Otherborn (The Otherborn Series)

by Anna Silver

  Zen’s room was admittedly a step up from the particle board crawl space she called home, but London still preferred the character of her and Rye’s building. The upper stories of Zen’s bank had the glass blown out from a storm years ago, rendering one third of the complex unlivable. It gave her the distinct feeling of squatting under a ghost town when she was there. A sensation she found untenable.

  London’s window was covered by a thin cotton t-shirt she’d tacked up years ago. Tonight, she tucked it aside and opened the stubborn pane. Leaning out into the sticky capital air, she lit another cigarette, contemplating all these bodies crammed into such tight quarters. You could practically feel the city swell with the sweat. The sagging striped sweater she loved to wear didn’t help, so she stripped down to her tank and panties between drags, running a finger across the fine networking of scars that covered her forearms like flesh-colored webs.

  A throat clearing startled her and London turned, bumping her head on the window frame, to see her mother standing in the doorway.

  “What gives?” she snarled, rubbing her head with one hand while she flicked her butt with the other. She folded her arms against her chest before Diane could see the scars. Not that her vision was clear enough for that kind of detail.

  London hadn’t cut in a while. Then again, she hadn’t dreamt in a while. Looks to be Kim’s turn right now, she thought.

  “I thought maybe we could talk. We never talk anymore,” Diane said, leaning on the pressboard, but her voice slurred over the words.

  London rolled her eyes. “Nothing to talk about.”

  “Haven’t heard you and Rye play for a while. Still practicing?” Diane tried anyway.

  She hadn’t heard because she’d been passed out wasted or gone, or both for all London knew, but she didn’t say that. “Yeah.”

  Rye was her friend long before the dreams came. They both loved music. He would beg her to hum the tracks she heard on Pauly’s discs at the club. And when they could, they scrapped for a few of their own. Though they had no way to play them. Not until Kim came along.

  They started the band, just the two of them. She on guitar and vocals, Rye playing the drums. A crazy idea she got after she began having the dreams. She thought the night pictures were just a mutant side effect of pollution or hormones or depression. It was hard then. The music helped, but the weight of her secret was overpowering. She thought she was going crazy.

  London discovered cutting by accident. A slip in the kitchen one morning when she was groggy with the dreaming. But it worked. She turned to it more and more as the only thing she knew could relieve the pain and pressure of waking to find herself still stuck in this pent-up hell. She tried to hide it under a wardrobe of bulky sweaters, but Rye eventually saw the marks and had a conniption. She swore to him that she would stop, and she told him about the dreams.

  Then Rye started having them.

  Diane sighed and took a long sip from her bottle. She rarely bothered with a glass anymore. “What about that other one? The Chinese.”

  “Korean,” London corrected through clenched teeth. “Kim is fine. Just saw him today.” She kept her words clipped and her answers short, praying whatever maternal bug Diane had caught would pass sooner that way.

  When Kim first came along, they thought he just wanted to jam. He lifted his great grandmother’s cello and scrapped it for a bass guitar, started practicing with them afternoons. It took only two months for the dreams to spread to him, too—restless nights filled with impossible imagery that felt so real it took twenty minutes to orient yourself upon waking. Followed by the deep and quaking realization that they were more than visions. They were memories.

  Not of this godforsaken life, of course. Maybe not even of this world.

  That’s when they finally decided to name the band, after the name they’d given to their dream selves. That’s when they became Otherborn.

  London looked at her mother’s silhouette in the doorway and winced. Her hair was knotted through an elastic on one side and her bra straps had slipped down her shoulders hanging nearly to the elbow. Her eyes were vacant, wandering. “I don’t like those other two,” she said suddenly, gesturing for London to pass her a cigarette.

  London knew just who those other two were: Zen and Avery. And she had to hand it to Diane, even through her stupor she’d picked up on the fact that Zen and Avery were different.

  Originally, Kim started to notice the change in Zen at school. He wasn’t necessarily a friend of theirs. But the sunken eyes, the pallid complexion, and dozing off in class, time and time again, were clear indicators of insomnia. Kim followed him one afternoon to the school library, where he found Zen’s massive frame hunched over a book. Caught him writing poetry in the margins. New poetry. A few simple, guarded questions later, it was confirmed. Zen was in.

  As for Avery? The pretty, studious waif didn’t fit their angst-riddled mold. And she didn’t play. Or write. But she drew. Sketch after sketch after sketch. Which was perfect because she was the only one who could afford the paper. They wouldn’t have discovered it except her face kept appearing in their dreams, so out of place inside the vivid memories. Someone would see her in a watery reflection or peering out between waxy leaves. When they confided the sightings to one another, they approached her. It was the first time anything useful came out of the dreaming. The first time they began to realize what they might have. More than mere visions or lost memories of some other past, the dreams could be important. Here and now.

  And they were calling them together.

  “They’re all right,” London replied as she lit her mother’s cigarette. Diane’s hands often trembled too much these days to do it herself. London always wondered what she did while she was in school. It was a wonder she hadn’t burnt the building down.

  “Not that girl. She’s too clean.”

