by Jody Wallace
“I forgot.”
Like hell she had. He’d reminded her to strap on her holster when they’d gotten their rental car, and she’d postponed it, claiming it bugged her while seated. Then he’d reminded her when he’d parked the car and unloaded their bags from the back seat. After that he’d been distracted by the environment, the guards, the nervous vigil, and his ruminations about the future.
“You got a lot better aim than skill in hand to hand.” This corridor was narrower, and they had to walk close. His arm brushed hers. The doors to the various rooms were reinforced, the inset windows tiny and thick. Unlike the rest of zone ten, zone ten-and-three-quarters, or whatever it was, was sparsely populated and quiet. “A bullet will sidetrack most manifestations long enough for you to remember the pointy end of the sword goes into the bad guy. There’s no reason to be unprepared. Guess how many weapons Adishakti’s carrying?”
“One?”
“Four.” As a vigil, Adi only had to surrender her weapons at the Orbis and in areas dictated by conventional law. “Two guns, two knives. May have spikes in her braid. Check her hips at the edge of the scrubs. Gun belt.”
“I don’t have to be armed if Adi and the guards are.”
God, Maggie pissed him off sometimes. He couldn’t talk her out of her fear of dreamspace, and he couldn’t talk her into taking self-defense, much less offense, seriously. And, of course, he hadn’t been able to talk her into a quickie on the way here, though that was wisdom on her part, not a reluctance to step up.
She had to step up. And he had to step up his training. Or something. Once the vigils separated them after her matriculation, how the hell would she survive?
“If weapons were so important,” she added, “they’d have let you keep yours.”
“I could…” he began, but Adi finished keying in a long sequence into a touchpad. The door bleeped and opened with a shush.
Reinforced? Understatement. The door was like a vault. Why’d they bother with that? It wouldn’t keep wraiths from materializing inside if that was where a conduit opened.
But then, if wraiths popped up in a place with reinforced steel doors, the facility could go on a proper lockdown. The monsters would get stuck in rooms or corridors and be easier to kill, and noncombatants could find hideouts. It wasn’t as if wraiths could rematerialize somewhere else once they entered the physical plane.
Adi led them into the small room. A thin woman lay pale and unconscious in an angled hospital bed.
It took Zeke a minute to recognize Karen Kingsbury. She was a skeletal shadow of her former self, her former self being a blond bombshell with a flair for the dramatic that apparently went hand in hand with murderous psychosis.
Zeke halted at the threshold. Tubes and wires pronged off her body like porcupine quills. Machines surrounding her beeped in various sequences.
His stomach bottomed out like a jon boat on a sandbar.
Maggie gazed at him questioningly. He leaned against the doorjamb and shoved a hand in his pocket.
He’d been relieved to find out this was about Karen. He’d known on some level he was going to see her. Walking into a room with a vegetative Karen Kingsbury was preferable to walking into a room with a curator bent on taking Maggie away from him, right?
Where were his balls?
Shriveled up and hiding.
The pitiful woman in the bed represented everything Zeke had done wrong as an alucinator. Maggie represented everything he was determined to do right. Having them in the same place at the same time was blowing his mind.
What if he’d met Maggie first? Would he have screwed up with her instead? Would she be the one lying in the bed?
He’d had sex with Karen and wanted to have sex with Maggie. They were both his students, both L5s, and had both formed tangible bonds with him.
The similarities ended there.
Goddamn. If Karen woke—some kind of shit was going down with her, else he wouldn’t have been sent for—Maggie would be the first person she’d target. Karen hadn’t just been murderous and crazy. She’d been neurotically jealous. He had to protect Maggie.
But he couldn’t creep closer to that bed.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to move into the room and not block the entryway.” A stern medical type, incongruously wearing a sword, spoke to Zeke from a nurse’s station in the hallway. Monitors displaying camera-eye views of beds surrounded the employee, and two soldiers trooped down the hallway, making rounds.
