The Nex Read online

  The guard came toward me, and up close I could see his face, which was like some kind of deep-sea nightmare fish – broad and flat, no nose, lipless mouth full of triangular teeth, oversized pearly white eyes – and I whimpered. He spoke, almost soothingly, then swatted the gun from my hands. After that he laughed. A laugh is a laugh in any language I guess.

  Something hard into something soft. The Nagalinda’s face was scary, but it looked pretty soft to me, and I had about a pound and a half of metal on each of my hands, so while it was laughing I cocked back my arm and just punched.

  I felt the impact, but only barely, and as soon as I struck... The Nagalinda disappeared. Poof, gone, gun falling at my feet. I looked at my hands. Wisp had said the jump-engine could send things away. I guess it worked. I just wish I knew how it worked. The jump-engine only seemed to do anything when I was too scared or adrenaline-pumped to control it.

  Howlaa groaned, and I went to her, glad she wasn’t dead. She rubbed the side of her head while I helped her up. “Whatsit?” she said, and I babbled about how the guards had hit her, how Wisp had possessed one, how I’d faced the last guard.

  By the end, Howlaa was laughing. “You punched him so hard he disappeared? That’s a good trick. Keep doing that and you’ll get a reputation around here. People might be more afraid of you than they are of me. Come on. We have to free Wisp. The guard must have sprayed some fixative on the body, something to keep Wisp from escaping, but the guns should have a setting to undo it.” Howlaa picked up a gun and started flicking switches and turning knobs like she’d done it a thousand times before.

  “So Wisp is in that guard?”

  Howlaa nodded. “Up the nose, in the mouth, into the ears – through any hole, really, even the more personal ones. He can take over bodies, but he’s crap when it comes to controlling them. He doesn’t have a body of his own, so it’s not like he gets to practice very often. Mostly he just falls over.”

  “So maybe he could take over the Regent, and...”

  Howlaa shook his head. “The Regent and his best cronies have defenses against the Bodiless – brain implants, neural doodads, who knows what. All those things are too expensive to give every grunt and guard, but the Regent might send some better-equipped special forces after us when he sees what happened here..”

  “These guys weren’t special?”

  Howlaa sprayed something orange and glistening from the gun onto the guard Wisp had possessed. “Nah. Bog standard. We’ve got a lot worse on the way if we don’t move fast.”

  Wisp’s motes, glowing again, came drifting up out of the guard’s clothes and mouth, reassembling into a cloud. The guard moaned but didn’t get up.

  “Thank you for stepping in, Miranda,” Wisp said. “I thought I was going to be stuck in that wet mush of a thing forever. And Howlaa, thanks –”

  “Mutual appreciation over,” Howlaa said. “Now we run.”

  Chapter 3

  We slept in a giant bird’s nest, a surprisingly soft place padded with leaves and made of what looked like whole uprooted trees. The nest perched in a pile of tumbled boulders, and Howlaa had to carry me up most of the way, because I couldn’t climb, tired as I was.

  Sleeping in a nest seemed weird, but Wisp said it was the safest place for miles, because everybody was afraid of the creature that lived there. He called it a “Bandersnatch,” which I remember is from that poem about the Jabberwocky, but I don’t remember much about it, except the line about “claws that catch.”

  “So why aren’t we afraid of the big bird?”

  “It’s not a bird, precisely... at any rate, Howlaa killed it,” Wisp said. “Though she sometimes takes on its form and flies around the surrounding area, just to keep up appearances. We decided it would be good to have some safehouses that weren’t controlled by the Regent. We’ve been planning our escape for a long time. Everything but the actual ability to escape. That’s new.”

  “Why would the Regent want to steal a big monster bird from someplace anyway?”

  “Oh, he didn’t,” Wisp said. “He wanted something else – an egg, a rock, a jewel, who knows? – and the snatch-engines accidentally picked up the bird along with the other things. Nexington-on-Axis is a closed system, though, so whatever comes here, stays. If we accidentally pick up something too dangerous to keep... That’s where Howlaa comes in. She neutralizes the problem.”

