Out of This World (21 page)

Now I can see our reflection in the windows of its foyer— two figures running hell-bent, dodging back and forth through the rubble and brush. There's a wide, clear space in front of the building's double glass doors. We're almost there. The doors are so close.

Then the shadow of wings flashes over us. I hear the whistle of wind in feathers. I don't even think of what I'm doing. I turn and slash up with my metal pipe and connect with one of the condor's wings. The blow throws him off balance and he careens into the brush just beyond the cleared area.

When he rolls to his feet, he's a man who could be Vincenzo's twin.

Another shadow cuts across the asphalt.

I brace myself, pipe held ready, but then Thorn grabs me by the back of my shirt and pulls me inside the building.

Like the windows, the glass door is still intact and it works, hydraulics pushing it closed behind us. I shrug free of Thorn's
grip and stand there breathing hard, flushed with adrenalin, pipe still in hand.

I watch the second condor drop, raising its wings to ease its fall. When its talons are about to touch the ground he changes into another Vincenzo twin. His companion crosses the cleared area and the two of them stand on the other side of the glass doors. Any damage I managed to do to the first one doesn't show.

I'd like to believe we're safe, but I know a few sheets of plate glass aren't going to stop this pair.

“They can't enter,” Thorn says from behind me.

“Are you kidding me? I know how strong these guys are, and that's just plate glass.”

“Doesn't matter how strong they are. They won't set foot in the building.”

I turn for a moment to look at him.

“They can't come in,” Thorn says. “They may have trapped Canejo in this pissant little world, but they're afraid to face him.”

When I look outside again, I see loping figures approaching from the far end of the street. The wild dogs. It's hard to count them, they're moving so fast. Less than a dozen, more than half.

“And the dogs?” I ask.

“Same thing.”

“Get her out of here!” a new voice yells from behind me.

I turn around to see a guy coming at us from the shadows that pool deeper in the building's foyer. The light's not great in here, especially after staring through the windows to the outside. As he comes closer, I see that he's a lean, compact man, just a little taller than me, dressed in loose pants and a shapeless shirt, black hair sticking up from the top of his head like a rooster's crest.

More to the point, he's totally pissed off.

“Now!” he says.

I see his teeth for a moment when he spits out the word. There seem to be far too many of them, sharp and pointed, like the inside of his mouth belongs to a barracuda. My fingers tighten around my pipe. I don't want to have to start swinging it, but I will if he comes at me.

Thorn moves so that he's between me and the stranger, who I figure must be this Canejo guy. But I don't know if Thorn's protection's going to be enough because Canejo's not alone. Moving toward us out of the shadows from behind him comes a whole crowd of beings—between twenty or thirty of them. They're mostly human in shape, but all sizes. Tall, short, fat and thin. Dressed in raggedy clothes like Thorn and Canejo. But there are others that aren't human-looking.

A tall figure who seems to have bark for skin, and hair that looks like thin vines with tiny leaves. A pair holding hands, with long, scaly faces and crests like fish fins. A girl with a wing for an arm, which hangs limply at her side.

And then I see three more kids I know from school: Matty Clark and Fernando Hill—neither of whom share any classes with me—and Stacy Li. She and I have biology in the same period. We aren't lab partners or anything, but we know each other well enough to exchange small talk before and after class. She disappeared a month or so ago. I thought she'd gone into the FBI program, or that her parents had taken her away from town. Now I know she's been here all this time, and I feel like I somehow abandoned her.

She starts to raise a hand, then drops it and looks away.

I'd feel hurt, but I'm not so uncaring that I don't understand.
She's been with these people for a month now. I'm somebody from an old life that must feel a million miles away. She's bonded with them. And I've just brought the monsters right to their front door.

I wonder what kind of a Wildling she is. I know she's not alone. I'm getting
pings
like crazy from the crowd, but I can't tell if they're all cousins. With this many, it's hard to focus in on just one.

Thorn raises himself up a little taller and wider as he faces Canejo. “You'd throw her to the hounds and their masters?” he asks.

“What were you
thinking
?” Canejo shoots back. “If they've sent the condors after her, what meagre protection we have against them won't hold. You've put us all in danger.”

Some of the heads in the crowd behind him nod in frightened agreement. Others look away or at the ground. But no one else speaks up.

Canejo starts to move forward.

Thorn positions his arms like those of a wrestler. “Take another step and I'll throw
you
out to them,” he says.

“Now, now,” a new voice says.

The crowd parts and an old, long-haired man approaches us. I blink when I realize that he doesn't have long hair—those are drooping rabbit ears hanging down on either side of his face. And he's got small horns sprouting from his brow, tined like an antelope's. But even though he's doing the half-Wildling/half-human thing, it doesn't look creepy. I sense a calm strength coming from him, along with the strongest Wildling
ping
I've ever felt. Like Auntie Min times a hundred. If you think of all the other cousins here as decent-sized curls, he's the Big Wave
you're always waiting on when you're floating out in the water on your board.

“Lionel,” he says, placing one hand on the shoulder of the guy with the barracuda teeth and then his other on Thorn. “Thorn. I need both of you to calm down.”

Lionel? I think. And then I realize that
this
is Canejo. Thorn and Lionel move farther apart and Canejo drops his arms and interlaces his fingers. Lionel glares at Thorn, but Thorn doesn't seem to care anymore. Canejo steps up to me.

I'm hyperaware of everything. Lionel's animosity, the crowd's. The condors and dog cousins outside. But when I meet Canejo's gaze, it all seems to melt away.

