by Silver, Anna
“Then I can read her when they’re gone,” Elias suggested. He looked at Sara. “I know you have questions since you lost the little one. You can return when they leave.”
Sara’s eyes glistened with unshed tears, but she consented with a brisk nod. Elias was good at this.
“Fine,” Ash said with a look at the guard, who quickly let go of Tora, her knotted red bracelet still in tact around her wrist. “Three days only. I’ll come at sunset the day after tomorrow. They can leave by nightfall.”
Elias nodded slowly and Ash, his women, and his guard all filed out, leading the burro with them.
“That was close,” London let out as she breathed a sigh of relief. She sat down in a nearby chair and leaned back. “We better get to it. You have a lot to tell us.”
But Elias scowled. “No. Now it is my turn for questions,” he said with a sage grin.
“Isn’t that what your Oracle is for?” Zen shot back. “Thought you had all the answers.”
“Not all,” he amended. “But many.”
London realized that as much as this meant to them—finding Elias—for the rogue Otherborn, finding them must have been as big an event. After all, the man claimed to have spent a lifetime on the road, searching for others like himself. And here four of them had just shown up on his doorstep. Curiosity burned in his eyes. They needed a lot from him, but they were going to have to give a little, too.
IT DIDN’T TAKE long to fill Elias in on the bones of their story. Over warm cups of herbal tea served in pottery mugs, they told him about how they’d come to remember themselves, find the Astral, leave Capital City, and get tangled up with the Tycoons. He was pensive as they spoke, asking questions here and there when something didn’t add up or some detail was left out. Everybody took turns answering. Only Zen didn’t say much.
At last, Elias said, “It seems it was a good thing for my mother to have abandoned me after all. I think—I think I was better off being reared outside the city walls.”
London and Tora both stirred at this. They each knew their own pain of abandonment. “Do you ever miss her?” Tora asked. “Your mother?”
Elias shook his head. “I did not know her. Not like you. In the Mulva camp, I was looked after well by several older, childless women. They are the closest thing I’ve known to a mother.”
“What about your dad?” London asked. “He didn’t want you?”
Elias shrugged. “I doubt he knew anything about me, but it’s impossible to say for sure. The women in Mulva said I screamed at night for months on end as a babe. It was everyone’s guess that this is why my mother gave me up for dead. Only later, after I knew my true self, did I begin to understand why I was so miserable as an infant. This adjustment, this body, has not been easy for me. Especially after so many years untethered in the Astral. ”
London tried to hide how unnerving his confession was to her. She tried not to remember his body covered with bees and his voice reverberating with a thousand individual buzzes. “My father gave up on me, too,” she said as if to change the subject. “If it makes you feel any better.”
Zen caught her eye after she said it and she immediately wished she hadn’t. It made her feel vulnerable. She could never talk about her dad without revealing all the pain surrounding his loss underneath the words. But she was grateful to see the old familiar softness in Zen’s eyes instead of the flint shields she’d been given for the last day and night.
Elias did not speak for a long moment and then he said, “It doesn’t bother me to have been neglected by my parents. I don’t think I form attachments here in the normal way. Some things about me did not make the shift entirely.”
He gave London a gentle smile. “I can see it is not the same for everyone.”
“The shift?” Kim asked. Slowly, the cogs of the conversation were turning and changing hands. It was their turn again to pick Elias’s brain.
Elias waved a hand. “I speak in error. Taking a host is not actually the same thing as shifting, but inwardly I often feel as though I am simply trying to shape myself according to this new species as opposed to really being…human.”
“What do you mean?” Kim continued. “What’s shifting?” He had taken off his dark red button down the night before and only thrown it over his t-shirt that morning. Now, he buttoned it up, apparently feeling the chill London had been complaining about all along.
Elias didn’t seem to notice. “To change the world around you—that’s what you call warping. It is permanent, no? If I soak this table top in water, to bend and curve the wood, it will stay like that. Warped. But to change yourself, your own appearance—that’s shifting.”
“That’s what Avery did,” London said before she could catch herself. Zen went stiff. She edged her dark, restless eyes in his direction and back to Elias. “When I found her in New Eden, she showed me her Other by appearing as she would in the Astral.”
“We are all more formless than we know,” Elias confirmed cryptically.
“That must be harder or something,” Kim said to London. “I mean, than warping. Can you do it?”
“I don’t know.” London had never considered trying to shift herself into another form.
“It’s much like warping,” Elias told them. “To do it, you must first be able to visualize the thing you want…or want to become. But there are, how do you say, setbacks.”
“Setbacks?” Zen asked, suddenly interested after Avery had gotten introduced into the conversation.
London tried not to notice, not to care, but she hated seeing how his feelings still raged over Avery. Just like in the Astral, when Avery accused Rye of hating London only because he still loved her, London felt like Zen’s sudden callousness toward Avery after seeing her was really a cover up for how deeply he still missed her and for how much whatever he saw that day hurt him.