“The door is programmed to shut itself.” Adi approached him like she might a snarling dog. Or a whimpering, cowering dog. “A blockage will set off the alarms. They’re loud. Please come in.”
Reluctantly, Zeke held up the wall beside the entry instead of the jamb. The door eased itself shut.
“Have a seat, both of you.” Adi indicated folding chairs that seemed flimsy and out of place in one corner. Maggie sank into one without protest. Did she not realize who was in that bed? Did she not feel the same way Zeke did, like inside he was screaming his head off?
That was how he’d screamed when Karen and her wraiths had scorched him into a dream coma. Cut off his conduit, his access to the terra firma. Locked him in the sphere. He’d escaped, obviously, but not unscathed.
Karen had scathed a whole fucking lot of people. At least he’d survived it.
Zeke forced himself past Karen’s bed so he could join Maggie. Every footfall could have been somebody punching him in the gut. Considering his poor handling of this stress, if there’d been a curator in this room, waiting to steal Maggie, he might have keeled over dead.
“You’re sweating,” Maggie said in a low voice. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t like not having a weapon.” He looked at Adi instead of Maggie. Maggie had been around him enough that she’d be able to read the lie in his words. “People are uptight as hell down here.”
Adi glanced up at the camera trained on Karen’s bed so quickly, Zeke only noticed because he was staring at the vigil. She joined them in the corner—underneath the camera and out of its scope.
Coincidence? He didn’t think so.
“We’ve registered some anomalous activity in the past several months,” Adi explained. Though she’d hustled them down here like her tail was on fire, her face remained mostly expressionless. “More patients than normal have passed on. Our doctors haven’t been able to detect any unusual infections or health fluctuations.”
“And her?” Zeke nodded at the body on the bed.
With a subtle gesture, Adi pointed at the camera above them.
So. Someone with access to the camera wasn’t in the loop. Lots of folks at this facility, as well as any vigil or curator, could retrieve the security feed. Not a small group—nor one Zeke would be inclined to mistrust. Adi better be making the right move with this, because he was trusting her with Maggie’s safety.
“Ms. Kingsbury may have evolved into a dream coma like several other patients we’ve lost,” Adi said without changing the tone of her voice. The camera would pick that up, which made it common knowledge. “As a number have manifested wraiths, we’ve taken the precaution of moving Kingsbury to maximum security.”
“No great loss if she kicks it,” Zeke said.
Adi frowned at him. “All life is sacred, Zeke. The Somnium preserves life. It doesn’t erase it.”
“When wraiths materialize,” Maggie said, “are they considered alive?”
“No. They don’t belong on this plane.” Adi stood before them calmly, her posture relaxed, but it didn’t fool Zeke. She was, and had been since he and Maggie arrived, poised to jump. She just hid it better than he did. “Many believe dispatching them returns them to their proper dimension instead of killing them.”
“What happens if a wraith isn’t dusted?” Maggie asked thoughtfully. Advanced dreamsphere theory was a class for alucinators who re
mained with the Somnium. Maggie hadn’t reached the point where it was time to choose between active employment and the fundi.
“No matter what form they take, they try to kill people until we nail them,” Zeke explained. “Don’t matter if the dreamer who made them’s alive or not. Bastards keep at it, what, years? Don’t need to eat, don’t need to piss, don’t need to sleep. Just kill kill kill, all the day long.” Researchers in the manifestation tank had had monsters in captivity for—he didn’t know how long.
That facility was another need-to-know location. Alucinators joked about it being the real Area 51.
“Their life spans may be indefinite. We’ve only been able to maintain uninterrupted study of manifested creatures for fifty years. Prior to that, we couldn’t safely secure them.” Adi fetched two clipboards, thick with paper, from a cabinet beside Karen. She handed them both one. “I’m going to need the two of you to sign some confidentiality agreements before we proceed.”
Zeke had never had to do this. Somnium employment contracts contained all the confidentiality strictures any secret organization could desire. The new doc was chock full of eye-crossing legalese.
