Othermoon

by Nina Berry

  It was like we were heading right into the jaws of the government, which had used this land for some of the most violent scientific experiments ever devised. Yet this was where the supersecret Tribunal organization had chosen to build its facility. Ximon’s audacity was breathtaking. The Tribunal had to have been digging here for years, maybe decades, without the government knowing. There must be some very powerful objurers involved to shield their efforts so completely. That and maybe a lot of money for bribes.

  Caleb slowed down, pulling off the road to come to a stop, then switched off the headlights. “We’re getting close,” he said, unsnapping his seatbelt. “Dez should drive, so we can do it in the dark.”

  So now he wasn’t even addressing me directly. “Fine,” I said, getting out of the car to walk around and switch seats. “Arnaldo, time for you to grow some wings.”

  Caleb and I passed in front of the car without looking at each other, the chill dry wind blowing his long black coat back like a cape. As I climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirrors, my hands shook a little.

  How different this raid on the Tribunal was from our last one. Then Caleb and I had been an unshakeable team, excited to be heading into action together. Now there was a wall between us thicker than the veil between the worlds. We shared a goal tonight, at least. But without the unspoken accord I’d leaned on in the past, would we be able to coordinate through the dangers ahead?

  Arnaldo had gotten out, climbed onto the SUV’s roof, and swiftly shifted into his eagle form. He thrust his clothes down through the moonroof using his long yellow beak, the snowy feathers on his head waving in the wind. His talons, as long as my hand, curved around the edge of the moonroof for balance.

  “Keep an eye out for the two cacti that form an X,” I said to him. “We should be pretty close now.”

  He emitted a sharp chirp, and then pushed against the car to leap into the air with two swift beats of his wings. The SUV rocked from the power of it. I turned back onto the road to follow the faint form of the raptor, visible to my night vision as the starlight glimmered faintly on his pale head.

  Arnaldo’s eyes were the sharpest of any of ours, and when he flew low in front of me, then zoomed up to circle, I knew to slow down and keep an eye on the right side of the road. Sure enough, a spearlike silhouette sharpened against the sky, tall as a tree, and as we passed it, the second cactus became clear right behind it, its long green arms reaching out toward the other to cross in an X.

  X for Ximon, I thought, and saw the faint wheel track a few yards later just as Arnaldo swooped down right over it, so close to the ground that the tips of his wings brushed the dirt. He followed the track, away from the road, coasting over the uneven sands as if he were trolling a lake for fish.

  I slowed down to turn, and everyone held onto something as the SUV bumped and rattled over the desert floor. We headed up a long slow incline, past the rattlesnake weed and ghost flower, thumping past rabbit burrows, lizard dens, and tarantula nests.

  My skin buzzed, and I fought the urge to roll down the window to smell the air, to call out to the creatures and plants right outside, to stop the car and join them under the stars. I blinked, focusing back on the mission. Othersphere was close and getting nearer.

  “God, are we there yet?” November asked, her voice pitched in a chirping whine. “I just want to . . . I don’t know what. But I have to do something.”

  “That’s the thinness of the veil,” said Caleb. His voice was normal now, dropping only as the car bumped hard over a rock. “It’s put us all on edge. Don’t let it distract you. Especially now, because I need to roll down the window.”

  Maybe that was the closest he’d come to an apology for shouting at us earlier.

  Caleb’s window lowered with a faint whirr, and the cold, powdery air of the desert flowed in. London, Siku, November, and I all took deep, happy breaths, as Amaris huddled deeper into her coat. As shifters, we could detect the scent of the monkey flower and brittlebush, still winter dormant, but silently working toward their spring bloom. Out there lay dusty gopher snakes, breezy red-tailed hawks, and musky desert kit foxes. Even at night, the desert was no wasteland, but a living place, full of its own silent drama. The black core of me that connected to Othersphere churned hotter and darker than before, wanting to spread out and take me over, to shrug off my human form and stalk through the night as a tiger.

  Soon. Soon I will hunt.

