Othermoon

by Nina Berry

  “One a.m.,” I said. “We’ll meet you there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his voice tinged slightly with admiration. “See you then.”

  The monitor went blank. Amaris tapped a few keys to make sure the connection was gone, and then turned to me.

  “ We will meet him?” she asked.

  “Just you and I,” I said. “For now. We’ll need to sneak out around midnight—quietly.”

  The Naiad Hotel and Casino had a neon sign over the entrance with its name picked out in an Old West font in gold, surrounded by glowing turquoise curlicues that were probably an attempt at evoking ocean waves. A woman with a glittering green fish tail presided, her hair the same blaring gold. Her seashell bra was a frightening blood red.

  It was 1:05 A.M. Amaris and I had successfully snuck out of the school, but were running a few minutes late. Outside the Naiad, pedestrians loitered while a man in a toga carrying a trident stood at the door greeting visitors wearing hoodies and board shorts.

  “Brace yourself for bad Greek mythology and inconsistent ocean imagery,” I said to Amaris as she drove the SUV into the parking garage.

  “I’m not sure I’d know the difference,” she said as she took a parking ticket from the automatic dispenser. “We weren’t allowed to learn the mythology of any other cultures. Morfael put some basic texts on my to-read list, but he said I should read the actual history first.”

  She was dressed in dark jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a waterproof jacket lined with fleece, her thick blond hair pushed back from her face with an elastic headband. I had on a similar ensemble, trying to keep as low a profile as possible while we were out.

  “Okay,” I said, as she threw the car into park. “We’re supposed to meet him near the entrance to the bowling alley, right? You know more members of the Tribunal than I do, so keep scanning the area, in case you see any familiar faces. Also keep your eyes peeled for anyone with an earpiece, or who seems overly interested in you or me or Lazar. Just in case he was followed.”

  “Got it,” she said. She looked a little paler than usual.

  “I’ll go up and talk to Lazar, with you nearby, in earshot, maybe twenty feet away. If we stay apart, we’re less likely to be spotted.”

  “That’s if Lazar double-crosses us,” she said. “Which he won’t. But okay.”

  “We hope for the best and plan for the worst,” I said, remembering my mother saying something like that to me the day my scoliosis had first been detected. Six months later the worst happened, and they fitted me for the brace. Thanks to my mom, I’d been as ready as anyone could be to deal with it, and I’d worn it faithfully until my first shift to tiger form miraculously cured the curvature. Dealing with that had taught me a lot about being patient, about enduring pain, and how you couldn’t always see on the outside what was going on inside a person.

  “You’ve been through way worse than this,” I said to Amaris. “Remember how brave you’ve been so far—facing down your dad, jumping from that plane while it was moving. We’re just meeting your brother here. This is nothing compared to that.”

  She nodded with determination, psyching herself into it. “And if something goes wrong, I run to the car, and drive it to the front entrance to wait for you.”

  “I’ll call or text you if we’re separated and the plan changes,” I said, holding up November’s phone. I’d “borrowed” it on my way out. Fresh from those lessons with Morfael, I hoped I could keep from destroying it. If worse came to worst, I’d get November a new phone. But it was one more thing they’d all need to forgive me for after the night was done.

  She nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  As we pushed through the door into the back of the casino, a cloud of smoke enveloped us, followed by the incessant dinging of slot machine bells and the recorded clanking of falling coins.

  I forced myself to breathe, even though the air choked me, and led Amaris past a man in a cowboy hat getting a fistful of cash from an ATM and a bent woman who was at least seventy years old screeching at an imperious one-armed bandit that had just swallowed her last quarter.

  We passed an entrance to “Billy’s Steakhouse” and moved through a glass door to the hotel reception area. Amaris coughed a little at the redoubled thickness of smoke. My tongue tasted like ash. Amaris cast a nervous glance toward the reception desk and hunched her shoulders.

  “Just act confident,” I said to her, striding across the lobby as if I knew where I was going. “A lot of people come and go in hotels, so they have no reason to think we don’t belong.”

