I watch for a few moments longer before I zip through the sky and I’m above the spot where I lost the de Padillas’ trail earlier. I drop down to earth and pull my physical shape out of the ground.
I have a bad moment, wondering, what if I get it wrong? What if when I re-form, my legs are sticking out of my shoulders or my head’s in the middle of my chest?
But nothing goes wrong. I even remember to be wearing clothes, and my new longer dreads are still with me. I don’t even have the hunger that I get when I shift from the mountain lion shape to this one.
In spirit form I detected a faint trace of the de Padillas’ passage—a slight, lingering echo of where they’d walked. Now I can only smell the fading remnants of their trail. I wake up the map in my head and try to push it—not away from me to take in the surrounding terrain, as usual, but right at the place where the de Padillas crossed between the worlds.
Nada.
I’ve positioned myself at the exact spot where they disappeared, but the map in my head tells me nothing. It just shows the ground at my feet. My nose tells me more, but nothing I don’t already know.
Damn. I was so sure I could make this work.
Okay. Time to try something else. I keep the map in my head and let my body fall away so that I’m just a spirit floating a few inches above the ground.
I have a little trouble keeping the map in place, but once I’m sure I can hold it, I superimpose the map in my head with the spirit’s ability to see the residue of the de Padillas’ passage. I don’t know what the residue is, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I can see it.
I lay them on top of each other, like putting a transparency of one map on top of another, and focus on the point where the residue disappears.
This time I get a sense of something—a faint thrumming sensation in the air—sort of like a heat mirage. As though the border between the worlds is just a little weaker there. I push at it, not hard, but firmly, and suddenly I’m through. When the map in my head explodes with a whole new topography, I’m still able to hold on to the map of the world I left behind.
Now I’ve got two maps, with the trail of the de Padillas laid upon them. This world’s not a whole lot different from the one I left. The forest is denser—smaller pines, with cedar and birch instead of the towering ponderosas. I expand the map for a couple of miles, but there’s no sign of people or habitation. Still, the path is there, following a game trail as it switchbacks down a steep incline, the forest thick all around it.
I follow along above the trail until it disappears again.
Now I know what to look for. As soon as I find that weakness that marks the border, I push through again.
It’s easier this time, and now I’ve got three maps superimposed over each other with the de Padillas’ trail marked on each. The mesa world. The deep forest world. This new, third one is flatter. The de Padillas’ trail follows a narrow road now, and I can sense a village nearby.
I congratulate myself as I follow this new trail through the third world, happy to have finally figured out how it’s done.
But my self-congratulation comes too soon. Just as I’m nearing the end of this third segment of the de Padillas’ passage through the worlds, I lose hold of all maps and I’m whipped back to my starting point. It happens with the abruptness of the rubber-band wars I have with Des, when I’m about to take a shot and the elastic snaps in two in my hand.
Thorn does a thorough scan of the sky to make sure the condors aren’t making a return sweep, then leads me deeper into the city. Debris still litters the streets—the wild reclaiming the once-tame blocks. We step around fallen rubble from the buildings, skirting our way past rusted cars, trucks and buses. At one point we pass by a tree whose limbs embrace a bicycle that’s now embedded in its trunk, which pretty much says it all. But as we get closer to the city center, the buildings are much taller and many are in better shape, though their windows are mostly busted out.
Twice we have to do the invisible-cloak thing. The second time we’re out in the open and one of the condors comes swooping down, snatching something out of the weeds down the street from where we’re standing, the two of us frozen and invisible. When the bird rises, that something is wriggling in its talons, but even with my Wildling sight I can’t make out what it is. A young tabby cat maybe. Or a baby raccoon.
The bird rises until it’s near the top of the buildings, then it lets go and the little animal comes plummeting down, a terrified mewling echoing on the buildings as it falls. The splat when it hits the pavement seems magnified—a horrible wet sound that’s way louder than you’d think it would be. It’s all I can do to just keep hanging on to my invisibility and not throw up. My hands are clenching my length of pipe so hard they’re starting to cramp.
The birds continue to circle above until I just want to scream. But finally they drift away and we can let the invisibility drop. Thorn’s face is pale.
