Astral Tide (The Otherborn Series) by Anna Silver Read Free Book Online Page A

three of you.”
    Kim looked stung.
    “You’re just as bad as they are,” she told him. “All any of you do half the time is mope around and whine about the Tycoons and how powerless you are. It’s crap! All of it. I lost someone, too. Someone I really loved. My brother is gone and I could be blaming you, but instead I’m here, trying my damnedest to make sure his death wasn’t in vain. Instead of crying over who lost what, we should all be figuring out what the hell the Tycoons are up to and what their next move—and ours—is going to be. Hantu’s right, you know. You’re all just stalling.” She finished by crossing her arms with a big huff.
    “He said that?” Kim asked.
    “Yes, he did.” Tora bit at her nail.
    “It’s pretty much what he told me, too,” London said.
    “He’s right,” Zen agreed. “We’ve been running when we should have been fighting.”
    London wrapped her arms around herself. Seven months and they’d never once gone back to see if Rye was maybe still alive. They weren’t any closer today than they were the night they left New Eden. All they had to show for themselves were a few dreaming Outroaders and London’s uncanny knack for warping the Astral when she was there.
    “I can’t believe he said that.” Kim’s brown eyes were wide. He rubbed at the Trigram tattoo his parents put on his wrist when he was young. It marked him a pure blood—Korean through and through. “Bugger.”
    “Don’t start that again,” London warned. Kim spent the better half of his adolescence speaking in a fake British accent as some kind of rebellion against his parents’ obsession with being Korean.
    He grinned at her. “No worries…mate.”
    London started laughing. “You’re so confused.”
    “Tell me about it,” Tora chimed in.
    “Okay,” London said, getting serious. “Bullshit aside. Tell us what Hantu said about the dreamers. We need to know this.” She shifted the truck back into
D
and began rolling down the pavement again, picking up speed.
    “It’s like the saying goes:
if you can’t beat ‘em, join’em.
This is all conjecture, mind you, but our best guess is that once they realized the dreaming was spreading, they decided to change tactics and utilize it as a new resource under their control. I guess Avery has impressed them with her skills. It appears they’re taking the dreamers in, though for what purpose, we can’t say. Possibly using them to develop new technology, art, intelligence, or whatever they can get from them. In any case, they’re quarantining the problem, so to speak. By removing the dreamers from the Outroader population, they’re hoping to keep it under control.”
    “Like a factory of
New
,” London said. New was a dirty word behind the walls, even among most of the Outroaders. Creativity died with the dreaming. London knew she was taking a risk when she wrote her first song last year and played it for Pauly. He did too and he tried to warn her. In the end, it had gotten him killed.
She
had. Apparently the only place the Tycoons tolerated New was in their personal settlement, New Eden.
    “That’s horrible,” Zen said. “Slavery? You really think so?”
    “We were all slaves, anyway. Think about it,” London replied.
    “I guess, but still. I feel like we set those Outroaders up to be taken in. At least they’d had some kind of freedom before—”
    “Before we came?” London asked.
    “Exactly.” Zen’s jaw clenched. “This sucks. We didn’t sacrifice everything just to end up another weapon in the Tycoon’s arsenal.”
    London knew he was talking about Avery as much as anything or anyone else.
    Zen rubbed his large hands over his face and peered out the window. “You better slow down. I think that right turn is coming up. We’re nearing the Ag District.”
    “Okay,” London said, letting up some pressure on the gas pedal.
    “It’s so much faster if we cut through,” Kim said. He and Zen had been arguing about this all