Page 89 of Odder Still
Water cascades through the entrance hallway, but it’s cut off by what must be the automatic emergency air lock rising into place out of sight at the top of the twisting stairs. In a series of tremors so loud they seem to bend my spine, the lab detaches from the Findlay tower. It falls through the water, taking us with it as it descends toward the seafloor with the layered city of Maraheem in its way.
Raghnaid and her aurora’s newfound fear only sharpen the mutants’ aggression. A walrus plows toward me. Half supported by the table, my parasite and I take another step back. Not-Jean climbs over the table behind us, fists raised. I turn to keep her in my sights, my parasite lifting our hands defensively. Panic wells through our already pounding heart and rushes like the sea through our ears. There’s not enough of us—not enoughinus—to fight Not-Jean and the walruses, to dodge or reflect my emotion onto them and still control the bear protecting Tavish.
Through the fray, the lab’s primary ignation supply gleams at me, its rainbow twinkle coming and going as though winking. But its glass casket sits on the far end of the lab counters, past the dying aurora’s tank and leaping mutants, above a quickly approaching city. My parasite yanks my attention nearer to the stuff winding through the lab equipment. It all looks too hard to access but for one handheld device on a nearby counter: the ignation shining in a tube along the side.
A table blocks us from it. Our attention slides between it and the bear protecting Tavish, between the walrus and Not-Jean and the wolf pack surging around us. Between every piece of our end, closing in.
The lab shakes with such force that I collapse into Not-Jean as the room’s glass bottom crashes into one of the upper’s enormous, enclosed bridges. It twists once more before sliding over the side and falling into a channel between the buildings.
The mutants right themselves before I can, Not-Jean latching onto my neck from behind as the walrus swings its tusks toward my head. A fluffy, silver streak tears up its back, launching off its head and catapulting over my shoulder with a yowl. Our hearts skip, and my parasite and I understand in unison: Lavender. Blessed, beautiful Lavender. She crashes into Not-Jean’s face, claws extended and teeth bared. The scream the mutated conspiracy theorist releases sounds more beast than selkie.
As Not-Jean’s hands jerk, I duck out of her grasp, avoiding the walrus in the same motion. Lavender leaps from Not-Jean’s face into my arms. I tuck her to my chest and dive us both across the table. As we roll, the blackness comes in, yanking at my grip on Tavish’s bear protector. But I can’t let go. I can’t. We can’t. We—
A mutated wolf crashes into the counter we need. The handheld device clatters across the floor. We snatch it up, but its back plate won’t budge. Lavender cries, trying to bury herself beneath our chin, and we can feel the ignation mutants closing in even if we can’t see more than mangled glimpses of the world.
I barely catch the flash of metal and glass through the clear tile beneath me as the lab crashes into the top of a silver building. It skids along the building’s roof, grinding its way toward the city’s great central waterway. One corner of the room bows. Water trickles from it.
My parasite and I tighten my grip on the lab device and think of home. Instead, I see a brilliant, strong selkie with a young jaguar in his lap, and Lavender in my own, and I don’t know whether we’re in the Manduka or in Maraheem, but I know that it’s what I want, whatever the cost. Tavish and I are only liminal if we choose something else over each other.
With all the strength my parasite and I can muster, we slam its ignation-filled side into the floor. It shatters, silver liquid slipping out. We slap our palm into it. The glass cuts through our fraying fishnets and into our skin, the pain of it coming too fast and strong for my preoccupied parasite to stop. Something glorious seeps out of the wreckage, something that feels like light and tastes like wine and smells like honey. Like Tavish.
We embrace it. My parasite’s tendrils shoot and slide, closing a bit more of the small gap between us, but I relish the sensation. The room keeps grinding around us, the warp in the far wall growing more prominent, and we fling the energy we’ve acquired outward, reverberating it through the mutants in a single desire: stop the lab.
The mutants within go perfectly still as the orca braces itself against the building’s exterior. Dolphins and sharks join it, even a few larger fish press into the glass wall to slow the room’s sliding. It grinds to a terrible halt at the edge of a roof. It quavers, the massive waterway looming just beyond with its drop straight to the main gate. The bowing wall rattles, still leaking. But it holds.
Raghnaid screams.
With the last of our new energy, we spear our emotions, not at the mutants, but at her, willing, wanting, needing her to stop this. We hit the same wall as before. With a final push, we shove through it, roaring our desire into the tangled being of Raghnaid and the aurora. They both scream this time, and a wave of blackness rolls over my parasite and me.
We drift, counting our breaths, lying on the floor. One. Two. Six. Nine. Ten.
As our consciousness steadies, I hear Lavender whimper. She shoves her face pleadingly against my shoulder, my neck, my head. I force my eyes open.
The mutants move almost listlessly around us now, their chaotic twitching and pacing coming in bursts. One of the cats with blue-grey tabby stripes gashed in vibrant green and red creeps across a bodyguard’s corpse, leaving bloody paw prints behind. The sight of her tears into me.
Lavender’s ears perk toward her old companion. Before I can stop her, she scampers forward, only to trail after Not-Blue in confusion, her shoulders hunched and tail low.
They pass Raghnaid, crumpled on the tank stairs. I can’t tell whether she’s alive. Her chest seems not to rise, and the threads woven through her look more ash than light. When my parasite and I try to resonate with the mutants in her place, though, a little more blood trickles from our nose, and something hot and hazy slips from our ear. We pull back, drawing all our remaining energy into ourself, harboring it like it’s a boat in a hurricane, and turn our attention to Tavish.
As he turns toward the lab entrance, he wavers from one leg to another like a man half-drunk, half-enthralled. His voice sounds wrong in an eerily familiar way, a little tired and a lot intoxicated. “This place smells like a nosebleed.”
Then he giggles. Hundreds of feet below the tower, below the rebels, below where Lilias should be standing with her stolen yellow ignit, Tavish giggles over the scent of corpses.
I feel not only drained, but dried and stretched. It’s not enough to have stood against the grasping queen beside her dying throne. Win all the battles, and another war only forms from the wreckage.
Kill all the villains, and new ones will arise.
CHAPTER THIRTY
To Care Enough
Hollow but not vacant, alight, alive, and free,
I will reach for you, palm open and heart unhindered.
Be not the moon or the tide, nor the ship to my sea.
Be not fire or ember or near-destroyed cinder.
