Borderlands (The Dreams of Reality Book 5)

by Gareth Otton

  “So what, we just let the Children of ADaM claim these attacks and America gets away with it?”

  “No, we need to prove the connection. Working with Lizzie might not be a bad move on this one,” Norman admitted. “We just need to be smart about how we do it. In the meantime, we need Mitena to ward up more buildings. Her new dreamcatchers worked perfectly and we need to get more places—”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Ryan interrupted. “They worked tonight. But nowhere else tried the same tactics that were used on Tad’s house. A bit of creative thought would be all that’s needed to get round the limitations of dreamcatchers.”

  “So why didn’t they attack in the same way elsewhere?” Norman asked.

  “Because maybe they weren’t all meant to succeed,” Stella guessed. She could tell by the look on Ryan’s face that she guessed right.

  “In a war, you don’t show your true strength right from the opening skirmishes. You feel out the other side, lay false information, and set your enemy up to underestimate you,” Ryan said.

  “It seems like a wasted opportunity,” Norman pointed out, earning a glare from Tad. Again Stella couldn’t wait for this meeting to end. Tad was taking these comments too personally.

  “Not if the attacks succeeding weren’t the purpose of tonight,” Ryan said. “Not if they were just a diversion.”

  “Diversion?” Norman asked. “Diversion for what?”

  Ryan didn’t shrug, but he didn’t answer either. Instead he stared back at the Prime Minister with an expression that said, You figure it out.

  “Whatever the case, can we use tonight to finally get buy in for this war?” Tad asked. “Will those useless arseholes finally see what’s right in front of their face and—”

  Yet again Stella needed to squeeze Tad’s hand to reign him in, and Norman was quick to fill the silence.

  “Probably not,” he said, referring to the holdouts within his government who didn’t believe there was a war coming, but thought Norman was trying to divert attention away from his emergence as a dreamwalker. “With the Children of ADaM claiming these attacks, they still won’t believe. Maybe before they found out about me, I might have been able to convince them, but now…”

  He left the thought hanging and Tad tensed up to pounce on the lull in the conversation when the door to Stella’s office burst open and Denise rushed in, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

  “Tad, Jen needs you, quick.”

  Tad didn’t hesitate. Still holding his hand, Stella was taken along for the ride. One minute she was looking at her assistant, the next she was staring at the walls of the break room as a gut wrenching nausea washed through her.

  “…need Dr Burman, dad. I can’t handle this on my own.”

  Stella blinked as her dizziness passed and the sounds of the world faded back into focus. She turned towards Jen’s voice and sucked in a sharp breath at what she found.

  “I’ll get him,” Tad said, again not hesitating in the slightest before he vanished with a pop, revealing the bloody figures standing around the little girl.

  Leon stood alone looking lost, blood covering his t-shirt, jeans and arms. But that was nothing compared to the young woman laid out on the table in front of him. At first she was unrecognisable to Stella. Her skin was ashen, there were dark marks on her face from where her makeup had run, and her blouse was so saturated with sticky wet blood that Stella couldn’t tell what the original colour was.

  “Lizzie,” Stella gasped.

  Not only did Lizzie not look up upon hearing her name, she didn’t so much as flinch. Judging by her unnatural stillness, Stella worried she was already dead.

  “Why isn’t she in the hospital?” she asked Leon. Although he was also covered in blood, her talents informed her he wasn’t hurt.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Leon admitted. “I panicked and here was the first place I thought of.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? We should get her to a hospital now.”

  Leon was about to answer, but there was a pop announcing Tad’s return. He had a sleepy looking Dr Burman with him. The poor man was dressed in checked pyjamas and his hair greying hair was a tangled mess. The bags under his eyes and the startled expression on his face made Stella think Tad had kidnapped him from his bed.

  “Dr B. Thank god, I don’t know what to do with this.”

  Dr Burman’s eyes spun towards Jen at the obvious panic in her voice, and they widened when they saw Lizzie.

