Dreamer

by L. E. DeLano

  “Oh God.” I put my head in my hands. “This isn’t supposed to happen. What has she done?”

  “Wait—you’re saying none of this should be happening?” Ben says.

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” I remind him. “None of this is right.” My eyes well up and I swipe at them. “I can’t let them take my brother, Ben.”

  “Service is mandatory, remember?” Ben says.

  I lock eyes with Finn and repeat it. “I can’t let them take my brother.”

  “We could run,” Finn says grimly.

  “That might be an op—”

  I don’t get to finish my sentence, because there’s a knock at the front door. The soldiers are back.

  My eyes meet my mom’s and she shoves the last of Danny’s things into his suitcase—the one with the Star Wars decals on it. She takes him by the shoulders and tilts his chin so that he’s making eye contact, just like she used to do when he was younger.

  “Danny,” she says, smoothing his hair back, “you’re going to go with the soldiers, okay? They’re going to take you on a vacation, and then they’ve got a job they need you to work on.”

  “But I work with you,” he says, confused. “I work with you and I work at the library.”

  “I know. I know,” she says, touching his cheek and smoothing his hair again. “But now you need to go to a new job, and they’ll show you just how to do it. They’ll make sure you have a place to stay and show you where the cafeteria is there, okay?”

  “But am I still going to go to the library?” he asks. “That’s not a job. It’s volunteer.”

  The knock comes on the door again and we all look, including Danny.

  “I work with you,” he insists again, and my mother cracks. She turns away so he won’t see her lose it, and reaches down, picking up his suitcase. Then she walks to the door.

  “Come on, Danny.” She can barely speak, and it’s hard to make out her words. “You listen to what they say, and you do it, okay? You work the way they tell you to. And I’ll come see you just as soon as I can.”

  She opens the door and the soldier gives her a glare.

  “It’s about time,” he barks. “We’re behind schedule! Let’s move!”

  He passes Danny’s bag off to another soldier, and I remember I was supposed to get his shirt. I run to the laundry room, dig through the hamper, and find it. I race back out and a very bewildered Danny is walking behind my mother, who has him by the hand. He turns to me and I can see the apprehension in his eyes.

  “Are you going, Jessa?” he asks. “’Cause I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “No, Danny,” I manage to say. “I’m not going this time.”

  His eyes widen. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here. I work with Mom,” he insists. He stops, digging his heels in, pulling my mother back by the hand.

  “I work with Mom,” he says again. “And at the library. They need me.” His voice is rising with agitation, and the soldier turns to see what’s going on.

  “What’s the holdup?” he shouts. “Get that man on board!”

  Two soldiers peel off from the group milling around by the open-topped transport truck, shouldering their weapons and heading toward us.

  “Mom!” I shout, but she sees them.

  “Please!” She steps forward, raising her hands to stall them. “Can’t you come back for him? I need some time. He doesn’t do well with change, and fifteen minutes isn’t—”

  “We’re leaving!” the soldier barks. “Now!”

  The soldiers take Danny by the arms and he begins screaming.

  “Mom! Mom! I work with you! I work with you! I don’t want to go by myself!”

  He’s kicking now, trying to pull away, and my mom is screaming at him to stop, to calm down, telling him over and over it’ll be all right, but he’s not hearing. He’s crying now, great, heaving sobs as they pull him along. He’s shoved from behind up the steps and into the truck, where he falls, with a shriek, rolling into a ball.

  My mom runs forward and I’m right behind her with wings on my feet as we rush to the truck. I can hear the engine revving and I’m reminded that I’m holding his shirt.

  “Mom!” I wave it at her, and she yanks it from my hands.

  “Danny!” she screams, and he pushes himself up, rubbing hard at his eyes.

  “Mom! Jessa!” He sees us and he reaches out, straining toward us. Hands from inside the truck behind him pull him back, but we can still hear him calling for us.

  “I have his shirt!” my mom is screaming as the truck pulls away. “I have his shirt! You can’t take him! I have his shirt!” She runs, waving the shirt in the sky like a flag, as if the waving of it will slow them, stop them. She keeps running until her legs give out, and I watch, frozen, as she crumples to the ground, burying her face in the shirt as the last of Danny’s screams echo down the street.

  The soldier shakes his head, making a notation on his clipboard, ticking off just another name on a list. Just another number on a roll sheet.

  My legs carry me to him as the anger burns through me. I am vibrating with the force of it as I grab him by the arm, stopping him from making yet one more tick mark on that damn clipboard.

  “How can you do this?” I lash out. “Taking someone from the only home he’s ever known? Not even letting him say good-bye?”

  He gives me a long-suffering look as he shakes my hand off. “I have my orders,” he says. “And you’re out of line, citizen-soldier.”

  “You bring him back!”

  “Stand down,” he warns. “Don’t make me arrest you—your mother looks like she can’t take much more today.”

  “No!” I shout back. “Danny is a special case! There have to be exceptions!”

  “No exceptions.” The soldier tries to go around me, and I move to step in front of him, but the other soldiers are too fast and block me.

  “Get your mother out of the street before we run her down,” the soldier threatens. “We’re moving! We got four more stops in this town, and I’d like to finish them off before dinner!”

