The Other Side

by Joshua McCune

  James looks up. “Erlik and I aren’t linked.”

  “Since when’s that stopped you? We can merge you now, if you want.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re not thinking straight, Evelyn.”

  “You don’t trust me, bro?” Joto says.

  “It has nothing to do with that.”

  Joto laughs. “What would your CENSIR say?”

  James clamps his jaw.

  Evelyn smirks. “Don’t worry, James. I won’t hurt her.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do to her, Evelyn. Praxus needs me,” he says. I bite the inside of my lip. How can his words still hurt?

  “Sing to them both, for all I care,” Evelyn says. “Get going.”

  Erlik, glow soft, belly bloated, lifts lazily into the air, Joto at the helm, James in the gunner’s seat. Evelyn cranks a lamp and places it on the boulder.

  “You have to leave, Twenty-Five,” she says.

  I snort. “It’s kind out of my hands at the moment.”

  “Haven’t you already caused enough damage?” Did her voice crack?

  “Klyv wasn’t my fault. Neither was Praxus. You did this, Evelyn.”

  “Them?” She lifts her head, shuts her eyes. She doesn’t talk for a while. Her words come out soft, pained. “You know, he was doing okay until . . .” She exhales. “He was finally getting over what he thought he’d done to you.” She hardens, glares at me. “What did he ever see in you?”

  Now I get it. Why she was in Dillingham and James wasn’t. Oren must have decided James’s feelings for me might interfere with the operation. Feelings for me? Real?

  It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. I look at Praxus, broken up there on the mountain. I blew my chance. I’ve lost Allie.I’ve lost myself. But at least I can make Evelyn suffer some for it.

  “James is very important to me, Evelyn.”

  “But you’re not like him. You’re not like us!”

  “You know what they say about opposites,” I say. I adopt my most sisterly expression. “You need to let go, Evelyn. Georgetown, that was just an act. Surely you’ve realized that by—”

  She draws a knife from her belt.

  “Evelyn, wait . . .” I expect somebody to shock her into submission, but whoever’s monitoring our CENSIRs doesn’t stop her. Maybe nobody is. Maybe we’re out of range.

  She stalks toward me. “You’re gonna get him killed.”

  I scooch backward. “Evelyn . . .”

  “It’s not fair, Twenty-Five. Three years . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” I run into rock. The knife trembles in her hands as her eyes glaze over. Is this some side effect of withdrawal from her link to her dragon? T-Clef told me everybody reacts differently.

  “Three years.” She stares off into space. I press my back into the mountain, push my hands against the ground, and struggle into a standing position. She looks back at me, unfocused, right hand tightening around her knife. “I was there three years.”

  Georgetown. “It’s gonna be okay,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. She’s off her chain and about to strangle me with it.

  “It’s not okay. I did everything they wanted! Everything.”

  She’s almost within kicking distance.

  “You can’t have him, Twenty-Five.”

  I plant with my left leg and throw an unbalanced roundhouse at her. But she’s quicker than I remember from Georgetown. She blocks it, sidekicks me in the gut. The air rushes from me. She whirls me around and shoves me against the mountain. I donkey kick at her. She slams her heel into my Achilles, and I buckle.

  She twines her legs between mine, jams her forearm into my neck. I hear the rustle of her jacket as she lifts the knife.

  “Evelyn, wait—”

  The tie wrap breaks, and suddenly I’m free. I spin around. She’s standing there, glaring at me. She has her cell phone out. She taps it. My CENSIR loosens. “Hit me.”

  I gape at her.

  “You’re gonna hit me, then you’re gonna escape. Come on now, give me your best shot. You know you want to.”

  I want to dance on her grave, but not like this. “You’re crazy.”

  “Get out of here. Call one of your Red friends.”

  I consider it. Run, hide, wait, and hope? No. But there is another option. “I’ll go, but first I need you to tell me where Allie is.”

  She taps her phone. My CENSIR tightens. She grins, and evil Evelyn, Talker One from Georgetown, is back. “Radio on. We are a go for beta protocol, sir.”

