Vagabonds

Chapter Fifty-Three: Already in Motion

"Holy hell...."

Tori's exhaled words echoed through the cavernous space. The room was two stories tall at least, broken in the middle by a stretching pillar of machinery, even more impressive upon closer inspection. Encased in giant screens filled with scrolling numbers, it was a monstrosity of wires and blinking lights, broken by rows of test tubes sticking out of wide panels that looked like airplane controls. Tori took a stumbling step inside, only to realize that she was nauseatingly close to the edge of the gangplank, nothing but air standing between her and a long, lethal drop to the tile floor below.

She felt the scientist shift next to her.

"Don't move," Tori said, pointing the gun at him without turning.

"Don't be stupid, you're stuck here," the man said. "You don't even know how to use this machine. What are you going to do?"

Now Tori faced him, lifting her eyebrows as she advanced on the short, balding man.

"I don't plan to do anything." She pressed the Glock to his forehead. "You're going to help him get inside the system."

"I-I d-don't know if I-I—"

"Just do it, Tero."

Standing behind them, Tori watched as the scientist grudgingly unlocked the nearest monitor, Tero hovering by his shoulder. Looking at the two bodies felt like an encapsulation of the whole night. Worlds colliding. Human and....

What was Tero?

What was Otto?

Tori shook her head. She could hear gunshots echoing from the hall outside, hear the crackle of Otto's electricity, the shrieks of men and women waking up to the effects of his slime.

It had been like pulling teeth, getting Otto to admit what his shimmering skin did. Tori had pushed, cajoled, prodded. It had become a joke between them in the quiet moments in the cavern, watching Aquila lead and Tero plan and Eliza worry. Tori had wanted to know more about him. She'd thought of her herself as particularly interested in people — in fact, she sort of preferred not to deal with them at all. But Otto was different. Otto was fascinating. Beneath the bravado and profanities was a young man unlike any Tori had ever met. He was rabidly defensive and vulgar, yet soft. Polite in his own strange way. Happy to curse around her, but also the first to pull out a chair or offer his help. And where the others saw simple aggression, Tori, who had grown up around brusque, gruff men, saw hidden depths.

Otto was more than he appeared.

She'd wanted to know everything about him.

But when he'd finally told her the truth, she'd gone pale.

The iridescent layer on Otto's skin was a venom. From a platypus, Otto said. Tori had almost laughed. Almost. Until he described what it did. Whenever his venom touched someone else's skin, his victim would become paralyzed. Their muscles would go slack. And then every pain receptor in the afflicted area would be activated, jacked up to the most intolerable degree. Otto had ducked his head, white-blonde hair quivering, as he described the first time he'd accidentally poisoned one of his brothers with it. He'd been thirteen, already accustomed to the strange coating of opalescence that he'd been born with. But something changed. The chemical component of the substance altered abruptly, almost overnight. And then one day, when Moose pushed too far and Otto tackled him to the floor, their fight was broken by Moose going terrifyingly still. Limbs freezing. Muscles twitching.

And then, Otto had been forced to watch his brother scream.

After that, the Vagabonds had figured out the hard way that you don't wrestle with Otto unless there's antivenom nearby.