  I run out to help my mom to the sidewalk, and with our arms wrapped around each other, we watch the last of the soldiers pull away.

  We move into the house, and Mom won’t let go of Danny’s shirt. She crumples down onto the couch, and I fall with her as we cry and hold and rock each other. Ben and Finn watch silently from across the room, and eventually I realize I need to get a grip. This isn’t helping Danny. And right now, I’m the only one—the only one in the whole damn universe—who can help Danny.

  “Are you okay?” I ask my mom as I pull away. “Do you need anything?”

  She shakes her head. “Are you all right?” she asks. “D-did they hurt you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She nods and clutches Danny’s shirt tighter as she gets to her feet. I follow her into the kitchen as she pulls a paper towel from the holder and blows her nose, then she looks over at me. “Did you take the NyQuil?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “I’ve got a pretty bad cold. My head feels congested and I’m achy.”

  She reaches out and touches my arm.

  “I don’t think they’ll delay your enlistment for just a head cold, Jessa.”

  “I know.”

  “The literature they gave us last week was pretty clear about that.” She takes in a shaky breath. “It didn’t say a thing about work camps, though, did it?” The tears are tracking down her face and she steps back over to the paper towels, ripping off a fresh one and cramming it against her eyes.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I tell her. “We’ll get him back.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice, Jessa,” she says, blowing her nose again. “But I think—maybe I should go see Representative Richardson. He comes to the senior center to visit his mother, and we’ve talked. Maybe he can help. He’s always liked Danny.” She looks up at me. “Where did they say he was going again?”

  “Hannacroix Creek,” Ben s
ays. “But that’s probably just for processing.”

  “Maybe I can get in to see Danny,” she says, more to herself than to us. “I mean, even if it’s for just a few hours. I could take him his shirt, at least.”

  “Maybe,” I answer. “It’s worth a try.”

  She grabs her car keys off the counter. “I’ll be back in a while,” she says, leaning in and hugging me tight. “Stay in the house, please.” She runs her hand across my hair and hugs me tight, and for a very long time. “It’ll all be okay, Jessa. It’ll be okay.”

  I wonder if she says it twice so she can convince herself. She heads out the door, still holding Danny’s shirt.

  33

  Splintered

  I lean back against the countertop, rubbing my hands over my face.

  “I’ve got to fix this, and I need to talk to Mario to figure out how,” I say. “I need to get to sleep, and fast. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You can sleep?” Ben asks. “Now?”

  “I have to try,” I tell him. “Anyway, I’m dead on my feet.”

  “Please don’t use that word,” Finn says quietly. “You came entirely too close to it today already. Let’s get you lying down.”

  I wave him off, choosing to curl up on the couch, clutching a pillow. I try to clear my mind from the events of the day, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s all whirling around me—Danny’s face, Eversor’s death, my counterpart’s disappearance. It’s too much. Despite my bone-numbing fatigue, I start to feel like it’s an exercise in futility as I close my eyes and begin slowly counting each breath in and out, in and out.…

  Mario is already in the classroom when I walk in.

  “We have a problem,” I say.

  “Yes,” he agrees grimly. “And unfortunately, it all makes sense now.”

  “Is she really gone? The me who swims with the dolphins?”

  He doesn’t have to answer; I can see it in his eyes. “It’s just as Finn suspects,” he tells me. “A convergence has already begun.”

  I look at him in alarm. “How? And how is Finn still here, if that’s so?”

  “I said a convergence—something close to what we were expecting, but not as it was before—and that’s the distinction,” Mario explains. “As I told you before, splintering occurs naturally, on a random basis. We’ve always been able to maintain and repair these with strategic corrections, things that heal the stream.”

  He gestures to the whiteboard, where a series of lines appear, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel from a central point.

  “We occasionally see fragmentation in the later streams that have split interminable times from various realities.” His finger traces the lines in front of him. “Two realities shear off toward each other, and we see a collision. Events will begin to intersect. But a fragmentation shouldn’t be reaching the origin in anything other than a very mild form.”

  “Such as?”

  “Occasional déjà vu. Like I said—it’s a very rare thing that can be avoided by strategic readjustments.”

  “Can you do that now?” I ask.

  “It’s too late for that. Rudy and Eversor were trying to start the convergence based on what they knew of its last occurrence. Picture yourself standing in the safety of the origin, almost like the eye of a hurricane,” he continues. “We assumed—like last time—that the convergence would eradicate everything outside of your protected area.”

  “And that’s not what happened?” I ask.

  “No. Eversor wasn’t strong enough. Even with the aid of the Traveler’s mirror it wasn’t enough to do what they’d planned. My guess is whatever drug she took couldn’t keep her in a stable hallucinatory state. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have an effect. What she did was start a chain reaction.”

  He gestures to the whiteboard behind him again, and it suddenly shows a dozen lines all traveling in one direction until one of them shatters, colliding with another, and another, showing a wave of splinters that begin to grow exponentially, splitting off and crossing over one another, merging and diverging in chaotic ways.

