Under My Skin

  Josh

  I'm counting exit doors as we race up the stairs.

  The first door has a big red "4B" on it. Fourth floor basement.

  Still a ways to go. Two more turns on the stairs.

  Third floor.

  Just as Rico reaches the landing, the door flies open. The alarm is suddenly louder and a security guard steps out. He has long enough to register our presence, then Rico grabs him by the lapels of his jacket and flings him right over my head, down the stairs. I hear the sound of breaking bones as he lands, but we're already up the next flight.

  The door below automatically shuts, muffling the screaming sound of the alarm until a second later, it opens again. Voices are shouting. One pair of crepe-soled shoes pursues us up the stairs. The other heads down to their fallen comrade.

  We're at the door to the second floor now. Just one more to go.

  The guard following us can't come close to matching our speed. We're not even breathing hard and he's already struggling for air. But he manages to radio our position to someone else.

  The ground floor door bangs open above us. Two guards fire in our direction. Rico leaps high, I drop low and the first shots miss us. Then Rico's on them. He propels one back through the door, the other toward me. The guard tries to latch on to me as he goes by, but I grab his flailing arms and use his momentum to throw him down onto the man still coming up the stairs after us. Then I follow Rico out the door.

  It's insane on the ground floor. We come out into the foyer to the wailing of the alarm, an SUV pulling three-sixties on the marble floor, and enough gunfire to make it sound like a small war. But they're not shooting at us. It's the SUV that has their attention.

  "Follow me!" Rico cries.

  As we take off toward a bank of windows, all the power shuts down. Lights. Alarm. It's dark, except for the SUV's headlights spinning counter-clockwise. There's a lull in the gunfire. The roar of the SUV's engine is deafening.

  I don't know what it is that Rico does, but a shimmer fills the air in front of us. For a moment, the windows of the foyer and the parking lots outside are hazy and indistinct, then I'm looking out at a completely different landscape. It's night out there, but the mountain lion's gaze tells me that there isn't a man-made structure as far as the eye can see. The smells that come to me are rich and wild. There's not a trace of concrete or gas or metal.

  Then we're through the shimmer and dry grass is crunching under our feet. I stop, stunned, until Rico barrels into me and throws me sideways onto the dusty ground. A moment later the red SUV from the foyer of ValentiCorp roars by, right where I was standing, throwing up a cloud of dust. It skids to a halt a dozen yards away and the engine shuts off.

  I leap to my feet and look back the way we came. I'm expecting guards to be running in our direction, firing as they come. But they don't come. I can't make out the shimmer anymore because of the dust. I need to use my other senses, but what my nose and ears tell me, I don't believe. It's not until the dust clears that I see they're telling me the truth.

  The building we came from is gone. Ditto, the parking lots that had surrounded it. All of Santa Feliz.

  It's dark out here except for the moonlight and there is absolutely no sign of human habitation.

  "Okay," I say. "Now I'm seriously freaking out."

  "Save it for later," Rico tells me. "We've got company."

  Right. The SUV.

  "Did they bring us here?" I ask.

  Rico shakes his head. "I brought us here. They just swooped along in our wake."

  "And where are we?"

  "Later."

  I'm getting awfully tired of his laters, but I let it slide for the moment. The wind's coming from behind us, so I haven't a clue as to who's in the SUV. But considering how my luck's been of late, I'm expecting the worst.

  Rico doesn't seem concerned. He's standing casually by my side, but I'm not fooled. He's poised for anything. I've seen how fast he can go into action. His gaze is steady as he takes in the vehicle. It's pretty beat up. All the windows are blown out and the metal is riddled with bullet holes, the paint scraped off the sides in long streaks and fenders bent. It looks as though it's had the wrath of God laid on it.

  "The enemies of our enemies," I mutter. I think I heard it in a movie.

  "Maybe," Rico says.

  Then the last person I expect to see steps out of the driver's door.

  "Chaingang?" I say.

  He grins. "Wassup, bro?"

