Othersphere (29 page)

The silence was broken by a hundred different sounds, animals of every shape and size braying and honking and rumbling in confusion. Among it all I caught a thread of one main emotion—fear. Fear of the doorway, of death beyond it, but mostly fear of Orgoli. They had followed him because they were afraid.

The tiger-shifters moved up behind me, quiet, watchful. The other animals flinched at the sight of them, probably reminded of the Amba.

We won't hurt you,
I said.
Go back to your homes. We will put ourselves now between you and Orgoli. We'll make sure he never hurts any of you again.

I only hoped I could make good on that promise.

At the fringes of the group of beasts, a few rhinos snorted and ran off. A cloud of red and blue parrots rose up and swooped back to their forest. The rest moved uneasily, edging away, but not yet certain if it was really safe to leave.

I walked down the side of the dune, the tiger-shifters following. As we approached, I came face to face with a giant horned reptile, a dinosaur I remembered from books in early science classes as a triceratops.

Which meant that the Amba had been collecting animals from our world for tens of millions of years. This gentle-eyed creature, with its fearsome pointed horns and herbivore's teeth, waggled its huge head at me and stepped carefully aside to let me pass.

I nodded, thinking
Thank you
, and began to move past it. An eight-foot-tall bipedal kangaroolike creature with mighty legs meant for jumping and a pouch on its belly hopped to get out of my way.

Beyond her, a creature seven feet high at the shoulder with great antlers spreading more than twelve feet across waited, with six or seven others like him grouped nearby. I recognized them as relatives of the elk that sometimes gathered near Morfael's school. A baby of that group had once walked right up and stuck his nose in the small of my back while I was kissing Caleb.

I couldn't smile in my tiger form, but I paused and extended my nose delicately toward the great elk.

He eyed me with a cautious liquid gaze, then ever so slightly stuck his own bulbous nose out toward me and sniffed. I exhaled softly at him, purring. He lifted his head high, as if no longer worried and bellowed out a cry that I understood in some way. It was a call to go home, to leave this place, never to bow to tyrants again.

The crowd of animals stirred, then parted before me, and the small herd of elk dug their hooves in and took off, running down the beach along the water's edge under the bulging moon.

I kept walking toward the doorway, and they all made way. Some were nervous, some curious. Some bolted away. The crowd was thinning. The purple frogs had hopped off; the beetle swarm flittered into the distance. Mastodon and antique ostrich, warthogs and families of giant shrews. They all waited as I passed, then turned and walked or scurried away.

Thank you,
I thought.

Nearest the doorway stood a great tawny cat-creature with two long curved fangs like tusks curling down from its upper jaw. A
smilodon
, a prehistoric relative of the modern tiger, all sinew and deep-chested power, coiled violence waiting to spring. Behind it slunk a slightly smaller female and two youthful cubs, all watching me with vigilant green eyes.

I paused and bowed my head to the great cats. Then, with the tiger-shifters doing the same behind me, I strode past them and up to where the doorway stood, buzzing and droning like a huge fly eternally flinging itself against a windowpane.

The doorway looked out though a hallway made of shining tubes and metal struts, supporting a heavy structure of some kind above. Fifteen feet down that hall, the room opened up. It was semicircular, filled with the blue gleam of steel and mirrors; a metal walkway led up to a steel door. As I stood there a red light began to flash, and a claxon rang out an alarm. The humdrums knew something was going on.

A clatter of hooves gave us a moment's warning before the giant ibex I'd seen go through the doorway came leaping around the corner up ahead and down the hall. I barely made it out of the way as it galloped past me, burrowing through the mass of tiger-shifters, who hastened to let it through.

What had frightened it? I lifted my paw to cross the threshold.

Heavy pounding sounded from near the hallway entrance, and hissing as a buffalo, followed by two very hairy naked hominids with tiny foreheads and alarmed expressions, and three forty-foot-long boa constrictor type snakes thicker than my tiger body bolted and slithered toward us.

We were readier to give way to them, and they didn't pause as they fled. The snakes fanned out to dart between the legs of the tiger-shifters as they headed back to their swamps.

“Did you see that?”

I swung my head back around at the familiar voice, coming at us down the hallway. A petite girl I knew all too well sauntered toward us. Her short-cropped hair was standing on end and she was naked as the day she was born. What a sight for sore eyes, showing all her pointed little teeth in a wide grin as she put her hands on her hips and surveyed the bevy of tigers before her.

