Out of This World (8 page)

“Bullshit.”

“Come on, dude. You really think I killed this guy? You think I'm a Wildling now?”

“I know you're not.”

Yeah, and how does he know that? But that's a question for another time.

“So why are you hassling me?” I ask instead.

“Because you know who
did
kill this guy.”

“I don't know anything.”

Solana sighs. “Look,” he says. “I could have picked you up at home in front of your mother and family …”

He lets his voice trail off. I wait a beat, then fill the space: “But you didn't.”

He nods. “As a favour—which I'm quickly regretting.”

“Unless you don't want your people to know that you met with me last night.”

Something flickers in his eyes and I know I'm on to something.

“Okay,” I say. “I'll come with you. I won't be saying anything about the dead guy because I don't know anything. But dude? I'll be able to talk all day about how you've been following Josh around and now you've switched your little obsession to me. I'll tell them about hawk uncles and secret societies and any other damn thing that comes to mind. That what you want?”

He gives me another sigh. “I want this butchery to stop.”

“Yeah, because these same guys running around with snipers' rifles—that's not a problem.”

“Of course it is.”

“Then why don't you go do some actual investigating, and I'll go to school, and we'll pretend none of this ever happened.”

His dark gaze settles on me, half warning, half threat. He is
so
pissed off.

“I know you were involved,” he says.

“Dude, that's no secret. I called you about the guy. But that's where my part in the story ends.”

I can tell he doesn't want to let it go like this, but he
is
going to back off and we both know it.

“Don't leave town,” he says.

A dozen responses to that cliché come to mind, but for once I'm smart and I keep my mouth shut.

“Later, dude,” is all I say.

I start to walk away, the back of my neck prickling until he pulls away from the curb and drives off down the street.

I keep on walking. I look down Josh's street when I'm passing by. The cop cars are still there, yellow tape marking off the yard of the house across the street from his. Half a block later, I duck behind a hedge and put Donalita on the ground. She immediately turns back into a girl.

“I didn't kill him,” she says. “I promised you I wouldn't, so I didn't.”

“I never said you did.”

“But you were thinking it.”

“It's not an issue, dude. We're all good.”

She grins. “So what are we going to do now?”

“I don't know what
you're
going to do, but I'm going to school and you can't come.”

“But I want to. And Theo said I'm supposed to guard you.”

“Except I'm not going to need guarding. Nothing's going to happen to me at school.”

“But—”

“And if Chaingang's that concerned, he can do it himself.”

She gives me a pout that would do my little sister Molly proud. “You
do
think I killed that man with the rifle. That's why you don't want me to come.”

I shake my head. “No, I don't want you to come because you don't go to Sunny Hill and I can't have you hanging around when you're not even supposed to be there in the first place. It'll just get us both into trouble.”

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“I don't know. What do you usually do?”

“I could change into something very small,” she says, “and then I could just ride around in your pocket. No one would ever know I was there.”

“Dude, I'm not walking around school with a mouse or a lizard in my pocket.”

“Please please please please.”

I shake my head again. “It's just not going to happen.”

She looks so dejected I almost change my mind. Then she brightens up.

“I know,” she says. “I'll change into a pebble. You don't mind carrying a pebble around in your pocket, do you?”

“You can do that?”

“Of course I can,
dude
. But you'll have to wake me up when it's okay for me to be a girl again.”

“A pebble.”

The physics of a human being turning into a rat or a bird is
confusing enough for me to get my head around, but this seems off-the-charts impossible.

“Why is that so strange?” she asks.

“Well, it's just—I mean, come on. A pebble.” That makes me think of something else. “Are you telling me everything's sentient?”

“Everything has a spirit, silly. How else could it know what it is?”

“I have to tell you, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.”

She shrugs. “It's just the way things are. Everybody knows that.”

“So you're going to turn into a pebble.”

“Yes. But you have to remember to wake me up later because when we take shapes like that, we can lose ourselves in them unless there's someone around to call us back.”

“And all of you can do this?”

“Oh no,” she says. “Only the very smartest and tricksiest

of us.”

“Okay.” It's not really okay, but every time she explains it to me it gets a little weirder. So I settle for agreeing and ask instead, “So how do you wake up a pebble?”

“Oh, that's easy. Just tap me against a wall or something.”

“Tap you …”

“Now, hold out your hand, palm up.”

“Wait a minute,” I start, but I do as she says.

Before I can go on she leaps into the air, changing as she does. There's a confusing flicker of strobing images as the normal-sized girl shifts and becomes something else. A moment
later a pebble lands in the palm of my hand. Except with my double vision, I see both a pebble and Donalita curled up like a baby. I reach out with a finger. All I can feel is the hard surface of the pebble.

So maybe it's a pebble, but it's also Donalita, and the whole thing creeps me out. I slide it carefully into my pocket, but keep reaching in to make sure the pebble's still there. I want to give it a rub with my thumb the way you do with that kind of thing, until I remember that it's also a tiny Donalita, and somehow, that would just be wrong.

I'm still quietly freaking out about it when I get to school. For a change, I'm happy to be here because at least I'll be able to talk to Marina about the latest weirdness going on.

