A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe) (17 page)

I snort. “Yeah, it was really helpful how you were always not there at all,” I tell her.

My father puts a hand on my arm, as though to shut me up, so I do. But only for him.

The wind rattles eerily.

“I think it’s well past time for me to turn in,” Oates says suddenly. “I’d advise all of you to do the same shortly. You will need your rest.”

The sun, by the way, is blindingly bright at this point. I swear, I’ll never get used to this.

“I know I’m beat,” Bernard adds, and he’s gone too.

Cole remains on his ice chair until my father stands and offers him a hand.

“Cole?” he says.

“Oh, thanks, Mr. Nara, but I’m not ti—”

“Come on, son.”

Cole looks from me then to Zee, but I refuse to meet his gaze. I don’t exactly want to sit out here and fight with my mother . . . but I don’t
not
want to either.

Finally Cole makes up his mind. “I’ll be right inside the tent if you need me, ’kay, Elvs?”

Where else would you be?
I think.
Honolulu?
But I offer him a tight smile.

It is silent between Zee and me for a long time. I listen to the muffled sounds of the men rolling out their sleeping bags in the tent, settling in for the night. Pontius snuggles happily at my legs, and I pet his warm, thick coat, not thinking much of anything.

“I loved your father, you know,” my mother says at last. “Leaving him—leaving you both—was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

“Guess you never tried Zumba,” I say to the ground.

After a few more moments of awkward silence I finally pipe up again. “Why did Dad think your name was Olivia?”

Zee tosses a pebble of ice into the distance absentmindedly, like she’s skipping stones on a lake. “Olivia was the name I took on when I . . .” She trails off. Shakes her head, as though she’s started the story at a bad angle. She purses her lips and tries again. “I was born Zada Khoury,” she says softly. “My mother was human. She had no idea that there was anything unusual about me, or that my father was Almiri. Even the Almiri didn’t know about me at first—my father, for his own reasons, chose to hide his indiscretion from his comrades. But when I was just about your age, the Almiri found out what I was and came for me.”

I know that my mom is telling me all this because she needs me to understand some things. And okay, yeah, I’m interested. How many times did I dream of having this very conversation with my mother—where she came from, and where she went? Only somehow, in my dreams, it went very,
very differently. I scratch Pontius a little harder behind the ears and do my best to listen.

“I had to run,” she says, “and hide. No matter where I went, the Almiri did their best to smoke me out. I was young, and terrified, and . . .” Her eyes drift to the distance, where she’s tossed the stone. “One day I woke up, and I decided it was time to start fighting back. I ferreted out more people like me, clusters of Enosi who had also been in hiding, and we learned to help one another. We started to organize. I knew it was exactly what I was meant to be doing. And then, well . . . then I met your father.” She picks up another ice pebble but doesn’t throw it, just studies it in her hand. “I thought I could go back to being human, I really did. I changed my name and tried to forget what I was. I suppose deep down I knew I couldn’t hide in plain sight forever. I always lived just on the edge of fear, worried they’d track me down sooner or later. But it was a lovely, lovely dream, being with your father, one I didn’t want to wake up from.” She looks up at the sky. “But when I discovered I was pregnant . . . well, I guess I thought there was a chance that if I wasn’t around, the Almiri wouldn’t ever find you. If you were just a little girl with a human father, they’d never . . . so I left.” She looks at me finally, staring so intently that it’s unnerving. “And I know you’d do exactly the same thing, Elvan, if you thought it would help
your
daughter.”

I close my eyes. Picture my precious baby. Would I do the same? Would I abandon my daughter in hopes of protecting her? Honestly, I’m not sure. What I
do
know is that I’m thoroughly tuckered out.

I’m about to tell my mother good night, that we’ll work
on Mother-Daughter Bonding Round Two tomorrow, but she beats me to the punch.

“I want you to end your relationship with that Almiri boy,” she tells me.

“
Excuse
me?” I say, practically choking on the last traces of my pemmican.

