by Anna Silver
Otherborn
Otherborn
Midpoint
Praise
“Travel to a world where dreaming is a radical act that can save the world… Anna Silver’s post-apocalyptic vision is rich with imagery and metaphysical ideas, grounded by vivid, three-dimensional characters. A truly fresh take on dystopian.” ~Nina Berry, author of the OTHERKIN series
“I loved the characters. London was a really great protagonist. The ending...man, I had really not seen that coming. What a twist! I'm excited to see where the author takes things in the next books. I'm already dying to find out what is in store for London and the gang next!”
~Ashtyn, Wonderland’s Reader
“Finding a gem in such a deluge of novels is pretty difficult, but Otherborn is definitely one of those gems. I was actually reading another similar and well-hyped book at the same time, and put down that one in favor of this one. The pacing is great, and I was surprised more than once with some terrific twists to the storyline. Silver is very good at description—I could distinctly imagine the surroundings and what their journey looked like. Overall, a terrific first installment by a new author with wonderful world building and fascinating characters. I'll be picking up the next book, for sure!”
~Christina, Ensconced in YA
“Silver built the right amount of conflict and tension to draw readers into her dystopian world, and created characters who are leery, yet determined to embrace New.”
~Natasha Hanova, author of Edge of Truth
OTHERBORN
ANNA SILVER
Copyright © 2013 Anna Silver
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior permission of the publisher.
Sapphire Star Publishing
www.sapphirestarpublishing.com
First Sapphire Star Publishing trade ebook edition, April 2013
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Names, characters, places, and plots are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1-938404-42-9
Cover Image by Roser Portella Florit
www.sapphirestarpublishing.com/annasilver
Dedication
For my husband, Nathan, without whom none of this would be possible.
And for my kids, Zoey, Evelyn, & Ben, who were my very first readers and believed in my talent even when I’d forgotten how.
Acknowledgements
OTHERBORN wouldn’t exist without the support of some very special people along the way. Big hugs to Zoey and Evelyn, my daughters and cheerleaders, who pored over every chapter for me after school and tried their best to help me spot the fatal flaws. Without their encouragement, I’m not sure how I would have stayed the course. And another hug to my son, Ben, whose enthusiasm is contagious.
Friend, beta reader, and fellow fearless pen-warrior, Sheryl Babin, I am forever grateful for your hawk eyes and your consistent belief in me. Thank you to Tina Nardo; you’ll never know how much you’ve given me. Thanks to Emmy Miller, for the unflappable way you just seemed to take it for granted that I would succeed. Sisters and more than sisters.
For the incredible support of the Sapphire Star Publishing family, I can’t say thank you enough. Thanks to Amy and Katie, who not only tolerated my endless barrage of emails, but actually responded— nicely. A BIG thanks to my editor, Nancy, who patiently waded through the onslaught of em dashes and adverbs with me. I learned so much from you! Of course, many thanks to my fellow SSP authors, who tirelessly support my work and have been there to congratulate me every step of the way. And a special thanks to cover artist, Roser, who brought both London and Si’dah to life beautifully.
The love, support, and encouragement of family and friends goes without saying. My beloved mother, Ruth, who never stopped pushing me. My father, Bill, who is forever a source of inspiration and imagination. My aunts, Juju & Kat, who are the best honorary matriarchs a girl could ask for (your boundless love and generosity don’t go unnoticed). My dear friend, Christie Daeger, who is convinced I’m going to be famous someday (your delusions of grandeur keep me going). And to all the others who have lifted me up along the way, I am so very grateful.
Finally, in the tradition of saving the best for last, I have to thank and acknowledge my husband, Nathan Sweat, who has given so much of himself for me to chase this dream. Nothing brings me more joy, than sharing this gift with you.
ONE
New
It wasn’t like her to be this nervous. London skirted the street entrance to the club and ducked into the alleyway beyond. Taking refuge behind a large reprocessing bin, she wiped her palms on the chunky knit of her oversize sweater where the sweat had begun to pool among the creases.
What if he hated it? What if he told her it sucked? What if he freaked out? She chewed anxiously on her bottom lip. What did it matter? What good was it to have this gift if she couldn’t use it? She’d promised herself, and Rye, that she would go through with this, that she wouldn’t wimp out. And she could not have it getting around that she’d gone soft. It took a lot for a girl of sixteen to amass even a speck of street cred in Capital City’s Central district. London couldn’t risk hers.
She clawed a cigarette out of the crumpled pack in her backpack and fished a city-issue lighter from its depths. A few drags and her heart rate began to slow nicely, her mind took on that drift she needed to get by in such a godforsaken world.
“It’s now or never, London,” she said to herself and crushed the cig into the chipped paint of the reprocessing bin beside her. She shook out her hands, tossed back her shoulders, and rounded the corner to the entrance reading Dogma in unlit neon tubing.
“I have something I want you to hear,” London announced, breezing into the dark room still swimming with smoke from the night before. She dropped her guitar and backpack to the floor.