  The passenger door opens and my own smile gets bigger as Cory gets out. But if they were unexpected, the two slim forms that pile out of the back seat pretty much floor me. Marina and Elzie.

  "Holy shit! What are you guys doing here?" I cry as I run forward.

  "And where the hell is 'here'?" says Chaingang, looking around.

  I ignore him for the moment and hug both girls. I thought I'd never see either of them again. The relief of having them here threatens to overwhelm me.

  "Well, we thought we were saving your ass," Elzie says.

  Marina smiles. "But it turns out you didn't need saving."

  I can't stop grinning. But then I realize there's something different about Marina.

  "You've changed!" I say.

  She and Elzie exchange a quick look.

  "Um, yeah," she says, looking up at me.

  "When did that happen? Is Desmond a Wildling, too?"

  She shakes her head. "So far as I know, Desmond's still human—much to his continued disappointment."

  "But he's safe?"

  "I hope so. He didn't make it anywhere near the building, so he should be good."

  Elzie reaches up to rub my scalp. "Now we're twins," she says, her eyes twinkling. I grab her hand and hold it in mine for a moment. I'm so grateful that she's okay. We look into each other's eyes and then Chaingang steps up and Elzie and Marina release me.

  Chaingang smiles and we bump fists.

  "Nice to see you, bro," he says, "but you'd better tell me what's going on here. Like I said, where are we?"

  "Later," says Rico.

  Chaingang scowls at him. "I wasn't talking to you."

  "Hey," I say, putting my hands out. "I don't have a clue either."

  Cory comes over to join us. "We'll get into that soon," he says, "but first things first. What did I tell you about keeping a low profile?"

  "Yeah," says Chaingang. "Back there, they've got all the footage they need to put you away forever. "

  Cory scuffs the ground with his boot and shakes his head. "Way to go."

  "Hey," I begin. "At first I wasn't going to do anyth—"

  "I get it," Cory says. "You didn't really know any better. But I was talking to Rico."

  "You guys know each other?" I ask.

  Rico shrugs. "Sure. Coyote Clan and rattler go back a long way," he says. "He's been around stirring that pot since day one."

  He looks at Cory. "Once our mountain lion boy here dropped his human skin, there wasn't much point in pretending anymore. And I've got to tell you, I wasn't looking forward to having them saw off my other leg."

  "You would have gotten it back."

  "How does that work?" I ask.

  But neither of them pays attention to me.

  "Maybe so," Rico says. "But it still hurts like a son of a bitch while they're doing it. And what they did to Jenny, you know—that little soft-spoken cottontail always hung around with the deer girls? Never had a bad word for anybody?

  "They cut the top of her head off and pulled out her brain. And I'm pretty sure she was still alive when they did it. She screamed for a long time—until she didn't. So don't tell me I was supposed to hang in there."

  Cory gets a pained look.

  Remembering the gruesome scene of Jenny on the autopsy table, I find that hard place inside me getting a little colder, a little stronger. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

  Once again I put one arm around Elzie's shoulders, the other around Marina's. They both shiver, listening to Rico. Marina tu
rns her head into my shoulder. Elzie's shoulders tense up under my arm and I know she's angry.

  Cory nods. "Truth is, I don't care how or why you guys broke out. I'm just glad you got a little damage in while you were doing it. It's long past time we had some payback."

  "But the old woman is going to be pissed," Rico says.

  "Oh, yeah," Cory agrees.

  "Well, I don't care. Maybe it's time she volunteered to be the experiment."

  "You know it wasn't her idea."

  "But she agreed to it."

  "Enough," Chaingang breaks in. His voice is quiet, but it demands attention. "Which one of you is going to tell us what the hell's going on here?"

  "Yeah," Elzie says. "Like Chaingang said, where are we?"

  "And how'd you grow your leg back?" I add.

  Cory nods and puts both hands up. "I understand that you've got questions," he says. "But let's do this in proper cousin style. Build a fire, make a truth circle."

  Chaingang frowns. "The hell's that?"