“I said that I want you—”

“I heard what you said,” I interrupt. “I’m just shocked you think it’s any of your business.” And
that
at least has her stunned enough that I manage to get out another sentence. “That Almiri boy’s
name
,” I tell her, “is Cole Archer. And maybe you had a good reason for leaving me and Dad. I believe that, really. But you
left
. And you can’t just expect that everything that happened while you were gone is yours to change.” I give Pontius one last pat, then rise to my feet. “I will see you in the morning,” I say.

Zee does not wish me good night.

Two minutes later I find myself with the others, slipped into our thermal bags—which are, for serious, crammed right up against each other. I listen to the breathing of my traveling companions slow as they nod off, one after the next, and I wonder how so much tension and awkwardness can fit into such a tiny tent. I squeeze my eyes closed, but sleep doesn’t come.

“Elvs,” Cole whispers softly into my ear as we snuggle much too closely. I guess he can’t sleep either. “Elvs?”

I shift my ear toward him so he knows I’m listening, but I don’t respond.

“It must be nice to have your mom back,” he whispers. “After all this time. Right?”

I think about Cole’s dream of driving to his mother’s home in Milwaukee with his imaginary family for Christmas. I think about how, thanks to the illness that took her life more than two years before I met Cole, that’s never going to happen. And suddenly I feel very guilty for the way I’ve behaved with my own mother. Not for her sake—but for his.

I close my eyes against the still-bright evening outside the tent, and do my utmost to settle into sleep.

•  •  •

I do not sleep well. I would toss and turn, except that there’s nowhere to toss and turn to. I can’t help wishing that now that my mother is finally in my life, I could find a way to make more of an effort to stop being such a raging asshat to her all the time. But then I do some more not-tossing-and-turning and wonder, Why isn’t
she
the one making the effort?

When I finally drift off, I have fitful dreams filled with the eerie thunder from the day of our arrival.

Crack-BOOM!

Crack-BOOM!

“Wake up!” comes the call, much too early. Someone is shaking me. “Elvs, wake up!” Cole. I must’ve slept more deeply than I thought.

“Cole?” I sit straight up, bringing the top half of my sleeping bag with me. Outside the tent I can here Oates shouting and the dogs howling. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Cole says, “but Oates is freaked out. We have to move now.”

Cole looks sufficiently freaked himself, inspiring me to jump straight out of my sleeping bag and into my boots and
thermal. I’m pulling the last boot on, the thermal dangling off one arm, as I come hopping out of the tent. And that’s when I see it. The meter-wide hole in the ice, just at the edge of the dogs’ tarp.

“Oates!” I shriek. “What happened? What’s going on?”

“Stop standing around, girl, and grab the gear!” he shouts at me. There is another thunderclap.

CRACK-BOOM!

“A storm?” I ask, still fuzzy. The dogs are going apeshit, and Oates has a hell of a time getting them into their harnesses.

“That’s no storm,” Oates says as he wrestles with the dogs. And that’s when I do a head count. Two sleds but only eleven dogs.

Oh God, I think, as I look back at the hole in the ice, the black water sloshing around beneath it.

Pontius is gone.

“Move your ass! Move!” Oates shouts at no one in particular. He’s strapping the remaining dogs into their harnesses, while Dad and Cole frantically pack all our gear onto the sleds. Bernard and Zee, meanwhile, are whipping the tent poles out of the ice so quickly, they nearly spear me several times.

“Leave that!” Oates says as I move to help dismantling the tent. “The food and the heating gear only!”

“Leave the tent?” I ask, incredulous. What the hell is going on? “But what are we supposed to use for—”

I’m cut off by another incredibly loud
CRACK-BOOM!
Only this time I don’t merely hear it. I feel it.

In the ice.

“Leave it all!” Oates shouts. “Get on the sleds!”

Booming ice seems to be all the incentive we need. Each of us instantly drops what we’re doing and jumps aboard the sleds, me with Dad and Cole, Zee and Bernard with Oates.
Oates and Cole frantically urge on the dogs, and we take off. There’s another
CRACK-BOOM!
which jolts the entire sled. The runners bounce up several centimeters off the ice and slam back down with a
thud
. But the dogs keep running, like creatures possessed. I may not have any idea what exactly it is we’re running from, but those dogs sure seem to.

