The Shimmers in the Night (12 page)

This is going to be hard to hear, honey. It's something I can do. I change from form to form, if I need to.

“But then—what you do—is it that shape shifting thing?”

Yes.

Cara didn't speak for a while, watching the spray.

“So then—so what
are
you?”

Last summer, for instance, I was the sea otter. Now I'm a fish.

Six

It was ridiculous. And yet Cara found she actually believed
it—or more, even: about the sea otter, part of her had already known.

She knelt at the edge of the walkway, staring down. All she saw was the mist of the sprayers, the wet wood.

“But, Mom. I mean, how can you
do
that and still be…”

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 stairway 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 H
ELLO
K
ITTY
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.