  “I’m the Regent’s janitor. I clean up nasty messes. The kind of messes that make more messes.” Howlaa snuggled down into a heap of leaves that smelled like eucalyptus and cough drops. “At least, I used to. Now I am one of the Regent’s messes. Dawn comes soon. Go pee – take some leaves – and then snatch some sleep while you can.”

  I picked my way a little distance down the rocks, managed to pull down my tights enough without falling over, and did my business, glad it was only pee. Though it’d be kind of cool to crap on another planet, I guess. Back in the nest I tried to settle down and sleep, but I couldn’t, especially once Howlaa started snoring. I stared up at the strange sky, and said, “Wisp, are you awake?”

  The response was a whisper in my ear. “The Bodiless – my kind – do not sleep.”

  “Those things in the sky...”

  “Ah. Some are private dwellings for those high in the government – that one, the swirly blue ball? It is a pleasure palace for magisters. The one that sparkles, that looks a bit like a crown or a chandelier? Is a mining platform, extracting strange particles from the places where other universes grind up against the Nex. That twinkle of red is an orbital railgun, and I hope it does not aim itself at us again.”

  I fingered the bracelets. “I wish I knew how to use this thing. How am I supposed to figure it out?”

  Wisp’s motes wobbled in the wind. “We’d planned to get help from a certain disgraced government scientist named Templeton, who was involved in the early stages of the jump-engine’s development. We’ll try to see him soon. Apparently the jump-engine has some... automatic functions, ways to protect you, but as for working it voluntarily, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I would advise against experimenting with it. You could find yourself underwater, or in the vacuum of space...”

  I stopped touching the bracelets. “Got it.” If I could just click the rings together and say “There’s no place like home...” I guess I wouldn’t. I mean, I missed my friend Jenny Kay, and our sort-of boyfriends, Joshua Singer and Ryan Rapoport (though we changed our minds about which one was whose boyfriend, and they seemed happy enough either way). I still didn’t understand everything that was happening, but it seemed like I would understand, if I had a little more time, and this place was way more interesting than avoiding Mom and fighting with Cal and going to school. And I liked Wisp, and Howlaa, even if Howlaa still scared me a little. People who can turn into monsters are sort of scary by nature.

  I yawned. “Sleep,” Wisp said. “I will keep watch.” His motes floated away, and I closed my eyes, and eventually, I must have slept.

  ***

  The sun came on, except it wasn’t a sun, but a nuclear explosion frozen in time and trapped inside a sphere of unbreakable crystal, set in the sky millennia before by the Queen and Kings of Nexington-on-Axis and set to provide ten hours of light and then switch off for ten hours of darkness, or so Wisp told me. He started to explain how it worked while I had breakfast – apples, and I was already sick of apples, even the white ones that tasted like some weird tropical fruit – but Howlaa interrupted and said, “It’s science, all right? Science is how it works.”

  Wisp’s answer was cranky: “When you say ‘science’ like that you might as well be saying ‘magic’ or ‘the gods’ or –”

  “Super science, then,” Howlaa said. “Are you happy? Let’s go. There’s rough ground to cover here, so,” she sighed, “I’d better let Miranda ride along. Stand back.” Howlaa started to shift and wiggle and change again, and since I wasn’t terrified this time I got to be fascinated instead. When the transformation was complete, Howlaa was a
big spiderlike thing with at least a dozen spindly legs and a roundish central mass that didn’t have eyes or a mouth but just a bunch of antennae, like snail antlers. The shadowy clothes she wore changed shape and became something like a seat or a saddle.

  The spider – Howlaa – squatted down and Wisp said, “Well, climb on.”

  I clambered up, where the shadowy stuff, which felt like stiff cloth, shaped itself around me and held me in tighter than a roller coaster’s straps. “Can she turn into anything?”

  “Anything with blood in it,” Wisp said, and then Howlaa started to run.

  I thought she’d been quick as a person, but as a spider she was at least as fast as a car. The wind streamed by so hard I could barely keep my eyes open, but I could see well enough to make out the crazy piles of jagged rocky rubble we passed over, with Howlaa leaping chasms and scrabbling over treacherous slopes as easily as I’d walk across my kitchen floor. In what seemed like moments we were beyond the rubble of rocks and racing through the remains of a city, only the buildings were made of dirt and paper and resembled wasp’s nests. “What is this place?” I yelled over the wind.