Pauly swung a burly arm across the once polished wood of his City Central bar, now rubbed raw at the corners and pitted with deep dents from years of use, wiping it with a torn bit of rag from an old t-shirt. He didn’t look up.
London reached out and grabbed his hand, forcing him to stop. “I have something I want you to hear,” she repeated, more forcefully this time. If there was one thing she couldn’t abide, it was being ignored.
He sighed. “Kid, I got loads of work before the night crowd arrives. You gonna wash my glasses if I stop to listen to whatever it is you got to say?”
London smirked. He always did this, acted put out. But deep down, she knew Pauly cared about her. In fact, he might be the only one who did care. He’d been sharing his rations with her mom for the last thirteen years just to make sure London kept clothes on her back and food in her mouth. Which was more than most people would be willing to do for someone outside their own family. “Come on old man. I’ll shine your glasses later. And it’s not something I have to say. It’s something I have to play.”
Pauly dropped the rag and folded his arms across his barrel chest. “Who you playin’ now?” he asked as London moved to the little stage and propped her long self against the edge of a stool. “You already mastered that entire album by the Replacements I gave ya last week?”
“Just listen,” she said and began to pick out the unsteady chords on the black acoustic guitar he’d given her barely a year ago, feeling her way through the melody. The bite of the steel strings hardly registered on her calloused fingers anymore, but the vibrations seemed to carry all the way to her soul. She moved
her way through the tune, doing her best to maintain the pitch of her voice, first soft and trickling, then ripening into a bold chorus where she strummed with such aggression she worried about popping a string or vocal cord.
Popping a string was bad. It could take weeks to scrap a new one. Popping a vocal cord would be worse. Her mother had very few medical rations stored. They only came biannually, and the handful of doctors inside city walls already had ridiculous waiting lists. Capital City used to be full of hospitals, or so it was said, but after the Energy Crisis, the rooms were needed for housing.
Pauly was listening in spite of his earlier moaning. His round head bobbing with the rhythm told London that. She smiled inwardly at the light bouncing off the bald section in the middle. He liked it, she could tell.
When she at last finished, London put down the guitar and said breathlessly, “I’m still working out the lyrics on that last part.”
Pauly gave her a quizzical look, but didn’t respond.
“So, what do you think?”
He nodded, “Not bad. But I’ve never heard that one. Who’s it by? They can’t be anyone I introduced you to. You got a disc Scrapper up your sleeve that I don’t know about?”
London laughed. Pauly always shared his discs with her, which allowed her to save anything and everything she could to trade for illegal tech. He should know she wouldn’t turn to a Scrapper for new music material, no matter where they managed to find the discs and sneak them into the city. “No old man. It’s mine.”
Pauly dropped his arms, his face serious now. “What do you mean yours?”
London shrugged, her loose sweater nearly dropping off one shoulder. “I mean I wrote it.”
Pauly shook his head, his remaining wisps of hair dancing in the air above it. “Wrote it? You?”
“Yeah,” London said, nonchalant. “What’s the big deal?” But London knew exactly what the big deal was. Her song was New.
She hopped off the stage and sat her guitar at the end of the bar. “Come on, let’s shine those glasses now.” She pretended not to notice the dumbfounded expression on Pauly’s face.
“London,” he said quietly behind her. “That’s impossible.”
“Can’t be. Just did it, didn’t I?” She turned to give him a teasing smile, but when she saw his face, the smile faded.
He was looking at her with a mixture of awe and fear, as though she’d sprouted another head right before his eyes.
“London, this is serious,” he said in a low voice.
“I thought you’d like it,” she replied, lowering her eyes, her disappointment at his reaction mounting.
“Doesn’t matter if I like it, does it? H-how? When?” His normally open face was balled into a cluster of creases, one for every question.
“I dunno. Last couple of weeks, I guess. Rye helped.”
Pauly put a thick finger beneath London’s chin and lifted her face to the light. “You’re special, kid. You know that, right?”
She rolled her eyes then nodded when his expression went sour.
“I want you to listen to me when I say this, okay? Listen good. Special ain’t tolerated. Not here. Not nowhere. Not anymore.”
London snatched her face away. “Spare me one of your crazy conspiracy rants. I get it. It’s New. That’s a big deal, I know. I thought I could play it during our set tonight. Test it out, is all. See what the regulars think.”
“You can’t do that,” Pauly protested. “Not in my club.”
“Fine, I’ll find some other grungy club to play it at,” she threatened, pulling out a cigarette. All this paranoia was working her up.
He slammed a paddle-size hand down on the bar, nearly sending London out of her skin. “Damn it London! Would you listen to me? It’s my job to look after ya. And you can’t play that song.”
“Why? ‘Cause it’s New?”
“Yes, precisely! Because it’s New. Because it’s impossible. New doesn’t happen. Not anymore.” His face was red with the shouting.
