Othersphere

by Nina Berry

  Lazar intoned a hum of his own, turning in a circle. The volume was low, but I felt the vibration scan over me like a wave. He stopped, swaying slightly. “Wow, you weren’t kidding.”

  “That way?” Caleb pointed in the direction Lazar was now facing.

  His brother nodded in agreement. “Yes. She’s that way.”

  “That way?” I pointed.

  As I gestured, clouds parted. Lightning withdrew. A hundred yards away, sunshine fell in a golden descant through the haze.

  London yipped and trotted off through the path the storm had made. Lazar, Caleb, and I followed more slowly, walking side by side.

  “Handy having you here,” Lazar said.

  “Good to be of some use,” I said. It was a little weird to see the world from this new height. Moving felt easier, more fluid, and my newly translucent skin was reaching out to the molecules around it, feeling every change in the air, breathing in the rain and the half-gray light.

  “We should be able to find the portal the same way.” Caleb looked over his shoulder.

  Behind us, a window cut from the fog revealed the unkempt lawn and rainy gray light of Burbank in a thunderstorm. It looked like a painting—pale and foreign. Within that frame, a mighty tone breeched the softness of the veil. It came from a figure thin as grass, white as marble draped in black.

  Morfael.

  The storm knew him, too. I lifted my hand. He raised his own, and a farewell danced between us.

  A few steps on we came out of the storm, shaking the rain from our faces, to find ourselves at the edge of a meadow. Behind lay the endless bank of roiling clouds. Ahead was a forest of slender, white-trunked trees with crimson and green leaves that shimmered in the rich yellow light. The sun hovered just above the horizon to our right. I wondered if that was west. Perhaps the sun set in a different direction every night here, or perhaps the days were thirty hours long.

  A warm breeze, laden with moisture, came at our backs and rustled the leaves. Each of them whispered in a distinct way, as if all conversing at once. I caught a name, chanted in a language I should not have understood, borne on the fluted air.

  “The Red Wood,” I said.

  My friends angled questions my way. They were all looking a little damp and shell-shocked.

  I shrugged. “That’s what it calls itself.”

  “Okay then.” Caleb hummed briefly, and then pointed into the wood. “That way.”

  London bounded off. The grass was shorter here, but hardy. Around the ivory tree trunks it clustered into thickets teethed with long emerald thorns. We followed the enormous wolf through a blue evening mist that smelled faintly like . . .

  “Fur,” Caleb said. “Why does this place smell like the fake fur on a stuffed animal you just won at a carnival?”

  “I was thinking carpet,” Lazar said. “When you’re a kid and your sister gets mad at you and rubs your face in the carpet.”

  “Trixie,” I said. “The wonderful old cat we had when I was little. She smelled so sweet and powdery. I used to bury my face in her neck and huff her like a drug.”

  London barked, her eyes bright, tail wagging, and I knew she was remembering something, too, something the scent of the Red Wood had brought back.

  “Speaking of cats, it’s a bit odd that we haven’t seen any animal life in this forest.” I looked around. All the trees were the same—at least three stories tall with smooth milky bark and branches thick with leaves of scarlet and jade. Back in our world, it might’ve been called the Christmas Wood. The only other living things seemed to be the spiky grass, which crowded the bases of the trees like sentinels. “Any scent of any creatures, London?”

  The wolf lifted her nose to breathe deep, and then shook her head once, in awkward simulation of the human gesture.

  “The air here reminds me of Amaris. She was stronger than she looked,” Lazar said, a smile spreading over his face. “And she could be sneaky. If I did something that made her mad, she’d wait till I was doing my homework on the floor, creep up behind me, grab the hair on the back of my head and rub my nose in the rug.” He laughed. “Good lord, it burned!”

  Caleb let out a small laugh. “She could be surprising, couldn’t she? Once, when you and Ximon were away, we sneaked off to a carnival in Barstow, back when I was living on the Tribunal compound,” Caleb said.

  “You did?” Lazar slid his smile over toward Caleb in surprise. “That was sneaky of both of you.”

  “That’s when we . . .” Caleb hesitated, then continued. “We started to plan how we were going to get away from there. After Ximon told her she’d have to marry that man.”