“Is the ice breaking apart?” I shout at my dad over the chaos. “I thought you guys said it couldn’t do that!” I look behind me, and sure enough, the ice is breaking away. But there’s something . . .
else
there too.

“What the hell is that?” I scream. Back at the campsite something beneath the ice pushes through to the surface. It’s dark and smooth, glistening with beads of water rolling down its sleek shape. The ice around it disintegrates, and our tent and all the supplies we were forced to leave behind plunge into the black water.

The dogs yelp and skitter on, running ever faster.

“Is that a
submarine
?” I holler. Holy shit. Of all the ways I imagined the Jin’Kai might track me down, this wasn’t one of them.

But then the shadowy form turns sideways in the water. And although I’m not super up to speed on my maritime craft, even I know that submarines don’t have
eyes
. For a second one large black eye meets mine, and then in a flash the creature dives deep into the murky depths of the ocean again.

What. Duh.
Fuh.

Dad hollers something at me, but I lose it in the wind. We’re whipping along far faster than we’ve gone before, the dogs tugging the sleds forward until it seems their harnesses might snap.
Cole urges the dogs even faster, trying to keep pace with Oates beside us. The
CRACK-BOOM!
s are beginning again, closer together now, sometimes overlapping. The ice all around us trembles and cracks. I look down and see a dark shadow racing along after us under the ice.

Hunting us.

One jolt hits directly beneath us, and again the entire sled lifts into the air and slams back down with a smash.

Whatever the hell is underneath us, it means business.

I twist around in my seat to grab at a box of protein gel just before it tumbles to the ice. What few supplies we’d managed to secure are dropping quickly away, sinking down into the newly forming cracks around us.

Suddenly Oates veers away from us, breaking hard to the right. He’s shouting something to us, but again, I can’t hear it over the cacophony of creaking ice, barking dogs, and wind. He’s pointing to his left, directly ahead of us. I turn to look. In front of us the ice is groaning and breaking free as something pushes through from below.

“Cole!” I scream. He’s got his head down to keep the wind out of his eyes, and he doesn’t seem to hear me, so I slap him on the back. Just in time he looks up and sees where I’m pointing.

We veer to the left with exactly enough of a head start to avoid the
giant black torpedo shooting through the ice
, in the exact spot we would be now had we not abruptly shifted course. A spray of water and ice shards rains down on us. The enormous black creature twists and turns, giving us a view of what look to be two small wings and a white underbelly.

No, not wings.

Fins.

A
colossal killer whale
is trying to murder us. Seriously, my life would be less weird if we were actually being chased by aliens.

The whale crashes down on the surface of the ice, shattering the crust and parting the water in a tremendous splash. Our sled rocks with the wave, but thankfully we manage to avoid getting blasted to smithereens. This time.

There is one moment, before the beast submerges himself again, when I swear to goodness he looks directly at me with his enormous round black eye. And it’s like I can read his thoughts, exactly what he’s thinking in that moment. He doesn’t see humans, or Almiri, or hybrids.

He sees meat.

The creature dives into the sea again. His huge tail rises up and slaps the side of our sled with a mighty
thwack
. The sled pitches over on its side, and we have no choice but to dive off as it flips and crashes down. My momentum sends me skidding on my stomach over the smooth surface for several meters. I spin around to see the dogs dragging the overturned sled away from us. Their harnesses scrape between the ice and the sled for several seconds and then snap free, sending the dogs skittering in six different directions across the ice. Dad and Cole run up beside me and lift me off the ground.

“Come on, Elvie!” Dad shouts. “To Oates.”

Oates is at least fifty meters away but has circled around and is heading back our way to retrieve us. But between us lies the large rift of icy seawater where the whale broke through. As we run toward Oates at an angle to circumvent the hole, the whale pops up again, his massive head bobbing almost
playfully on the surface. He stares straight at us, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say the shitbag was
smiling
.

Smiling with rows of enormous, sharp-ass teeth.