Borderlands (The Dreams of Reality Book 5)

by Gareth Otton

  “I could do a lot with a couple of seconds,” Leon said. “I could have done a lot with it before, but now…”

  Leon let his words trail off as he saw that Stella got his meaning. Suddenly everything fell into place and a plan formed. It would be both a good way to end this and also test just what Lizzie’s story had done for her.

  “I have an idea,” she said, before gesturing for the soldiers to huddle in close so she could explain. It was clear by their expressions that they didn’t like being told what to do by someone outside the military command structure, but as she explained her plan, what she could do, and how they could put it to use, their doubt turned to grudging acceptance. By the time she was done explaining, she had everyone on board.

  ◆◆◆

  Stella risked raising her head so she could see the street. She had dreamwalked to the roof of a building far enough away that the pop of her arrival wouldn’t alert the enemy to her presence, but close enough that she could see between the two buildings on either side of the palace gates. The enemies were sheltered from the soldiers in the parliament building by the corridor created by those two buildings.

  From here she could see fifteen men, all of them pressed up against the wall of the building to the right of the gate to better hide themselves while they discussed their next actions. Two of those men were right at the edge of the building furthest from the gate so they could keep an eye on the soldiers across the street.

  It would be so easy to kill them all, Stella thought, thinking how an ambush from the palace grounds or even from the rooftops would give her soldiers enough time to kill them before they could escape. They would deserve as much, right? They were here as part of a war effort that killed countless innocents.

  However, she sympathised with Tad’s point of view on killing these people. It was one thing to do it in the heat of battle, and it was another to do it from a position of ambush in cold blood. Maybe that sort of thinking was why she had no place leading people in a time of war, but she had to believe that there was a better way. If she could capture them, then who knew what kind of information they could get.

  “You ready for this?” she whispered to Leon, the only other person who followed her up to the rooftop. The rest of the soldiers had dreamwalked into the palace grounds and were waiting for her signal for them to move.

  “I’m ready? What about you, you have the dangerous part,” he said, sounding worried.

  “I’ll be fine. Just don’t waste the distraction.”

  “You can count on me, Stella, I promise.”

  She felt a similar level of insight to when she talked with the soldier. Leon meant every one of those words with all of his being and Stella was touched at the depth of his feelings.

  You don’t have time to get soppy, Stella. Get your head on straight, her inner voice demanded. It was the same voice that had driven her for most of her adult life, that made her such a great detective and kept her focused on what she needed to do. She heard less of that voice these days, shutting it out when it tried to get her to go back into her shell and rebuild her emotional defences. However, right now, the advice was good and she pulled her mind back to the task.

  “Let’s do this,” she said, as much to herself as Leon. Then, before she could think better of it, she activated the tattoo on her back.

  The world shifted, but not by much. The rooftop view jumped so that now she was at street level and a little closer to the corridor where the men were hiding. The two guards at the front jumped at the sound of the pop and spun towards her, one raising a gun and the other activating a dreamcatcher that flashed brightly even though it was covered by a thick layer of clothing.

  “FREEZE!”

  It wasn’t just a word that Stella said, it was an order that she threw all the Authority she could muster into. She had used this talent sparingly since she discovered it, as it was a tremendous drain on her energy. But with her other talents increasing and Leon having her back, she dared go a little further. She didn’t hold herself back and braced herself for the wave of weariness that would leave her defenceless for a little while.

  Just as expected, it felt like her energy was being drained out of her and her legs felt weak and her muscles ached. However, it was not so debilitating as it had been before and she was able to stay on her feet to see the results of her actions.

  The word hit the men harder than she expected. She remembered trying it on Deo back when he was posing as Miles, and it barely stopped him longer than a fraction of a second. But she felt the difference when she said the word this time, almost like her voice was filled with energy that had physical weight, and each of these men felt it as well.

  They froze, the gun stopping long before it finished its journey, the tattoo on the man’s chest continuing to glow but not getting any brighter. The rest of the men froze in place like they were statues. It was as though time had stopped, and it made them sitting ducks for what came next.

  There was a pop that broke the silence, then Leon was there, moving so quick she couldn’t see more than a blur. The man with the raised gun was suddenly on the ground with his gun knocked from hands that were somehow secured behind him by cable ties in the time it took Stella to blink. A moment later, the man next to him had been thrown against a wall hard enough to break bones, but he was caught and secured before he had finished his bounce.

  In the space of a heartbeat, there were two men down and out. However, the sudden movement had broken the spell that Stella laid on the other men and they moved in a combination of people going for guns and or activating dreamcatchers. In some cases, they did both.

  Neither actions mattered.

  Two more men went down before they had a chance to fire off an attack, and by the time the final eleven were ready to fire, there were more pops filling the air as the British soldiers appeared in the tight space, ignoring the gate and taking Kuruk’s people by surprise.

