It was the weirdest sensation, like a film was being pulled off me. I could almost see it, extending out beyond my hand, a ripple in my vision, distorting the darkness. And reaching, reaching, reaching—
The creature beyond the glass or whatever it was seemed to see it, too, or to see something. Because she was pressed against the surface now, her very human hands spread wide across it, allowing me to see the faint weave of skin in between the fingers. Her eyes, likewise, were so human but so strange, larger, slanted, crystalline, with that same noncolor of the scattering of diamond-hued scales that edged them. She looked almost like a statue carved out of crystal, except that she lived and breathed, the gills on the sides of her neck fluttering excitedly because almost, almost—
“Dory!”
Louis-Cesare pulled me back, right before I would have taken a headfirst plunge into darkness, but he didn’t get all of me. Something went careening out into the theatre, flowing over the heads of an audience who never noticed, if they even could have, being too intent on the assault on the castle that some of the creatures were pantomiming. And then came curving back, through air and glass both, into dark water and luminous, crystal eyes.
Tell me.
And she did.
* * *
—
Darting out into the lobby, pushing through a ward over the stairs that crackled and hissed, going down, down, down, two stories, three, five. Out into a hallway with three doors, two normal ones on either side, and a metal submarine-type straight ahead. Some security guards in an office, through the door to the left, watching a row of TV monitors.
“What the hell is she doing?” one demanded.
Another man, leaning over his shoulder: “Dunno. Fucking vampires.”
“I think she’s a dhampir—”
“Same thing. They’re all crazy.” He made an annoyed sound. “Better call the boss.”
Getting tired; couldn’t hold free flight much longer. Luckily, two guards were leaving the office. I grabbed one lightly, just enough contact to steady me. Then we were through the metal door, and into a corridor that looked like it was literally on a submarine. There was a narrow strip down the middle of rubberized flooring, and large portholes on either side, looking out onto a huge holding tank.
“I don’t like it in here. It’s creepy,” my guard said. He was younger than the other, tall and thin with an obvious Adam’s apple that kept bobbing up and down.
And then stopped, arrested like his breath, at a flash of iridescent green outside one of the portholes.
It was gone in an instant, before I had time to more than glimpse it. Then it reappeared on the other side, hesitating long enough for the young guard to notice. Along with a glimpse of yellow, alien eyes.
He stumbled back, swallowing a cry, and the other guard grinned.
“Aw, it looks like Fairfax likes you.”
“F-fairfax?”
“One of the girls in the office named him. Means ‘beautiful hair,’ or some shit.” He shook his head. “Women.”
“Women,” the younger guard agreed, and laughed nervously.
And then screamed and jumped back when something slammed into the metal wall, right beside him.
“Relax, kid. He does that all the time. It’s why they don’t let him upstairs no more; wouldn’t keep on script. Just kept ramming the ward, like he was tryin’ to take it down.” The older guard grinned evilly. “Or maybe eat the audience.”
The younger man didn’t look like he thought that was funny.
“Could he do that?” he asked, staring around.
“Naw. Redundant system. Got a control upstairs as well as down. You’re safe enough.”
The older guard started working to get the door at the end of the hallway open, while the younger continued to stare around. But Fairfax was nowhere to be seen. After a moment, my guard visibly relaxed—
Until strange sounds started emanating from portholes up and down the corridor, making him jump. They were impossible to describe in any human tongue, because they weren’t made by a human tongue. Just strange, underwater sounds, loud and disorienting, causing the young guard to reach for weapons he couldn’t use.
“Would you calm the hell down?” the other guard demanded.
“Would you hurry up? I didn’t sign on for this!”
“You signed on for exactly this, and stop letting him get to you. It’ll only encourage him, and he’s bad enough as it is. Be on the pile already, if he wasn’t such a good breed—ah. Here we go.”
The door gave way, and we were through, into a medium-sized, dimly lit room with curved sides, one of which was made almost entirely out of glass. Or perhaps a transparent ward, considering what the pressure had to be down here. The other walls were piled high with wooden crates, to the ceiling in some cases, along with something on a table, desiccated and dry. A few brown, curled-up bits, like withered leaves, floated to the floor from the disturbance of our entry.
And then Fairfax reappeared out of the murky depths, to throw himself at the ward, battering it with his body so furiously that even the older guard flinched.
“See? I told you so!” That was a short, overweight man with shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat on his brow. I thought he might be the “Curly” my twin’s friend had mentioned. He was bald, but had a rim of little blond curls around his head that flipped up instead of down, making him look like he was wearing a hat without the hat.
There was another person with him, a man, judging by the height, but I couldn’t see him well. They were standing directly under a recessed light, which gilded Curly’s brim of golden curls and danced in his blue eyes, yet the shadows gathered around the other man so thickly that the light couldn’t penetrate. A mage, then, cloaking himself for some reason I didn’t understand. Surely everyone knew him here?
Curly, if that was who the other man was, certainly seemed to, and was vibrating with irritation. “You can’t just come in here and do things like this!” he snapped. “I know how they are, and how to handle them; you don’t!”
“It’s working so far.” The other man’s voice matched his appearance: low, with a deliberate rasp that hid its true inflection.
“Does that look like it’s working?” Curly demanded, pointing at Fairfax. The powerful tail was churning up the water, the humanoid torso was beating at the barrier with both hands, and the strange, alien eyes were staring, staring, staring—but not at any of us. But at . . .
The girl.
Because that was what was on the table, I realized: not a clump of browned, shriveled-up seaweed, as I’d first thought, but a child. A tiny thing, shorter than the table she lay on. And almost completely unlike the beautiful creature upstairs, who was suddenly animated, too.
I could see her dimly, through my twin’s eyes. As well as the scenes she was feeding us through the link. It was her child, and she was deathly afraid, her child, and they planned to—
I flinched, and almost lost my hold on the guard, pain searing through me as it did the female and Fairfax, the child’s father. They were punishing him for leading a revolt. For encouraging the others to refuse to play out the pantomimes set for them until their children were freed.
Instead, he was watching his own child wither in air breathable for his people, but in dryness that was toxic over time. The delicate membranes that made up their bodies could not afford to dry out. It would kill her; it was killing her.
“You’re too soft with them,” the other man said, and looked at the older guard. “Show him what defiance costs.”
The man hurried to the wall and slammed his fist down on a button. A high-pitched sound resonated through the room, barely audible to the guard I was riding, but Fairfax screamed, an almost human sound. And writhed in apparent agony on the other side of the ward.
“I said cut it out!” Curly snapped, and knocked the guard’s hand away. “You don’t take orders from him!”
The guard just stood there, looking nonplussed.
“What are you two doing in here, anyway?” Curly demanded.