Flux Read online

  Hands pressed to the dirt floor, Nellie focused, but the only vibrations that came back to her were her own. Defeated, she curled into the space the remembering dress had occupied, and rested within the throb of her own emptiness. Gone, gone—past and present, everything gone. Common sense told her to seek safer shelter, but her body had filled with a leaden heaviness and she couldn’t move. The shack and the remembering dress were her last link to her mother. It was here and here alone that she’d slipped into that glimmering gold fabric and called out in a voice of utter loneliness, and her mother had always come to her, each time she’d risen from beyond the grave and reached out in infinite love. Nellie wasn’t kidding herself, she knew a ghost when she saw one. Her mother was definitely dead, but still filled with enough love to reach all the way from the underworld and touch her daughter’s face when she called. How would her mother be able to find her if Nellie wasn’t wearing the goldspun dress of angel light? Without it she would be only one among thousands, every one of them calling out for the love that had gone missing in their lives.

  With a snaking hiss, the candle gutted. Utterly alone, Nellie lay at the heart of a darkness that deepened into itself until she could feel all its levels, all her doubles within those levels hugging themselves and listening to the empty thud of their hearts. How long was she supposed to go on pretending loneliness was just a different kind of friend?

  Nellie’s face slackened into a deeper emptiness, and she slept.

  SHE WOKE FROM A DREAM so vivid that for a moment it felt as if the stars she’d seen singing deep in space were actually the neurons of her brain calling to one another. They’d been shifting again, realigning along some new axis, and Nellie felt herself tilt and retilt as her mind adjusted to its waking state. She was cold. Hard earth pressed against her hip and she moaned, trying to find a more comfortable position in the dark. The remembering dress is gone, someone’s stolen the remembering dress.The thought came at her like pain, and she rolled onto her other side, feeling about for something to cover herself with.

  And saw it. Several feet to her left an open gate hovered midair, clearly outlined by light that spilled through it from the next level. Frozen in a half-crouch, Nellie stared, terrified something was about to step through. Was she awake or dreaming? But she had to be awake—she could feel the ground, cold and hard beneath her, and when she shifted the stiffness in her hip was a crystal-brilliant pain.

  Rising slowly to her feet, she hugged herself and stared at the well-lit gate. Though she tuned into the shack’s molecular field on a regular basis, she’d made a point of never opening any of the hairline seams she’d seen there. The shack’s molecular field often heaved with flux and when flux was around, opening a gate could mean coming into contact with anything. Far better not to know what pressed close, one level away, she’d decided, while she slept and dreamed. Better to keep the levels firmly separated in the shack, her one true sanctuary.

  The gate that hovered before her, however, did not belong to the shack’s molecular field, and the vibrations it emitted were faster than the frequencies of any level she’d yet encountered—so much so they could only be sensed, not felt. Hugging herself, Nellie continued to stare at the open gate. Had it been sent by the Goddess to console her for the loss of the remembering dress? Could this be a doorway onto the world of the dead and the arms of her waiting mother?

  With a hoarse cry she lurched forward, but the gate danced back, out of reach. Stumbling to a halt, she stared at it. Was it possible this was an erva-induced hallucination? She’d filched a cold drink from a vendor’s stall on her way home. Some of the vendors were known to spike their drinks, but she hadn’t noticed any side effects before falling asleep. Now as she stood watching the gate, her thoughts felt clear. No, this wasn’t erva. Tentatively she took a step forward.

  Mom, she thought. Again the gate flickered backward. Despair surged through Nellie. Grabbing whatever was within reach, she flung it at the shimmering opening, but the objects merely flew through the apparition and crashed against the shack’s far wall. Panting, she stared as the gate continued to hover, unperturbed, in mid-air.

  “What is this?” she whispered. “Some kind of doorway to Lulu-land?”

  As if in answer, the gate opened wider. Then, without seeming to move, it was suddenly all around her, its vibrations pulsing through her skin, deep into her body. With a gasp Nellie braced herself, but there was no pain. Her right foot lifted, taking her through the opening, and the gate shut behind her, closing off the shack and her home level. Habit took over and she focused on riding out the first few seconds as her body adjusted to the vibration rate of the new molecular field.