  I angled left, moving past another bar, and found a sign pointing farther left that said MOVIE THEATERS, BOWLING ALLEY, OCTOPUS’S GARDEN ICE CREAM PARLOR—THIS WAY.

  The way was paved with craps tables, banks of slot machines, and a rickety roulette wheel surrounded by men in trucker hats wearing rock band T-shirts and women in jackets that easily shed their sequins.

  Amaris, who had not come into the Luxor with Caleb, kept swiveling her head around, looking at everything. I leaned in to her, but she put her hand on my arm and said, “I know, keep an eye out for suspicious people. I’m trying. There’s just so much noise, so many lights.”

  She was right. The place reeked of acrid smoke and sickly sweet alcohol. Lights of gold, blue, green, and red flashed and skittered from symbols on the slots. Under the clanging from the machines and the shouts of the dealers, people cursed under their breath or grunted with joy.

  Behind it all, under the perspiration and perfume and carpet glue, lay the grimy odor of money. Dollar bills always smelled filthy to me—not the sweet earthy aroma of soil, but like the sweat of a thousand hands and the dust of a thousand cash register drawers had soaked into every crease of the inky paper. That’s what Vegas stank like to me, and I hated it.

  I almost didn’t recognize Lazar. I noted the back of a tall, broad-shouldered blond guy wearing a leather jacket and jeans standing by the door to Caliban’s Bowling Lanes and caught myself admiring how his jeans fit. Then with a jolt, I pulled my gaze back up to the shining head of hair. It was cropped to show the clean tan back of his neck as he bent his head down to look at something in his hands.

  He turned, scanning the room, and I realized this was the first time I’d seen him wearing anything other than white. Before, he’d always had the look of an arrogant, avenging angel, the kind of masculine beauty the Renaissance painters tried to capture. But in that faded blue T-shirt and brown leather jacket, he could have been the most popular boy in high school—the class president or the captain of the football team.

  Only the concerned crease between his eyebrows and almost military stance of readiness gave him away as something quite different. He’ll have a gun under the jacket, even if he’s sincere about helping us.

  “There he is,” I said to Amaris, nodding toward her brother.

  Her eyes landed on him. “Oh.” Her eyes got very bright, almost happy. “He kept his word. I guess I should stay here while you talk to him, right? That’s what we agreed.”

  I regarded her for a moment. She attempted to smile and looked past me, her lips pressed together as if keeping something profound in check.

  “Go.” I patted her shoulder. “Go say hello to him. It’ll give me a chance to be sure he’s alone.”

  “You sure?”At my nod: “Okay, thanks!” Her smile became genuine, and she bounded around me toward Lazar.

  I inspected the crowd, staying back behind a cluster of craps players. No one seemed to be paying her, him, or me the slightest attention. That was good.

  Lazar noticed Amaris approaching, and his whole face opened up for a moment in happy surprise.

  Amaris saw it, and she lit up with a sudden grin. She threw her arms around his neck in a hug. He laughed, wrapping his arms around her waist, and I saw that in one hand he held a manila envelope, unlabeled. Had he brought the plans for the Tribunal facility, like he’d promised?

  Amaris broke the hug, still beaming, and then t
urned to examine the room, probably looking for me. She gestured, as if saying, “I need to go keep a lookout now.”

  He leaned in to kiss her cheek with a sudden, surprising tenderness.

  She got very still, biting her lip.

  He spoke, and the words looked a lot like “I’m sorry,” and then “I love you,” and I had to look away, knowing I was observing something incredibly intimate.

  When I looked back, Amaris was heading toward me, a little breathless from anxiety mixed with happiness. “I told him I’m keeping a lookout. See anything suspicious?”

  “Nothing so far.” She nodded, and I walked toward Lazar, who stood looking right at me, his face now unreadable.

  “That was clever, having my sister come see me first,” he said as I got close. The familiar, arrogant sneer I remembered from when we raided his father’s compound was marring his face. “You got to observe me with my guard down. Maybe it’ll help you see through all my lies.”

