I shift from foot to foot. I have no clue how he’s planning to bring me anywhere. “Okay, so what happens now?”
“Just stay still and fill your head with Marina.”
I feel totally out of my depth, but I nod. He steps up close and puts his palms on my temples.
“Just think of her,” he says. “Not only what she looks like, but what her skin feels like, how she smells, what she cares about— everything that makes her real to you.”
I close my eyes and start with how she looks—that’s easy. But beyond that it gets complicated. She hid that she was a Wildling for six months, so how am I supposed to know what she thinks about or what she feels? She’s been mooning after Josh for pretty much as long as I’ve known her, but suddenly, wham bam, she hooked up with Chaingang, who’s not even remotely like any of the dudes she’s ever dated.
I don’t even want to get into the crush for her that I’ve carried for years.
“Man,” Cory says. “You guys are like a bad reality show.”
His voice seems to come from somewhere behind me, but I can still feel his hands on either side of my head. I open my eyes to look at him and then vertigo hits me.
We’re standing on—dude, I don’t know what we’re standing on. It’s like we’re floating in nothingness and my stomach just won’t stop doing flips.
“Wh—where are we?” I manage.
I feel like I might puke, so I start to pull away, but he holds my head more tightly.
“Don’t break contact!” he says.
“Dude—what the hell is this place?”
Cory shrugs. “Hard to say. Feels like a piece of something you might have dreamed once.”
Like that makes any sense. But I’m feeling too nauseous to ask him to explain.
“You’re doing good,” he says. “Close your eyes. Keep concentrating.”
I want to argue that I’m not doing good at all, but if I open my mouth again I’m pretty sure I might barf. So instead, I close my eyes.
And just like that, the queasy feeling goes away and I’m visualizing Marina again.
“Dude,” I say, keeping my eyes firmly closed. “That was weird.”
“Concentrate. Don’t get distracted.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Focus.”
Yeah? On what?
I’ve got a thousand pictures in my head of Marina. She’s surfing—on her own or with the school club. She’s banging the drums, head keeping time, her hair flying. She’s on a skateboard and laughing because she can’t get her balance on wheels like she can on a wave. She’s sitting across from me at a table in the lunchroom, trying not to smile at some stupid thing I said.
And then I remember the Sadie Hawkins Dance last year. She was gorgeous in that pink dress, hair all done up, but wearing a radical pair of high-tops that she’d painted a million colours in art class. Being a Sadie Hawkins Dance, I’d been sure that she was going to invite Josh, but instead she showed up with some loser whose name I can’t even remember. I can’t remember who asked Josh, or who I went with, either. All I remember is her watching Josh, and me watching her, and Josh being oblivious to it all, as usual.
“Got it!” Cory says.
I feel like we’re falling—but it’s a sensation that’s only in my head. I still feel Cory’s grip, and the ground underfoot. Then Cory lets me go and I stagger.
I open my eyes and all around us is a dead city. Like a big city, except it’s been all bombed out or something, and there’s trees and vines and crap growing over everything.
“Where are we?” I ask. “The end of the frigging world?”
But all he says is, “Fuck.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
“What? What is it?”
“I need to talk to Donalita.”
“Dude, you’re freaking me out.”
Instead of answering, he cocks his head.
“Fuck,” he says again. Then he turns to me. “Donalita. Now.”
I take the pebble out of my pocket and kneel down to tap it on the asphalt underfoot. A moment later Donalita’s kneeling in front of me. We’re nose to nose. She starts to grin, but then she frowns and shoots Cory a dirty look.
“Where did you bring us?” she asks, her voice sharp.
“She was here,” Cory says. “Maybe a half day ago.”
“But this is a closed world.”
“You think I don’t know that?” he says. “And it gets worse. Hear that?”
Donalita cocks her head like he did.
“Hunting horns,” she says.
I still don’t hear anything, but I already officially hate this place.
“Somebody want to tell me what’s going on?” I say.
“Sometimes,” Cory says, “a cousin will carve out a little pocket world. It might be no bigger than a room, or it might be like this—going on for who knows how far. But there’s only one way in and one way out.”
“Yeah, so? Can’t we just go back the way we came in?”
He shakes his head. “This one’s set up differently. Anything can be funnelled in, but there’s no way out, except through whoever set it up in the first place. They control the exit.”
“And these horns you’re hearing?” I ask.
“I think this world is somebody’s private hunting preserve,” he says. “Which means that either Marina stumbled onto it and is now stuck here—just like we are—or it could be Vincenzo’s people chased her into this world.”
“So the horns …”
He nods. “Mean that the hunters have noted our arrival and are coming for us.”
I feel the blood drain from my face. I get up from the ground a little too quickly, and that strange feeling that comes just before you faint hits me. I lean over and brush off my pants, trying to tamp down my panic. I stand back up, more slowly this time.
“So what you’re saying is, we’re screwed.”
“I’d like to see someone try to hunt me,” Donalita says.
She flashes a mouthful of way too many sharp, pointy teeth, then they’re gone again. She looks at my white face and wide eyes and laughs.
