The Shimmers in the Night Page 11

  She trailed off. The rest of what she thought was human? But she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud.

  Then it came: It’s complicated. I’m sorry—I know it’s hard to get your mind around. Even your mind, which is resilient. But listen, this water’s pretty toxic. I need to get out soon.

  “How can hear me all the way up here?”

  I can hear you with my mind. What brought you here, sweetie? Are you safe?

  “Jax isn’t. He got poisoned. By Roger from your work.”

  Roger! Roger?—Roger.

  The word came to Cara with a tone of disbelief; then tightly controlled fury.

  “It wasn’t normal poison,” she added. “It was something else. And the people taking care of him, the teachers at the Institute, told me to get a memory from you—to bring back a memory for them to fix him with.”

  Roger. I can’t believe it. They needed someone close to me—

  “Mom. Listen! There are people outside with these black eyes. Like Jax has. They’re going to know I’m in here soon. So would you tell me what to do?”

  They hollowed him out.

  And then, colder: I am going to kill that man.

  “Mom. Can you stop obsessing? What should I do?”

  See if you can break the wooden slats. I could do it myself, if I were in my first form, but I can’t do it as a fish. Break some of them for me.

  Cara paused, then walked toward the opposite wall, searching the shadows for objects—anything that would split wood. Even a rake, she thought, or a shovel…but of course there was nothing like that here. She couldn’t do it with her hands; for one thing, it was far down, out of her reach, so that if she leaned over enough to touch it she’d fall in. She needed something long and heavy.

  She could stamp the slats and pipes with her feet, she was thinking, if only she had something up here to hold on to, when she heard the flap of wings and a high, keening sound. She glanced up to see the pterosaur descending, a big, brown blur. She realized the sound was coming from Jaye, who was clinging to the thing’s neck—Cara’s belt, in fact—for dear life with her eyes shut, just as Cara had, and trying to suppress a scream.

  And then she was unceremoniously tipped off the beast’s back—again, just like Cara. She rolled along the walkway a bit, hitting one foot on a pipe.

  “Wait!” yelled Cara, catching sight of the creature’s impossibly long beak as it started to rise again. “Don’t leave—we need you! We really need your help!”

  Flap, flap.

  After an instant of what seemed like hesitation, it landed and perched on the walkway, arranging itself precariously with its five-taloned claws gripping both edges of the catwalk and its great wings half spread, slightly vibrating.

  She could see the head a lot better now that she wasn’t sitting above it. The beak was yellow and brown, and there was a protrusion on the back of its skull, like a crest; the eyes were tiny, barely visible, and the neck was hairy. The creature was less scary than homely and bizarre—except for the fact that it couldn’t possibly exist.

  That part was a little unnerving.

  “Do you understand? When I talk?” she asked.

  The thing cocked its head. It reminded her of a dog.

  “If you do—we have to break the wooden slats there. See? We need to make a hole big enough for a person to get through. Could you—?”

  It lunged forward with its massive beak—Cara jumped back, almost losing her balance. The beak poked past her, down between the pipes, and she heard a splintering sound as the creature made a series of vicious-looking jabs. She shuddered, imagining what that beak could do to her own tender skin.

  She turned to Jaye, sitting against the wall staring.

  “Are you OK?” she yelled over the racket.

  Jaye shook her head and pointed to her ears. The sound of breaking wood was loud over the background noise of the sprayers, and then there was the echo. All this had to be audible from outside, Cara realized with a jolt of alarm. Didn’t it?

  Were those black eyes widening now, those blank-faced people turning and filing toward the doors?

  There were no windows, and the metal doors appeared locked tight, but still—it was so loud…

  The pterosaur made a strange, squawking croak, then flapped its wings and was airborne again.

  It had succeeded. It had broken a section of pipe as well as the network of wood planks beneath: water rushed out, and Cara couldn’t easily see beyond it. In the distance she heard a beeping. An alarm. Time was ticking away.

  “Mom!” she yelled. “You can come out! Hurry!”