  Startled shouts filled the air as the enemy turned to face this fresh attack. Gunshots cracked as some of Stella’s soldiers felt threatened enough to fire first, and there were bright flashes of light as the dreamcatchers finally finished igniting. Three men fell to the gunshots. There were more gunshots and a flash of fire in the darkness that cost the life of one of Stella’s people, but not before two more of the enemy went down at Leon’s hands and another man lost his life to a well-placed shot.

  One of the enemy closest to the street exit of the little corridor was positioned in such a way that Stella could see he was about to fire his gun at a soldier’s back. The message rang through her mind loud and clear even as that enemy was beginning to execute his plan, and her eidolon reflexes had her acting before she fully registered what she was doing.

  She rushed forward, surprised to close the ten-foot gap between herself and this man in the blink of an eye, and she had a hand on his shoulder just as he was bringing the gun level with her soldier’s head. She tugged on that shoulder as hard as she could, intending to pull the man away before he could get off his shot. Bones snapped under her grip that was far stronger than she expected, and the man didn’t just get pulled away, he spun wildly. As intended, when he fired the gun it missed its mark.

  In a blur of movement, Stella snatched the gun out of his hand, breaking more bones in the process, and threw the man against a wall before using her own zip ties to secure his hands behind his back. She’d already finished by the time the man got his breath back from being so violently manhandled. As the pain of his broken shoulder registered in his eyes, he started whimpering as the fight left him.

  A tattoo flared for an instant under his shirt, but it was extinguished by the dramcatchers hanging from the zip ties around his wrist. They were only small, but they would nullify the enemy’s ability to use their powers to dreamwalk away, and would last long enough for Stella and the soldiers to get these men somewhere more secure so they could destroy the tattoos.

  When she looked up from the whimpering man, who was no longer g
oing anywhere, she saw that the battle was already over. All the enemy were either tied up or dead, and it looked like they had only lost one of their own people. However, one was more than enough for these soldiers, and again Stella recognised what was going to happen and acted on instinct.

  “STOP!”

  Once more, the surrounding soldiers became living statues. She hadn’t put as much into this one, so the energy drain wasn’t all that much. It helped that these men were already predisposed to listen to her, but she recognised she was also a lot stronger thanks to Lizzie.

  A shiver of fear ran through her as she wondered just how far that strength could go and how it could change her, but she forced herself to ignore that fear for another day and concentrate on the situation.

  “The fight is over,” she said. “These men are secured and are now prisoners. Anyone who does anything to these men in the name of retribution will answer to me. Is that clear?”

  All heads nodded, including the prisoners themselves, and Stella relaxed a little as she turned to the soldier in charge of the group.

  “Escort them back to the base and have their dreamcatchers removed before you lock them up.” She looked over her shoulder at the parliament building and added, “Then get a group of soldiers without dreamcatchers to come here to relieve the quick response team. We don’t need people with dreamcatchers guarding that building thanks to the dreamcatchers already in place, but we need every dreamcatcher we can get for the rest of the—”

  Her words were cut short when suddenly Leon was in her face, hands on her shoulders like hydraulic clamps that were holding her in place with such strength that she couldn’t move even if she wanted to. After experiencing new levels of strength like she had never felt before, it was disconcerting to be so easily overpowered. But not so disconcerting as what she read from the expression on Leon’s face.

  “You’ve been shot,” he said, staring at her stomach with wide eyes.

  Stella looked down and was surprised to find a pool of blood growing on her shirt over her right hip. It was below the area covered by the bullet-proof vest and closer to her hip than her stomach. As if it took looking at the wound to actually feel the accompanying pain, Stella grunted at the new fiery heat.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” Leon said, his fingers tightening on her arm.

  “No, wait,” she said, trying to shrug off his grip but not succeeding until she asked him to let her go.

  Gingerly, she reached for the hem of her t-shirt and started pulling it away from the wound. She winced as the wet fabric clung to the blood, but there was something not right about the sensation in her side that accompanied the pain, and she had to check it out. It was burning hot, but there was a strange itching sensation, which was growing more intense.

  When she got the t-shirt out of the way, she winced at the sight of the bloody gash in her side. The bullet had gouged a deep trough of a wound, but it had only gone through flesh and had missed the bone. It hurt now that she was aware of it, but it was manageable enough that she hesitated in getting it treated as she looked closer at what was causing the itching sensation.

  At first she could see nothing that was aggravating the injury, but then she spotted something that she had only seen once before. There was movement from within the wound, almost like her flesh was wriggling. The last time she saw this, it had been much more obvious as it happened within a well lit stab wound on Lizzie’s stomach. It was what it looked like when cells were regenerating at a much quicker pace than nature intended.

  The wound was healing.

  It wasn’t so quick as what Jen could do, but it was fast enough that she doubted there would be any sign of it in ten minutes.

  “They saw you heal.”

  Leon’s awed whisper made her look up, and as soon as she recognised his expression, she realised what he was talking about.