  “Who knows?” Wisp said in my ear. “The Regent let the royal orphans know he wanted something, and they fired up the snatch-engines to get it. I’m sure they got whatever they needed, but they also got these ruins in the process. Eventually, as the population expands, I’m sure our citizens will take up residence. For now they’re deserted.”

  We ran for a long time before Howlaa slowed down, and we passed so many things. A pile of blimps with holes in the gasbags. More trees, only some of them weren’t trees but giant mushrooms. A thing like a big termite’s nest that rose into the sky so high it made my eyes water trying to see the top. An ordinary parking lot like you’d see at the mall, complete with lightposts, sitting in a meadow of weird green flowers. A sword as big as an apartment building jammed into the ground, black metal hilt sticking out at an angle. And more. Nexington-on-Axis was a patchwork place, and the weather was like a mild spring afternoon no matter what weird stuff surrounded us.

  Howlaa stopped running beside what could have been any old junked-up country farmhouse built on bare dirt, surrounded by heaps of scrap metal and various piles covered in gray and faded blue tarps. But this farmhouse was on the shores of a shining lake, or maybe an ocean for all I knew, that stretched off in the distance as far as I could see.

  Howlaa squatted down again and I slid off, legs numb – we’d only stopped once in all those hours, to drink from a spring bubbling out of a rock – and stomped around, trying to get some feeling back. I’d been gone from home less than a day, and felt like I’d seen the world several times over. I liked it, but I was starting to see some advantages to going back someday. For one thing, I could have used a hot shower and my own bathroom, even if I do have to share the facilities with Mom. (Cal gets his own bathroom because he’s such a pig.)

  Howlaa rippled and transformed. The shadowy stuff was clothes again, but this time it was a skimpy halter and even tinier shorts. She looked like a skank, like Tina McKenzie the day she got sent home from school for being dressed inappropriately.

  “Those clothes...” I said.

  Howlaa arranged her top, which made her boobs, which weren’t very big really, look a lot bigger. I think she misunderstood what I was asking. “Being a skinshifter is hell on normal clothing. I got sick of ending up naked at the end of a fight, so the Regent had his scientists whip this up for me. It’s smartcloth – changes to fit my shape.”

  “It, ah, definitely fits your shape now,” I said.

  Howlaa nodded. “That’s the point.”

  “So, how does it work?”

  Howlaa opened her mouth, but I held up my hand. “Wait, don’t tell me. Science.”

  Howlaa smiled, and it was a lot like the way the wolf-monster smiled. “Smart girl.”

  Wisp floated near me while Howlaa walked up to the farmhouse door. “Howlaa is not above using sex appeal to get what she needs. She specializes in physical solutions. That doesn’t always mean beating people up.”

  I thought about that. “Eww,” I said.

  “Indeed,” Wisp agreed. “I don’t know how you bodied types do it.”

  I started to say we didn’t all do it, or anyway not yet, but then the front door slammed open and a skinny guy wearing patched overalls came out holding some kind of gun, but with a bell at the end of the barrel like an old-fashioned musket.

  “My friend!” Howlaa said. “I’ve come to visit!”

  The guy, who was maybe not as old as I thought at first despite his white hair, lowered the gun and frowned. “What brings the Regent’s chief junkyard dog all the way out here? I haven’t seen you since my change-of-address-at-gunpoint.”

  “We’re on unofficial business,” Howlaa said.

  He lifted the gun again. “Don’t get me involved in your smuggling bullshit. That’s how I wound up stuck all the way out here under house arrest in the first place. If the Regent didn’t need my schematics, I’d be in a gulag somewhere.”

  “Merrill,” Howlaa said, and I wouldn’t have believed she could purr before then. “We come in peace. I don’t ask much. A chance to use the bathroom for me and my friend – the friend who has a bladder anyway – and maybe a bite to eat. Then we’ll discuss things further. Unless you’d like me to tell Regent about the moonshine you’re brewing out back? You know he disapproves of you drinking. It makes your blueprints go to shit.”