  Jaye was stumbling along the walkway toward Cara, hobbling a little; at the same time, a blurred mass rose from the mess of broken pipes and slats, through the rushing water. At first it was a large fish, a kind of whiskered, ugly fish with an overlarge head, but before she could even get a good look at the fish it was changing, too fast to follow with her eyes.

  And then the fish was her own mother pulling herself up onto the walkway. She was soaking wet, so pale she looked white, and wearing only an oversize, dripping T-shirt that went halfway to her knees. She reached out to hug Cara quick and hard, smiling, water running down her face—and then they were both drenched.

  But she didn’t look healthy; there were dark circles beneath her eyes, and the lids were red and swollen. Also, she didn’t smell so good. In fact, she smelled like something rotten, overlaid with chemicals that had a pungent smell, ammonia, possibly. Cara’s nose wrinkled as she pulled away.

  “Sorry,” said her mother apologetically, still smiling.

  Cara realized Jaye was standing next to them, her mouth hanging wide open.

  “Hello, Jaye, dear,” said Cara’s mom. “Forgive my appearance. That water—ugh. It was really getting to me.”

  “Uh, hi, Mrs. Sykes,” said Jaye, and cleared her throat. She looked very confused.

  “How are we supposed to get out?” asked Cara. “That—pterosaur? We can’t go out the doors. The people are there, the ones with the black eyes.”

  “We call them hollows,” said her mother, and twisted the rope of her long black hair to squeeze out some of the dirty water.

  “Jax’s eyes are like that,” said Cara.

  Her mother nodded wearily and flicked her arms to shake off water.

  “We can’t get past them,” pressed Cara. “I think that beeping—you hear it?—is some kind of alarm. Isn’t it? So how can we get out of here?”

  Her mother didn’t even have shoes on, she saw; she would freeze in the cold October night outside, maybe even cut up the soles of her bare feet…

  There was a creak, a heavy, metal creak, and all three of them turned quickly to look. Across the bottom of the tower, one of the big wheel-like things on the insides of the doors was turning, ratchet-ratchet-ratchet.

  “It’s them!” whispered Jaye, clutching Cara’s arm.

  “Go,” said Cara’s mother, and pointed to a door at the other end of the walkway. “I’ll hold them off. I was too weak to take any form other than my own; I’ll have to build up strength again for that. But the hollows I can probably handle. Meet me where it’s safe. Outside the fence.”

  “How did you—” started Jaye.

  “But I don’t want to leave you,” interrupted Cara. “I just found you again!”

  “It’s the only way, Cara. Your friends need you. The hollows aren’t outside the side door now—they’re all coming through the front. They’re not strategic. More like remote-controlled robots. It could be dangerous for you here. Go!”

  Then the far door was swinging open, and backlit by the bright, industrial spotlights outside was a dark crowd of heads and shoulders: the hollows’ silhouettes.

  Cara and Jaye hesitated briefly, then both turned, ran along the catwalk, and wrestled with the door. For a time Cara didn’t see how it opened, but with both of them grabbing and fumbling at the handles and levers they had it open somehow and were outside, standing on the landing of a stai
rway slatted like a fire escape. Beside them an arc of water sprayed out of the bottom of the tower and was swept away around the base.

  If the hollows were dangerous, Cara was thinking, as she stood there uncertainly, hearing the water rush and pour, did that mean Jax was dangerous, too?

  “Wait!” she told Jaye, who was clanging down the metal steps ahead of her.

  Jaye turned and gazed up.

  The door stood open behind them.

  Cara felt torn.

  “Can’t we help her? She’s all alone!”

  “She said to go, Cara! Didn’t you hear? She said it was too dangerous!”

  Jaye wanted to go, clearly—she wanted nothing more than to run away. And Cara didn’t blame her. But it wasn’t her mother back there. What if Cara’s mother did need them? What if she couldn’t handle the hollows?

  “And what about Hayley? She’s all alone, too!”