  Caleb hummed low under his breath and scanned the blackness outside his window. Just over the horizon the sky glimmered brighter, and I felt the moon there, like a bride just outside the chapel door about to sweep down the aisle.

  “There,” Caleb said, pointing straight up the low hill we were climbing. “Over the hill. Something big.”

  “Oh, thank the Moon,” said London, biting at one of her cuticles. “If I don’t shift soon, I’m going to split wide open.”

  Arnaldo dropped down, coming to rest on another saguaro that stood like a disembodied giant’s hand at the top of the incline. I let the SUV slow down without pressing on the brakes, downshifting until we came to a gentle stop a few yards downhill from the cactus.

  Like a dam breaking, doors clicked open as everyone piled out. “Careful!” I said, voice low. “They’ve got someone watching down below.”

  We crept up the last few yards of the incline, cheeks cold in the breeze, to peer over the crest of the hill. It was less a valley below than a shallow basin. Above, the stars glittered like diamond dust, and I could see that there was nothing down there but more desert, except at the far end of the basin, metal glinted in a wavering line across the horizon. It was a fence, cutting off public lands from the government lands of the former nuclear test range.

  “There.” Caleb’s sleeve brushed over the tips of dry grass as he pointed to a seemingly normal patch of desert. The Tribunal’s objurers had drawn a curtain of shadow over the area so exactly that I could see no difference. Only Caleb, with his ability to feel vibrations through the veil, could have found it. Only Caleb, who was here because we needed him, but not because he cared for me.

  I turned to see the faces of my friends. They looked exactly as I felt: on edge, fearful, but ready to go.

  “Welcome to the most nuked patch of land in the world,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The full moon rose, fat and yellow, as we approached the door to the Tribunal’s compound from an angle.

  With Arnaldo high above, we spread out ten or twenty yards apart, following Caleb’s lean dark-coated form, using boulders and clumps of sage as cover as we got closer. I swallowed down an instinctive need to be at his side and forced myself to think about our plan. Lazar hadn’t said there were Tribunal patrols in the area, but I preferred to be extra cautious.

  London and November had slipped into their wolf and rat forms as effortlessly as expert divers slicing into the surface of a pool. After a moment of severe concentration, Siku shifted into a raccoon, since he would have been larger and easier to see as a bear. November sat on his back, long pink tail wrapped affectionately around his neck. London, a ghostly silver in the moonlight, trotted with her ears perked straight up, her eyes like eerie blue lamps.

  The Shadow Blade’s touch kept me from following them into my tiger form. I held it with one hand as I advanced over burrow weeds and dormant fuchsia, trying to disturb the chipmunks and desert tortoises sleeping underground as little as possible.

  Amaris kept closest to me. Before we’d crested the hill and headed down into the basin, she’d asked me if I was sure she should come. She felt useless.

  In response, I’d dug into a backpack in the trunk of the car and handed her the gun Raynard had purchased last term. Everyone in the Tribunal, Amaris included, had extensive training with sidearms. She’d looked a little relieved, knowing that with a gun in her hand she could do us some good. We only had two extra clips of bullets, but she didn’t need to go on a shooting spree. The intent was to kill as few
people as possible.

  But we’ll do whatever we have to.

  Ten yards ahead of me, Caleb stopped and waved us forward, even though the ground in front of him looked no different from where I was standing. I moved up till I was about ten feet away from him, Amaris not far to my right. The other three crept closer too.

  A vibration from Caleb hummed through my chest and down to my feet. Seeing him out here in the desert, calling out to shadow, I couldn’t help remembering the first night we met, when he had drawn forth a ridge of white marble to keep the Tribunal from capturing us. The effort had made him collapse. With the moonlight on his face, he’d looked so beautiful that I think that’s when I started to fall in love with him. Now the vibration from his voice was a painful reminder of the gulf that lay between us.

  High above, I could just see Arnaldo’s silhouette blotting out bits of the star field. Everything seemed more distinct here. Sounds echoed strangely. The touch of the breeze felt like a cold hand on my skin, and the light of the moon fell with a substance and weight such as I’d never felt before.