He flipped a few pages. More legalese. Long paragraphs. Lawyers didn’t care about a reader’s need for white space on a page, that was for damn sure, much less the occasional illustration. “Jesus, Adi. Can’t you summarize this?”
Maggie’s finger trailed across the pages as if she were reading and not just looking for the X to sign beside. “It’s pretty standard.”
“Please read it, Zeke. After you familiarize yourself with the document, I’ll explain what we need from you.” Adi—out of sight of the camera—withdrew a small spiral notebook and pencil from a leg pocket of her scrub pants.
Wow. Old style. They couldn’t orate in the dreamsphere, couldn’t chat on the phone, couldn’t talk in the hallway.
Who and what did Adi suspect? Should Zeke be flattered or concerned that she wanted to involve him?
Others think K’s on same path as deceased, Adi wrote. I think she’s killing them. You 2 must trance in & assess.
Adrenaline bashed into Zeke like a racecar, and he jumped to his feet. “Fuck no.”
Maggie exchanged an exasperated glance with Adi. Probably not because he’d refused a suicide mission but because he’d bounced up like a bingo-playing idiot and refused vocally.
He should have just flipped Adi off. Camera couldn’t hear that, but she’d have gotten the message.
“Fine, I’ll read the confidentiality agreement,” he said for the camera’s sake. He sat and crossed his arms. Maggie returned his clipboard to his lap. His heart pounded in his… Shit, it felt like it was in his throat, choking him. A big ball of tension.
Goddamn. That’s where his balls were?
Z only 1 who can link w/K besides curator, Adi wrote.
Zeke accepted the pad and wrote, Fuck no.
A pending murder spree didn’t seem like something Adi ought to hide from the others. Why were her suspicions off the record? Everyone knew what Karen had done—and how it had been half his fault.
Maggie sighed. She took the pad next. How is she killing?
In dream coma, shield deteriorates. Adi’s handwriting remained concise despite the fact she was writing with the pad in her hand instead of on a table. Victims can’t defend forever.
Maggie used her own pen. How long can they?
A week or more, Adi wrote. Zeke had become perforated after a couple hours, but he could have survived a dream coma for weeks—provided his body were maintained in the terra firma. Other alucinators trapped in dream comas wouldn’t be as enduring.
Can K vigil-trap from coma? Maggie wrote.
No. But believe K helping wraiths. Directing them. Something.
Zeke let the women scribble at each other and fumed. Adi wanting him to trance in and connect with Karen was fucking stupid. If that psycho was close to being functional again, she had to be put down. From the outside.
It was long overdue. The people she’d killed. Friends, strangers, innocents. She’d reveled in the violence as if she were the wraith, as if she were growing more powerful with each death.
Had she found a way to kill from inside the dreamsphere? Were the other patients an appetizer? If she could vigil-trap healthy alucinators like she’d managed with Zeke—a procedure most alucinators were never taught—who knows what else she could do? No alucinator would be safe, much less a neonati like Maggie, whose shields were imperfect to begin with.
His Maggie, whom Adi expected to accompany him into the war zone of Karen’s dreamsphere.
Fuck no.
Maggie was writing now. Why are patients changing coma types?
Occasionally it happens. Don’t know reason for marked uptick.
Request curator?
Zeke would like to read the answer to that too.
Adi shook her head. Nobody involved curators until they were desperate. Adi’s rank as a vigil wouldn’t offset her wariness, but this was huge. A curator had had to help subdue Karen last time. Now Adi thought they could avoid one?
Zeke hadn’t defeated Karen by himself the first time and couldn’t now. Linking with her in order to conduct a rudimentary assessment—he wasn’t a trained assessor and only knew basics—would place him at her mercy. Again.
Adi should know he’d bomb. She was, after all, his shrink. Sort of.
Maggie added, Why both of us? and gave Adi the notebook.
You strengthen his shields. Adi’s clear, neat cursive put his and Maggie’s penmanship to shame. Then again, Adi wasn’t thrown for a loop. Lill told me. Guardian role inspires him.
