Cloudy With a Chance of Dropbears: A City Between Novellette (The City Between) Read online

  Oh. It wanted a boost. “I can get you to the first branch of that tree,” I said. On the side that wasn’t road and gravel, the trees surrounded the playground and overhung it; at least one of those branches should be caught in the same bubble as us.

  And if the kid was right—who was I kidding? Of course it was right. There’s nothing so snooty and self-confident as an intelligent fae. And they all think they’re intelligent.

  “Should I climb on your shoulders, or—”

  “No!”

  “Oh. Well, how am I going to—”

  “Turn arou—” I snapped, slapping at the containment spell to see exactly where it was. And that was as far as I got. Something raw and strong and magical threw me across the playground the instant I touched fae magic. I hit the tree house, though it felt more like the tree house hit me, and for a very long, dusty, grassy time, I whimpered up at the sky.

  There was the sound of running footsteps, and a voice yelled, “Five! Five, are you okay?”

  I considered whimpering again, but the kid might have heard me. “No, I’m not okay!”

  “Right,” said the kid. Its face appeared above me, then wiry arms tugged at me until I could sit up. “Yeah. Um, can you stand up?”

  “No!” I snarled, and stood up a bit hazily. I’d been winded, and that was as bad as it was, but there was no way I was going say that after the fuss I’d made. “If I’ve broken anything—!”

  The kid was grinning again. Guess I’d underestimated how much it knew about injuries. “Look on the bright side,” it said. “At least your peg leg isn’t broken.”

  “With all this gold-perishing sunlight there’s no other way to look at things,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah, the hole in the ozone layer is right above us,” the kid said cheerfully. “Wanna try again?”

  “No!” There was a pause before I said grudgingly, “Yes. But I have to pee first. Another impact like that and the grass’ll think the rains have come to this gold-perishingly barren place.”

  There was a barely stifled laugh from the kid, but it said, “Wouldn’t do that f’I were you.”

  “What? Why can’t I pee?”

  “It’s not that you can’t,” the kid said, “but there was a redback on the toilet seat in the loo yesterday, and I don’t know where it went.”

  “What’s a redback?”

  “Spider. Pretty deadly.”

  “Either it’s deadly or it isn’t.”

  The kid considered that. “Then I s’pose it depends on how quickly you get to the hospital, and if they have the stuff to treat it.”

  “I don’t have to sit.”

  “I didn’t say it lives under the loo seat; that’s just where I saw it last. I was moving pretty quick then, so I didn’t see where it went after that. And I think it got touched by Between a bit, so it might be bigger than usual.”

  “Is everything here trying to kill me?”

  “Not everything,” said the kid. Its eyes, which had been looking around curiously at something I hadn’t seen, widened. “Oh. But those might be.”

  There were so many trees out there, all green and brown from the heat, that I didn’t see the perishers until the kid pointed them out. About four or five very big bears surrounded the playground from every direction that contained trees, their greyish pelts blending into the branches they clung to with long, sharp claws, their eyes black and glittering in the shadowy foliage. They were each the size of a decently grown polar bear, and as they made their way toward us through the branches, the tree branches shook as if in an impossibly high wind.

  “What are those? What are those!?” My voice cracked. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened.

  “I think they’re dropbears,” the kid said thoughtfully. “It’s weird. They shouldn’t exist.”

  “Dropbears?” I said feebly. “What are dropbears?”

  Whatever else they were, they were definitely Between creatures; chimeras made of possibility, magic, and malice.

  “Kind of like really mean, really big koalas,” the kid said. It was looking less thoughtful and more alarmed as the dropbears shuddered closer through the trees. “They drop from trees and tear you to bloody pieces. They weren’t—I mean, they don’t exist. They’re a thing that was made up for TV ads. They’re not a thing that properly comes from Between.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped desperately that when I opened them, the dropbears would have disappeared. They hadn’t.

  I said, “They do now.”

  But wait. We weren’t Between—we were firmly in the human world. How in the woody green were Between-magicked dropbears approaching from the human world?

  “How?” I panted, mopping more sweat from my brow than I’d thought possible for my body to contain in its entirety. “We’re not Between! They shouldn’t be here!”

  “Yeah,” said the kid. “That’s what I thought. That’s why I said we’re Between, even though it doesn’t feel quite the same. Zero isn’t here, so I thought I’d wait and see what happened, but then you arrived so I s’pose we should try to do something about it.”

  “They’ve been there all along!?”

  “Mostly,” the kid said. “They didn’t start coming closer until you started flying around, though.”

  “I wasn’t flying around! I was suffering blowback from your stupid—”

  “I don’t think you can really blame that on me,” the kid said seriously. “It was the containment thingie. I’m not magical or anything.”

  “It’s Other. You say you’re not Other.”

  “Yeah. So you can’t blame that on me, can you?”

  “Well, it was your idea!” I said nastily. “I don’t go around getting close to Other spells for no reason. I suppose you think I just threw myself in the air for the fun of it!”

  “I thought it was pretty funny,” the kid muttered, but when I snarled “What?” at it, it cleared its throat and tried to look innocent. “Nothing.”