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” he said to Tad, before stepping forward to look at the woman on the table.

  “What do I do?” Jen asked again, her voice wobbling like she might break into tears. Jen’s skin was ashen and her fingers trembled along with her lower lip. Stella’s heart went out to her. After the night she’d just endured, this would be too much for anyone, let alone a thirteen-year-old girl.

  “We need to get her to a hospital,” Stella said before Dr Burman could answer, wondering why everyone was missing this obvious fact.

  “No.” Though he was the last person Stella expected to disagree, it was Dr Burman who shot her idea down. “Jen can do more for her than an emergency room.”

  Despite the seriousness of his message, his tone was calm and his eyes never strayed from Jen for a second, making it clear to whom he was talking to.

  “This is what we’ve been practicing for. Remember everything we’ve been through and we’ll be fine.”

  “But those wounds go so deep. There could be internal damage and I don’t know—”

  “Forget that,” Dr Burman said. “Remember, that’s not your job. We talked about this, you’re not a surgeon right now, you’re a battlefield medic. So what’s your job?”

  “Make sure that the patient survives long enough to get her more help?” Jen said, her voice growing stronger as she repeated what was obviously a well learnt lesson.

  Stella glanced at Tad, and found her surprise mirrored on his face.

  Battlefield Medic?

  She mouthed the words at him, and he shook his head, knowing no more about this than she did. She wondered just what Dr Buman and Jen had been doing over the past month.

  “That’s right. So first step, assess the patient. Quickly now or we might lose her,” Dr Burman told Jen, who had stopped shaking and was looking closer at the injuries on Lizzie’s stomach.

  “I need scissors,” she said, almost absently.

  As if by magic, a pair appeared for her to take. It wasn’t magic though, it was just Stella’s incredible assistant doing what she did best and anticipating the needs of the people in the room. While the rest of them had been standing around like idiots, not knowing what to do, she had retrieved a first aid kit and handed Jen the scissors that were bundled in the pack.

  “You have a torch?” Dr Burman asked.

  This time it was one of the tactical team who provided the equipment, pulling a pocket sized torch from his combat trousers. Dr Burman accepted it with a quick thank you and shone it onto Lizzie’s stomach that had been exposed as Jen went to work on cutting away Lizzie’s top. She was surprisingly competent at the task, and again Stella glanced at Tad to see his reaction. He wasn’t looking at Stella this time though, instead watching his daughter in fascination.

  As soon as Lizzie’s stomach was revealed, Stella’s curiosity about Jen’s lessons with Dr Burman vanished. There was yet more blood revealed by the removal of the shirt, but also a trio of three inch gashes that still oozed. Stella gasped at the sight and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Damn, it looks like the bastard caught her liver. He’s missed the major arteries which is a God send, but she’s still loosing too much blood.” Dr Burman looked at Jen, and for the first time there was a hint of uncertainty on his face. “You ready for this? If not, say so now and we’ll get her to a hospital.”

  Jen hesitated only a second before her expression firmed and she nodded. “I can do it,” she said. “Look for the bleed, fix it as quick as possible, t
hen close her up to stop infection.”

  “That’s right,” Dr Burman agreed. “Can someone please hold her down?” he asked the room in general as he pulled on some gloves from the first aid kit. “She’s probably too far gone to feel this, but just in case.”

  Leon was there in an instant, both hands on Lizzie’s shoulders, while Tad placed his hands on her hips. While neither of those men hesitated, the doctor paused to suck in a deep breath as though calming himself. It shocked Stella to see an almost guilty expression on his face, and she was sure she heard him mutter some kind of prayer before he found his resolve and nodded at Jen to say he was ready.

  Then he did the last thing Stella expected. He opened one of Lizzie’s wounds wide with one hand while shining the torch inside with the other. Stella gasped again as she got her first glimpse inside the human body before a similar nausea to when she dreamwalked rushed through her and she was forced to look away. She didn’t think she had a problem with blood, but something about the grizzly scene was one step too far.