Zeke flipped to a clean page impatiently. So his shields were tougher…as long as he had Maggie to protect? Lill didn’t tell me that.
Adi raised her eyebrows at him. Had Lill told her anything else—like how many wraiths Maggie attracted and how she’d managed to orate with Lill?
Out loud, as if he and Maggie were obediently speed-reading the doorstoppers, she said, “Initial each page at the bottom. I’ve highlighted where you need to sign and date.”
Then she wrote, Prior to recent events, anomalies noted. Upsurge in wraith population.
Everywhere, Zeke wrote.
Not this many. Adi’s pencil flew across the paper. Masses. Shields don’t shroud them.
Maggie’s knee bumped his. That described her dreamsphere too. Karen’s trance sphere, if that was what Zeke had seen this morning, bore a marked resemblance to Maggie’s sleep sphere.
He needed to tell Adi about encountering Karen—and probably about Maggie’s wraiths. If Lillian hadn’t already. Adi finished writing and showed him the paper.
Irregularities in K’s upkeep. Broken bones, no abuse on camera. Healed.
L5. Shit heals fast, Zeke scribbled. The higher the level of the alucinator, the better his or her recuperation. It was attributed to the Somnium’s physical fitness and dietary requirements—yeah, they micromanaged that too—but a few fringe theories insisted it had something to do with dreamspace. He had a vague memory of that being a pet project of some vigil, but he didn’t stay up to date on medical crap.
Adi puzzled over Zeke’s sloppy scrawl before responding. K heals in days.
That was some speedy recovery. Zeke gave his hair a tug, thinking.
Not broke, he wrote.
Very broken. 3 places. Adishakti wasn’t a degreed medical doctor, but no doubt actual doctors had treated Karen.
Tamper with security feed?
Second camera. Secret.
Incredible. Super vigil Adishakti Sharma had gone so far as to place a hidden camera. Now she was covertly involving him and Maggie in her investigation. Zeke liked and trusted her—but he trusted the other vigils too. He hoped he wasn’t placing his faith in the wrong one.
Dream coma, he wrote. Wraith bro
ke arm.
Perhaps. Adi didn’t look convinced. Broken bones weren’t a wraith-style attack.
Other wounds?
None.
In the terra firma, wraiths sucked blood and devoured flesh, bite by bite. Lacerations, gashes, tears, punctures, and tooth and claw marks were the result. In the trance sphere, they struck the same way while consuming a dreamer’s sanity.
They’d starve their asses off if they tried to make a meal of Karen’s brain. This was assuming she was in danger and not one of the monsters herself.
Concerned with healing, Adi added.
Who knows? Zeke asked.
About breaks—many. About healing—myself, Blake, 2 med personnel. Sworn to silence.
Adi had been hiding something from Blake at the checkpoint. Blake know all or just healing?
Just healing. Adi’s expression became more revealing than usual. Her smooth, brown forehead creased, and she seemed to be biting the inside of her cheek. Like she was trying to hold back words she wanted to say. Concerns she wanted to share.
She was worried. Like he had to take a leap trusting her, she was taking a leap bringing him in. Then again, she needed his cooperation.
Other vigils? Zeke wrote. Curators?
A tiny, negative shake of the head. After handing the pad to Maggie, she crossed the room, into view of the camera. She calmly adjusted Karen’s pillow as if performing routine maintenance. She jotted a few notations on the chart at the end of Karen’s bed and returned to the camera-free zone.
“Kingsbury has started to show signs of the same physical decline as the other patients,” she told Zeke and Maggie for the camera’s benefit.
Adi was doing well pretending nothing sneaky was going on. The camera monitored the patient, not other occupants of the room. The Somnium had its share of schemers, but unlike many governments, employees shared a single driving goal: protect the world from manifestations. It made for a less contentious political machine.
The lack of opposing organizations helped.
“None of the other patients,” Adi continued out loud, “have been able to communicate with our staff, whether they were matriculated or not.”