Elias stared at Zen with an odd, keen glint. Like Tora, his eyes sometimes cut to the quick. “When we warp, the line between this world and the Astral blurs a little more. And for those like us, the line between who we are here and who we are there diminishes. It’s like placing a bag of ink into a pot of water and then poking holes in it. It gets harder and harder to separate ink from water and one can’t seem to tell anymore whether the water is infiltrating the bag or the ink is infiltrating the pot. We warp ourselves in the process.”
“And shifting?” London was almost afraid to ask. Elias was describing exactly what she’d been going through as more and more of Si’dah made the trip back with her from the Astral.
“Shifting, in a sense, accelerates the process,” he said with a knowing look. “There, we are infinite. We can move and shape ourselves however we choose. But here, there are rules to follow…laws.”
“Like the Tycoons and the president make?” Kim asked.
But Elias shook his head. “No. More like your scientists used to talk about.”
“You mean like gravity?” Tora said. “Physics.”
“Precisely,” Elias nodded. “Here we are finite. We, those born twice, we are bending those rules. There are consequences. Bend them too much and the pressure becomes more than we can sustain. Life creates resistance. And a shift can only be temporary at best. Try to hold it too long…”
London kept forgetting that Elias had seen Avery that night, too. He knew what she had become. He was explaining it to them. Even in the Astral, she was no longer strictly her Other—and neither was Rye. What was Avery teaching him? What were the Tycoons making him do?
London shuddered and tried to quell the fury that suddenly sprang up in her. Rye had forgotten about her. No, wait, how did Avery put it? He hated her now. What good were her defensive reflexes if he didn’t want her help? If he liked being Avery’s pet? The Tycoons’ plaything? Her nostrils flared and she did her best to take deep breaths without being noticed. She still wasn’t ready to disclose what they’d witnessed last night and for whatever reason, Elias was allowing her to keep mum for the time being.
But Zen’
s gray eyes were all over her. Probably at first because he was searching for the signs of her recent alterations, but then because he noticed her reaction. London knew that look. There would be questions later. And could she blame him? Had she wanted any less when he came back from spying on Avery, loaded with anger and pain? She met his eyes for a brief second and wondered if she should just tell him. After all, they could be keeping the same secret.
“And then what?” Kim asked, interrupting London’s reverie and the strange exchange of looks she and Zen were sharing.
“And then you lose control,” Elias said quietly. “The Astral rebounds. And you…slip.”
“What’s a slip?” Tora asked with a gulp.
“A shift back…to the edge planes.”
Zen looked at Elias with fear in his face. “Edge planes?” The muscles along his neck tightened and feathered beneath the skin. “What does that mean exactly?”
“You disappear into the Astral, into the farthest, loneliest, planes. No one…no one knows where exactly.”
“But your body?” Zen asked.
“It remains.”
Kim stared at Elias, his beautifully angled eyes wide and round as walnuts. “You mean, a coma?”
“If you’re lucky…for a while,” Elias responded.
“And if you’re not?” Kim asked with arched brows.
Elias gave only one word in reply. “Death.”
Chapter 16
* * *
Gift
THEY HELPED ELIAS put away his new supplies in a hollowed out pantry where he kept his honey stock and listened to him explain his arrangement with Ash. Elias insisted he wasn’t a prisoner because he could easily escape if he wanted to and often did, mostly for night walks in the desert air. He said that Ash knew that, but it made the Outroaders feel safer if they believed Elias couldn’t leave his abode and wander into their camp. The lock was purely for show. The Mesa campers were very superstitious, and they feared the old man’s unnerving mannerisms and unwavering insight. For protection and supplies, Elias kept the camp stocked with honey, and provided readings for Outroaders whose curiosity outweighed their fear, which apparently it did often.
“Take Ash’s wife, Sara, for instance,” Elias explained. “She’s secretly terrified of me, even more so of you, but a recent miscarriage has her desperate for answers. She’ll come for that reading, soon as you leave, mark my word.”
“And what can you possibly tell her that will do any good,” Tora asked.
“I can tell her only what the Oracle tells me,” Elias said. “But it’s what I can give her that will make the difference.”
“Give?” London asked as she chewed on her lip.
“A charm,” the Beekeeper said with magic in his voice. “Like your bracelet,” he added, pointing to Tora.
“How?” Tora wanted to know.
“Easy. Just like warping only…when you pull the ether through, you adhere it to an item. See?”
“No, I don’t see,” Zen said. His hostility was waning, but he still questioned Elias at ever opportunity.
Elias scowled at Zen. “You don’t want to see. That’s your problem.”
Zen turned away.
“So all those bracelets that Keziah wore, they really worked?”
Elias’s face lit up at the name. “Ah, Keziah! How long since I have seen her. And is she well? Safe?” he asked.
“She is,” Tora told him.
London had borrowed Tora’s jacket and was zipping and unzipping it over and over. She couldn’t wait to get Elias alone and talk about last night. It filled her with nervous energy. “What was with you and her anyway?”
Elias beamed. “She was my mate for a time.”
Kim made a face and Tora smacked him as discreetly as possible. London smiled in spite of herself. “That explains a lot,” she said under her breath. Old Keziah and her bits of string.
“I thought you couldn’t form normal attachments,” Zen reminded them.
Elias’s face fell. “No, I can’t. That’s why I had to leave. She wanted things from me that I am incapable of giving. But I was always fond of her.”