  A groan from Lizzie made her turn back and Stella saw that though her eyes were still closed, her face had scrunched up into a painful grimace and it was rocking from side to side. Leon, also looking away from what was happening, kept her shoulders steady.

  Again Stella glanced at Tad, but he hadn’t looked away, and his fascination had turned to wonder. It was a rare thing to see on his face as normally it was other people looking at him that way.

  “You stop the bleed?” the doctor asked.

  “I think so,” Jen answered. “The big one at least.”

  “Fantastic Jen, I knew you could do this.”

  The girl looked up at the doctor with a pleased smile, but Stella could see the strain as well. Whatever she had just done had taken a lot out of her. Focusing her eidolon senses on the girl, Stella soon saw the problem and grabbed a nearby chair.

  “Jen, sit on this. Don’t try to do two things at once right now.”

  Jen looked up from Lizzie’s wound, a grateful expression on her face as she sank into the chair. Something about the way her legs settled suggested they were incapable of moving. Stella didn’t pay them much attention, as her eyes were drawn like magnets back to Lizzie’s wounds.

  The nausea returned almost instantly, but it was less this time, as curiosity overrode it. Something about the wound looked different that she couldn’t put her finger on. Maybe there was less blood coming from it, maybe it looked a touch smaller. Her curiosity to discover what changed meant she didn’t look away this time as Jen got back to work.

  It was one of the most disgusting and fascinating things Stella had ever seen. It horrified her and made her want to be sick, but at the same time, she couldn’t tear her eyes away. There was movement from deep within the wound, not from Dr Burman’s fingers, but from Lizzie’s own body.

  Sometimes that movement looked like muscle twitches, and other times it was like the flesh was crawling. It was something so alien that Stella took a few minutes to realise that she was watching the growth of new cells happening so fast that Stella could see it with the human eye.

  Then, over the course of thirty seconds, the wound closed. At first it looked like Dr Burman was closing his fingers, but Stella could see the skin knitting together and the wound itself getting smaller. Less than five minutes after Jen began, there were only two wounds instead of three.

  Jen let out an explosive sigh and fell back into her seat, exhausted.

  “It worked,” Dr Burman said, the surprise in his voice making Stella look up sharply.

  “You didn’t know if it would?”

  “I’ve seen what Jen could do to smaller wounds and we’ve theorised about what to do in a situation like this, but this is the first time we’ve tried it. We couldn’t know for sure what would happen.”

  “And you experimented on Lizzie?” Stella asked, half horrified and half wondering if she should put the doctor in handcuffs.

  “She was losing blood far too fast and her pulse was already weak. If we didn’t stop the bleeding, we’d have lost her even if we took her to a hospital,” he answered, though to Stella’s mind he was selling himself an excuse more than anything. “Jen just saved her life.”

  Every eye in the room turned to the exhausted teenager whose cheeks turned pink.

  “We’re not finished yet,” she said, trying to divert attention away from herself.

  “Yes we are,” Dr Burman disagreed. “Battlefield surgeon, remember. You keep them alive long enough to get them to help, and then you let other doctors take over.”

  “But I can heal her,” Jen argued.

  “Jen, she needs a blood transfusion and a specialised trauma surgeon to help her. You’ve done enough to keep her alive, but we can’t be sure that you’ve fixed everything correctly.”

  “Then I want to go with her. I can do whatever the surgeon wants and help heal her.”

  Dr Burman was shaking his head. “The surgeon would never allow it.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t let me heal one of your patients?”

  The doctor started shaking his head, but then hesitated, looking down at the closed stab wound on Lizzie’s stomach.

  “You’ll have to do what the doctor says. No going rogue on this. We’ll also have to prove to them what you can do. I’ll probably get fired for even suggesting this…” His words trailed off as he started going through the logistics in his head of how he could make this work. However, he snapped out of it when he looked at Lizzie again. “We need to get her to the hospital. We can figure the rest out later.”