  Caleb stopped humming, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to sweep us all with a glance. His eyes glowed a molten gold without a trace of black. Tiny sparks of black smoke issued from his fingertips. The nearness of Othersphere had empowered him as well. His look told us to be ready.

  I nodded, making sure my hand lay on the hilt of the Shadow Blade to brace myself. Directly ahead of Caleb had to be the shroud of shadow the Tribunal had called forth to disguise the entrance to their facility. Here, where the veil was thin, a disguise like that could last for a day or more if it was undisturbed.

  Caleb was about to disturb it. He swept around to face north once more, lifted a hand, and called out a thunderous note. It throbbed in the very center of my being, and if not for the Shadow Blade, I would have shifted there and then.

  Siku shifted again—into a bear. The call to become his most familiar form must have been too irresistible. One moment November sat on a dog-sized gray raccoon with a black robber mask, the next moment a bear as big as a truck stood there. November squeaked in surprise, and then ran along his back to perch on top of his head.

  London threw back her head and howled, and the piercing call, instead of interrupting Caleb’s vibration, joined it like two instruments in a duet. Then, as if wiped clean, the desert scrub in front of us was gone.

  In its place sat a wide metal door set at an angle into the ground, big enough for a large truck to fall through if it was opened. The door had been painted desert brown, but rust marred its scratched, weather-beaten surface. It looked as if it had lain there since nuclear tests started nearby in the 1950s. But that was part of its disguise, in case the shadow camouflage failed.

  Next to it sat a large shallow cement pond filled with inky water. Lazar had told us it was used for runoff in cooling the accelerator. The enormous yellow moon on the horizon floated in reflection there, its rays gilding the smallest ripples.

  Between them sat a tower, set on an open structure of metal struts, about thirty feet tall, with a simple open box on top. Caleb had told us that the objurer guard there would not be able to see us until we dropped the shadow façade.

  I looked up. A white face above a white jacket was righting itself from where it had been resting against the side of the box. The man had been sleeping. I had time to see him gape down at us, the whites of his eyes shining in alarm. Then he lifted his hand to press on the button on his earpiece.

  But Arnaldo was ready. Like an arrow, he shot down from above, directly at the man in the tower. The furious flapping of his wings obscured my view, but he struck as the man lifted his hand. A strangled cry rose up, and then was cut off.

  The man slid from view into his box, and Arnaldo hopped to perch on the edge of it, holding something in his beak. I ran to stand directly below him and held out my hands. He let the small thing drop, and I caught the man’s earpiece in the palm of my hand.

  I gave him a thumbs-up, walked over, and gave it to Amaris. “See if you can hear anything on this,” I said, as she wiped away a trace of blood on the black plastic. “Just don’t let them hear you.”

  She fitted it into her ear, pretending to zip her lips together. Siku lumbered over on all fours toward the door in the ground, November on top of his flat head like a figure on the prow of a ship. When they reached it, she jumped down and ran over to a small pad of numbers on the right-hand side, tiny pink-clawed paws poised over it, waiting.

  Amaris shook her head. “We’re good. No chatter on the radios at all. And the mic on this piece isn’t active, so he never got a chance to sound the alarm.”

  I glanced over at Caleb, instinctively wanting to share this good news with him. But he was staring down at the door, hands jammed into his coat pockets. His eyelids half hid the glow in his eyes, but energy still eddied around him, as if gathering to explode.

  I glanced at my watch: 1:02 A.M. “Do it, November.”

  November was normally our lock-picker, but her tools and skill only worked on regular tumbler locks. Still, she had wanted to maintain her role as door opener, so she had memorized the twelve-figure code Lazar had given us for the front door. She now tapped out the code on buttons as big as her paws. Lazar had explained that they used a less sophisticated-looking keypad on the exterior, one that did not require a handprint scan, to make the door look less like one to a top-secret, high-tech bunker and more like an old government shelter, in case their shadow smokescreen ever dropped.

  As we all gathered around the edge of the door, November pressed the last key, chittered at us, and pressed “enter.”

