Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  “What if it’s fae-made?” she asked, lifting her chin. “Particularly for problems like this, I mean. And what if we attached one of the badges to it to make sure no one can get in? Everyone who has a speaker would already have a badge; we just need to secure the emitter and put it somewhere that can’t be easily got to.”

  Zero thought about it for a solid two minutes, and everyone let him do it. That’s what happens when you’ve got an air of authority and about twenty sharp objects belted to your chest, I suppose. Must be nice.

  At last, he said, “We’ll try it. Do you have a way of stopping them if something goes wrong?”

  “Low-level EMP emitter,” said Abigail, nodding. “It’s attached to each speaker already.”

  “Heck,” I said, staring. “You really were doing up some tech this morning!”

  “Well, we were already getting the computer in,” she said, and I saw the gleam of her teeth in the shadows for a brief moment. “Seemed like it was worthwhile.”

  “What if the sirens can still use them?” asked Zero, but he asked more thoughtfully.

  Ezri grinned and held up a hammer. “Then we’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” she said. “Smash the hardware. We already have earplugs, so it’s not like there’s too much of a risk.”

  I saw Zero and Athelas exchange a look: a look of mixed amusement and respect. Zero said, “Very well. We’ll do it your way. We’ll still take groups of three, but we’ll spread out. Where’s your frequency emitter—the base?”

  Abigail passed him a small box with metal housing that looked to be pretty heavy. It also looked like it would take a bit of damage without being too worried.

  “We’ll need one more badge,” Zero said. “We’ve got one for every speaker that’s going with a person, but none for the emitter. Who’s going to stay with the emitter?”

  JinYeong took his badge out of his pocket and gave it to Zero.

  “Heck no!” I said firmly. “Put that back in your pocket you flamin’—”

  “There are already not enough people,” JinYeong said. “This is a good chance. They can not hurt me: I am more beautiful and more persuasive.”

  To my irritation, Zero only nodded. “Keep your earplugs in,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid. Break into three groups; we’ll spread out in our groups from different directions and drive inwards—”

  I scowled at Zero as he sorted the humans into three groups, and then at JinYeong. “All right, but you better stick close to me; I’m not having a siren talking you into taking a dive.”

  JinYeong looked far too pleased at that, so I added shortly, “If I want you in the drink, I’ll shove you in myself.”

  “No, I am in my—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re in your best suit. You always say that.”

  “It is because my best one is always ruined, and then my next best one becomes—”

  “Are we going to get going, then?”

  “Yes,” said JinYeong, as our group formed rather lopsidedly. He still sounded far too satisfied with himself. “From now on, I will stick very close to you.”

  Lucky us, we ended up with Ezri in our group. She must have been feeling pretty mellow, though—maybe it was the bandage around her hand. Come to think of it, most of the humans looked a bit battered: several had been patched up around the arm or leg, and I was pretty sure one of them was missing an ear, too.

  “Someone been having a go at you again?” I asked her, as we threaded our way down through Salamanca Place through the late-night bar-hoppers. We were the closest to our starting point, so we’d stayed in the park the latest.

  She grinned down at the bandage. “It was all in a good cause. We’re all a bit banged up at the moment: it’s worth it, though.”

  “What, because you killed a few of the other side?”

  “That’s always a bonus,” she said. “Good grief, why are there so many idiots out on a Friday night! Do they want to be killed?”

  “Believe it or not, some people have a normal life,” said someone from behind us, in a disgruntled voice.

  “Mugs, all of ’em,” opined Ezri. “There’s no fun in being normal—look at that one, he knows. Maybe he’s trying to make a break for life with a bit of an edge.”

  Just to our left and further down the road, I spotted the drunk, not too steady on his feet and making a beeline for the cordoned-off waterfront, toddling along under the shadow of the Aurora Australis.

  “Ah,” said JinYeong, clicking his teeth. “So annoying.”