  “See how funny you find it all when the dropbears get to us,” I told it.

  “Wait, though,” said the kid uncertainly. “The spell should stop them too, shouldn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t count on it,” I said sourly. Of all the ways to go! I’d survived the 3rd war, even if my right leg hadn’t, and now I was about to be sent off by a pack of dropbears. Mind you, the dropbears were in the trees; they were still approaching, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think they might not be clever enough to try and go over the spell.

  Only they never did drop from the trees; they kept lumbering through the foliage in a storm of shaking until they were well past the tree we’d been trying to boost each other into.

  “Oh,” said the kid. “Reckon they figured out the spell, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We should try to get out again,” said the kid.

  It was clearer toward the front of the playground that faced the road, so we legged it toward that part. There was only one tree there, but before we got to its trunk the spell set us hurrying back toward the treehouse again.

  “Reckon the treehouse is the centre of the spell,” the kid panted, when we’d righted ourselves again. “Look, we can reach that branch, though. You ready to try again?”

  I wasn’t, but I said, “Yeah,” anyway. What else could we do?

  “Maybe I should try boosting you this time,” the kid said.

  “Yeah.” I wouldn’t have suggested it myself because I’m not a coward, but since it had suggested the idea itself… “That’ll work.”

  And it worked. Oh boy, did it work. The idea had been to give me a gentle boost and circumvent whatever gold-perished magic some Behindkind had put on the inside of the spell.

  It gave me a boost, all right. We couldn’t make sure exactly where the Behindkind magic was without touching it, but it sure knew where we were. The kid boosted, I hit the magic, and with that magic behind it, the boost sent me sailing further into the air than the first jolt had done. I flew back o
ver the playground, grass and trees a brown-and-green blur around me. There was a bigger blur of brown for just long enough for me to realise that I was going to hit the tree house headfirst this time, then I was stuck like a cork in a bottle.

  And there I was, somewhere in Australia, human-world side, head and shoulders in a tree with my rear exposed to the elements and the dropbears thudding to the grass all around me.

  “Better wriggle!” yelled the kid. “They’re in!”

  I wriggled. I wriggled harder than I’d done since I was hatched, a crawling feeling running up and down the leg I didn’t have any more, warning that my other leg was about to be bitten off. A scratching lower in the tree house made me stop short, unsure whether it was safer in or out, but then the kid popped up from a small hole in the floor and grabbed my arms.

  There was another brief moment where I felt like a cork in a bottle before I exploded inward. The kid yelped as I head-butted its stomach but hauled me to my feet without retaliating.

  “Couldn’t wedge the door shut,” it gasped. “It’s too small for them to get in that way, anyway. Wouldn’t count on the treehouse being strong enough to stop ’em if they really want us, though.”

  I poked my head out of the round window for another look at the dropbears. “They want us,” I said grimly. All five of them were sniffing around the base of the treehouse. They didn’t look too bright, but they didn’t have to be to get us.

  “I reckon it’s a trap,” the kid said. “They were out there, but they didn’t get interested until you got here.”

  “It’s not a trap,” I said. “It’s insurance.”

  “Insurance for what?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “It is my business! They want to eat me! Well, I suppose it’s you they want to eat, actually, but I don’t think they’ll stop at you.”

  “No, it’s you they want,” I said, without thinking.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” said the kid, “but that doesn’t make much sense. They only tried to come in after you got here.”

  “It can’t be me they’re after,” I said. “I’ve been given a task to do and I can’t do it if I’m dead.”

  “Then what am I here for?”

  “To die,” I said, and it wasn’t wrong.

  “I wonder if Zero and Athelas know about this?” the kid said.

  It looked pretty comfortable for someone who was about to be eaten by dropbears. Was it expecting me to do something, or was it still waiting for that Zero it kept talking about? Trustful didn’t even cover this kid.

  “We came here a couple days ago because the locals have been hearing weird stuff and seeing lights at night; that sort of thing.”

  “So I’m not the first to arrive here,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there was something about the kid’s trustful face that made it easy to talk more than I should. “There have been other Behindkind sent here.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I reckon. And people have been disappearing.”

  “Humans disappearing?”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah. A fair few of ’em, too. Locals, tourists, seasonal workers; doesn’t seem to matter who. I reckon the dropbears must have been getting ’em, but why are there dropbears here?”

  Humans disappearing in a particular spot? Now that was a pattern I was familiar with, and it was a pattern that didn’t involve dropbears. The dropbears were part of something else altogether, but this—this place was a human resources source. Not human-made or human-sourced resources like coffee. Human resources. A stock supply of humans.

  And that meant that Allied Traders was a human stock mill.

  I grinned. “Now I’m getting somewhere!” I said, satisfaction thick in my voice. It’s not like a human stock mill is illegal, so to speak. But there are some very specific rules about how the humans can be used, consent, and the safe disposal of them once they’re through their indentures. Behind likes to stay a secret.

  “What?” asked the kid, its voice quick and indignant. “What did you just figure out?”

  “I know why your humans have been disappearing.” Now, just how much could I tell it without it figuring out I’d been sent to kill it? “Someone Behind is stealing humans to sell.”