“Oh relax, dude!” she says. “This will be fun. I just wish Theo was here because he knows what to do to hunters.”
Cory bristles. “We’re not killing anybody,” he tells her.
“Oh, pooh. What are you going to do? Sweet-talk them into letting us go on our way? Tra-la-la.”
“We don’t know that anybody’s trying to kill us.”
“We don’t know that anybody’s not, either.”
“Vincenzo was,” I say. “We know that. And now we know he’s got some brothers running around—and some dude who’s the boss of them.”
Cory shoots me a dirty look. “The dogs that treed you didn’t try to kill you,” he says.
“Only because you called in a thousand crows,” Donalita says.
“There weren’t a thousand—”
“Do you have some crows here to help us?”
“No, I—”
“Right,” Donalita says. “So you want to greet the kind hunters and have a nice little civilized chat with them because everybody knows that dogs don’t run in packs and rev each other up.”
Cory closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
The horns sound again, closer. I know because now I can hear them.
“Look,” Cory says. “Somebody has put a binding on them. They don’t want to do this.”
“Unless maybe they do,” Donalita says.
“Can we just—”
“You know, I smelled you on that roof,” she says to Cory.
“What—”
“Yeah, you do know,” she says wagging her chin smugly.
“The one across the street from where Josh’s mother lives.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “How could you know that? You were in my room with me all night.”
I really want to blow this popsicle stand—I don’t need another confrontation with these dogs, so th
e sooner we’re out of here, the better—but what she’s saying has me rooted to the spot. I look from her to Cory.
He’s looking back and forth at us like he thinks we’re an item or something.
“Dude, it’s not like that.” I turn back to Donalita. “Are you telling me you went back to kill that guy anyway?”
“Of course not, silly. I promised you I wouldn’t. Besides, he was already dead when I got there.”
I shift my attention to Cory. “You killed him, dude? Hypocrite much? You’re pissed that Chaingang kills a pack of vicious dog cousins who go after him and a whole bunch of us, but it’s totally cool for you to go kill this unconscious guy? And before you say it, I know he was an asshole assassin. But the cops were going to pick him up. The dude was totally out of the game.”
Cory shakes his head. “I didn’t kill him.”
“He didn’t,” Donalita agrees. “The snake cousin did it. But he was there.”
“Wait a sec—what snake guy?”
Cory sighs. “Rico.”
It takes me a moment to place the name.
“You mean the dude who was in the lab with Josh?” I ask.
“The one who got his leg cut off?”
Cory nods. “The one who saw a bunch of cousins get dissected to see how they tick. He’s been after these Black Key Securities people, taking them down one by one.”
“But the word is, it looks like some wild animal’s tearing them apart. A snake can’t do that. Wait. How big a snake can he turn into?”
“Just a regular rattler,” Cory says. “He kills them while he’s in human form and it’s not pretty. At first I didn’t know it was him. When I finally did figure it out I tracked him down, but I got there too late. He’d already killed that latest one and disappeared.”
Him saying “killed” brings me crashing back to our own situation.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s split so the same thing doesn’t happen to us.”
“Too late,” Donalita says. “Here they come.”
I turn to look where she’s pointing and see a half-dozen lean dogs loping steadily in our direction. They’re far down the street, bounding over rubble and junked cars, but it won’t take them long to reach us.
Tío Goyo sits cross-legged in the dirt a half-dozen yards away, his back against a tree. Busted. So much for working this out on my own.
“I was practicing,” I tell him. “You know—that spirit thing you showed me. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Good.”
He studies me for a long moment, then rises in a smooth motion and starts back to our camp. I follow along, trying to decide how much to tell him.
In the end, I decide to tell him everything because what’s he going to do? He gets the fire going and brews us some tea while I talk. By the time he hands me a mug, I’m done.
I sniff the steam coming from the mug, but I can’t tell if anything’s in there that’s not supposed to be. I look over the brim to catch a smirk on his face, like he knows just what I’m thinking.
What the hell. I blow on the surface of the tea and take a sip.
“Why didn’t you search for the de Padillas directly?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You followed their trail, which was clever, but you already know this couple. You should be able to focus on them and go directly to where they are. It’s how you’ll find your friend.”
“Uh … I didn’t realize that.” Great. Something else I have to learn. I figured as soon as I got the GPS map in my head up and running again, the main stumbling block to finding Elzie would be over.
“Don’t be so worried,” he says. “Look what you’ve already accomplished in just a couple of days.”
“I suppose. But what about that hummingbird guy I met? Talk about having a chip on your shoulder.”
Tío Goyo shrugs. “It’s most unusual. The Hummingbird Clans are among the most joyful of the animal people. Their kindness and generosity are legend. I’ve never heard of an aggressive one.”
“I don’t know about that. Mom’s got a feeder on the porch and they’re always dive-bombing each other and trying to drive the other off. They seem pretty aggressive to me.”
“Ordinary birds, perhaps, but I’m talking about cousins.”