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said, below my breath. “Maybe he won’t be able to make it over the—nope, there he goes. Oi, Ezri: you and your lot get going with the herding. Take my speaker; reckon I’ll have my hands full—me and JinYeong will go and get that idiot out of trouble.”

  “Gotcha,” she said, plugging one of her ears. “Good luck. Message us when you’re coming back and we’ll make room for you.”

  I gave her the thumbs up, blocking my own ears as we parted ways, and JinYeong drew very slightly closer to me. It would have been disconcerting any other time, but today it was comforting: if he got too far out of my radius, he’d be out of range and unprotected from any electrical interference. So I didn’t hunch away when our arms swung naturally beside each other, and I didn’t complain when the backs of our hands occasionally brushed, either.

  The drunk, tottering along under cover of the Aurora Australis’ red hull, seemed to be heading in the direction of the silver gangplank—who the heck had left that out?—and JinYeong’s pace increased.

  I gently pinched my fingers around his wrist and pulled back very slightly. Go slower. Let him get ahead, that pinch said. The drunk was already enthralled, and if I had a guess, I would have said that wherever he was going was closest to where the siren he already heard was waiting for him.

  JinYeong slowed, and we followed a bit more cautiously while the drunk made a parody of going up the gangplank twice before he managed to get aboard the ship. We were still ten or fifteen metres away when the silver aluminium gangplank was summarily drawn up and disappeared over the edge of the deck, with barely a flutter of blue uniform.

  “Flaming heck!” I said aloud, furious with myself. The sirens must have seen us following along behind, and now we were going to lose the bloke because I’d let him walk into danger.

  I looked around hastily, my breath caught in my lungs, hoping to see another gangplank—or a rope, or a bit of wood—anything that could get us onboard and to the hapless bloke who was stumbling to his death.

  This time it was JinYeong who seized my wrist: he pulled me along the dock until we were opposite the gap in the ship’s railings and then put his hands briefly on my shoulders to turn me to face him. I stood where I was put, uncomprehending, while JinYeong took a few long, light strides away across the dock. I didn’t understand, in fact, until he dashed at me, laughing, tie flying. A laugh caught in my throat, and I opened my arms. Wiry arms caught me around the waist and rolled with me, and then we were flying, or almost flying, in a tight coil that whisked us breathlessly through the air and curled into a swift, light landing.

  I emerged from that landing in a swirl of cologne, on the run, and took off after the vague shadow that was the drunk. Ahead of him was the movement of cloth in a very familiar shade of blue, but the drunk didn’t pursue that flutter: he turned at the stairs with a funky little wobble and headed upward at an impressive turn of speed.

  I caught myself up at the base of the stairs, turning too fast, but JinYeong had something else in his sights—there, on the deck toward the bow, was one of the uniformed staff members we’d seen the day we came on board for the first time. The one who had looked confused when we didn’t reply to him. Only now that staff member didn’t look quite so uniformed. Now he looked…scaley.

  I snatched at JinYeong’s suitcoat as he dashed for the siren, hauling him back within range of the badge I wore, my muscles straining. He turned to me and I saw him shake his head; he released himself and push
ed me toward the stairs again, then took off at a run toward fore of the ship, leaving me caught between rage and terror.

  There was no time to think: JinYeong could look after himself, and the human couldn’t.

  JinYeong had better be able to look after himself, or I was going to—

  I didn’t know what I was going to do, so he better be able to look after himself.

  I turned back to the stairs and took them three at a time, regretting the lead the drunk had on me. There was no time to text, no time to call anyone. I just ran, my eyes on the tottery legs moving up the stairs far too quickly ahead of me, gasping with the effort of the stairs. I lost sight of him somewhere around the fourth or fifth level and stopped briefly, panting, only to catch sight of a shadow, wobbly but quick-moving, to my left.

  I took a chance and sprinted out onto the deck, chasing the shadow. It wasn’t until I’d followed it around fore that I saw that I’d been chasing exactly that—a shadow. The drunk himself, real and tottery and beatifically smiling, was one deck above me.

  Ah heck.

