by P. S. Newman
Greyson stood up slowly and took a step towards me. My blade was suddenly unbearably heavy. It fell away from his throat, glancing off as if he'd cast a spell.
"I feel like I know you just as well as her,” Greyson said. “I guess, in a way, you are her. Eden, is it?"
All I could do was nod. He opened his mouth, but the sound of the steel door below falling into the lock stopped him from speaking. We had company.
"How is it going up there?" a man’s voice drifted up to us. The security guard! I took a giant step backwards, away from Greyson. His eyes held mine even as I called out an answer, hoping it would stop the guard from coming up here. "I'll be right down."
I shot Greyson an imploring look and laid a finger over my lips. He nodded, eyes dark and penetrating. I turned and jogged down the stairs, round and round, until I almost ran into the guard coming up the stairs towards me. His eyes widened when he saw the sword in my hand.
"Was the shade up there?" he asked.
"Yes. I eliminated it." A lie, but any deviation from the usual shade hunter procedure might make him suspicious. Shades were eliminated by hunters immediately, unless doing so posed a physical or psychological threat to innocent bystanders.
"It didn’t damage anything, did it?" he asked, worried about the building. “I thought I heard the bell chime.”
"The shade fell against the bell when I killed it," I told him, “but there was no damage.
"Do you need help getting the remains down?"
I shook my head. "We’ll take care of that. I'm going to call my cleanup-crew right now." Just as there were private shade hunters like me, there were also private cleanup-crews. I pretended to dial the number and held my phone up to my ear as if it were ringing. As I waited for a pick-up that would never happen, I waved a hand down the stairwell. "You might as well continue on your rounds, Sir."
"I'll be in the main hall, just in case."
“Thanks." Leave already.
He finally did. I pretended that someone answered the phone and had a one-sided conversation with myself until I heard the door at the bottom of the stairs fall shut behind him. Then I hurried back up the steps. When I reached the top, blank walls and empty windows met my eye. Greyson was gone.
“Move!” Aunt Vy screamed at me, but it was too late. I felt the cold bite of steel against my neck.
"You were planning to kill me?" Greyson's voice was a growl in my ear; cold, low, dangerous. "Why not banish me to the dreamscape?"
Stupid stupid stupid. Of course he’d overheard every word of my conversation with the security guard. I laid Aunt Vy on the ground, slowly, then held up my hands. The edge of the sword against my neck stopped me from turning my head to look at him.
"That's not how it works in the real world," I said. "The only way to eliminate a shade is to kill it." Or to phaze it my way, but I didn’t know if he’d be capable of doing that. It had taken a lot of practice and some close-call trials and errors before I figured out how to redirect my powers from banishing shades to the dreamscape to instead disconnecting their dreamers’ essences and phazing them.
He mulled it over. "That's why my banishing powers don't work. Why none of the hunters who came after me and the hellhounds tried to banish us. They aimed to kill." He paused. "Are you here to kill me?"
If I were smart, I’d take Aunt Vy’s advice and end it now, before it ever began. All I had to do was reach out and touch him, use my powers, and he would fade back into my dreams.
"No.” I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was why I'd sent the Order after him in the first place. "I'm not going to eliminate you. I have a proposition for you. We need your help."
"We?"
"There are people who want to meet you," I told him. "They might be able to help. They asked me to find you."
He walked around to face me, the tip of his sword a whisper against my neck. "How did you know to look for me here? I don't even know why I chose this place as a hide-out. I just knew this would be a safe place, as long as I climbed up the roof without being seen."
I swallowed. "I've hidden out here before, too, after a traumatic experience at the Plaza. Which is probably why I dreamed about it. I figured my safe place might have subconsciously been transferred to you."
He let that sit for a moment, then lowered the sword. "These people know I'm your shade?"
“A couple of them do, yes. I will take you to them."
"What if I don't want to?"
"I won't force you to do anything, if that's what you're asking,” I told him. "But the people hunting you will catch you eventually. They will eliminate you on the spot, no questions asked."
"They couldn't take me if I faced them with my hands and legs bound," he said with a snort of derision.
"Don't underestimate them," I said. "What they may lack in skill compared to you, they make up for in tenacity and fanaticism." Taylor was the best example. "You will not have a peaceful life as long as they're trying to eliminate you. Which they will if you keep popping up and saving peoples' lives."
He blinked. "How is that a bad thing? It's what I was created to do. By you." The sword came up, pointing at me like a giant finger of accusation.
I grimaced. "It's complicated. I’ll tell you on the way to my friends if you agree to come with me."
He frowned and took a step back.
"That wasn't meant as blackmail,” I jumped in, cursing myself. This was Greyson, my Greyson. His integrity couldn't be bought. "But we're running out of time. That guard is going to be back any minute to check on me. Since I'm not going to eliminate you and there's no cleanup crew on the way, we need to get out of here before he figures out something’s fishy. At least, I do."
I turned my back to him, the hardest thing I'd done in a long time. Not because he was armed, but because he was Greyson. I couldn't bear the thought of averting my eyes from his face; of him not following me.