  Flux was certainly playing games with the levels tonight. Looking around, Nellie could see no sign of the shack. Ceiling, walls, floor—everything gleamed, a radiant white. Ahead stretched a row of doors, all of them closed except for one halfway down a long hallway, which stood ajar. Tiptoeing toward it, she hesitated just outside. All that could be heard from within was a steady electronic hum. Cautiously she peered around the doorjamb.

  The room was well lit. Cupboards and medical equipment lined the walls, and a large computer dominated the far end, but what drew Nellie’s attention was a line of cubicles that ran through the center of the room. Covered by a plastic dome, each cubicle was the length and breadth of an average adult body. Nellie’s breath caught in her throat and she froze. Everything about the room—its whiteness, the quietly beeping machines, the cubicles’ sleepy blinking lights—was familiar. The gate she’d woken to see hovering midair in the shack seemed to have opened directly into one of her memories. Without approaching the cubicles, she knew what she would find lying inside. The question pounding the blood through her veins was not what, but whom? Would it be a stranger or one of her own doubles, her head cut open and wires running directly into her brain?

  Entering the room, Nellie approached the nearest cubicle. From the doorway the dome had been opaque, but as she leaned over the lid, it became transparent, revealing the child that lay within. Eyes closed, she was about four years old. Her chest rose and fell in a regular sleeping rhythm and she was naked, wearing only a helmet. When Nellie saw the nightmare tangle of wires and tubes that ran in and out of various places in the girl’s skin, she bent double and rode out a rush of hot and cold. As it faded, she found her body pivoting toward the room’s open door. Run, run, her legs screamed, but she forced herself to move toward the next cubicle and the next, studying the face of the child in each one. Even if she hadn’t yet come across one of her own doubles, there had to be a reason the Goddess had brought her here. She could leave now and never understand, or she could move on to the next cubicle in the hope of discovering the meaning of this place.

  The boy she found there looked so like Deller that, except for the slant to his eyes, he could have been his twin. Like the other children she’d seen, a helmet rode his head, and a shock of wires ran in and out of small openings in his skin. Shyly her eyes flicked across his naked penis and the wires that were taped even there. Above his head, a small green light pulsed in the rhythm of his heartbeat. Urgently Nellie pressed against the cubicle, her hands scrabbling across the surface. If she could get it open, she could wake the boy and take him back to Deller. But there didn’t seem to be any buttons or levers. The cubicle felt completely smooth.

  Inside the cubicle, the boy’s eyes opened. Slanted and weasely, they stared up at her. Above his head the light flashed more quickly as he started to speak. Pressed against the cubicle, Nellie moaned in frustration. Nothing could be heard through the dome, and the dark-colored plastic made it difficult to see the boy’s lips clearly.

  In the distance an alarm went off, and footsteps could be heard running down the hall. With a gasp, Nellie pushed off the cubicle and dashed through the open doorway. To her left, she could see several lab-coated figures coming toward her. A shout went up as she turned to the right and took off. The gate was still there—she could see a hairlin
e crack superimposed over the wall at the hall’s far end. Would it open for her, or was this some kind of a set-up, a grim inter-level joke?

  The gate opened before she reached it. Throwing herself through the gap, she felt it vanish before she landed and turned back to the place it had been, midair in the shack’s early morning gloom.

  Chapter 9

  SHE HEADED DIRECTLY INTO the pre-dawn gloom to find Deller, pausing only to pack the blue-robed statue of the Goddess into her knapsack. Outside, the early morning air breathed in sleepy gusts and the sky drowsed, sluggish and heavy-lidded, above the trees. Just over the horizon hovered two ghostly smudges, the twin moons. Nellie trudged quickly toward them, passing bushes that hunched deep in shadow and the occasional wickawoo’s waking cheep. Wet grass flicked her bare legs, and she brushed furiously at insects hitching a ride on her arms, trying to ignore the strange trembling that kept sweeping her body.

