Read Online Darkside Sun by Jocelyn Adams - Free Book Online Page B

of hair dye had exploded on her head.
    The words “delicate” and “dainty” came to mind when I looked at her. Her pale blue eyes seemed large on her face, skin flawless and perfect as a porcelain doll’s. Her high cheekbones sported circles of pink as if she’d overheated in her long-sleeved baby blue T-shirt, and her lips were glossed peach. Pretty and, to my mind, completely harmless. So why were my shoulders suddenly tight and the hairs on my nape standing on end? And why would I think a complete stranger would be anything but harmless?
    “Where am I?” I asked through the gravel in my throat. “Who are you?” I tried to sit up. My stomach rolled. I lay back down, arm thrown over my eyes until the world stopped swinging me around by the heels. Squinting up at her beneath my arm shield, I asked, “And why do I feel like hurling?”
    “I’m Sophia,” she said with a smile. Even her name was delicate. “It’ll take a little while for your body to adjust to being this deep within the Shift. Most of us pass out and hurl our first time, so don’t be embarrassed.”
    The what? “Asher had mentioned the Shift like it should be in all caps or something. Is that the whole beating heart thing I’ve been feeling? It happened right before I blacked out. What is this Shift thing, and why am I in it?”
    “Asher said our founder created hundreds of layers of alternate realities to confuse and deter the wraiths from the real one, to keep the guardians safe while we hunt and protect the mortals as much as possible. We call those layers the Shift. None of the false layers have people in them, just buildings and regular terrain and stuff. Time also moves differently here, for those of us who don’t know how to travel through the layers properly. Only the sentinels and a few soldiers can call and travel through the Shift without getting hopelessly lost. The rest of us depend on others to transport us around.”
    “Guardians?” I asked.
    “Oh, it’s just a term we use for those within the Machine, forgetting position and rank.”
    I nodded, considering all she’d said. If this Shift thing was meant to protect us against invasion by the dead, it clearly wasn’t working, not that I really comprehended what she described. How could someone create other realities? It sounded too Twilight Zone to me. Even so, some wraiths still came through.
    Like in the AL.
    Like in my room.
    An echo of a gunshot rang in my head. Asher’s empty eyes staring at me. “Welcome to your life, guardian.”
    I scrambled away from Sophia and off the bed I’d been lying on. I had just enough time to grab a trash can in the corner before retching into it. How much time had passed? Hours? Days? How could time move differently in here?
    Sophia came from behind me, holding back the hair that had fallen out of my braid. When I finished, she handed me another cool cloth, and I wiped my mouth. “Asher hasn’t told me what happened, because he doesn’t tell us mere grunts anything, but I guess you just remembered why he brought you here, huh?” Bitterness spilled out of her with the words.
    He wanted to make me one of them, a sentinel of the Mortal Machine. “So it’s true. It all happened. For a second there, I hoped … I thought maybe I just dreamed it.” I turned and propped my back along a wall painted off-white.
    Everything in the room fuzzed at the edges like a fifties-era television—not unraveling, just out of focus. Was that because it wasn’t real, a false reality within the Shift? The small bed to my right had nothing but white cotton sheets and a pillow on it. Other beds dotted the room, all identical with perfectly tucked corners. That would be the way Asher would make his bed, so you could bounce a coin off the sheets. But mine appeared to have been ravaged by a wild animal. The room smelled of medicine and antiseptic. It all seemed real enough to me.
    “Is this some sort of Mortal Machine infirmary?” I asked.
    She smiled,