I ducked beneath the bells, picked up Aunt Vy and faced the stairwell. The city glittered all around, a plane of lights until it hit the dark gray canvas of smoggy sky. It was close to curfew. There’d still be enough people around to blend into the crowd but not enough to get in our way if we were recognized and had to make a run for it.
I looked back. Greyson stood where I'd left him, sword half-raised, watching me. I met his eyes. This was it. All or nothing. "You coming?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I drove. Greyson sat on my right, watching the well-lit city roll by against the dark canvas of night. For the first in a long time I looked at it, perceiving it with the same fresh eyes he must be seeing it with. The run-down city blocks of crumbled buildings with empty windows, where shades had driven out the former owners. The high, electrified fences around houses and properties. The park with the perpetual rain cloud emptying itself over it. The neighborhood bathed in flickering blue light. The giant set of reptilian footprints stomped into a derelict highway. The petrified forest growing around a former church.
Shades on a scale big enough to damage or destroy buildings, landscapes or entire cities didn’t happen as often as you might think. But, like the Pit, they were also the ones that tended to be more permanent and less easy to eliminate or clean up. People had learned to live with such shades. Or rather, live around them.
Societies had collapsed in the first years after the Surge while chaos reigned and people panicked, struggling to make sense of everything. The U.S. government had gotten their act together faster than a lot of other countries and managed to return at least a semblance of law and order to the country after the first year. The founding of the Somni Order to research and police this new phenomenon during that same year certainly helped. People started to understand how shades worked and that they were here to stay. They began to rebuild and found ways to cope with the constant threat and fear of shades.
Other countries weren’t so lucky. Some self-destructed when they couldn’t handle the societal and political unrests that erupted alongside the manifesting dreams. S
ome were obliterated by a massive-scale shade disaster shortly after the Surge. Others destroyed themselves in their attempts to combat shades with any and every means possible.
Los Angeles was counted as one of the most shade-infested cities in the country and money in many neighborhoods was tight. Repairs took longer and some destroyed buildings were simply left to crumble. Many of them became temporary makeshift homes for refugees and homeless people - and temporary often became long-term. In the richer areas, shade damage was usually cleaned up and repaired a lot faster.
Fifteen minutes from the Financial District and PharmaZeusics headquarters, we came to the temporary bypass leading around the Pit. Traffic on the interstate slowed to a crawl.
“What is that?” Grey asked, pointing at the wisps of smoke rising above the green-mesh fence. It was the first thing he’d said since we left the station.
“A giant crater called the Pit,” I told him. “It’s someone’s shade that popped up about a year ago and killed over seventy people.”
“Why is it still here?”
“As I mentioned earlier, we can’t banish shades in this world.” I was the exception to the rule, but I didn’t want him to know that. Not yet.
“Nobody can get rid of it?”
I shook my head. “The Order has tried everything to fill it up. But the more you toss in, the more the lava expands.”
“It seems senseless that shades can’t be banished. Like some giant cosmic joke that nobody is in on.”
I laughed. “Welcome to the real world. Things here are different from your world as I imagined it. My dream reality - your reality - is a world of fiction.”
He frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “What do you mean?”
“You’re a character out of a graphic novel series called Dreamscape,” I told him. Just like me. “The first volume was published about two years after the Surge when people were getting used to the fact that their dreams and nightmares would continue to haunt them for real.”
“The Surge?”
“The first night during which shades came alive.” In the Dreamscape series, and therefore in my dream, there’d been no Surge. The world had simply always dealt with shades. “That was twenty years ago. What followed was chaos and destruction. Entire countries were wiped out. The economy collapsed. The world… changed.” Large-scale shades didn’t happen often, even back then. But the world wasn’t prepared for them and the destruction they wrought had been monumental. “It took a lot longer to rebuild to the point where society was stable again.”
“So in the real world, the dreamscape doesn’t exist? Shades don’t come from there and can’t be banished there.”
I nodded. “That’s fiction. It’s a concept born out of people's desperation and desire for control over their lives.”
“So what happens to shades if they’re not banished. Do they just exist forever?”
“If we can’t eliminate them, yes.” The green barrier to our left was the perfect reminder. “At least until their dreamer dies. Then their shades disappear.”
We passed the Pit. Traffic picked up speed. We were half a mile away before he spoke again. “That’s why the guard expected you to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to be hunted for the rest of my life.”
My heart twisted in my chest. I’d been trying to avoid that very thought. It hurt.
He saw the look on my face. Defiance flared in his eyes. “That doesn’t seem fair. I haven’t hurt anybody. I help people. I’ve saved lives.”
“The people I’m taking you to think you might be the key to righting that unfairness,” I told him. Speaking of which, I needed to call David. We hadn’t discussed where I should take Greyson once I found him. Probably SHAID’s safe house, but I had to verify.
“Why did you dream of me?” Greyson asked before I could make the call. “Why did you dream of yourself as Elysia?”