  Praxus looses a mournful wail. Three green stars emerge from behind the shadow of a distant mountain. The extraction team. They were waiting for her signal. She set me up.

  I charge her. She shocks me. I stumble, grab a rock. I lift it to throw at her and get a sharper shock. I let the rock fall from my hand, let myself fall hard onto my knees. I crawl toward her with exaggerated ricketyness.

  “Pathetic,” she says.

  I spring into her midsection. The phone flies from her hand. I drive her into the boulder. Her head smashes against it. I punch her in the stomach. She doubles over. I uppercut her. She staggers. I throw her to the ground, get on top of her, wrap my hands around her throat.

  She chokes and coughs and gasps. I think she’s trying to say something. I squeeze harder. Her eyes go big and desperate; her irises shade a bright green. The heat swells behind me; dragon wind buffets me. I glance back in time to see a massive black claw coming toward me. It yanks me off Evelyn, swallows me in darkness.

  38

  My legs tingle, my breathing hurts, and the darkness enclosing me feels like it’s spinning in chaotic gyrations, even when I’m pretty sure it isn’t. I can’t see anything, and the only thing I hear is the muted whoosh of racing wind. It’s an eerie sound that echoes all around me.

  I count time to stay oriented the best I can, to distract myself from worrying about what awaits me on the other end of this black journey.

  Somewhere around hour three, we dive. My stomach jumps into my throat; the wind noise escalates, shifts to something with a more hollow resonance. We’ve gone underground.

  After a couple of minutes of dipping and swerving on what seems like a downward trajectory, we slow to a glide and settle to horizontal. The spinning fades, and the wind softens enough for me to hear distant roars. Until my captor starts roaring, which drowns out everything. The heat picks up, and I’m soon drenched in sweat.

  We land. The claw opens, and I drop onto concrete, hard on my back. A strident symphony of roars and growls surrounds me. A fog of bright green-tinted smoke swirls everywhere. It takes my eyes several seconds to adjust. Staggering to my feet, my legs half numb, I look around.

  Through the bars of a dragon cage, I see that I’m in a massive terminal split down the middle by two sets of train tracks. Dragon cages line the walls in every direction. Collared dragons fill those cages.

  Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

  “Pretty,” somebody says. I look over my shoulder. A woman with spiked pink hair is leaning against the dragon’s leg. White cloak, no CENSIR, gun pointed at me. She’s chewing on a straw.

  “Where are we?” I ask over the roars. I can’t stop sweating.

  She tosses her gun high in the air, her eyes never leaving me, then catches it and thrusts it at me. “Bang, bang!” She spits out the straw, laughs. “What’s the fuss with you, girl? Tide in the sky says you’re washing out dragons with your reflux.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “What’s any of it mean, girl?” She looks up at the dragon. “Shush now, we’re trying to have a conversation.”

  The dragon stops growling at the Green in the adjacent cage to look at her. He bares his teeth and snorts smoke in her face, then resumes his growls, though at a quieter volume. The pink-haired woman laughs but cuts off abruptly to glare at me. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You hold your horses, girl. Please and thank you. We
’ll fix you up with a fiddle and jump you over the moon lickety-split.”

  “Thank you,” I say, because she’s crazy and that seems like the best thing to say. She resumes spinning her gun. She stops every once in a while to “Bang, bang!” at me and laugh. I’m half tempted to tell her to shoot me and get it over with.

  That’s what they’re gonna do. Execute me. First they’re gonna interrogate me. On the flight in, that was the only reason I could think of for why they didn’t kill me on the spot. I refuse to die a prisoner.

  As I rub feeling into my legs, I watch her flip her gun, trying to get the timing of it down. But she’s got no rhythm to it. I take a deep breath, call on the rage for everything that I’ve lost, and launch myself at her.

  “Bang, bang!” she says with finger guns, then sidesteps, grabs me by the collar, spins me, and drives me to the ground. Even in her body armor, she’s not much bigger than a pixie, but she holds me down, not even breathing hard. “Hold your horses, girl!”

  She laughs, lifts me up, shoves me backward. “You can try again, if you want.”