  London bit back the urge to laugh out loud. Ave was squeaky clean all right. Practically sparkling. No wonder Zen had the hots for her.

  Avery and Zen tagged along to all their shows, sitting in a corner of the bar while they played. They kept quiet, so Pauly let it slide. Everyone knew about Zen’s crush, which made a good cover. Why else would a doe-eyed bookworm from the Rise start entertaining four streetwise teens destined for low-class assignments? London was the daughter of a pit worker, for crying out loud. It didn’t get more untouchable than that.

  Diane pointed the two fingers gripping her cigarette at London. “You gotta watch those types, London. Always thinking they’re better than everyone else just because some Tycoon somewhere decided they should get a high and mighty assignment that puts them in the Rise while good men like your daddy are sent to die in the pits.”

  London swallowed hard. They never talked about her dad. And Diane had used the d-word. Dead. “Avery’s not like that,” she said, changing the subject, but Diane had a point. After all, only the affluent received enough rent rations to afford the Rise, Capital City’s shining beacon of fine living—a central high-rise that affected the impression there was still a wealthy class among the crowded, downtrodden masses. Something to hope for. Not that you’d ever get an assignment which afforded it. Not unless your parents had the right contacts, meaning you basically had to be born to it. In London’s eyes, the Rise was a monument to a hologram.

  The truly wealthy didn’t live in the city at all, didn’t mix with urban rodents like London and her friends. The really wealthy were shackled to the Tycoons by marriage or breeding. Like the Tycoons themselves, they could afford to live outside the reach of commoners, where only their shiny cars could carry them. Milking the great oil teat for all it was worth while everyone else rotted within the confines of crumbling concrete and steel.

  London shook off the bad vibes thinking of the Tycoons always gave her. She stared at her mother while she smoked and drained the last of her bottle.

  “Time for a new one.” Diane turned toward the kitchen, shaking her empty liquor bottle. “I’m going to catch some more of
that Seinfeld. He’s funny,” she drawled, stubbing her cigarette out on the wall as she left.

  London glared at the space where her mother had been. “Nice talkin’ to ya,” she mouthed as she pulled her curtain to, shutting out the light.

  With Diane out of her hair, she lit a new cigarette and replayed Rye’s words in her mind, Degan did. Rye was such a prick sometimes, but she knew he was right. Degan had approached them. He’d known about them. Found out somehow. Everyone knew about the band, knew you could catch Otherborn playing at Dogma every week. But no one knew about the dreams besides the five of them. Or so they thought.

  Looking back, Degan never really said much. London just kind of assumed that he’d been tipped off about them in a dream, like they had with Avery. Maybe everyone had. Everyone but Rye. Rye believed whatever exposed them to Degan, exposed Degan to his murderer. He believed they might be next.

  London flicked her butt out the window and pulled her illegal netbook out from under her bed, spreading it open on its butterfly hinge and cupping the metal spine with one hand. License be damned. Her mom could never afford the cost of a technology license, especially one with Capital City intranet. Only good assignments paid tech rations. And it would take some serious scrap to get a fake one off the Tigerians. You had to go outside the city walls to find those kinds of goods to trade, where only heavy Scrappers dared to tread. Packs of feral dogs supposedly roamed the Houselands. If the dogs didn’t get you, the wild hogs probably would. And the Houselands were rumored to be haunted, churning with the restless ghosts of all those pre-Crisis rebels who’d never made it into the gates.

  Plus, if you got busted, the Tycoons could have you executed like any other criminal. Not that they would. They seemed to prefer looking the other way, though the occasional example did get hauled out onto the Old Green at the west wall for public execution.

  No, the rules were clear. No one was allowed outside the city walls except the Tycoons and their class. And no one was allowed technology without the proper license. And no one was allowed a license without the proper rations.

  Fortunately, London was never one to follow rules.

  They’d been saving ration tickets from shows at Dogma over the last year and stockpiling some choice items won courtesy of Kim’s sticky fingers. Then last month, Avery, who already had a legal netbook, complete with all the necessary paperwork, smuggled them a small loan and finally made their computers and netcards possible. London’s inside-man with the Tigerians–a brown Scrapper named Ernesto–was more than happy to trade them the netbooks without the proper licensing. What did he care if they got hung on the pristine lawns of Old Green?

  Her netcom account was set up under a pseudonym, which she only shared with the Otherborn. Not even Pauly knew the netaddress. Or that she had the netbook, for that matter. But they wanted a way to communicate in private about the dreams. The city was so crowded. There always seemed to be someone looking over your shoulder. This was completely confidential. Or so they hoped.

  London powered the netbook, telling herself she needed to alert the others, let them know Rye was finally cracking up. That he really believed they were in danger. But deep down, she was looking for validation that everything would be okay, that Degan’s death wasn’t her fault.

  The familiar screen lit up her bed with that green technical glow. London typed in the Invisinet address, logged on, and waited only a moment before her combox appeared. The flashing exclamation surprised her. The sender’s name made her skin crawl: kingsnake@invisinet.capital.

  None of her friends used that name. No one else was supposed to have her netaddress. She didn’t know Kingsnake. And Invisinet rendered whoever it was untraceable.