  “This is overload,” he says, running a hand over his face. “Too many splinters—a tidal wave of them, and it’s building exponentially. We’re having a hard time controlling it.” His eyes aren’t quite able to meet mine. “We’ve got Travelers out in force, making corrections, but we can’t keep up with it. And we’re losing them almost as fast as we send them.”

  “What does that mean for us? I can stop it, right?” I ask frantically. “You said I’m the one who can stop it.”

  “Not like this. The wave is now monstrous in its proportions. It’s grown far beyond anything we can control.”

  “Tell me what to do!” I plead. “Tell me what I need to do!”

  His eyes close for a moment and he lets out a breath. “Wake up. Say your good-byes. Then come back here and we’ll do what we can to keep your reality from sustaining too much damage. It’s the best we can do, Jessa. I’m sorry.”

  I run for the red door, feeling like the universe is falling down around me, and I wrench it open. I come awake with a start on the couch, sitting up and gasping, feeling the crushing weight of every one of Mario’s words.

  “What’s happened?” Finn asks, hovering over me. “Has Mario got a solution?”

  “No.” It comes out as a whisper. “He says it’s too strong to stop. It’s going to keep building, and we can’t stop it.” I raise my eyes to look at him, and they flood with tears. “I can’t stop it.”

  “But aren’t you the chosen one or whatever?” Ben asks. “If you can stop the annexation, get Danny back—I mean, if none of this is really supposed to be happening—”

  “It’s not.” I swing my legs down so I can sit upright. “But there are too many realities colliding. Mario says they’re like a wave of dominoes, falling into one another.” I use my hands, mimicking the way they’d fall. “It’s only a matter of time until it swamps us.”

  “And I disappear,” Finn adds tensely as he begins to pace back and forth across the living room.

  “One little shard of obsidian,” Ben marvels. “And this is the result.”

  “It might as well have been a boxful of shards,” Finn says with disgust. “At least it would be over quickly.”

  A sliver of a thought begins to wedge itself into my brain, pulling at my memory. “The double mirror,” I say to myself. “Two mirrors. Double the power.”

  “What’s that?” Finn asks.

  “Ben told me that ancient oracles sometimes used mirrors held over pools of water,” I tell him. “They created a portal to the gods by looking at the reflection reflected again into the pool. A double mirror.”

  “You think that might work?” Ben asks. “But you said the other Aztec mirror wasn’t anything special.”

  “It’s not. I only need one on this side.”

  “Come again?”

  Now I’m up and pacing opposite Finn. “What if I use the Aztec mirror to transfer to the dreamscape and use a mirror in the dreamscape as well? Mario can pull one up—he can find anything in there. If I’m looking from one into the other—I can link them. Make the wave feed back on itself.”

  “You mean, create a counterwave?” Finn interjects.

  “Exactly.”

  “Not sure I’m following you, love. You can’t bring that mirror into the dreamscape, and a dreamscape mirror won’t register in the real world. You’d have to be in both places at once.”

  “Which involves drugging yourself up so you can do that,” Ben points out.

  “And where am I going to get those kind of heavy drugs—and fast?” I shudder, remembering how Eversor looked toward the end. “Mario said it wasn’t stable enough doing it that way, anyway.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re one of the oracles, with a temple full of volcanic steam to send you off to La-La land,” Ben says.

  “I can’t do what Eversor did,” I say firmly. “How the hell are we going to get me into a sustained
hallucinatory state?”

  “There are other drugs,” Ben says. “Maybe safer ones. Lower dosages. Can you ask Mario?”

  “He wouldn’t have that knowledge. And we don’t have time to try to get a doctor’s appointment or even break into somewhere. The universe is already changing around us.”

  I turn fearful eyes to Finn, because he could quite literally vanish at any moment.

  “I won’t gamble you that way,” he says firmly as he continues to pace again. “We’ll have to find something that won’t put you at risk.”

  “Sleep deprivation might work,” Ben says. “It’s been a military tactic for hundreds of years. Sleep deprivation can bring on paranoia, hallucinations, psychosis.…”

  “Still not going to be fast enough,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Well, unless you can wave a magic wand or something, I don’t see how we’re going to beat this,” says Ben.

  “Jessa.” Finn stops his pacing, freezing in place.

  “What?”

  “I know what we’re going to do.”

  34

  The Plan

  “So this is the plan?” Ben asks, looking at us both like we’re crazy. “Hypnosis?”

  I shut the door to my room just in case Mom gets home sooner than I think she will, and I sit down on the bed as I try to lay it out for Ben.

  “Finn’s going to hypnotize me, and while I’m under, he’s going to give me a trigger word—something he can say that will make me open my eyes and go to the mirror.”

  “Then I’ll give her another command to travel,” Finn explains.

  “Since I’m hypnotized, I can be both here and in the dreamscape at the same time—and it’ll be stable. Then I’ll simultaneously start a transfer in both places. If it all goes right, the second I make the transfers, it’ll create a counterwave.”

  “Like lighting a fire line to stop an oncoming fire,” Ben says, nodding slowly. “Make it consume itself.”

  “If it goes right.” I cross my fingers, silly as it is. We need all the help we can get.

  “How am I going to know if it worked?” he asks, still looking at us uneasily.