Before I can go inside, Bobby White, one of the Ocean Avers, steps in front of me, blocking my way.

“Theo wants a word with you,” he says.

He nods to where Chaingang's sitting on his usual picnic table under the eucalyptus trees, shades on, shaved head gleaming. Great. Now everybody's going to think I'm a drug dealer, too.

Two weeks ago I'd have thought it was cool having Chaingang want to talk to me. Now it's just a pain in the butt. What does Marina even see in him?

But you don't turn your back on a summons from the big guy.

Chaingang lifts his shades as I walk up and gives me a nod.

“What's up, bro?” he asks, then he studies me, an odd look in his eyes. “There's something different about you—like you're a Wildling and you're not, all at the same time.”

“That's because I've got Donalita in my pocket.”

“You've got—”

“Don't even ask, dude.”

He lets the shades drop. “Right.”

I stand there for a moment waiting for him to tell me what he wants.

“Some of us have classes to go to,” I say.

I figure that might get me a laugh, but he just nods like I said something profound.

“You heard from Marina?” he asks.

I shake my head. “We usually walk to school together, but when she didn't answer my texts, I thought she was catching a few waves or … you know …”

He cocks his head, waiting.

“Or that she was with you.”

“No, I dropped her off near her old man's house in East Riversea last night when we got back. She's not answering my texts, either.”

Maybe that's because she finally wised up, I think, except then I remember the way she was looking at him last night and how freaked she was when we all thought he was going to die. Time to take the high road.

“Did you try calling her dad's house?” I ask.

He chuckles without any humour. “Yeah, like that would go over well.”

I dig in my pocket for my phone. “Do you want me to try?”

“Nah, it's all good. I haven't seen Ampora this morning, either. They'll be along.”

“Not together they won't.”

He shrugs. “If she gets in touch, ask her to shoot me a text.” “Sure.”

“Later, bro.”

I stand there for a moment longer than I need to before I realize I've been dismissed.

“Right,” I say. “Later.”

I add “asshole,” but only in my head because I don't have a death wish.

“Des,” he says as I start to walk away.

I look back at him.

“How the hell do you have Donalita in your pocket?” he asks.

I smile. “Sorry, dude. That's strictly need-to-know.”

He lowers his shades and studies me for another long moment before he smiles as well. Then he pushes the glasses back up again and he looks away.

I turn to look at Tío Goyo sitting on a rock in the moonlight. “What exactly are the Thunders? I thought it was a cousin thing, except it kind of sounds Native American, too. But you're Mexican, right?”

“No, I am Toltec.”

“Right. Solana told me about that. So, the Thunders is a hawk uncle thing?”

“It's just a word,” he says. “You can call the creator God, or gods, or Thunders. It can be an old man with a beard, a woman with the moon in her eyes, maybe a whole pantheon, each responsible for this or that bit. Or you can say that Raven stirred his pot back before the long ago, and this world is what came out. Whatever expression you use, it's just a way to describe what's impossible to comprehend.”

He waves a hand to encompass the whole of the starry night sky. “How can we even begin to imagine the being that brought all of this into existence?”

“We could call it evolution.”

He shrugs. “The first people believe that Raven woke the Thunders before he made the world.”

“Well, I don't.”

“What
do
you believe?”

“I don't know what to believe anymore. But even with everything that's happened to me, it all sounds like a fairy tale.”

He nods sagely, as if I've just said something profound. Then he takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one.

“No, thanks,” I tell him.

He shakes one out for himself and lights up. Standing, he turns in a slow circle and lifts the cigarette so that its smoke rises up to the stars. He does that four times before he sits down again. He leans back against a rock and takes a drag.

In the distance I hear a vague rumble of thunder.

“Think we'll get a storm?” I say.

He only smiles and exhales a stream of smoke.

“So what do you think?” he asks. “Is what happened to you purely random, or did somebody plan it?”

“I have no idea.”

He nods. “I would guess random. If it were planned, somebody would have approached you by now.”

“Cory did, pretty soon after I changed,” I say. “He was there when I woke up as a human again. And Auntie Min keeps trying to convince me that I'm some big chosen one.”

“So you think they're responsible for what's happened to you and the other young people in Santa Feliz?”

“Cory? No. I'm not too sure about Auntie Min.”

Tío Goyo shakes his head. “She is too connected to her land to have grander designs. You know nothing of your heritage, do you? What it means to be a cousin—one of the animal people?”

I shake my head. “But I don't buy into this crap of me being some kind of hero saviour. I mean, come on.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I grew up my whole life being
me
. I love my mom, but our family doesn't have any special heritage, in the way you're saying.”

“What about your father?”

I shrug. “He's just a loser that I don't think about.” That's a lie. Not the loser part, but I've been thinking about him my whole life. I try to figure out why he left Mom. She's beautiful and smart. She's a good woman. It never made any sense that he'd just walk away from her. Why he'd walk away from
us
.

But that's nothing I want to share with anyone, and I'm not going to start with Tío Goyo. He's looking at me—studying me—but I can't get a read on him.

“With all you've experienced so far,” he finally says, “how can you be so sure that you don't have a destiny?”