  “That horrible old man.” The smile dropped from Lazar’s face. “I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t believe our father would . . .” He broke off, staring down at the sodden leaves of red on the grass beneath his boots like a bloody green carpet. “Anyway. I’m glad you were there.”

  Caleb turned his head to glance at his brother and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Me, too. I won a purple turtle for her at the carnival ring toss that night, and she named it Penelope the Purple Turtle and rubbed it against my face. . . .” His voice trailed away. His black eyes were staring off into the blue-gray mist, remembering.

  My throat ached a little. Caleb had lost his mother not long before that, his only family up till then. How much it must have meant then to find his long-lost siblings, for one of them, at least, to show that she loved him.

  London whined and shoved her wet nose between Caleb’s arm and his body, forcing him to take his hand out of his pocket. He ran his fingers through the soft silver fur behind her ears. “You’re remembering something about her, too, aren’t you, London?” he asked, stopping to meet the wolf’s aquamarine eyes.

  London pointed her black nose at the sky and let loose a high piercing howl. I’d heard her do it before, but here, as the sunlight faded and the blue mist rose around us, the melancholy moan brought tears to my eyes.

  It stopped Lazar in his tracks. He and Caleb, so sensitive to vibration, stared at her, mesmerized. The keening descended down a bleak scale. At the final heart-ripping note, Lazar moved over to her.

  London lowered her head, doleful eyes like lamps in the deepening twilight. Lazar reached out and scratched the ruff of fur at her neck.

  “We’ll find her,” he said.

  “Guys, we really should keep going,” I said. The three of them were standing next to a particularly large tree, sharing a nice moment, yes. But the moment was dragging on. The forest had gotten very quiet, except for our voices.

  “We should make her bake more for us when we get her back to the school,” Lazar was saying. “She’s okay at making dinner, but there’s this Bundt cake she does . . .”

  “Guys?” I walked over to them, my footsteps dampened by the soaked leaves. On each fallen red leaf I noted a lovely black outline, a swoop that looked like a closed eye, the eyelashes brushing a red cheek.

  “I remember the shortbread cookies most,” Caleb said with a grin at Lazar. “She’d roll them in powdered sugar.”

  I patted London’s head. All this talk of baking must be playing with my head because the air around us now smelled like fresh bread. “We all love Amaris, I know. So let’s not stop looking for her.”

  “Oh, wow, the shortbread! With the pecans?” Lazar shook his head in wonder. “I ate, like, three hundred of those at one sitting once. I nearly exploded.”

  The huge white tree next to us was even larger than I’d thought. Or . . . was it getting bigger? I blinked. The spiny grass around it stretched farther than I remembered, encircling us.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said. “The wood . . .”

  “But you would’ve died happy,” Caleb said to Lazar, as if I hadn’t spoken. His voice was so happy, carefree. He was smiling and leaning into Lazar as if he’d never hated him, never wanted him dead. “Who’s got the next birthday? We’ll beg her to make a cake for us.”

  “There is something wrong here.”
I put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder to make him pay attention.

  He blinked at me. “You like cake, silly.”

  “No, the trees, the grass . . .” I turned and grabbed the front of Lazar’s jacket. He lifted his eyebrows in mild surprise.

  Tendrils of grass had reached delicately over his shoulders, tickling his chin. He brushed them away casually. I looked down. The barbed plants had intertwined over our feet. I could barely see my own shoes.

  A shiny thorn, as long as my finger, reached for Caleb’s neck. He jerked away, but couldn’t go far, hedged in by the white tree on one side and a growing cage of spiny grass.

  “What the hell?” He looked around, as if seeing the encroaching plants for the first time.

  “It’s moving. It’s all around us!” Lazar yelled, tugging against the binding green ropes now wound around his arms and legs. A thorn drew a long bloody scratch down his neck. “How do we get out of it?”

  “A chainsaw?” I proposed, ridiculously. The light around us dimmed as tentacles of green reached over our heads, blotting out the sky. The four of us were clustered close now, hugged together by insidious arms of undergrowth. I tried not to struggle, but barbs were drawing red lines on my exposed arms and wrists, puncturing my clothes.