  “You go,” she said to Jaye. “Run to Hayley, OK? I’m coming after you!”

  She swiveled and peered around the metal frame of the door.

  What her mother was doing now—whatever it was—it didn’t look like anything Cara had seen before. She’d seen the wavering, mirage-like ripples in the air that happened when the mindtalkers and mindreaders did their ESP, or whatever it was; she’d seen the threads of light cast over Jax to get the poison out of him.

  But she hadn’t seen this.

  At the far end of the tower, the people called hollows were filing in, ranging themselves along the interior wall. Their movements were unhurried, their gaits slack, but there were more and more of them; they just kept flowing in.

  In the middle of the catwalk, between Cara and the hollows, her mother was standing where they’d left her. Her arms were down, her feet slightly apart; she wasn’t moving. Some kind of emergency floodlight had come on, dispelling the dimness. So Cara could see that something was happening between her mother and the hollows, and it was happening fast. The network of pipes and wooden slats that made up the floor of the tower was rising, as though pulled up by her mother on invisible ropes—rising to become vertical, as pipes creaked and broke and sections of them fell off, spraying water in plumes all around.

  It’s a wall, thought Cara. She’s building a wall. And it’s a wall of water, too, at least for now.

  And also: My mother can move things without touching them.

  Then, just as the wall reached a height a little ways above her mother’s head, the hollows raised their hands above their own heads in a fluid, synchronized motion. Their black eyes grew and grew until the eyes were like saucers; they grew until the eyes joined each other and swallowed up the faces. And then the faces were black holes, and through the holes something was emerging.

  It looked like a stream of blackness, a liquid stream expanding in the air; Cara smelled something, something that reminded her of car engines and gas stations. The edges of the stream were orange; the edges were burning.

  Behind the stream, one of the hollows caught Cara’s eye—someone short. A tiny girl with red hair. A girl so little she must barely be out of kindergarten.

  But then, beside the little girl—holding onto her hand—was someone else. Cara only saw her face fleetingly—the recognition was so out of place that it took her a second to register it—but the face, she could swear!—the face, with those black eyes in its center, looked like Max’s girlfriend. It looked like Zee.

  And then she had to tear her own eyes away, because the beeping was a scream now, blaring as piercingly as a siren.

  “Run, Cara!” cried her mother, who was running along the catwalk toward her. “Run!”

  They slammed the door behind them, but when Cara turned to lock it, hesitating as Jaye half-dashed, half-limped ahead across the pavement, her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

  “It doesn’t matter!” she yelled. “The door won’t stop it anyway. It’ll come out the top. Just run!”

  And so they were running, as fast as they could, away from the cooling towers and the shrieking alarm, across the cement to the place where they’d left Hayley.

  Looking back, Cara saw the white steam above the tower was turning gray—clouds of gray smoke were puffing up into the center of the white billows, darkening them and making them look ominous. The chill of the night was growing less: around them it was getting warm, and the odor of oil was stronger and uglier in her nostrils.

  And then, legs aching and breathing hard, they were around the corner of the first building and there was Hayley, still wearing her absurd pink HELLO KITTY backpack and hugging the book to her chest.

  “Mrs.—Mrs. Sykes?” blurted Hayley. “You’re practically naked!”

  “Out,” said Cara’s mother, leaning over with her hands braced on her thighs, trying to catch her breath, then gesturing toward the perimeter fence. “Out of the complex. Now!”

  Hayley looked blank for a moment, then fumbled with the book, trying to open it, but Cara’s mom shook her head.

  “That won’t work here,” she said. “The Burners have the perimeter warded; you have to land or take off from outside the fence. I know you made a call from inside, but you can’t travel that way—you can’t cross a ward using the windowleaf.”

  She must mean the book, Cara thought, but then they were running again, the three of them following her mother in an exhausted stupor, feet crunching on the dried grass, ignoring the spotlight occasionally sweeping across them, almost blinding them.