  It was just that it was too big, the whole thing gone wild-crazy, over the edge, and she no longer knew how to fit everything into a recognizable pattern. Before last night, she’d never thought much about the relationship between the levels. She’d traveled enough to know they weren’t stacked next to each other like a deck of cards, and she couldn’t expect to find them organized spatially like doors in a hallway. Levels were more like notes in a song, she’d eventually decided, as long as you understood that when flux was active both the singer and the song could change with each note. But until last night, those notes had all been reasonably familiar, even when flux was playing its tricks. Sure, she had to keep on her toes for small changes, like a double with a knife, but no mysterious gate had ever appeared out of thin air and opened onto a room of children with wires running into their bodies, white rooms filled with children being held hostage for experiments ...

  The strange trembling swept her again and Nellie bent over, gagging until her body gave up trying to eject the nothingness of an empty stomach. Straightening, she wiped her mouth and leaned shakily against a doogden tree. She was cold, her skin rippling with goosebumps. Why had that gate appeared to her? Had Ivana sent it, or was it simply one of those flukes that happened during the month of Lulunar? She’d only been traveling for seven months, and so had no previous experience with the month of the twins and the chaos it could spawn among the levels. A year ago she hadn’t even believed the levels existed, dismissing them as erva-spawned conjecture and fantasy.

  Tightening her knapsack straps, she trudged on toward Dorniver. This early, traffic was infrequent and she felt safe sticking to the main road. A dog barked from a nearby shack, running the full length of its chain, and she glanced speculatively at the next few houses she passed. They seemed quiet, their curtains drawn, with no dogs prowling the yard. Hunger bellowed in her gut and she paused, pondering a raid on a backyard garden, but the rattling of an unseen dog chain convinced her otherwise. Tightening her stomach, she slapped it a few times to quell its queasy growl, then broke into a trot that soon brought the city into view, stroked with the easy pastel light of dawn.

  She didn’t know where Deller lived, if he had a family, or if he fended for himself in the streets. There was little chance he attended school and he could be anywhere in the city, running with the Skulls or trying to sniff out his brother’s dead-cold trail. If only, Nellie thought, cursing her stupidity, she’d thought to ask his last name.

  Heading toward the river, she soon found the deserted warehouse that housed the Skulls’ headquarters. Located in an area that had been slotted for demolition, the warehouse squatted on a long street of ramshackle buildings. A few doors down a small factory seemed to be in operation, but the buildings to either side were obviously empty, their windows smashed and graffiti festooning their walls. The warehouse had several entrances, but Nellie remembered exiting through an alcove on the west side, next to a lopsided black skull that had been spray-painted on the wall. Approaching the building, she found the skull leering ominously in the gloom. The small entranceway was in shadow, but she immediately spotted a large padlock hanging above the doorknob. With a groan she slumped against the wall and took a disgusted swing at the lock. Creaking, it gave. So the padlock was a disguise, just like most of the Skulls’ blustering.

  Tentatively she removed the padlock and pushed open the door. Warnings tiptoed along her skin and breathed down the back of her neck. Careful, she had to be careful. No one could catch her inside this place, not even Deller. Her plan was to locate a suitable hiding spot nearby, head Deller off when she saw him coming, and tell him about his brother. And then? Nellie shrugged off the thought. Then she would be alone with what she’d seen, and so would he.

  But first she had to see this place on her own terms and beat the ugly hold it had on her thoughts. Peering through the open doorway, she scanned the small shadowy room with its sagging table and three-legged chairs. Cobwebs draped everywhere, and a scurry of mice and spiders greeted her entrance. The place had probably been a lunchroom once, or some kind of an office. Cupboards lined one wall, and a dusty sink stood under the cardboard-covered window. On the table splayed several magazines, some half-eaten doughnuts, and a jelly sandwich minus a large bite. Without hesitation Nellie wolfed the food, then chugged the remains of a bottle of nevva juice. Gradually the roar in her stomach abated, her shivering stopped, and the steady kick of fear at the base of her brain let up. Slumping to the floor, she wrapped her arms around her knees and stared dully at the sliver of light cutting through the two pieces of cardboard taped over the window.

