Shifting Fates Read Online Free

suit. They bound ahead and I follow slowly, the rations packages feeling light as air now that I am close to home. Lily is already tapping out the secret knock, and the door opens from inside where Nim must be waiting for us.
    When I walk through the door and see what they’ve done, I gasp.
    “Do you like it?” Kit says, skipping back and pulling me by the hand. I swear, the only reason she shifts into human form is because she can’t drag me around any other way.
    “I love it,” I say, letting her tug me forward. Tears well in my eyes and I have to struggle to keep from crying. I let the rations packages fall to the ground. “I love it, Kit. I really do.”
    The entrance to our den, once you get past the door, is a circular grate that used to let excess drainage flow through the subway system. The kids have strung lights all through the iron grating, from the floor to the ceiling, and covered them so that they shine in different colors. It’s glowing through the entire tunnel. It looks beautiful. It looks…
    “It looks like Christmas,” I whisper.
    I walk forward to get a better look. The bulbs are an eclectic collection of lights, some big, some small. There is a double set of lights that I see came from one of Logan’s old toys, an electric truck. He must have taken the headlights off.
    Some of the bulbs have been covered with old wrappers - a pink Pepto-Bismol plastic bag, a green bottle. All of the colors twinkle and shine in the darkness of the abandoned drain tunnel. The lights themselves are strung together with copper wire wrapped in straws, hooked up to the generator.
    “You wired all this, Logan?”
    The bobcat twin is already getting dressed, pulling on his jeans quickly over his underwear.
    “Yep,” he says sheepishly. “I know it’s kind of not the best present to make you go out to get the wires, but…”
    “It’s beautiful. Who decorated the lights?”
    “Me! Me!” Kit squeals, tugging an oversized sweater over her bare limbs. “Me and Lily watched to make sure I did it all right! And Nim went out to find more light bulbs that work!”
    “Oh?” I arch one eyebrow over at Nim. “That so?”
    Nimrah is leaning against the wall in a leather jacket he found down on one of the subway platforms, too cool for his own good.
    He remembers the war. He was young, but he remembers. I can never keep him underground, even though we’re not safe to roam the streets here. The soldiers could always be just around the corner.
    We try to be quiet when the soldiers are above us. Patrols come overhead all the time, but Logan has set us up a little lamp and a system of grocery store sensors so that whenever anyone ventures near either entrance - the tunnel or the ladder - the lamp flashes. It’s ingenious. I wonder, not for the first time, if Logan might have been a scientist or an engineer in this lifetime were it not for the disease that has made us all monsters. His future after the bomb struck was circumscribed by the arc surrounding the whole of New York City.
    Strange. I always thought of New York City as a big place, but now that it’s emptied out it seems so small.
    “You like it, right?” Nim says, pushing off of the brick wall. His hair is black, his eyes black. Unlike the rest of us, he seems meant to live in darkness. I have to remind myself that he’s a child still. Just a teenager.
    “I love it.”
    “I thought it would remind you of Christmas, maybe.” He affects nonchalance, but I can tell that under his practiced words there’s a current of nervousness. He wants to please me. All the kids do, but he’s older than the rest, and he’s beginning to get more familiar than familial when I’m around. I don’t know what to do about his crush on me, whether to squelch it or let it run its course. Or to wait.
    “It’s wonderful,” I say. “Very Christmassy.”
    I give him a hug. A motherly hug. His arms squeeze around mine, holding on for a split second too long. The warm pressure