I tried to remember my dream and whether there’d been a specific reason I’d created him. In that way of dreams, it had already become fuzzy around the edges. “I guess I had the Dreamscape stories on my mind.”
He gave me his hard stare. “You created me for a reason.”
“Subconsciously.”
“You must have some idea, Zee.”
Hearing him say that name was a shock to my system. I blinked back tears and kept my eyes on the road. “I’m Eden.”
He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You’re also Elysia.”
“Only in my dream. In what you consider your reality.”
“That’s the one that counts,” he insisted.
“Stubborn as always,” Aunt Vy said dryly from behind the passenger seat, where I’d relegated her to make room for Greyson. “You couldn’t even fix that.”
“I don’t happen to think he needs fixing.” Yes, his stubborn streak could drive me nuts, but it was a part I also admired about him.
“Except he didn’t exist until a few days ago,” Aunt Vy pointed out, half-guessing, half-hearing my unspoken thoughts in that way she sometimes did.
“You didn’t exist until two years ago and yet here you are, the most annoying sword that ever spoke,” I shot back.
Greyson, who had been watching me, suddenly looked over his shoulder at the red hilt protruding from behind his seat. “You two are arguing, aren’t you?”
He hadn’t so much as acknowledged Aunt Vy so far. They’d never liked each other, not in the graphic novels nor in Bella’s dream. Nor, therefore, in mine.
“So he remembers me,” Aunt Vy said. “But he can’t hear me, can he, pretty boy?”
Greyson kept looking at me for confirmation. The fact that they couldn’t speak directly had always been both a blessing and a curse in the graphic novels. Now I counted it as a blessing all the way. “Us two who?” I asked, scrunching my brows together in what hopefully looked like convincing confusion. He was fishing for information. I couldn’t confirm that my sword was alive or he’d figure out that I was Elysia. I wasn’t ready to reveal myself to him.
“At least you retain a little bit of common sense,” Aunt Vy allowed.
Greyson was giving me a long, hard look. Somehow, I held my ground until he finally sighed and looked away. “Never mind.”
Needing a change in subject, I instructed my phone, connected to the van’s stereo, to “call David”. Greyson threw me a questioning glance when the ringtone sounded through the vehicle.
“I’ll explain later,” I said.
He nodded just as the phone was picked up on the other end of the line. “Eden?” David asked.
“I have someone here with me,” I told him. “Someone you wanted to meet.”
"Yes! I knew you’d find him," David said, "though it’s sooner than I expected.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I haven’t yet cleared this idea with the other chairmen at SHAID, that’s all,” he said.
My brain screeched to a halt. Most of SHAID’s almost four hundred members were unaware that the chairmen ran a highly illegal operation in the background: they helped shades who could pass as ‘real’ to integrate into society. Including me two years ago. They were usually a very organized bunch - had to be if they didn’t want to be discovered. Which was why I’d just assumed that they were all in on David’s… idea. “I thought you had a plan!”
“I do, sort of. I just thought I had more time till you found him.”
“You’re chairman. Can’t you decide?”
“I’m one of the chairmen. We decide issues like this together. Harboring an infamous shade like him will create controversy, even among us shade advocates. Seeing as it’s illegal and all.”
“What do you propose I do with him until you all have discussed this? What if the others don’t agree to this plan of yours?”
“Calm down, we’ll figure it out. I’ll organize an emergency conference. Bring him to PharmaZeusics, for now. I just got here. Sean called me in to talk about something.”
&
nbsp; My surprise that Sean wanted to talk to David about his doppelgänger in person was eclipsed by a different concern. “Your office? What about Izzy’s safe house?”
SHAID had a safe house for shades the chairmen deemed real, benevolent and inconspicuous enough to be integrated into society. Izzy, one of SHAID’s original founders, ran the highly illegal hideaway and forgery operation to give those shades the necessary ID, documents, and history. She’d been instrumental in my survival and legitimization two years ago. Back then, David had taken me straight to her, which was why I’d expected him to tell me to take Greyson there, too.
“No, bring him to PharmaZeusics,” he insisted. “I haven’t told Izzy about this yet, either. If you show up there with him out of the blue, she’ll refuse out of hand. You know how strict she is.”
“And rightly so,” Aunt Vy scoffed.
In general, I agreed with her and Izzy. It was too risky for Izzy’s illegal underground operation to take on a shade that had drawn as much attention as Greyson. But it didn’t mean that taking him to PharmaZeusics was a good idea, either. “Won’t people see him?”
“Not if you drive into the back section of the garage. It’s reserved for PharmaZeusic’s big cheeses, so there’s little traffic, especially this late. The elevator will go all the way up to my office without stopping. Nobody will see him if I don’t want them to.”
“I can just drive right in?”
“You’ll need to punch in a passcode. I’m already texting it to you.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you. This could be a turning point in shade history. A step closer to the legalization of shades.”
“Some of them, at least,” I muttered. “I hope you’re right.”
“Me too. When will you be here?”
“Ten minutes.”
“I’ll meet you down in the garage.”