  So the sun was up and another day had officially begun. What would tonight bring, what was she going to do when the sun went down and the twin moons took over the sky? She couldn’t go back to the shack, not after her experience with the strange new gate. If it had opened there once it could open again, and who knew what other gates it might attract? Only an utter madman would continue living in such a place. And, Nellie thought, fighting off a yawn, there was always the chance the thief who’d stolen her remembering dress and money would return, intending to take up permanent residence.

  She snapped out of a murky doze to hear footsteps approaching the door. Scrambling to her feet, she scanned frantically for a hiding place. The bathroom was the obvious option, but any advantage she might gain there was lost to the open outer door—a dead giveaway to her presence. Backed against the wall, she watched a shadow ooze across the entrance. A shoulder edged the doorjamb and feet shuffled nervously.

  “What d’you want?” she yelled, hurling her terror at the door in loud angry sound.

  A thin face topped in a tangle of black hair peeked around the doorjamb, and Snakebite began an agitated dance in and out of the entrance. “What d’you want?” he whined, openmouthed.

  “I want Deller!” Nellie bellowed. “Get him now, or I’ll blow the whole street with my brains. Like this.” With a crazy-man leer, she leaned forward and snapped her fingers.

  Instantly Snakebite withdrew, and she listened to the thud of his feet racing down the sidewalk. Edging to the doorway, she peered into the street. It appeared deserted, with only Snakebite’s rapidly retreating butt in sight. Who knew if he actually intended to carry out her order, but regardless, she wasn’t fool enough to get caught in the same trap twice. Scouting out the back of the building, she found the rusty frame of an old truck parked against the wall. A grunting jump took her from the top of the cab onto the warehouse roof. From here she had a clear view of the city rooftops and the brass hands that crowned every church spire, reaching toward the heavens. Quickly she sent a prayer toward them, her heart beating like wickawoo’s wings. Then she squatted in the shadow of a heating vent, fixed her eyes in the direction Snakebite had taken, and waited.

  It was mid-morning before she saw Deller, several of the Skulls in his wake as he came striding down the street toward the warehouse. Two paces ahead, Snakebite flickered like a nervous insect across his path, running backward and talking in an eager high-pitched voice. Hunched behind the heating vent, Nellie o
bserved the approaching group through narrowed eyes. Now that she was consciously studying them, it was obvious none of them lived wild, fending for themselves in the streets. Each was too well dressed, his hair recently washed. Even at this distance she could smell the scent of shampoo and laundry soap pouring off them. It was the smell of a mother, and the thought sent an electric knife singing through Nellie’s heart. All of the boys coming toward her saw the sun rise and set in a mother’s face every day, and didn’t even notice it.

  Pullo was the tallest and probably the strongest, but even at a distance, Deller’s command of the group was evident, his head turning to one boy then another as they clamored for his attention. Coming to a halt outside the warehouse, he nodded tersely to one of Pullo’s remarks, then cut off Snakebite’s yapping with a wave of his good hand. Overnight he’d discarded the tensor bandage from his other hand, and the absence of his third finger was marked by a beige bandage that curved over the stump.

  “I wanna touch her scars.” Snakebite danced about, babbling eagerly. “Let’s get her down and touch her scars.”

  “Go get her then,” Deller said, his face expressionless. “I’ll wait here and see if she blows your brains out.”

  “She wouldn’t.” Pullo scratched nervously at his neck. “Not if she sent Snakebite to fetch you.”

  Deller shrugged, then watched the rest of the group sidle into the entrance. Fierce whispering drifted out of the alcove. “You go first. No, you.” A tiny grin played across Deller’s lips as the Skulls finally stumbled, a congealed mass of arms and legs, into their headquarters. Silence descended onto the street, the overheated air shimmering like a raw nerve. Nellie shifted, her butt cooking on the warehouse roof. Hooding his eyes with his good hand, Deller turned to scan the rooftops. His gaze paused on the heating vent and he came quickly toward it, stopping directly opposite.