“Did you see?” November asked. Behind her, a dozen more small human figures scurried, including one who looked like the rat-shifter on the local council. “Snakes—running from rats! Well, rat-shifters anyway. I ought to try it with all of you!”

She bared her teeth in a mock grimace and laughed. I crossed the threshold without a second thought to run my rough tongue up her face, purring.

“Ew!” She scrubbed at her cheek. “Good to see you, too, Stripes, but we need to get busy. We got in the rat way, but now we need to open that door”—here she pointed to the metal door at the top of the stairs near the flashing red light—“and let our friends in. Because Orgoli's busy destroying the machinery right around the corner. And Arnaldo told me we'd better stop him or we'll never be able to close up this ugly old hole. Orgoli's bigger than my brother's RV, and he's mad.” Her shining eyes flicked to the tiger-shifters amassed behind me. “Wanna bring your friends to a fight?”

CHAPTER 17

The answering roar rattled the metal tunnel around me.

November narrowed her eyes against the blast of sound. “Guess they understood me. Oh, hey, what's this?”

She stooped over to pick up something she'd stepped on, a broken black shard of glass about three feet long. The Bengal beside me nosed it curiously.

Carved figures writhed along it up to the sheared-off end. I knew it as well as I knew November. I'd seen it when it was whole in Orgoli's hands as he took on his shadow-walker form. It was his staff, or part of it, broken.

“What the hell's Orgoli's thingie doing here?” November said. “Here's another bit of it.” She hunched down and came back up with a smaller splinter of shiny dark glass, sharp as a knife, with one carved anguished eye still visible.

I looked around. Above and behind the door, thousands of tiny metal tubes wound around each other, coming around to all point at the heart of the doorway we'd come through. Those had to be the lasers, created by the National Ignition Facility. We were in the heart of that place, standing in front of a doorway created by those lasers not long ago. All that metal around me made my hide twitch and itch.

November saw where I was looking and snapped her fingers as a thought came to her. “Those tubes must be the laser guns, probably. Arnaldo told me they all have to fire at a single tiny sphere of metal or gas at the exact same time to generate the power the humdrum scientists were looking for.” She held up the pieces of Orgoli's staff. “Was there an accident or something when Orgoli turned them on?”

A clank of metal, and sparks flew high up in the canopy above us created by all the laser tubes.

“Oh, crap,” November said. “Orgoli's still destroying stuff.” She looked past me at the tiger-shifters. “Arnaldo told me Orgoli would try to do that after opening the doorway, and that we'd better stop him or we'll never get it closed again. Playtime!” she shouted at the tiger-shifters.

As they poured past her, a striped stampede, she pointed over at the big metal door at the top of the staircase. “Do you still have that knife of yours on you . . . somewhere?” She had to shout a bit over the snarls and roars around us. “We can't bring lock picks with us in rat-form, and that was the only way we could get inside. We need to open the door to let Arnaldo and everyone inside.”

Even though it wasn't visible, I did have the Shadow Blade. As always, whenever I shifted to a non-human form, it blended in as part of me, and it reappeared in its scabbard on a belt around my waist whenever I became human again.

I meowed at her and bounded down the hallway through the mass of striped fur, crossed the thirty yards of open ground in a second, and leaped atop the stair in a single bound. The two rat-shifters there fussing with the locked door handle were short handsome boys with spiky brown hair a lot like November's. They startled at my arrival, and then grinned, showing all their teeth.

“You must be Stripes,” one of them said. “I'm Toby, 'Ember's brother. This is Jules.”

The other one waved. “Another 'Ember brother.”

The view up here showed a huge cement room cluttered with metal and pipes curving in a circle below us. Banks of computers lined the walls closest to us. The bank of laser tubes and other circuitry formed a huge semisphere in the center of the room, with the hallway to the Othersphere door down the center. But the walls of the room curved around behind the array of pipes, out of sight. There was more back there I couldn't see, and the tiger-shifters were following November's lead that way.

I shifted to my human form. The rat-shifter brothers took it right in stride. “Nice to meet you,” I said to Toby and Jules. “Where are the other eight of you?” November had ten older brothers, most of them named after months of the year like her. Toby was October, and Jules had to be July.

“Busy helping the other shifters, probably,” Toby said. “Or stopping for a smoke.”

“You shift fast, tiger lady,” Jules said. “What's that?”