  "It's something cousins do when we need to share, to make sense of things."

  "I've got a better idea," Chaingang says. "How about we skip the New Age bullshit and you just answer our questions?"

  "It's not up to you," Cory tells him. "You're not the only one here."

  I want answers to all those questions, too, but something about this pristine place makes me feel we should follow the lead of the older Wildlings. If they've got a ceremony for this kind of thing, maybe it's best to follow it.

  "Let's give their way a chance," I say.

  Chaingang turns to me. "Oh, and are you calling the shots now?"

  I shake my head. "No, I'm just saying. I mean, what would it hurt?"

  "Josh is right," Marina says, looking at Chaingang. "I think maybe we all could use a truth circle right now."

  Chaingang frowns, but he looks at Marina, then his face softens and he nods in slow agreement.

  "Okay, I get it," he says. "But I gotta tell you, this place has me feeling antsy. I guess I can wait a little longer, but do your thing and then let's get going."

  Rico rubs his hands together. "Excellent," he says. "So do you have any food in that big-ass car of yours?"

  "Something was rolling around under the cover of the hatch. Let's go check," Elzie says.

  Marina and I follow her to the SUV. As we walk, Marina explains to me how Chaingang hot-wired it in the parking lot. It looks like a mom owned the vehicle because, miraculously, when we roll back the hatch cover, the storage space is packed tight with cloth bags full of food. A bunch of apples have come out of one bag and are scattered everywhere, and a carton of milk caught a bullet and leaked itself empty, but otherwise, everything seems to have survived the firefight.

  Whoever owned this vehicle was really practical and orderly. They probably have four perfect kids. Besides all that food, there's a pile of thick fleece throws in the back and each is monogrammed: Mom, Dad, Kirsty, Katie, Kieran, David. Marina bundles them up in her arms.

  All that food makes my stomach growl. I hadn't even thought about it because there'd been so much going on, but now I realize how hungry I am. That's what shifting your shape does, I remember.

  Elzie turns and tosses me a bag of chips.

  "After what I saw on the surveillance cameras," she says, "you'll probably want to start in on this."

  What she saw? I remember the sounds as the mountain lion's paw broke that woman's neck, then her back snapped. I stare at the bag of chips and although I'm famished, the last thing I want to do it eat. Then I think of what they were doing to Wildlings in that place and know that if I had the chance for a do-over, I wouldn't do anything differently.

  "You saw what happened?"

  She nods. "We all did." Her eyes are sympathetic and she puts a hand on my arm.

  "You didn't have a choice," she says.

  "You know that's not true. There's always a choice."

  "Well, sure, if you wanted to end up like those kids we saw in the autopsy room ..."

  Another shiver creeps up my spine at the memory of Jenny and all those drawers filled with dead kids.

  "But how did you see all of that?" I ask.

  "Barry hooked into the feed of their surveillance cameras," Marina says.

  "Barry? What was he doing there? Is he okay?"

  They both nod.

  "He told us about all the tunnels that ValentiCorp has under that complex," Elzie says. "That's how they got you into their building."

  "But he wasn't with us," Marina adds, "when Chaingang went, you know, all Arnold and drove us right into the front of the building."

  Elzie nods. "Yeah, I didn't think we'd make it. I'm surprised none of us got shot." She taps the chips I'm holding and adds, "Eat."

  I give in to my hunger, rip the bag open and start to make short work of the chips.

  Marina

  Viewing the grisly scene at ValentiCorp already made me feel ill, but now my stomach is in even more knots. I've worried for months about telling Josh that I didn't trust him enough to reveal that I'm a Wildling and now time has run out. I'll have to find the courage to admit my mistake and face the consequences.

  If Desmond felt as shocked and hurt as he did, Josh is going to feel ten times worse. I wish I could turn back the clock. If I had a second chance, I would never betray our friendship.