  Merrill swore. “Come in, then. And I imagine you’ll want a drink from that still you’re blackmailing me with?”

  “Maybe one,” Howlaa said. “Or two. Three at most.”

  “Please,” Merrill said. “You drink like a goddamn fish.”

  “Speaking of fish...” Howlaa said, following Merrill inside.

  ***

  “Piece of crap.” Howlaa banged a big red wrench against the side of a twenty-foot-long metal sculpture of a fish propped up on cinderblocks near the shore. The fish had overlapping metal scales that tinkled in the breeze, eyes made of big dirty curved windows, and metal jaws full of serrated teeth. Howlaa flung open a toolbox and began rattling around inside. Her outfit looked like a mechanic’s jumpsuit now. I sat in what shade I could find from a nearby pile of splintery boards, glad to be out of Merrill’s crap-filled house, all heaped with engine parts and with greasy blueprints thumbtacked to the walls. The only upside of the visit had been the chance to use a real indoor toilet, even if it was almost as dirty as Cal’s bathroom, and I’d had to sort of hover over the toilet seat to pee.

  Wisp bobbed in the breeze. “It just occurred to me – you must forgive me, I have no family in the conventional sense – that your loved ones must be worried about you, Miranda. I wish we had a way to get a message to them. Normally, I’m afraid, it doesn’t much matter, because new citizens have no hope of ever returning home, but your situation is unusual. I hope you don’t get in too much trouble when you return.”

  “Oh, I’ll get in trouble.” I didn’t want to think about it. Being grounded for the rest of seventh grade didn’t sound fun. “But at first my Mom will just think I ran away. They won’t worry much until tonight, probably.”

  Howlaa, kneeling to peer underneath the mechanical fish, didn’t seem to be paying any attention. Wisp floated closer, motes of light stirring together, and said, “Oh? They won’t think you’ve been kidnapped?”

  Wisp doesn’t have a face, so it’s not like his expression made me uncomfortable, but I still looked down at my feet. “I’ve run away before. A couple of times. Once I slept under the bleachers at school by the football field, until the janitor woke me up at dawn. The other time I just hid out in a friend’s basement.” Jenny Kay’s basement. It wasn’t an awesome basement with couches and a pool table and pinball machines. It was just pipes and spiderwebs and old rakes. But Jenny snuck down after dinner and brought me a corn muffin with butter and a chicken leg wrapped in a napkin, so it was still better than shivering behind th
e school.

  “Running away’s a good impulse, but you went back afterward?” Howlaa growled. “Quitter.” Guess she was paying attention after all.

  “Why did you run away?” Wisp’s movements were hypnotic, beautiful and random.

  “I don’t know. The first time things were just really tense at home, and I couldn’t stand it, I needed to get out.” That was right after what happened to Dad, with Mom all zombified on pills, Cal in his room blasting music all the time, the whole family falling to pieces. “The second time was mostly to avoid my Mom’s boyfriend Ross – it was the first night he slept over. I can’t stand him.”

  “This man beats you?” Howlaa banged a wrench or something, and the fish shuddered, tiny metal scales showering down flakes of rust. “Or tries to take liberties –”

  “No! Nothing like that. He just... he sings all the time.”

  “I do not understand,” Wisp said.

  “He’s... he’s always singing songs from old musicals and doing dumb little dances and he makes my Mom heart-shaped pancakes and he tries to talk to me about stupid things. Like, he got my reading list from English class somehow, and read all the books, and tried to talk to me about them.” The only good thing about Ross was that Mom pretty much stopped drinking once they got serious a few months ago. She was finally “moving on.” But I didn’t really want her to move on. When your husband gets exploded, shouldn’t you stay stuck right where you are for a while? I didn’t want her getting over Dad. Especially not for a giant loser like Ross.

  Wisp bobbled. “I fail to see what’s so objectionable about singing and cooking and –”

  “She means the man is annoying, Wisp.” Howlaa climbed out from under the fish, which was beginning to move its fins with a series of squeaky shrieks of metal. “With the la-di-dah and the prancing and the sunny disposition that doesn’t know when to shush.”

  “That’s it.” I nodded. “That’s exactly it.”