He was pointing to the Shadow Blade, which had appeared on its leather belt around my naked waist. I gripped the haft and calm rushed over me. The itch from the surrounding metal completely disappeared.

I recognized the feeling now. It was the same centered feeling I had in Othersphere, the knowledge that I was fully integrated into the universe. Even if I didn't go back to Othersphere, at least I'd still have the Blade here as a reminder.

I pulled the dagger from its scabbard, revealing its smoky-edged blade. It was as black as the vastness of space without the stars.

“Whoa,” said Jules again.

I put the tip of the blade to the metal door, aiming near the lock. Above me, the red light was still blazing, the alarm loud and obnoxious to my ears. I focused my thoughts on it, feeling the “wrongness” of worked metal, and told it, “Shut up!”

The alarm went silent, and the light went out. There was blessed quiet and minimal light, which suited my tiger-shifter eyes just fine.

“Whoa!” said Toby.

I sliced the Blade through the metal door. The amorphous edge firmed up and bit down happily, as if eating the metal. It cut through the steel as if it were paper, right through a large metal bolt and another locking mechanism.

I pulled the blade out and tugged on the door. It swung open without a sound.

“Awesome,” said Toby.

“Let's go!” Jules scampered through the open door, which led to a cement hallway. Toby followed and I peered after them. The lighting was low here, too, every third fluorescent panel in the ceiling faintly aglow for the night.

A familiar pair of figures came running around the corner toward us, one blond as a sunny day, and the other dark as the Shadow Blade: Lazar and Caleb. It lifted my heart to see them side by side. Behind them strode Arnaldo, Amaris, London, and her two dire wolves. There were others, too, but not many. Where were the rest of the shifters?

November's brothers skidded to a stop and waved at them. “This way! This way!”

I waved, too. My friends caught sight of me and smiled. But the two brothers' faces were the most revealing. Each bore the same expression of extreme, almost exhausted relief at seeing me. Caleb waved back, and began shrugging out of his coat immediately. Lazar started to run alongside Caleb. Then, as if remembering things had changed between us, he made himself slow down and let Caleb get ahead of him. There was pain on his face, but something more. My throat tightened as I realized he was looking at his brother with love, and acceptance, and the tiniest bit of pride. As if he'd done something to help Caleb smile at the sight of me.

Maybe he had.

That was why Lazar had broken up with me. To atone for killing Caleb's mother, he'd given Caleb his heart's desire. Me.

Unshed tears pooled in my eyes. Caleb ran up, holding his coat to throw it around my shoulders with a flourish like a cloak. He wrapped it around me, and then enfolded me tightly in his arms. I could hear his quick, steady heartbeat, and I buried my face in the curve of his neck, inhaling his thunderstorm scent. No wonder I loved him. He smelled like the air around the Lightning Tree and the eternal storm in its shadow.

He pulled back, hands warm and strong on my shoulders, and caught my eyes with his dark gaze. His smile checked and faded. “What is it? What's wrong?”

I shook my head, smiling and wiping my eyes as I put first one arm, then the other through the sleeves of his coat. “I'll tell you later.”

The ground heaved upwards beneath our feet, causing the metal staircase to creak alarmingly, and all the machinery in the room to sway and bounce. I caught hold of the wall with one hand and Caleb with the other to stay upright. Thirty feet over our heads, the blank white ceiling cracked from one corner to the other.

“Hope he can't keep that up too long,” Caleb said. “Or he'll bring the roof down on all of us.”

The rest of my friends had caught up, panting a little from running. I smiled at Lazar, and then quickly looked away, happy to see everyone else looking well. “So good to see you all.”

“Welcome back, Dezzy!” Amaris shouted. She and London were holding hands, looking adorable.

“Glad to see you,” Lazar said quietly. His eyes on me were warm but cautious.

Caleb was looking past me at the tiger-shifters. “I see you brought back some friends.” His hand surreptitiously rubbed my back in tiny circles. “Well done.”

“Where's your army?” I asked. I was trying not to lean into him too obviously here in front of Lazar, before anything could or would be explained to the others. But being here, next to Caleb, I felt a huge wave of relief breaking over me. I wanted to do nothing more than rest in his arms, tell him everything. But that would have to wait, assuming we survived the rest of the night.