  Cara worried they wouldn’t be able to find the opening in the chain-link again, but just as she felt a needle of despair there it was, the gaping, torn-back triangle of mesh. As they covered the last few steps she realized she was coughing and her throat hurt; the others were coughing, too, laboring hard to breathe. The air was thick with smoke. It was close above their heads; the sky and the stars were completely hidden now, and when she turned around she couldn’t even see the massive cooling towers anymore. She couldn’t see anything but the bottoms of the buildings, the train tracks stretching out past the flat-topped hills of coal dust, the pavement and the low blanket of smoke. The smog was so dark gray it was nearly black, so thick it looked like it might be solid to the touch.

  “As soon as we’re through we have to use the book,” said her mother hoarsely, and coughed as she crouched down to follow Hayley through the fence gap. “Take us to Jax, Cara.”

  Cara and Jaye pushed through after her mother, Jaye still hobbling to favor the hurt ankle, Cara holding her hands a little limp.

  It was only once they were through—huddling on the dried grass and panting, Hayley still clutching the closed book—that Cara looked down at her mother’s bare feet and saw they weren’t feet at all. They were large claws.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” said her mother when she saw Cara staring. “I did it to save my feet from getting torn up, slowing us down. Wait.”

  All three of them watched in disbelief, breathing hard and coughing, as the claws shrank and formed into bare feet again.

  “Let’s stay focused,” said Cara’s mom wearily, and coughed harder. The smoke above them was acrid, its fumes thicker and thicker.

  “What’s happening?” asked Jaye through a cough.

  “It’s the Burners,” said Cara’s mom. “Open the book! They’re close. We need to go.”

  “If we go to Jax,” asked Cara, “won’t they follow us?”

  “They can’t use the windowleaf,” said her mother. “It’s only for us.”

  Hayley opened the book between them.

  “We have to hold hands,” said Cara. “Or be holding each other somehow, anyway.”

  “That’s right,” said her mother. “It has to be done by Cara, but she can’t do it alone. Cara, think of Jax. Touch the ring!”

  Cara shifted one hand onto the top of the other, palm against the ring, and stared down at the white pages. Jax, Jax, she thought. Wherever you are. Book, take us to my little brother, won’t you?

  But the thought was distracted, because h
er lungs hurt and her nostrils burned whenever she breathed in. She tried to think of Jax and instead kept seeing the black eyes in the face that looked so much like Zee’s. Beside her Hayley started to cough harder and harder, and on the other side of the fence forms were emerging from the smoke—the Burners. She could see the orange glow of their open mouths.

  They were moving toward the fence; they were near.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Focus, focus, she told herself. They can’t come with us through the book.

  Her lungs, her throat.

  Don’t think of yourself, honey, said her mother into her mind. For now, forget our problems here. Think only of Jax.

  The next instant the Burners were through the fence. The mesh was melting at their touch. She wanted to kick herself: she’d forgotten how time flew past whenever she closed her eyes and both hands were in contact with the ring.

  She’d lost time, valuable time. Critical time.

  “Now, Cara! Now!” Jaye was yelling, and Hayley was on the ground, falling away from Cara in her coughing fit. Cara reached out one arm to make sure she was still touching her, reached out and thought, her whole self moving forward with the urgency of it, Please, please, take us to Jax!

  She looked up at her mother, who was the closest to the fence, and thought her hair was burning—a red halo around her head. Her mother’s hair looked as though it was on fire. The Burners were close behind her—almost on her—and even as she beheld them and saw the halo of fire, she also felt her mother’s eyes on her, steady and unwavering. Her mother didn’t seem frightened by the fiery hair, glowing around her head like a nimbus, or the Burners at her back.

  Then Cara was stepping into the book, whose white pages had shifted into an image she didn’t have time to make out. Without knowing where she was going, she went, Jaye on one side, grabbing Hayley as she moved forward; and this time she made herself trust their future, forced herself to think their fall was a pure, safe arc. She thought of it with a sudden conviction that made her stronger as she felt, again, the sensation of plunging down into a far and empty place.

  But it wasn’t like before.