  The metal slid up soundlessly, disappearing into the dirt at its top to reveal an asphalt-paved tunnel wider than a truck slanting down into the earth. LED lights in the ceiling flicked on, illuminating nearly thirty yards of empty passageway before turning to the right, in the direction of the nuclear test site.

  We waited. Thanks to Lazar, we knew that two men patrolled this area, with their guard post just around the bend in the tunnel. The lights must have alerted them to someone entering. They would investigate in moments.

  We all kept well back of the doorway, not wanting them to see us peering down at them. All except November, whose head was tiny enough to avoid notice. Arnaldo still circled overhead. Amaris took the pistol out of the waistband of her jeans and checked to make sure the safety was off.

  Another protracted moment passed. I longed to shift and bound down that tunnel, to find the guards and deal with them and put an end to the deep agitation in my heart. London paced, and Siku placed both front paws, with their black, daggerlike claws, on the edge of the door, clicking them against the metal, as November scampered around the edge of the door and ran up his foreleg to perch once more on his head.

  “Yo!” The man’s voice from the depths came as a relief. “Stop there! You’re not authorized!”

  Footsteps echoed up from the tunnel. “Unless they are authorized and someone forgot to tell us,” another man’s voice added. “Remember the other day when Ximon’s kid reamed us for not expecting him?”

  “That was previous shift’s fault for not marking down that he left,” the first man replied, then lifted his voice, coming nearer. “Hey! Who goes there?”

  “How much you want to bet Lazar left to visit the Bunny Ranch?” said the second voice. They were less than ten feet from the entrance now.

  Bunny Ranch? I crouched down. Siku had stopped tapping his claws, and London’s back leg muscles were tensed to spring. “He’s a young man, trapped in a bunker in the middle of the desert, and I hear the lovely ladies there are very welcoming.”

  Oh. Prostitution was legal in Nevada. Not that Lazar would ever visit a whorehouse . . . although, for some reason, the thought made my face grow hot. Damn it. Everything was heightened where the veil was thin.

  “Sounds like you’re the one who wants to visit the Bunny Ranch,” the first man said. “Ximon’s kid’s as upright as the Bishop.
”

  “Careful near the entrance now,” said the second man. “How can there be nobody here? And why didn’t we get a call from Rivers?”

  “I can see the stars,” the first man said. “What about the shroud? Should I be able to see the stars?” He poked his head and the point of a pistol over the edge of the door, like a prairie dog sticking its head out of its burrow. “The shroud has dropped! Call reinforcements—whoa!”

  Looming big as a shed, Siku swiped at the man’s face with one giant paw. He didn’t use his full strength. Instead of taking the man’s head clean off, he knocked him across the width of the tunnel mouth, slamming him against the far side. His head made a horrible thump against the metal doorsill. Then he crumpled and lay still.

  His friend had time to raise a gun at Siku. He fired just as London smashed into him. The bullet went wide. He fell to the ground with a horrified cry, disappearing beneath her rangy gray form. A muffled snarl came, then a wet ripping sound. Blood sprayed against the tunnel wall, and he too lay still. London stood over him, licking her red muzzle with a long pink tongue, eyes hot with a thirst that one kill hadn’t even touched.

  I felt it too, the thrill of the kill, even though I was still in human form and had not lifted a hand. “Well done,” I said. “Now, inside! Caleb, help me with this guy.”

  London, Siku, and November padded farther down the hallway as Arnaldo swept in to alight on Siku’s shoulder. The grizzly was big and strong enough not to be slowed down by the weight of a larger-than-life bald eagle and a rat the size of a small dog. Amaris searched the dead objurer, head turned away from the gore where his throat had been, and came away with his pistol and two mags of bullets. She followed the others, gun pointed expertly at the ceiling.

  Like a black hole in the night sky above him, Caleb stood for a moment in the doorway. We were alone. The breeze whipped his black hair around his cheekbones, brows fierce over molten eyes. He looked like some ancient god of power. He caught my eye. We both paused, and my stomach clenched as a current ran hot between us.