“The other shifters are busy incapacitating the humdrum guards and all that,” London said. “The place is on a pretty strong lockdown, so it hasn't been easy. Once it was clear, we ran ahead to see if Orgoli had opened the door yet.”

“He has,” I said. “But November and her friends shooed back the animals that crossed over. And I told the rest to go home. That seems to be what they're doing, so he should be alone.”

“Still won't be easy,” Caleb said. “Where is he?”

“He's around the back of the laser machinery there, destroying it.”

“Why doesn't he just, you know”—London wiggled her fingers toward the bank of lasers—“call forth some shadow and send it all back to Othersphere.”

Lazar hummed as she spoke, squinting down at the laser bank. “It doesn't have a shadow in Othersphere,” he said. “We got lucky with the helicopter tonight. The higher tech something is, the less likely it'll be attached to anything in Othersphere. And this laser's about as high tech as this world gets.”

“If we can't get the lasers going again, we'll never be able to close the doorway,” said Arnaldo. “We figured out that Orgoli would need something powerful from Othersphere to use as a focus for the lasers. Morfael thinks he has a focus we can use to shut the door again, but the lasers need to be working. If you can stop him, maybe we can reprogram it.”

“A focus for the lasers . . .” I was thinking hard. A lot of what Arnaldo said usually went right over my head, but something about his statement clicked now. “November found what looked like shards of Orgoli's staff right in front of the doorway. Could that have been his focus?”

“That must be it!” Arnaldo's eyes lit up, but then his face fell. “What the hell do we have as powerful as
that
to reverse it?”

Light footsteps padded down the hallway, accompanied by a well-known tapping sound. Morfael's gaunt figure, wrapped in black, glided down the hallway toward us. He was holding his own wooden staff out, hitting the floor lightly in front of him as he came. I waved. He lifted a bony white hand in greeting.

Arnaldo was staring at Morfael's staff. “No way. We can't ask him to give that up.”

“I don't think you'll have to ask,” I said.

An explosion of horrible snarls and snappings erupted behind us.

Three tiger-shifters flew over the top of the half-sphere of machinery in the center of the room, bloody, legs flailing, and squalling in pain. They landed with painful thumps on the hard floor below us. All three stirred, still alive, and I knew they could shift soon to heal.

“Let's go!” Caleb shouted.

I put one hand on the stair's railing and vaulted over it, dropping twenty feet to land easily on the floor below.
Thank you, cat-shifter strength and dexterity.

Caleb, Lazar, and Arnaldo ran full speed down the stairs, followed by London and her dire wolves, with Amaris nearest the back, waiting to see if her healing abilities would be needed.

I didn't wait, but tore off Caleb's coat, tossing it to him even as I shifted. I was tiger once more, and I chirped a request to the tiger-shifters in this part of the room to go up the stairs and help the other shifters deal with guards and humdrums—in a nonlethal fashion. The room was getting crowded, and if Orgoli's earthquake brought the building down, I didn't want every tiger-shifter now on earth to be killed. Something good had to come of this.

The tiger-shifters swarmed up the stairs we'd just come down, snarling promises to do as I'd asked, and I sprinted around the corner of the laser machinery, ears cocked to hear anything useful.

As I ran through the curving hallway behind the lasers, I heard painful meows and felt a low rumble in my chest. Orgoli's growl. There was also a faint, human whimpering, a more erratic heartbeat than the tiger-shifters'. Who could be in there with them? Maybe it was one of the rat-shifters somehow unable to shift into rat form.

The hallway opened up to a large room a hundred feet square lined with computers and equipment. Some of them were sparking and gouged, smoking. But it was Orgoli who filled the room. He wasn't mountain peak–sized here, but still he was five times as big as I was. He looked a veritable dragon of a tiger, over twenty feet high and sixty feet long. His coat was bloody orange-red, slashed with stripes so black they reflected no light. His fierce head was spattered with blood, and strips of flesh hung from his teeth.

At his feet lay the Bengal tiger, my friend, his abdomen torn open, eyes eternally open. Sadness and rage overtook me as his body shifted for the last time, back to human. As Siku's had done.

A weak, very human whimpering came from a huddled form wedged tightly in a corner under a shelf of hard drives. It was Ximon, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking ever so slightly back and forth. His gray shirt and pants were ragged and dirty, his body wasted away. His white hair was patchy, and his once glittering, intelligent eyes were dull with fear and confusion. He stared right at me, that mindless whimper issuing from the back of his throat.