said anything strange. Her eyes remained downcast, sadness and fatigue weighing painfully heavy on her round face and small shoulders. “Doors don’t mean much to us. Except for the ones Turret puts up. He can lock us out, and set up… something, I dunno, it’s like he closes up the curtains around a room so nobody can see or hear into it?”

  “Sounds like a dampening field,” Rose remembered something Danae said once that she hadn’t thought much of at the time, but came into sharp relief born from urgency now. “He’s put one up around the house?”

  “Just around Hans’s room!” Lisette’s eyes were wide with fear. “He’s doing something in there, and it can’t be good. And we can’t get past it! Radio Angel can’t listen in! And CyborJ can’t hack into it, and—Garrett tried everything! People with really good ears can’t hear inside, X-ray vision people can’t see in…”

  “You’re right, this is bad,” Rose said quietly. “I see why you got scared. But listen to me, this isn’t your responsibility. You shouldn’t have been put in the middle of this in the first place. Garett’s an adult, and so am I, and so is…”

  Suddenly, Rose saw everything with perfect clarity. And she knew exactly where to go. The little leaves and tendrils that stuck out of her hair and sleeves started to shiver as if they were frightened.

  “Miss Rose?” Lisette asked. “Did you just…?”

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” Rose promised, and hoped she wasn’t lying. “Thank you two so much. Garrett will be just as proud of you as I am.” She pushed herself to walk down the hall through the remnants of pain and mounting conviction that this was going to be a hell of a fight. After a brief, apprehensive pause, her new you
ng friends followed.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to resolve this,” Rose said firmly. “You’re staying here where it’s safe.”

  Lisette opened her mouth to protest, but didn’t get the chance. Without warning, Hans popped into all of their consciousnesses, presence saturated with anxiety.

  “Hey—Rose?” He was tentative, as if unsure if he had the right to use her name after all these years.

  “Yes, Hans?” Rose smiled and gave him a slight nod despite the pounding of her heart. Even under the strangest of circumstances, the strongest emotion she felt when she looked at the ghostly image of the teenage boy was fondness and relief.

  “Evelyn is in the foyer,” he said, hand on his cocked hip. Even his projection was shaking; Rose immediately saw the fear behind his cavalier posture. “I think she wants to talk to all of you.”

  ❈

  “When you two told me you’d reconnected with your old friend, this… wasn’t what I expected.” Evelyn’s fingers were clenched around her upper arms to keep them from shaking.

  For the first time, Hans stood before everyone in plain sight. The time for subtlety was over, he’d decided, and broadcast his consciousness into all of their brains. But the simultaneous signal didn’t come in as clearly as when he spoke to them individually, and his image flickered in and out, popping across the room in an instant and disappearing again. His static snow distortion came back, but now it didn’t seem like he was controlling it for intimidation, and while he appeared to lean casually against an invisible wall in midair, tension twisted his default smirk into a barely-hidden grimace.

  “Believe me,” Rose tried to focus on Hans, but as usual, he floated in the corner of her eye, gone when she looked straight-on. “It wasn’t what we expected either. When our friend Hans… disappeared ten years ago—” she glanced up as he rolled his eyes, but didn’t stop. “We never thought we’d see him again. And definitely not like this.”