  I stopped in front of him, trying to stand in a relaxed way, to make it look like we were friends just hanging out between frames. Through the entrance to the bowling alley came the small thunder of pins being knocked down.

  “I am an ingenious bitch,” I said.

  He withdrew a little, blinking incredulously. Like Amaris, he’d been raised not to swear, so I got cheap satisfaction out of shocking him. I continued: “So ingenious that I don’t need your sister’s help to know when you’re lying. Are those the plans to the new Tribunal complex?”

  The sneer faded slightly as he narrowed his eyes at me, assessing. “I keep my promises,” he said and handed the manila envelope over.

  It was oddly close to something Caleb had once said, about how he didn’t often make promises, because when he did, he kept them.

  “You didn’t bring my beloved brother with you?” He looked down at me, brown eyes sparkling with gold, just the way Caleb’s black eyes did. “Or should I say ‘your beloved’?”

  “You really shouldn’t say anything about that at all,” I said, keeping my voice calm even as my face turned red. “I’d hate to have to kill and eat you in front of all these grandparents.”

  He studied me a moment. Was that the faint trace of a smile on his face? “I will obey you fully and keep my covenant.”

  It took me a moment to translate his archaic language. “Were you followed?”

  He shook his head. “And I hacked the GPS in my car again.”

  “Okay.” I opened the envelope and allowed its contents to slide into my hand. On top I saw a map of Western Nevada, one part of it marked with a small X. It lay about an hour’s drive north of Morfael’s school, out of the mountains, and into the desert, perilously close to the air force base closed off to the public.

  “That’s the location of the accelerator?” I asked, wondering suddenly if Morfael had chosen the school’s location for a reason other than the thinness of the veil. Could he have suspected somehow the Tribunal facility was nearby?

  “That’s the entrance,” he said, touching the spot with his finger. “It leads to a series of underground tunnels. The base actually spreads out over an area about this big. . . .” His finger traced a part of the map beyond the lines denoting the air force base.

  “You tunneled under a government base?” I looked up at him. We’d moved close to each other to view the map. I noticed a cut on his lower lip that had just started to heal. He smelled like clean skin and fresh-laundered clothes. I took a half-step back.

  “That was deliberate,” he said. “The accelerator is a circle.” He pulled out a second sheet of paper, which showed the floor plan of a complex comprised of a series of rooms and halls clustered on the western edge of a large ring. He ran his finger around the ring. “This is a large circular steel tube to conduct the subatomic particles. We aim them at each other at something close to the speed of light, and when they smash into each other, they break apart into smaller particles and release energy. I’m only just starting to understand what our scientists are talking about.”

  “This goes under the testing range,” I said. “It was once a nuclear testing range.”

  “I know,” he said. “When our workers were building certain parts of the conductor, they had to wear special gear in case of radiation, but it’s not dangerous in this area. Where we live.” He tapped the rooms next to the accelerator ring. “It’s just so dark. I miss the sun.”

  Clearly, Lazar hadn’t been taught by Morfael. “The U.S. government exploded nearly a thousand nuclear bombs on this range,” I said. “Don’t you know the effect that has on the veil?”

  He pursed his lips, mulling over what I’d said. “You mean like the Tunguska explosion in Siberia?” he asked. At the word “Siberia” I got a chill. That’s where I’d been found as an infant. “That was a meteor, not a nuclear bomb, but it nearly ripped apart the veil between the worlds. Are you saying the veil near our base was torn by the bombs?”

  So Lazar was quick, like his siblings. “Yes,” I said. “So my next question is: Why build an accelerator close to where the veil is thin?”

  His eyes narrowed, glittering with speculation. “I’m not sure, but as particle colliders go, it’s small. Nowhere near as large as the one under Switzerland. Being close to Othersphere might make up for its small size and somehow augment the tests they’re doing.”