  I retreat to the corner. She picks up her gun from the ground and tosses it to me. She raises her hands. “Think you can do it, girl? Kill an unarmed—”

  I pull the trigger. Nothing happens.

  She pouts. “Had to empty it beforehand. I get a little itchy scritchy.” She flicks her trigger finger. “Maybe next time. Give it back now. Please and thank you.”

  I throw it back. “What do you want?”

  “World peace.” She laughs. “Or a world on a fire. Pick your passion. Make it so it doesn’t pick—” The roars and growls of dragons quiet; the glow in the terminal brightens. “Oooh, you’re special. Getting to ride on the O-train.”

  I look down the terminal in the direction she’s staring. The dragons are all looking that way too. I’ve never seen Greens do anything in unison. Or quietly.

  A train glides toward us. The dragons track it. It stops outside my cage, and through the train’s window, I see a girl in white scrubs, a CENSIR on her head.

  Allie!

  Something’s wrong with her. Her lips are moving rapidly, like she’s talking to herself. Her hands are pressed against the window, bandages wound about both wrists. Her gaze sweeps over me without recognition.

  Oren and two hulking brutes exit the train.

  “What did you do to her?” I ask.

  He pushes a button on his tablet. The door to the cage opens. “You’re too much like your mother, you know that?”

  “What did you do?” I ask as his two guards grab me.

  “I made a promise to her, you know. A long time ago, back when we were friends. We made promises to each other.” He gives me a rueful smile. “I didn’t want you to be part of this, Melissa.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have taken Allie.”

  “I know what you think of me. I know what the world thinks.” This smile is sadder. “War is hell, and it requires demons. Compassion only prolongs the suffering.”

  “What about her suffering?” I say through clenched teeth.

  “I hope you can help her, but I need you to be calm. Can you be calm?”

  I give a terse nod.

  He waves to the guards. The moment they release me, I bolt onto the train, calling Allie’s name. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t turn away from staring out the window. She reeks of urine and roses. The woman sitting beside her introduces herself as Elise, Allie’s nurse. She’s forty maybe, with ruffled brown hair and beady eyes that belong on a bird. Handcuffs hang from her belt loop.

  “Talk softly,” Oren says. “No fast movements.”

  Fast movements, slow movements, quiet, loud, Allie doesn’t seem to notice anything other than the dragons.

  She mumbles to herself as she scans the line of cages. “Strachen, Strubak, Sudanki . . .”

  “Allie?” I say as the train takes off.

  The dragons track her. She tracks them. “Talix, Tamrik, Tebum . . .”

  I reach for her hand.

  “Careful,” Elise says. She unhooks her handcuffs, offers them to me.

  I ignore her, remove Allie’s hand from the window, lay it in mine. Her small fingers stay limp against my palm. “Allie?”

  “. . . Tesiv, Thaxx, Theule, Thog. Thog, Thog, Thog, Thog . . .” She keeps muttering the name. She cranes her neck to focus on an empty cage receding from view. She stands up, puts her free hand on my head for balance. Her fingers dig into my hair for purchase, but I don’t think she realizes it.

  “Allie?”

  “Let her work it out,” Elise says.

  “Thog, Thog, Thog . . .”

  Ahead of us, the tracks diverge toward two tunnels. We zoom into the right one. The cages disappear, and soon so does the green glow. Allie squeaks out a mewl, then goes silent, sits back down, and drops her chin to her chest. She crosses her wrists and starts scratching furiously at the bandages that cover them.

  I intervene. It takes most of my strength to hold her still. “Allie?”

  Nothing.

  I look at Oren. “What did you do to her?”

  “It’s the CENSIR,” he says.

  “Take it off.”

  “It protects her,” he says as the train slows.

  “She can still hear them, you know?” She just can’t talk to them. “The CENSIR doesn’t work like it’s supposed to on her.”

  “I know.” He sounds sad.

  The train dead-ends at a pair of elevators. Allie doesn’t budge.

  “You should put her in these,” Elise says, once more offering me the cuffs. “It’s for her own safety.”