“Yeah, well, this cousin was a racist dick looking to pick a fight. I’ve been called a lot of crap but being an ‘unborn’ is a first.”
“Family and clan are important to the cousins,” Tío Goyo says. “The idea of not having either makes them uncomfortable.”
“I do have a family. My mom and my grandparents are amazing. If they’re not good enough for him, that’s his problem.”
“It’s also yours,” Tío Goyo says, his voice mild. “At least it will be if you intend to lead the cousins.”
I let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m not leading anybody anywhere.”
“Look at it this way,” Tío Goyo goes on as if I hadn’t spoken. “For someone from an old clan like Hummingbird, your lack of an affiliation makes you appear potentially dangerous. Here, in a society without laws or courts, respect, trustworthiness and clan affiliation all serve to keep excesses in check.”
“Hey, I’m not trying to disrespect anyone. All I want to do is find Elzie and get us back to the real world. I don’t even want to be here.”
“He couldn’t know that. You arrived in his territory without adhering to normal customs, so there was already a sense that something was off. But on a broader cultural level, in circumstances where a member of one clan causes harm to someone in another, the injured party can go to your clan and demand justice. Your clan will then either take your side—if you were in the right—or punish you if you were not. Without affiliation, only the individual can be held responsible, and then problems are solved only by who is stronger. Might is right. It’s how despots are born.”
“Okay, but why would he be pissed when I told him my name? The de Padillas and I exchanged names, and they weren’t upset. I was just trying to be friendly to him, too—and respectful.”
“Often one fears what one does not understand,” Tío Goyo says. “It seems that some of these older cousins are distrustful of you and your Wildling friends because you are new. They don’t necessarily want to pledge friendship and mutual respect—yet, anyway. According to past convention, giving someone your name puts the receiver in the immediate position of either accepting you as a friend, or refusing, which is a major insult and can give you justification to attack them.”
“That’s messed up.”
Tío Goyo nods. “I agree. But what do we know? I am only a man, while apparently you are”—he smiles—“an unborn.”
“Well, screw him. It’s not like I’ll ever see him again.”
“Perhaps not, but you will meet more cousins who will judge you for how you came by your mountain lion aspect. They will either embrace you or hate you. The latter could prove dangerous if you run into a large number of them.”
I kick the dirt beside me. “It’s not as though I chose this.” He shrugs. “Neither of us chose the colour of our skin, yet we’re still judged by it.”
“Well, I had the last laugh on that jerk. You should have seen his face when I dropped my body and he saw a hawk lifting up into the air. Because he knew I had a mountain lion under my skin.”
“I’m sure,” Tío Goyo says, “though you ought to have been discreet about it.”
“Oh, crap. That’s one of your uncle secrets, isn’t it? And I totally gave it up to him.”
“It’s done now.”
In the east the sun’s rising. Fat shafts of light slice through the boughs of the ponderosa pines.
“Get a few hours’ sleep,” he says. “Then we can go back to finding your friend with clear heads.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You’ve been up all night.”
“It’s weird,” I say. “Every time I call up my body from the earth, it’s like I get the perfect version of
it. I’m not hungry or thirsty and I’m super alert. It’s not the same when I shift back from my mountain lion form. Then I’m always really hungry.”
Tío Goyo nods. “But if you don’t sleep, you won’t dream, and dreams nourish your spirit in a manner that nothing else can.”
I think about how I’ve already slept right near him. There’s been so much crap in my life that it wouldn’t surprise me if I had a nightmare. Would he go into my brain and kill whatever was in my dream? Would he kill me? I’d rather not take that chance.
I stand up and poke at the fire with a nearby stick. “But I’m not even remotely tired,” I say. “I need to be doing something. Like finding Elzie. Can you teach me about how this focus thing works?”
Tío Goyo sets his empty mug down and rises as well. “All right,” he says. “So the map has returned to your head.”
I nod. “I’ve got five different ones layered on top of each other right now.”
“And how much of each world do they show?”
“I’m not sure, but I feel like I could let them expand to include as much of each world as I want to see.”
“I don’t advise that,” he says. “In fact, it would be best for you to shut all the maps down if you can.”
This is nuts. As soon as I get the GPS working again, he wants me to shut it down. What’s with this guy?
“I’d rather not,” I say. “What if I can’t get them back?”
“Then we work on that. You’ll need them later, perhaps, but not to find your friend.”
I drop the stick into the fire. I feel anxious about doing what he says, but then I remind myself, if I believe the ability is still inside me, it will be. I’ve already proved that, haven’t I?
So I go ahead and close all the maps—even the one for this world we’re in. I wait a couple of beats—long enough to hum a few bars of a Bo Diddley riff—then call back the map of the de Padillas’ home turf. It comes up in an instant, all the topography and every living thing in it. I let it expand a little until I can “see” Manuel and Lara, then shut it down again.
“Okay, I’m good,” I tell Tío Goyo. Then I have a thought and give him a curious look. “How do you move between the worlds?”
“If I’ve been in one before, I can simply step into it,” he says. “The same way I assume your friends the de Padillas can.”