“Obviously it just did,” she spat defensively.
Pauly wiped a hand across his brow in exasperation. His white sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and he fumbled to loosen a couple of buttons on his shirt.
“Better watch that blood pressure,” London warned him.
He frowned at her. “London, you’re an exception to the rule. You always have been. I knew it when you first picked up my guitar and started mimicking the chords you heard on my discs. Hell, I knew it before that. And I love havin’ you and your friends play here. It’s good for business. Not every club has a live act. Your band, Otherborn, is the real thing. But you have to understand. There hasn’t been anything New since right after the Energy Crisis. I mean, that’s generations ago. Not a note, not a song. Not a stitch, not a stroke, not a word. Nothin’. I don’t know how ya did it and I don’t care. I just know that it’s dangerous. People aren’t ready for that. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. And the Tycoons like it that way. Start rockin’ the boat and you’re gonna find yourself overboard, understand?”
London took a last drag and squashed her cigarette in the nearby ashtray. “It’s just a song,” she muttered.
“But it’s not,” Pauly answered her. “It’s much, much more than that and you know it. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but whatever it is, it needs to stop. You’re heading for dangerous waters kid. I’m telling you this because I care about you. I want you to stick around. You play that song tonight, you’ll be gone by next week. Like the others.”
London tapped a chewed nail on the bar. “What others, old man? There’s no proof of any others. You shouldn’t be listening to all those Scrapper stories about missing people.”
“They aren’t stories London. Used to happen all the time. In all the walled cities. They’d send ‘em to get reprocessed.”
“Like the trash? Whatever,” London brushed him off. “I won’t play it. So don’t go blowin’ a gasket, okay? I don’t need you dropping dead before tonight’s show.”
Pauly seemed to relax a little at that.
“At least there’s one man in this world who’s got my back,” she mumbled as she picked up her guitar.
“London,” Pauly said sternly. “He loved ya. You know he did. Couldn’t help it, could he? Being a pit worker.”
London scowled. She really didn’t like being reminded that she was the daughter of a lowly pit worker. “Yeah, yeah.”
She started to turn away, head for the back exit, but Pauly grabbed her arm. “I mean it. I was his best friend. Knew him better than anyone. Last words to me before they sent him back to the pits were, Watch her for me, Pauly.”
“Then why hasn’t he been back, huh? Don’t pit workers get leave once a year? We haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for over a decade now.” The bitterness spiked London’s voice like poison. She and her mother had given up on her dad years ago. Only Pauly continued to uphold his memory.
“London…” he said sadly, unable to explain what he didn’t know for certain himself. “He’d be here if he could. You know that.”
London looked away. The implication was that he couldn’t, meaning he was dead. Accidents happened in the pits all the time. Noxious gases, avalanches, cave-ins, chemical fires. When a pit worker died, no one was notified. They just stopped coming back. Like London’s dad.
Pauly looked down where he was rubbing her arm with his thumb. His jaundiced eyes went wide, and London tried to jerk her arm away, but it was too late. His grip was tight and he wouldn’t let her go.
“Hey, what’s all this?” he huffed, pushing her sleeve up to reveal the white underside of her forearm crisscrossed with a delicate pattern of scars. “This why you been wearin’ all those sweaters lately?”
London wriggled free. She yanked her sleeve back down and gripped it with her fingers. “It’s nothing.”
“Like hell it’s nothing! It’s a hundred degrees out there and you’re prancin’ around for the last year in sweaters and jackets l
ike it’s one of them northern snowstorms. I just thought it was some new fashion, or maybe you were trying to keep your skin from the sun, seein’ as how all the boys like ‘em pale these days. Now I see what’s really going on. What’ve you done to yourself?”
“It’s nothing, I said.” She turned her back to him, ashamed.
“You weren’t born with them marks, I know that. Had you in this club nearly every night since you were old enough to walk. It ain’t them alley cats, is it? I told you to stop feeding ‘em.”
“No,” London scowled. “Couldn’t get near enough to touch one if I wanted to. Too skittish. About as feral as a pack of hogs, you know that. And I only give them scraps anyhow. Couldn’t keep a field mouse alive on what I toss them.”
“Well, someone or somethin’ put ‘em there,” he said, nodding at her arm.
London’s shoulders sagged. She slung the guitar across her back and grabbed her backpack. “I did. So don’t go asking around.”
“Why would you do something like that? I don’t understand.”
London looked over her shoulder at Pauly, and the concern in his face nearly forced her to her knees. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me,” he said.
“Do you ever dream, Pauly? In your sleep?”
“You mean night pictures? Like in a story?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“’Course not. No one does. It’s just a myth, dreaming. An old wives’ tale.”
“Right. Just a myth,” London sighed, deciding not to press it. He’d never understand. He couldn’t. No one could, except the band. And Zen and Avery. “You know what, don’t worry about it. I haven’t made one of those marks in a while and I won’t do it again, I swear.”