  “And why are they conducting tests?” I fixed my eyes on him, looking for any sign of a betrayal.

  “Somehow it involves your DNA,” he said.

  So far he was being honest with me. I could see it in his posture, his face, the tone of his voice. He’d made no attempt to manipulate me with his voice, as objurers were trained to do. “That’s what we suspected.”

  “I figured you’d know that’s what we were after that night I was in your house. But I don’t understand how the accelerator ties into the DNA, or what my father is planning.” His eyes narrowed with genuine irritation. “He won’t tell me, and the science is too advanced. I’ve been able to hack briefly into some of the scientists’ files, but I don’t know what they mean.”

  “Did you include those files here?” I rifled through the pages in the envelope, but there weren’t many more, and they all looked like floor plans and maps.

  “I couldn’t copy them. They were too well protected, and I didn’t have much time.” At my skeptical look, he raised his eyebrows, a rueful smile across his lips. “You try sneaking around a closed complex full of paranoid fanatics in the middle of the night, hacking into their top-secret plans. See how much information you get.”

  I looked away from him for a moment, scanning the room for any signs of trouble to give myself a minute to think. A thumping wash of distant music pounded through the walls, underscoring the distant scrape of the ball falling into place in a roulette wheel and the electronic simulation of slots clanging into place. The fountain show outside must have started. A woman in a Christmas sweater at the blackjack table squealed with delight as she scraped two towers of chips closer.

  I looked back at Lazar. He’d delivered on his promise. But he wasn’t going to like what I had to say.

  “You have to go back,” I said. “Tonight.”

  Incredulity washed over his face, followed swiftly by anger. “Go back? But I brought you everything you asked for. . . .”

  “You’ll do us a lot more good inside than out,” I said.

  “So you believe me.” Annoyance and maybe a bit of sadness edged his expressive voice. “But still it isn’t enough.”

  “We’re going to need to get into this complex of yours,” I said. “If you’re inside, you can get us inside too.”

  He shook his head at me, exhaling hard in frustration. “I held up my end of this bargain. Now you need to step up and help me get away from the Tribunal.”

  “I will personally give you a thousand dollars to start a new life,” I said. “But only after you help us put an end to whatever your father is planning.”

  Lazar got very still, except f
or his warm brown eyes, which flitted back and forth between mine, as if looking for weakness. “You know it’s a huge risk for me to go back there after bringing you this information,” he said. “If my father finds out I’ve betrayed him, he’ll kill me.”

  “The way you killed Caleb’s mother,” I said, my voice cold. “Without a second thought.”

  He inhaled sharply, trying to keep his face unreadable without success. “I understand,” he said. “Nothing is ever good enough.”

  “It will be,” I said. “Soon.”

  He was looking at me, faint horror in his eyes. “Now I get it,” he said. “I didn’t see it before because you’re this beautiful girl, and he’s my father, but . . .” He shook his head, disbelief now battling with amusement in his face. “You and Ximon are a lot alike.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I said, not happy with how my voice rose in anger. “I am nothing like him.”

  “Every day was like a test with him,” Lazar said. “A test of my loyalty, my skill, my commitment to the cause. Nothing I did was ever good enough because of when I—” He broke off, lips going white, and looked away.

  “When you what?” I asked. The expression on his face sent my anger leaking away. Whatever he was thinking, it had nothing to do with me.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I didn’t really mean that about you being like my father.”

  “I think you did mean it,” I said. “But you don’t have to love me. You just have to help us.”

  “Love you!” The words tumbled out of him, his face suddenly flooding with color. “I never said that I lo—I never said that!”

  “I didn’t say you said it,” I said, starting to confuse myself. Why had that phrase so flummoxed him? “I just mean—”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he interrupted, putting up both of his hands and taking a step back. A maddening look of condescension took over his face. “Just because I said you were beautiful, and I saw you . . . enjoying yourself with my brother in the back of that car, and I agreed to meet you here alone doesn’t mean I give a damn about you personally. You’re just a means to an end.”