  “She’ll be fine,” I say, more for myself than anybody. I shift my grip from her forearms to her armpits and hoist her up. She crosses her wrists and resumes scratching, then leans backward. I almost drop her. I set her on the bench and wrest her arms apart. I wrap her hands around my neck.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Elise says.

  I scowl at her and hug Allie to me. She leans back again, but her hands catch on my neck. Her gaze tightens, her lips curl into an angry O. A moment later, her fingernails are digging in. Trimmed and dull, but intent. She breaks skin. I yelp. She digs harder. Elise pries her off me. Allie sits back down and goes back to clawing at her wrists.

  Elise makes to handcuff her.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t. Please.”

  Elise looks to Oren.

  He nods. As I dab the blood away, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the silver dragon brooch I gave Allie in Georgetown. He holds it out to her. “Come on, Allison, it’s time to go home.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Come on, Baby’s waiting,” he says, as if speaking to a toddler.

  She looks up, holds out her hand. “Arabelle?”

  “I’ll give it to you when we’re in the apartment,” he says.

  Stiff-legged, she follows him and Elise to the elevator.

  Oren presses his palm to the adjacent bioscanner.

  “U211,” he says once we’re all inside. We go up.

  The floor indicator above the door starts at U600 and changes numbers (U599 . . . U598 . . . U597) about every second. Allie remains frozen at his side, arm still extended in a begging gesture. I crouch in front of her. She blinks periodically, but I might as well be invisible.

  “Grackel’s alive,” I say.

  Her eyes wrinkle, but that’s it.

  “Arabelle misses you,” I say.

  Nothing.

  I push her arm down. She attacks her wrists again. I force them loose and hold her in an awkward embrace that pins her arms at her sides. “I miss you,” I whisper in her ear.

  She doesn’t move, except to scratch at her thighs.

  “It won’t do her any good,” Elise says.

  I keep talking to her, holding her, but Elise is right. And after about a hundred floors, I figure out why. Allie’s tangled, so when she’s off her CENSIR, she’s getting hundreds of murderous dragons sharing their thoug
hts with her, all at once. An endless flood of desire for death and destruction. And now that the CENSIR’s protecting her from that . . .

  I recall the euphoria of Praxus’s presence, the abyss inside me created by his absence. Magnify that a hundred times over, and that explains Allie’s current state.

  Angry tears roll down my cheeks as I pry her hands apart once more. She’s already managed to shred through two layers of bandage. “You broke her. Why? For what? Why?”

  “I’m protecting her,” Oren says. “Protecting all of you.”

  “Protecting her?”

  “As long as there are dragons in this world, Melissa, people like us will be a threat to them. We will be slaves at best in their eyes, like your brother, or we will be monsters.”

  The elevator stops. The doors open into a motel-style hallway, replete with white walls, cheap carpeting, and dismal lighting. “With your help, Melissa, she will recover, I’m sure of it. Come on, Allison.”

  He waggles the brooch at her. She trails after him.

  We stop at the fourth door on the right, the only one in the vicinity with a scanner on it. Oren leads us into a studio apartment that stinks of ammonia and urine. The bed’s got pairs of padded handcuffs at the top and bottom. Spots of blood sprinkle the daisy-print comforter. A cot has been set up at the foot of the bed.

  “Elise will be by every few hours to check on her,” Oren says.

  “I’d keep Allie locked up in the interim,” Elise says. “Plug her ears, blindfold her—”

  My CENSIR shocks me into a stumble. “I need you to stay calm, Melissa. You are a guest here,” Oren says. “You treat us well, we will treat you well.”

  A guest under constant surveillance, it appears. I was merely thinking about hitting her.

  Elise gives me a sympathetic look. “It’s really the best thing for Allie.”

  I think she believes that’s the truth, and I don’t know whether to hate her or feel sorry for her.

  “I know it’s not ideal,” Oren says. “It’s only a few more days. Keep her safe for a few more days, Melissa, and then you can have her back. Deal?”

  Safe? I look from the bed’s shackles to her, and my chest hitches. I swallow and nod.

  “Arabelle?” Allie says, tugging at Oren’s cloak.