They’d been through another meal of cheese and honey and by now, London was beginning to hate goats. But she would always, always love bees.
“I’m exhausted,” London confessed with a yawn.
“I guess you are,” Kim said, wagging his brows. “Tough night in the Astral exploring unknown planes?”
London cringed. Zen was staring at her with a look that could scald milk. “It was just one,” she said casually, praying they would drop it. But of course, Kim was like a dog with a new bone.
“What was it like? The plane Elias took you to? Can we go?” He was about as eager as an excited puppy.
London looked at Elias and then down to the floor. He waited for her to speak. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” London said quickly. “Elias is tired and needs a break. Besides, it was pretty dull.”
“You’ve been there now. You can lead us,” Kim tried.
London sighed. “I just said I was exhausted, Kim. Not tonight.” London had no intention of revisiting the plane Avery and Rye called home without talking to Elias first.
Zen began tapping his foot loudly on the floor. “No, Kim’s right. If there are other planes, we need to know about them. Maybe that’s how Avery keeps figuring out where we are—how she’s spying on us.”
London pinched the bridge of her nose and tried not to notice the slight thickening that had happened there since Si’dah began seeping into her appearance. “I know. You’re both right and I do think that’s what’s going on. I— I just need some time, okay? I need a break. One night, please? That’s all I’m asking.”
Zen looked at Kim and Tora, who both nodded, and then back to London. “One night, London. Then we all go.”
LONDON THOUGHT HER friends would never go to sleep. She’d tossed restlessly on her pallet, just waiting for that steady rhythm of breath to let her know it was safe to slip out and find Elias. Tora and Kim were snuggled up together across the room and Zen, though still not sharing a space with her, had moved his pallet a little closer. It was a start, at least.
Finally, when the forms of her friends lay like perfectly still shadow heaps in the dark and you could wind a watch by their breathing, London kicked off her blankets and got to her feet. She left her boots beside the pallet, afraid they’d make too much noise and wake the others, and tip-toed in stocking feet toward the tunnel she’d followed earlier to Elias’s giant bee hive/bed chamber.
She had to step over Zen to get there, which was easier said than done since he was so broad, but her legs were longer than they used to be— thank you, Si’dah—and she seemed to have gained an added ounce of grace along with them. He never stirred.
In the tunnel, the hum of bees reverberated all around her like a torturous lullaby. She might have liked their honey, but the bees themselves unnerved her. She’d been stung once as a kid in Capital City when she was playing near some reprocessing bins. Hurt like hell and she swelled up like a balloon full of puss. It took a fistful of Diane and Pauly’s medical rations together to get her the shot required to stop the swelling and keep her alive, along with an extensive supply of hydra cream. She itched for a month.
London took deep, slow breaths and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. The terror of that morning, of what she had seen and was about to see again, threatened to send her screaming back into the other room, but she needed this and there was no way she would get Elias to herself tomorrow. Not now that the others knew what he was and what he could do. They still had so many questions and their time was severely limited. Only two days remained.
It was dark, but a shaft of moonlight bathed the end of the tunnel in a bluish glow. She could see the bend drawing closer, and across from that, the dark hollow of the cleft. Even in the night, she could see a few dark bodies buzzing about, but not very many. Not by comparison to what she knew awaited her in the cl
eft.
London closed her eyes and exhaled. “Steady,” she said to herself. “Stay calm and they won’t harm you, not if they don’t think you’re a threat.”
She inched toward the cleft and leaned in. Instantly alert to her presence, the bees seemed to grow louder and a few buzzed around anxiously, but she tried to keep her heart rate steady through controlled breathing and it seemed to be working. The colony settled and London scooted toward the mass of bees resting on the floor, presumably Elias.
“Elias!” London said in as loud a whisper as she could manage. “Elias! Wake up.”
The form stirred and the bees hummed and crawled about. London cringed, every muscle tensing, but forced herself to relax.
“Elias, wake up. I need to talk to you,” she tried again. This time, he shifted and what appeared to be his head shook. A few dozen bees flew away and vanished into the hive. Elias’s eyes blinked at her from the bit of his face that was exposed, but the bees framed it in an ever-crawling flurry of activity.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“I know,” London whispered. “But I have to talk to you. Alone.”
Elias nodded. “Be quick about it. They won’t tolerate a foreign presence this close for long.”
Great, more time limits, London thought, but she launched into her questions anyway.
“How did you know about the plane last night? About Rye…and Avery? Why did you take me there?”
Elias blinked. “The Astral is so much a part of me now. There is little that happens there that I am not aware of. Especially when it overlaps this world.”
“So you knew about them,” London said as she slid slowly down to a crouch, “just because. And you knew they were spying on us?”
Elias nodded.
“Then how did you not know about the Circle, or Hantu, or us even?”
“I have known about the Circle for ages, though I have no part in it. It is folly, to think the Astral as small and manageable as the Circle does. And it has been corrupt for a long time. But the Circle protects its own and cloaks its doings when it can. That is what the grove is for. So I did not know about you and your friends until very recently, when you began working outside the Circle and the grove and therefore made yourselves evident to me.”