  Hesitantly, as though she were handling a live grenade, London clicked the envelope and the message box popped up mid-screen. Her eyes traced the common Arial font, every letter spelling a word she didn’t want to read. Every word completing a sentence she didn’t want to know. Every sentence suggesting the very thing she was afraid of most.

  Rye was right.

  Someone knew.

  They were all in danger.

  And she was to blame.

  ~

  It was 2:00 a.m. and the night air hummed with mosquitoes and moths, but London didn’t care. She needed a smoke in the worst way. She stuck her head out into the fray and tried to light the end of a cigarette. Her hands were shaking so bad she could hardly put flame to paper. Finally, they connected and London took a long, deep drag, coughing out the result. But a cigarette wasn’t going to do the trick. Not if she wanted to get back to sleep.

  It was hard enough dozing off in the first place after the disturbing netcom she received. The worst part was, she couldn’t let anyone know. If Kingsnake hacked her netaddress, who’s to say they couldn’t trace her netcoms, too? How could she forward that message without risking the identity of her friends? For at least one night, the burden of that message was on her shoulders alone.

  She snatched a tiny box from under her bed and opened it, fingering the contents.

  Screw her promise to Pauly. Pauly didn’t understand. And she’d made it before Kingsnake showed up and Degan bled out at her feet in the back alley. Besides, she’d already broken her promise to Rye a dozen times over since he learned her secret last year. He hadn’t noticed yet. Or at least he hadn’t said anything.

  Gripping the razor blade with the sort of nimble expertise that comes from playing an instrument, she drew a shallow line in red down her left arm, crossing several old scars and cursing her dependency in the process. Normally, she would have taken her lighter to it first, let the flame sterilize the blade then held it as it cooled before using it. But tonight, she decided to forgo sanitation. She’d barely gotten the damn cigarette lit.

  On nights like these, she hated herself. Hated the flavor of reprocessed plant and burning chemicals lingering on her taste buds. Hated how much she craved the fiery sharp sting left behind as the blade made its way deftly across her arm. Hated the slow suicide apparent in every gesture. Hated herself for needing it. Hated that once upon a time, a time she still couldn’t place, a time she remembered only in sleep, she had been better than this.

  London closed her eyes against the tormenting sight of blood beading on skin only to open them just as quickly, afraid the dream would reappear. This time, it was more than memory, more than flashes of another, better life—another, better place. This time it was current.

  True, she’d appeared as the self she’d come to recognize only in the dreams: the middle-aged, slender woman with long, dark plaits and piercing ebony eyes. The self she concluded she’d been before. Only tonight, she didn’t revisit the world that self had known, the world of yurts and fires and rich forests teeming with wild, exotic animals. Tonight, she became that self in another world, another realm. Tonight, she stepped out of this world into a place between, a place suspended in the dreaming.

  And she wasn’t alone.

  On the other side, Degan was waiting.

  London took another drag, holding it for a few priceless seconds before exhaling through trembling lips. The thing that really shook her, really broke her up, was that he knew her. He recognized the long fingers, exaggerated height and strange dress of her other self, understood that every bead and feather bore a meaning, a rank among her people. But he didn’t call her by the name she’d come to realize was the name her people had given her in that life. He didn’t call her Si’dah, which meant “traveler” in their language. Instead, he looked up into her angular, coal-black eyes and said, “London, we’ve been waiting for you.”

  FOUR

  Lucid

  “Are you sure it said that?” Avery asked again.

  “Yes Avery, it said dead.” London would have taken the question offensively, but she realized it wasn’t that Avery didn’t trust her, she just didn’t want to believe it was true. The netcom filled them all with dread.

  “Read it one more time,” Rye insisted.

 
She’d already recited it twice, but London sighed and prepared to repeat it a third time, pulling the scrap of paper where she’d jotted it down from her sweater. “Now you lay your head to sleep, pray to God your life you keep. To steal your dreams, your head we’ll take, and leave you dead before you wake.”

  “Shit,” Rye said simply.

  “Bloody hell,” Kim whispered.

  “Yeah,” London concurred. “Kinda messed up.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” Zen asked now. He’d been the quietest as London explained how she discovered the netcom from Kingsnake.

  “It’s an old rhyme from before the Crisis. My mom used to say it with me at night before she became a drunk. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” London crossed her arms protectively over her chest.

  “You don’t think whoever killed Degan sent this, do you?” Kim asked.

  “That’s exactly what I think,” London answered.

  Rye shook his head at Kim. “Come on, man, don’t you get it? To steal your dreams, your head we’ll take. Zen said it looked like they tried to saw off Degan’s head. Whoever killed Degan was sending us a message as clear as this netcom. They killed him because of the dreams. And we’re next.”

  “No way,” Kim resisted. “No way! How could someone outside of us know about the dreams? That’s impossible.”

  “The same way they knew my combox address, Kim. The same way they knew Degan was going to meet us last night at Dogma.” London was pacing now, tugging at her lip anxiously. “So much for communicating by netbook,” she mumbled.

  “And we just got those too,” Rye moaned.