  He was moving toward the railing, too, phone in hand, shoulders moving to music that only he could hear, and when I threw a look down at the lower deck, JinYeong whirled in a fast, furious back and forth with the siren we had seen when we boarded. A moment of searing relief shot through me: his earplugs must be doing the trick, then.

  Only if he was fighting the siren we had seen at first, why was there another one looking up at me from the lower deck?

  There were two of them here.

  Of course there were two of them.

  Their flaming nest was probably here—and they were being driven toward their nest.

  The drunk’s shadow lengthened and stretched out into the darkness of empty space, and I looked up sharply.

  Yep, there he went. One idiot climbing over the railings while the siren who had bewitched him watched from below, a shadowed, mysterious smile on his face.

  If I could draw attention away from the drunk for just long enough…

  “Oi!” I yelled at the siren.

  Its eyes did a weird vertical blink that had to mean it had an extra set of eyelids, and it looked away from the drunk and over to me for just a moment. Above my head, the drunk wobbled on the railings, arms windmilling, and the siren’s gaze snapped back onto him. I saw its mouth open. Ah heck.

  A flurry of movement behind the siren bowled him over, and I saw a small, bright spot of orange tumble through light and into darkness. JinYeong rolled effortlessly to his feet and lifted one hand unerringly to his ear. I saw him snarl, then strip the second earplug from his ear and hurl it into the darkness after the first as the two sirens sprang to their feet.

  Their mouths opened, one toward JinYeong, the other toward the drunk and me, and for a brief moment, I heard something.

  “Do not look at me!” JinYeong snapped, the words bursting through my earplugs with a filigree of Between as if I was really hearing them instead of being fed the translation through Between. “Do not look at me with your beautiful face! I do. Not. Like. It!”

  But I saw his foot step forward as though pulled by a string, and I didn’t hesitate: I swiped my finger across the screen of my phone, opening the camera app. Hopefully someone was watching on the app to send out an alert to Zero. Otherwise, I was probably going to take a long drop with a sudden stop that wouldn’t be too healthy for me, and JinYeong wouldn’t be far behind.

  Unfortunately, it looked like there wasn’t any other way of distracting the sirens for longer than a few seconds. I unpinned my badge and dropped it at my feet; then I took in a deep breath, took my earplugs out and said softly into the camera, “Oi. Do you wanna dance?”

  I don’t know whether the song was already there in my brain or if it came as a result of my challenge, but it was threaded through every thought before I could breathe in. It ran through my blood like vampire spit and fizzed through my sinews, pulling me into a dance that was The Dance. Light and shadow, the trill of notes along the breeze, and the deep bass twang of small waves slapping against the ship as another siren leapt lithely from the water and onto the deck.

  Even the shadows danced and sang, and it wasn’t cheesy; it was life. Life, and breath, and blood fizzing through my body.

  Oh heck, said the bit of me that was still able to think. Oh heck. What do I do now?

  I couldn’t see JinYeong, but I couldn’t see the ship any longer, either. All I could see was the music and the dance, and the road that I needed to turn to melody beneath my feet.

  Pretend it’s the little worm, suggested my brain as my feet mashed potatoe’d along a surface that was pretending to be much bigger than it was.

  The worm.

  But if it was a worm, where was the thread that led back to its source? I needed that to do anything. I pony-trotted to slow my forward momentum, and looked down desperately into the camera app, searching for the source of the compulsion.

  I saw a face not my own, but not entirely unfamiliar. Perhaps it was my own face idealized and made beautiful with the kind of behindkind sort of beauty that’s almost terrifying. But it was the source—or at least the medium for the source. I found the tug of Between that was attached to me in fibrous filaments that were almost too small to see, and pinched them a little, slowing the flow of the magic and hoping it would affect the potency of the call that gripped me.

  It did; I couldn’t stop dancing, but I was able to turn my pony-trot into the Charleston, which allowed me to move back for every move forward and kept me in the same spot long enough for a desperate look around.