  It was hard to even see the others now, though they were inches away. The plants were entwined around us from every angle, a living screen. If we didn’t do something soon, we’d all die of blood loss, trapped here. Unless being ensnared was just the beginning.

  London made a pained yipping noise. The thorn-covered grass was making her paws bleed. The blue mist puddled there, as if drawn by the blood.

  “I’ve got a silver knife in my boot,” Lazar said. The plants bowed slightly as he tried to bend over to his shoe. “I can’t reach it.”

  “Check the shadows!” Caleb said, and then began to hum. Lazar joined him. I winced back as a thorn as big as an antler stabbed at my eye. My adrenaline surged. I broke out in a sweat. “Hurry up!” Being constrained like this was deeply disturbing. If I didn’t get out soon, I might start flailing and tugging, which would only draw more blood. I forced myself to take deep breaths and craned my neck to avoid being blinded.

  The vines squeezed me tighter on one side. I shuffled my feet to stay upright, fearful of falling into a thorny bed. Through the teeming mass of olive and jade stalks I saw the white tree trunk get closer. “It’s drawing us to the tree!” I shouted.

  “Barbed wire, darn it.” Lazar’s mild swear word spoke volumes. “In our world this thorny stuff is barbed wire. The tree is a post.”

  “No point in drawing forth that shadow,” I said. “Ow! Damn it!” The thorns pressed in, drawing more blood, getting close to tendons, muscles, and bone. I could shift into my tiger form to heal the cuts, and that form was stronger. But it was also bigger. If I got even a little bit larger, the thorns would be driven in deeper. The one poised in front of my face was long enough to kill me instantly if it went through my eye or my neck. Why hadn’t it stabbed me yet?

  It doesn’t want us dead. Not yet.

  The smooth white tree trunk in front of me trembled. An ominous crack gashed the surface.

  “What the f—” Caleb was cut off as our captor jerked us closer.

  The fissure in the bark split, revealing a gnarled maw dripping with cherry red sap. The vines were pulling us inexorably toward it. I struggled to believe it even as it happened.

  Lazar leaned back, trying to stop our movement. “Just when I thought this place couldn’t get any weirder.”

  “I always wondered what it was like to be digested alive,” Caleb muttered.

  “Maybe we can cut our way out once we’re in there.” I tried to sound hopeful, but it came out desperate.

  Lazar was humming again. He broke off. “There’s a hut! With tools! On the other side of the veil in our world, just ten yards to my right! I think I see an axe.”

  “Ten yards too far,” I said, wincing as more thorns stabbed into me, forcing me to limp six inches closer to the slavering cavity ahead. Caleb’s arm was half inside it already.

  “No, Dez!” Caleb twisted around despite the thorns, exhaling with the pain of it. I could see his black eyes flecked with gold through the twisting greenery. A streak of sluggish blood ran down his cheek. The mist was thickening around it. “You might be able to get out of this,” he said. “If you shift into a cat.”

  “Of course!” Hope surged through me. As a tiger I was too big, but as a cat, I just might be small enough to slip out. I’d only made that shift twice before, but there was no time like the present to try again. “London, you should do it, too,” I said. “Turn into that little fennec fox like you did before.”

  London yowled mournfully, not sounding very positive.

  “We can help her!” Lazar said. “Right, Caleb?”

  “Yes, yes, good idea!” Caleb gritted his teeth, straining away from the yawning wooden jaws beside him.

  “We’ll do it at the same time, London, okay? So they don’t have time to react and grab us again.” London barked sharply. “Great. On three.”

  “Ready, Lazar?” Caleb asked.

  In response, Lazar let loose a baying note I’d never heard before. It pierced and wavered like a deeper version of the wolf’s howl London had wailed earlier.

  Caleb sent out a note to join his, forming a chord, and then pitched it higher, thinner, as if it was coming from an animal much smaller than a wolf.

  Lazar mimicked him. I watched carefully as much as I could through the writhing plants. Lazar’s gold-and-brown irises were locked onto Caleb’s black-and-gold ones. The brothers were interweaving their tones into an eerie song with a story I could feel under my skin. It was the story of a wolf who asked the moon a favor. And to save her life, the moon granted her wish—to become a fox.