  We're all sitting around the fire on the fleece throws that I brought from the car. I seem to be the only one without much of an appetite. Everybody else is hungry, but there's plenty of food. The grocery bags hold steaks, pork chops, hot dogs and spare ribs, and we cook it all, poking sharpened sticks into the meat and holding it over the fire.

  Loaves of bread, boxes of cookies and cereal, milk, bottled water and pop—a respectable amount of it disappears quickly.

  No one talks much while they're eating. I don't know what anyone else has on their mind, but I'm trying not to think about the coming truth circle.

  I wonder where we are and what happened to Santa Feliz. This place is amazing. The clean scents of plant life and the breeze from the nearby ocean waft over the smells of the fire and the food. The air is incredibly clear and the stars and a quarter-moon make a vast canopy of light above us. Ours is the only other light for as far as I can see—one small crackling campfire in a sea of darkness.

  Finally, the last food wrapper has been burned in the fire and all the Styrofoam containers have been bagged, ready to go back into the car. Elzie starts to say something, but Rico raises a hand to stop her.

  "Let's do this right," he says.

  Cory nods and rises. He pulls a little bundle of tightly bound sage and sweetgrass out of his pocket. Turquoise and red strings hold it together. I've seen these inside Mandala, the New Age store on Main Street.

  Cory takes the stick he was using to cook with and lights it from the fire, then holds it to one end of the sweetgrass bundle. The bundle flames up and he blows it out so that it starts to smoulder, reminding me of the heady smells in the shop.

  First Cory directs the smoke toward himself, running his free hand through the smoke toward his chest and then over his head. Then he walks around in a circle behind us. As he goes, he stops four times and holds the smouldering grasses high above his head. The second time he stops, I realize he's marking compass points. North. West. South. East.

  I glance across the fire at Chaingang and he rolls his eyes, but doesn't say anything. Cory makes the circuit four times, then returns to the blanket where he was sitting and rubs the smouldering end of the bundle on a rock until it's extinguished.

  "We have broken bread together," he says, "and given our respect to the four directions. Let there only be truth in this circle that we share."

  "Let there only be truth," Rico repeats.

  The two of them look at the rest of us. After a moment, we repeat the words in a ragged chorus.

  "Is there going to be more of this?" Chaingang asks. "Because I've gotta tell you, this touchy-feely stuff is really not m
y bag."

  "What we're doing with this circle," Cory says, "is showing our respect. Respect is a pretty big thing to the Ocean Avers, right?"

  Chaingang shifts on his blanket and nods.

  "So were showing respect to the grandfather Thunders who live in the four directions—and also to the land, the sea, the sky and the fire. And we're showing our respect for one another. Wherever our individual ways take us after tonight—here and now, in this circle, we offer only respect to each other. And we speak only the truth."

  "That too touchy-feely for you?" Rico asks Chaingang.

  Chaingang smiles and shakes his head, but he flips a quick "screw you" finger in Rico's direction. Looks like respect might be a challenge for Chaingang.

  "So whatever we ask someone," Elzie says, glancing at me, then Josh, between us, "they have to answer with the truth?"

  Cory shakes his head. "We're not here to confront each other or to bare our souls. We're here to share information and strategies."

  I let out a sigh of relief. Maybe I won't have to do this so publicly.

  "Can we start with where we are?" I ask. "And how did we get here?"

  "That's easy," Cory said. "These are the spiritlands—they're a step sideways from what you thought of as only one world."

  At our blank looks, he laces his fingers together and moves the fingers of one hand. "Think of this as the world we came from"—He wiggles the fingers of the other hand—"and this is where we are now. It's almost like they take up the same space, but they're two individual places. Once you learn to see from one into the other, it's easy to move between them, the way Rico did to bring us here."

  "You expect us to buy that?" Chaingang says.

  Cory shrugs. "You're here, aren't you?"

  "You can really do that from anywhere?" I ask. "In either world?"

  "Sure."

  I look over at Rico. "Then why did you stay locked up?" I ask.

  Rico's face is calm. The light of flames dances across his features. "Two reasons. If we'd simply disappeared, they'd know we can do that."