  What I saw chilled me to the bone. I didn’t remember dancing over the railing somewhere on the fourth level of the ship, but I was already out past it and dancing my way toward the lip of the deck past that—and then to a drop straight down onto the deck if I was lucky enough to avoid shish-kabobbing myself on the various metal projections on the way down.

  I tried to stop the Charleston, too, but I wasn’t strong enough. Now that I knew what the tug felt like, I could feel the tug of the other two sirens on deck, even though they were turned on JinYeong instead of me. Then a fourth, feeble tug came from the side of the ship that ran along the dock, and I turned my head in dread.

  Deep in shadows that gleamed only with reflected light from the glass of the specimen capsules, water dripped. And as it dripped, it grew smooth and firm and…humanoid. And then the water stepped down onto the deck, scales rippling down to hide the nakedness of its body.

  The capsules. The capsules were the nests. Whatever else the expedition had collected from Antarctica, they’d also brought back sirens.

  I tried to slow down my back-and-forth Charleston to at least text the others, and for a moment, the dance and the music didn’t align. A ripple of dissonance swelled through my phone as the siren realised I wasn’t dancing appropriately for the song—dissonance, and then a stronger, sweeter call that filtered through even the Between fibres I had pinched and wrapped itself around my heart again.

  This is the you that the world will see, whispered a voice. The real you. The you that can dance on air and live forever in minds and hearts. Join us. We are beautiful and we will make you beautiful, too.

  I caught my breath in delight and my feet moved forward again: forward toward delicious death and terrifying freedom.

  I didn’t even feel myself fall, but I felt the force of the sudden deceleration as my hoodie sleeve caught on something. It should have hurt when my shoulder dislocated, but all I could feel was frustration.

  I reached up to unhook myself with my other hand, and a tickle of breeze brought scent to my nostrils, causing my nose to wrinkle involuntarily. I hesitated, dangling from thickly woven cotton that wasn’t thick enough to prevent itself from tearing slowly, and the fresh evening breeze swept up and around me. I smelled JinYeong as if he stood next to me, and the sudden, shocking brightness of relief that he must still be alive cut away the threads that had held me.

  The deck swa
yed below me. I gave a yelp and grabbed onto that spar for dear life just as my cuff gave way, and the momentum of that desperate movement sent me swinging wildly, the metal cool and slippery within my whitened fingers. I caught sight of the deck below my swaying feet, sickeningly far away, and two figures facing each other at the very point of the bow.

  They didn’t move, but I saw the threads, the fibrous filaments that clung to every part of JinYeong and tugged him toward the siren, who sang a song I couldn’t hear because it wasn’t directed at me.

  I screamed at him, but JinYeong, his voice molten with rage, said in the most terrible whisper I had ever heard, “I am the most beautiful thing on this ship and I will not allow you to be more beautiful. I will do as I please: go away!”

  The siren shut his mouth in shock, and swayed. He said, in a tremulous voice that carried up on the breeze, “You reject me?”

  “I do not need your beauty,” JinYeong said through his teeth. “I am already beautiful. You have nothing I need, and I will not come with you. My heart is already full.”

  The siren wailed—a high, bitter keening of loss that was suddenly, ear-shreddingly audible—and I saw the gleam of ice in his hand just seconds before he plunged that icy knife into his own chest. I wasn’t past feeling vicious satisfaction as he folded in on himself and flowed downward into a brief wave of water that splashed against the deck and then melted away into nothing. That would teach him to try and kill JinYeong.

  The others ran in fear, wailing, which would have amused me if I hadn’t been so cold and tired—sirens who had stood up to Athelas’ viciousness, running from JinYeong’s beauty—and he let them run.

  They vanished into their nests like water, but JinYeong didn’t even watch them go: he looked up at me and lifted a hand to point at me.

  “You,” he said to me, blazingly autocratic. “You will not let go because otherwise you will have to turn vampire.”

  “Don’t reckon I could if I wanted to,” I called down to him, my voice thin and weary. “Heck. My hands are cold.”

  And then I let go.