  Do their voices tell stories back in our world, too? I was sensing things in Othersphere I’d never known existed before.

  The song seemed to be reaching a crescendo. I focused myself on how it felt to be small, how I’d once fit on a bookshelf in my cat form, how Caleb had run his hand over my head and made me purr with happiness. I found that place inside myself easily. Othersphere made it feel completely natural. I could be the world’s smallest cat in a heartbeat.

  “Okay, London,” I said. “One, two, three.”

  Like a diver slicing through the surface of the water, I dove into my cat form. It rushed over me and down I went, under the grasping tendrils of the vines, slipping past the cruel prickles and barbs dripping with my own blood.

  My paws were tiny now, narrower than the blades of the grass, speckled in swirls of orange, white, and black fur. Above me, the feelers that had held me were flailing, searching. Two feet away, a tiny fennec fox gathered itself, pale fur easily visible amidst the seething greenery. It swiveled ears as wide as coffee cups at me and yipped.

  I meowed and angled my sinuous body around a particularly large thorn, poking my head past a grasping tentacle, and slithered through the fluctuating gaps in the living net that had held my human-ish form.

  The fox followed, ears now tucked tight to her head, black nose narrow enough to find the cracks between the blades, tiny paws dancing past floundering emerald antennae.

  Our escape was a kind of song, too. I felt the rhythm of it, a flurry of tiny notes in counterpoint to the menacing fugue all around.

  Then I slinked between the last lattice of shrubbery and was free. London popped out beside me and shook her enormous ears. We skittered farther away from the seething hedgerow now looming so high, and she woofed. We couldn’t see the boys, but they could hear us.

  “Are you free?” Lazar’s voice cut through the vegetation. I let out a hard meow, trying to make it sound like “yes” as London barked, louder this time.

  “Okay, Caleb, ready?”

  “We’re going to call forth whatever we can from the hut,” Caleb said. “Get anything you find quick as you can because—arrh!”

  His voic
e broke off in a growl of anger and pain. I trilled a question, pacing, trying to see his black coat, something, but even the white trunk of the huge tree was invisible to us now.

  “Like I said.” Caleb’s voice was more strained, but determined. Thank the Moon. “Be quick. Go, Lazar!”

  Lazar intoned another note, different from the wolf and fox howls, happier, more workmanlike. Caleb’s voice joined his, describing in notes a tin hut, padlock rusted and useless, abandoned and unused on someone’s land, with tools hanging from rusty nails inside.

  I felt more than heard the pop of something coming through shadow. The fox’s ears swiveled in that same direction, and we took off. The hut was there, exactly as the boys’ notes had described it, leaning to one side, door hanging open. I ran right in, London beside me, and shifted instantly to human. On the wall, a large, slightly rusty axe was hanging from a hook. A saw with broken teeth hung next to it.

  I grabbed the axe as London ran yipping around my feet. Perhaps she wasn’t able to shift. “Stay back!” I shouted, and raising the axe, I rushed right at the teeming foliage now nearly two stories high at the base of the white tree.

  I brought the axe down with all my might. The blade didn’t look very sharp, but it bit into the stalks of undergrowth with a satisfying thunk. The grass tore beneath it, oozing cherry red, and then turned black. More dramatically, the entire bank of greenery recoiled, fanning out as if afraid of the axe head.

  Be afraid.

  I swung the axe down again, ripping away stems and thorns. The stalks nearby reacted more like a crowd of people than a plant, heaving away from me, desperate to escape.

  I heard growling and the padding of feet behind me, and I knew London had shifted back into wolf form and was coming, dragging something. I chopped downward again as a silver streak, big as a pony, lifted a large, flat, rectangular object in her mouth and flung it at the rippling hedgerow.

  The object clanged, vibrating, into the main body of the plant. It was the entire broken front door of the hut, made of corrugated, rusted tin.

  The plants beneath the door wilted and blackened before our eyes. Lazar, his right leg now mostly free, was pulling his way out. Caleb’s black shape was still deeply embedded in squirming green, half in the quivering hole in the tree, half out.