  “We’ll see about that!” said the kid, with a martial light to its eyes. “Just wait until I tell Zero about this! Someone is going to be really sorry!”

  “No one is going to be sorry,” I snapped, “except us! They’re going to get away scott free because we’re going to die. There are still dropbears out there and we’re still in here. They only have to wait. Or break the tree down.”

  The kid made a piffle kind of noise, which was annoying because this wasn’t the situation in which anyone should be making a piffle noise.

  “We’re properly Between now,” it said. It was grinning; a tough, sideways sort of grin that was directly at odds with the usual trustful look to its face. “The dropbears brought it with them; can’t you feel it?”

  I scowled at it, because now that it had said so, I could sense it. “What’s it to you whether we’re Between, Behind, or human world?”

  “That’s the thing.” It was still grinning. “Between likes me.”

  “It likes—Between doesn’t like people.”

  “Yeah, well, I can do stuff here.”

  That settled it; the kid was wrong in the head. Humans couldn’t access Between, and they certainly couldn’t do things Between.

  “Don’t believe me?”

  “Nope,” I said, and looked out the window again. One of the dropbears slapped a paw against the tree house and the whole thing shuddered, us with it.

  “Okay,” said the kid, and pulled a sword out of thin air. No, it was an umbrella that looked like a sword. And now it looked like a sword again.

  I blinked hard. It was a sword, but it hadn’t always been a sword—or rather, here in the human world it was just the tattered remains of an old umbrella that someone had left in the treehouse on a rainy day. Behind, it had always been a sword. Between, depending on how you saw it, it could be a sword or it could be an umbrella.

  I was definitely having trouble seeing. “Gold perish it!” I snarled. “Who taught you how to do that?”

  “JinYeong,” said the kid, admiring the sword. It looked pretty pleased with itself, and I didn’t much blame it; pulling something out of Between is meant to be impossible for a human. Even for a Behinder, pulling a sword Between isn’t the easiest thing in the world. “But Zero was the one who showed me how to see it properly. I’ve been practising pretty hard lately. Lucky, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a dry throat.

  “Want something?”

  “Yeah.”

  The kid looked around doubtfully. There wasn’t a lot to choose from in the tree house; the umbrella was the biggest, sharpest thing in there. Apart from that, there were crumpled little canisters of what looked like thin metal, a few woolly bits of string, something whippy and wooden that could have been for supporting plants, and an assortment of sharp little things that were a mix of glass, metal, and wood.

  The kid didn’t look worried. “You have this one,” it said, passing me the sword.

  Kill the kid, said the words burned across my mind, and you can come back.

  “I don’t want it!” I snapped. “Gold perish it, do I look like my arms are long enough for that thing?”

  “And there’s your leg,” the kid said. It was a bit pinker than it had been, though I wasn’t sure why. “I didn’t think about that. Sorry. How are you at archery?”

  “All right,” I said, hunching my shoulders. “And I’ll thank you to remember that I can still cut a pretty pace with my peg leg!”

  “Oh good!” the kid said, and picked up the whippy piece of wood and the longest piece of string. By the time the light of the window fell on them, they weren’t plain wood and string any longer; they were a neat little recurve bow and bowstring. “Can you string it? I can’t ever get them to
bend back enough.”

  I took it and strung it in two seconds flat. I might have been trying to prove my mettle, but it was a good thing; the whole tree house shook again a moment after. The kid, who was reaching out to snap off old, dried twigs from the outside of the treehouse, nearly fell out the window. I grabbed it by the belt—why did I do that? I didn’t have to do that—and after a furious bout of wriggling it came back in, brandishing six arrows at me.

  “Enough?”

  “Maybe,” I said. That left me one bad shot, which in normal circumstances would be enough. This wasn’t normal circumstances—but then, nothing in war was ever normal, either, and I’d survived that. “Not if they get in here first.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said the kid. “You all right by yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t want to waste the sword.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  “A bit,” said the kid. “Ish. Zero hasn’t finished my training yet, and I usually have a couple of lighter ones instead of a big one.”

  “If you can’t string a recurve, you can’t hack down that lot with a sword,” I said. It had been a while since I’d seen combat, but I still knew that much.

  “Just as well you’re gonna be up here shooting them, then; isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Just make sure you shoot all of ’em so I don’t have to do too much work.” This time, it sounded like the kid was trying to be cheerful. “I mean, someone’s gotta get ’em away from the base; it’s not like you can shoot them at this angle. And maybe Zero will come soon. I don’t think he’ll leave me here.”

  “No use thinking about someone who isn’t here,” I said. “We’re alone until we kill those bears and get over the spell.”

  “If I get ’em away from the base, reckon you’ve got a good shot?”

  “Get ’em away from the base of the tree and I’ll shoot every gold-perishing son of ’em,” I said grimly. The kid was right: close range was good, but that angle was too tight.

  “All right,” said the kid, and vanished.

  “Green and gold!” I swore. I hadn’t expected it to go that quickly. I’d expected a bit more hesitation, a bit more whining—maybe a few tears.