  It would have been an unintended side effect of the video Lizzie released. She hadn’t focused on this, but Stella realised it was impossible for people to miss. Back when she had been caught in the explosion, photos had leaked to the media of what she had looked like thanks to the camera phones of patients in the emergency room. Then Lizzie’s video had shown more recent images of Stella looking almost healed.

  The public didn’t know about Jen’s abilities, so it must have looked like Stella could heal herself from that sort of injury on her own. That belief had taken hold on mass.

  By the time she was done figuring this out, she had another shock. It turned out her estimates of how quickly the wound would be gone were way off and now all that was left to show for the fact that she had been shot was the sticky red blood that still saturated her t-shirt and stained her unbroken skin.

  “Amazing,” Leon whispered, and Stella couldn’t help but agree.

  The soldiers around her stared at her like she was an alien. Their silence was only broken by a sudden pop that made everyone jump, followed by another pop that signalled the arrival a giant dog.

  “I’m okay,” Stella said quickly, seeing the look on Tad’s face as he spotted the blood covering her. She had read him easily enough before her abilities got a boost, but she could tell now just by the look on his face that he was a heartbeat away from grabbing her and dreamwalking her to Jen. “It’s already healed, see,” she continued, wiping away the blood to show she was unhurt.

  “Healed?” Tad asked as his panic faded. He took a few steps forward and gently brushed at the place where the wound had been, almost like he needed to touch it to make sure she wasn’t lying. Stella was amazed there wasn’t even a little pain at his touch, almost like the wound had never existed.

  She answered his question about what happened, but that just led to more questions about how they had secured these men and saved the Scottish parliament from the same fate as the one in Westminster. That led to questions about how Tad’s own mission had gone, which unfortunately had not been so successful.

  “Wait, you used what Ashely taught you?” Stella asked. “How did it feel?”

  “It was insane,” Tad admitted. “It was like nothing I have ever felt before. I only connected to four other ghosts, but it felt like the difference between being powered by a car battery, or tapping into the national grid. It was more power than I am comfortable with if I’m honest.”

  “But do you think you can use it again to help us tonight? There are more attacks, Tad, and we could use all the help we can get.”

  He hesitated only a moment before nodding in agreement. “Yeah, I think if it’s to save lives rather than take them...” His words trailed off and he firmed up, suddenly looking more determined. “Of course I can do it again. Where else am I needed?”

  Stella smiled at the new confidence she heard in his voice, confidence that had been sadly missing since losing Ryan. That confidence was infectious. Again Stella rubbed her fingers over the wound, marvelling at her own upgrades before she looked at Leon and remembered him moving so quick he was almost a blur.

  Surely between the three of them, they might make a difference tonight. It had started with disaster, but maybe they could stop it from getting any worse.

  “Miles will know,” she said. “Come on, let’s go find out.” To the soldiers, she added, “You know what you’re supposed to do. Get on it, then come find me. We have a long night ahead of us and a lot of lives to save.”

  Her words lit a fire under them and they each rushed off to do as requested, while Stella turned her mind to her own tasks. She was right in what she said. She knew she had a long night ahead of them. But after how well that had just gone and Tad’s own improvements, she felt hopeful about being able to claw something back from what could otherwise be the jaws of defeat.

  Suddenly more determined than she had felt since Freckles died, she narrowed her focus on what she needed to do next, and she thought about Miles and the HQ before changing the channel.

  34

  Friday, 30th December 2016

  23:58

  �
��There are attacks happening in most of the major cities across the UK,” Stella reported over the large TV in the conference room. “The forces are split in terms of abilities. From what we could see, the three main dreamcatcher attacks were in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh, though they have moved on to other places. Manchester and Birmingham are getting hit pretty hard right now, and I’ve sent Tad to Newcastle to deal with what’s going on over there. I’m about to lead a team to Manchester to help where I can with that one.”

  “Maybe I should go to Birmingham then, lend a bit of dreamwalker support there,” Norman suggested, but five voices shouted him down at once. Stella and Norman’s three military advisers shouted him down from the television, while Amelia accompanied her own vehement rejection with a smack to the back of his head.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she scolded. “You’re staying right here.”

  “She’s right, Norman,” Stella said. “We have this covered. Chakikra is leading a team of soldiers armed with dreamcatchers to Birmingham, while Gary is off to Manchester to help with the rest. And to top that off, as soon as Tad is done with Newcastle, he will go over there to help.”

  Still a little stung by how forcefully he had been shouted down, Norman asked, “You think Tad can handle Newcastle quickly enough to help?”

  Stella hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  “He didn’t get to Cardiff in time to help save the Senedd, but he told me what he did there and… Yes, I think he can help.” She glanced off screen for a second and said, “I need to go. There’s one thing you should all know before I leave though.”

  “What’s that?” Norman asked.

  “The other cities that don’t have a heavy dreamcatcher presence, there are a lot of American soldiers taking part in the attacks and they’re not hiding anymore. This is an all out offensive now and there’s no way that the Americans can deny this.”