“This … this is new,” he finally says.
“What do you mean?”
“The condors don’t hunt here—they leave that to the hounds, and the hounds only play games with us. Fierce and unpleasant games, I’ll grant you, but games nonetheless. Games we can survive. Not … not like that.”
He nods in the direction of where the little creature died.
Neither of us says anything for a long moment. Then Thorn sighs and heads that way.
“Do we have to see it?” I ask.
“This is the way we’re going,” Thorn says. “You can always avert your gaze.”
Which I totally plan to, but it’s like rubbernecking at an accident. You tell yourself you’re not going to do what everybody else does, but as soon as you’re close enough, the morbid scene draws your gaze like a magnet.
We get to the other side of the rusted car, pushing through weed and brush until we find the body sprawled like a broken doll, abandoned, like everything else in this awful place.
It’s worse than I expected. The condor didn’t kill a cat. It killed a Wildling who changed back into a boy at his death. It’s so sad and horrible. The face is turned away. The body lies with its limbs at awkward angles. The back of the head is cracked, and blood and brain matter are seeping out.
When I see that, I turn away.
I’m aware of Thorn going around to the other side of the body and crouching down on his haunches.
“I don’t recognize him,” he says.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” I ask, still not looking. “Like bury him?”
“No time. We don’t know when the condors will be back.”
I wait until I hear Thorn stand again and start to move, then I walk around to join him. I’m doing fine until I get to the other side of the body and my morbid curiosity makes me look at the dead boy’s face before we go on.
I stop in my tracks, staring.
“Marina?” Thorn asks.
For a long moment I can’t speak. I clear my throat.
“I … I know him,” I finally get out. “That’s Jeff Phelps. He goes … went … to my school.”
My gaze lifts to search for something that makes sense in Thorn’s eyes, but he just looks sad and bewildered.
“How could he have gotten here?” I ask.
“He must have been chased here, the same way you were.”
I’m about to say that I never knew he was a Wildling, but that’s not true. I made a point of knowing who all the Wildlings were in school—mostly so that I could avoid them and not have them figure out that I was one, too. It’s easier than you think to pull it off, or at least they never let on that they knew I was a Wildling. I suppose we were all in denial, praying that no one would find out. But even if I did manage to stay under the radar of the other kids, you could never hide it from one of the elders like Auntie Min or …
I glance up at the sky.
Those awful condors.
I shiver, remembering the horrible sound of impact when Jeff hit the ground.
“If that?
??s true,” I say, “and they killed him because he came from Santa Feliz, then they’ll be looking to do the same to me.”
Thorn gives me a sympathetic nod. “But you already guessed that.”
“I suppose. It just didn’t seem entirely real before.”
Thorn glances at the body. “It’s real now,” he says. His nostrils flare and he kicks at some debris before he turns away and starts off down the street once more. His pace is fast enough that I have to hurry to keep up with him.
Ten minutes later, he stops at the edge of a sunken roadway filled with water. It goes off in either direction like a canal cutting through the city, reeds and brush choking the sides. Right in front of us is a makeshift bridge of boards crossing the water, and we use it to get to the other side, walking in a single file. The wood creaks and sags under our weight, but otherwise holds up just fine.
On the far side, Thorn points to a tall building where the street ends a few blocks away. It towers over its broken-down neighbours and seems relatively unscathed until I realize that it’s missing all of its top floors. I can’t imagine how tall it must have originally been.
I’ve been walking with a prickle of anxiety gnawing at me deep between my shoulder blades. I keep anticipating that the condors will show up so suddenly that we won’t have time to hide from them. I can almost feel their talons digging into me, ripping me from my footing as we go up and up.
And then the long fall.
I shake my head, trying to push the fear away.
“Is that where we’re going?” I ask.
Thorn nods. “Canejo’s warren.”
“Warren? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see.”
And that’s when we both freeze.
From somewhere behind us we hear the hunting horns. With all the echoes bouncing around, it’s impossible to tell how close or far away they are.
Thorn gives me a push forward. “Run!”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I take off at full Wildling speed, and whatever kind of being Thorn is, he has no trouble keeping up with me. The tall building gets closer and closer.
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 y
our 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.”