“Look at you,” he says, opening his hands. “You're just a slip of a girl with an otter living under your skin. What could you have done to make everyone so angry?”

“Nothing.”

“Her friend killed Vincenzo,” Thorn says.

Canejo's brows go up in surprise, but all he says is, “Ah.”

“I didn't have anything to do with it,” I say.

“There are those who would laud you as a hero if you did have a hand in it.”

“I don't want to be a hero,” I tell him. “I just want to go home.”

Lionel gives a derisive laugh. “You think you're the only one? Now you've screwed us all.”

Canejo nods toward the front of the building. “We have nothing to fear from them.”

“Then why are they hanging around out there?”

“They're waiting for Nanuq,” Canejo says.

His voice is mild, but a collective shudder goes through the crowd. Canejo gives me an apologetic look.

“I'll admit he's a formidable figure,” he says. “But somewhere inside us, we each have the potential to be just as strong and fierce.”

“I don't,” Thorn says.

Canejo gives him a smile. “And because of your humility, you could be the strongest of us all.”

“Good,” Lionel says. “Let
him
confront Nanuq since he brought them here.”

“You speak out of turn,” Canejo says without turning to look at him. When he does turn, it's to speak to everybody. “We gain nothing by milling about down here, feeding each other's fears. I would ask you to disperse, so that I might speak to our guest without a crowd of onlookers hanging on to our every word.”

He says “ask,” but it's taken more like a command because the crowd immediately breaks up and fades back into the shadows. The last to go are Stacy and Lionel. For a moment she looks as if she's about to talk to me, but then she drops her gaze again and follows the others.

Lionel remains rooted to the spot, his face clouded with anger. “We have to make a plan,” he says.

Canejo shakes his head. “We already have a plan. You will go away because you're making our guest uncomfortable. She and I will remain here with Thorn to get to know one another.”

“But—”

“If you feel the need to be doing something, you might brew us a pot of tea to drink while we await Nanuq's arrival.”

Lionel draws back his lips and gives me such a glare that I
feel the only thing he really wants to do is bury that mouthful of sharp teeth in my neck. But then he gives Canejo a brief nod and stalks away.

“You must forgive them,” Canejo says as he ushers me to some couches on the far side of the foyer.

I'm surprised everything's so well taken care of in here. Outside, it looks like World War III hit a decade or so ago and it's all gone downhill since. Inside, we could be in the foyer of some corporate building in my own world—without power, of course, but the polished marble floors are spotless, the couches are firm and clean, and the air smells fresh instead of like old pee, the way it did in the stairwell of the building where Thorn and I ate lunch.

Thorn drops onto one end of the couch and the whole thing shivers a little from his weight. I take the other corner, leaving room for Canejo, but he opts to sit on the low, wooden coffee table facing both of us. I look past him to the other side of the glass doors and walls, my length of pipe laid across my knees.

Outside, the condors are as motionless as statues, but the fury in their eyes speaks volumes, while around them more and more dogs arrive. Some take human form, both male and female. They stack brush, then start fires in the piles they've made.

The whole scene is eerie as hell, but if everyone's sure they'll stay outside, I suppose I should relax. I lean my pipe against the side of the sofa and ignore the twitch in my hands that wants me to keep holding it.

“How did you come to find yourself in Dainnan?” Canejo asks.

I nod toward the dog men. “They chased me here. I thought
I was escaping them, but I guess they were just herding me to this place.”

“They had no choice, you know,” Canejo says.

I glance over at Thorn and back at Canejo before speaking. “Thorn says that they're controlled by somebody—one of the condors, I guess. Or this Nanuq guy, if he's the one that's carrying around the controller.”

I pause for a moment, then add, “But you're not scared of any of them, are you? Not the dogs outside, not Nanuq. Even though everybody else is.”

Canejo shrugs. “They can't hurt me. I wasn't supposed to be in this little prison of theirs. I stumbled upon it when they took some students of mine. But once I was here, they couldn't let me leave for fear of what I might reveal to other cousins. I'd been looking for a good place to conduct my teachings, so it hasn't been all bad.”

“So you can't get out, either?”

“There is only one passage out of Dainnan and that's controlled by whoever holds the token.”

“You've tried to get hold of it?”

That gets me another shrug, then he says, “I can do my work anywhere, but here, my students need me more than ever.”

“What work is that?” I ask.

“I teach my students how to fulfill their potential—to become the best that they can be.”

I look past him at the condors and the dog cousins. “That doesn't explain why
they're
all scared of you.”

“They aren't scared, so much as cautious. I am an old cousin. I wasn't here when Raven first pulled the world out of that big
black pot of his, but it wasn't much longer after that before Coyote was chasing me through the new world. Young pups like those outside are no match for me—not even with their greater numbers—and I have dealt with the Condor Clan a time or two. They know better than to test me.”

I imagine Theo here, rolling his eyes, but I believe him. He sounds a lot like Auntie Min.

“And Nanuq?” I have to ask. “What about him?”

“He's Polar Bear Clan. We have never had occasion to physically assess each other.”

I look again at Thorn sitting quietly on the other end of the couch, then back at Canejo.

“And you don't think trapping you in this world is reason enough to take him down? Or at least to try?”

“I told you. I have—”

“Your work. Right.”

It seems the older a cousin is, the harder they are to understand. How can he not be mad at being stuck here? And how can his students reach their potential in such a confined setting? But I decide to let those questions lie. Straight answers from elder cousins are few and far between.

“So now, little otter”—Canejo leans forward, cupping his chin, elbow on his knee—“tell me how Vincenzo died.”