  “Here, I’ll take her,” Tad said, speaking up for the first time as he scooped the now unconscious Lizzie into his arms like she weighed nothing. “You, stay here,” Tad said to Growler and Hawk before turning to Jen and saying, “You okay to bring the doctor?”

  At Jen’s nod, Tad vanished. A moment later, Jen touched the doctor’s arm and they too vanished, leaving Stella, Leon, Denise, a few members of the tactical team, and even the Prime Minister and Ryan, looking at the bloody mess of the break room and standing around in amazement at what they had just witnessed.

  After that miracle, Stella didn’t think any of them would see Jen in quite the same way again.

  However, she was also the first person to recover as the gears in her mind started spinning up and questions formed. Turning to her cousin she said, “Tell me everything.”

  After just a moment of hesitation, Leon started speaking.

  7

  Saturday, 24th December 2016

  06:28

  “Do you understand how this changes things? If we had one of her in every hospital, think how many lives we could save, how many—”

  “Of course I understand,” Dr Burman snapped. The two surgeons had been talking excitedly for the last ten minutes as the trauma surgeon expressed his awe of Jen’s abilities. “But think about this, Nigel. There’s only one of her right now and it’s exhausting work. I agree, she will change the world one day. But how she does that isn’t clear yet. I think we need to work with her more, figure out how we can replicate what she does and—”

  “Replicate?” the surgeon interrupted. “How could we replicate what she does?”

  “With dreamcatchers.”

  It was Tad who answered this time, making both doctors jump as they’d forgotten he was there. Dr Burman recovered first and looked away, a little shamefaced as he realised that Tad had seen through his long-term plans. The other doctor stared at Tad in the way a teenager stares at a popstar. It had been Tad’s presence more than Dr Burman’s arguments that convinced the doctor to let Jen help in the operating room and was the reason Lizzie was in recovery without a scar to show for the ordeal she’d been through.

  “Dreamcatchers?” the surgeon asked. “You mean those things that stop nightmares?”

  “They do more than that,” Tad said. “They can also capture Dreams so anyone can use them. We’re still trying to find the best ways to make them usable, but the desig
ns are getting more advanced every day.”

  “You mean I could do what she just did?” the doctor asked, stunned.

  “Maybe one day. And not until Jen’s ready,” Tad said. Now he’d uncovered Dr Burman’s plans, he was starting to see their potential. However, as he worked through it in his mind, he also saw the pitfalls. The only person who knew what Jen did was Jen herself, so she was going to have to be the one who created the dreamcatchers. Even then, Tad wasn’t sure it would work. Dream was a magic of the mind and no two people thought alike, which was why even dreamwalkers couldn’t always replicate the actions of each other.

  “She’ll need to work with the woman who designs the dreamcatchers to figure this out, and even then she could do with understanding it better herself first,” Tad continued.

  “Understanding it herself?” the surgeon questioned. “She just healed a severe abdominal wound that would have taken that woman months to recover from. What more does she need to know?”

  “She’s doing this on instinct,” Dr Burman answered. “She’s only got a rudimentary understanding of anatomy as she has only been learning about this for a few months. Imagine how much further she could go if she had a doctor’s understanding of the body. I’m telling you, Nigel, if we are patient with her, it will pay off in the long run.”

  “Patience is a hard ask considering how many lives we could lose in the meantime.”

  “It’s not a request,” Tad said, his voice growing harder as these two men talked about Jen like she was a resource rather than a person. Tad didn’t doubt Dr Burman had grown to care for Jen, but the doctor inside him was itching to advance his own goals. “She’s a thirteen-year-old girl with a broken back. She has enough pressures on her as it is, she doesn’t need more from both of you.”

  Shame faced, the doctors didn’t answer, and Tad decided he’d heard enough. With a final warning glance at both men, he walked down the corridor towards Lizzie’s room and stepped inside.