“Ow!”
Troy laughed. “Nope. Not a dream.” He kissed his own fingertips then brushed them lightly over the spot that he pinched. “All better?”
Goosebumps blossomed up her arm, answering his question for her. It felt better than better. A powerful thrill tingled inside of her, reminding her of their kiss earlier. The heat and passion of it had consumed her. Troy was so tender with her, so considerate, that she felt completely safe, sheltered in his arms like she belonged there.
So when he asked her to tell him about her dreams, she did; finally trusting him enough to share the truth. He hadn’t lied; he was a great listener, completely engaged, without a hint of judgment or criticism, as she told him the gory details about the dream with Blake and how she had watched him shoot someone in cold blood. The honesty alleviated a burden she had carried about hiding it all from him, but it also left her feeling completely exhausted and, while lying on his lap, she must have drifted off.
“I can’t believe I fell asleep. How rude!”
“It’s totally fine. I was enjoying the view.”
She blushed again, sat up, and stretched. Then she realized that for the first time in two days, she had slept without dreaming. Could it be possible that just talking to Troy had cured her? Sure, talking with Genesis had been helpful, but the fact that Troy accepted her affliction put her even more at ease.
But then Aislen thought about her father. If she were cured of the dreams, would she see him again? She had actually started to like him and the idea of not seeing him—of him being a figment of her imagination—renewed the ache of loss.
“What’s wrong?” Troy asked.
“What makes you think something is wrong?”
“Aislen, please. You wear your heart on your sleeve. You may not say anything, but every emotion you have reads across your face like a CNN news ticker. What is it?”
“I just realized—I didn’t dream just now. For two days, I haven’t slept without having some kind of strange or disturbing vision. I’m kind of relieved, but kind of sad, too, I guess.”
“Gen told me you had another dream, something about an estranged father, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about. She thought that would be best if it came from you.”
Aislen thought about her father, a man she had only seen once in her whole life and rarely thought about, until the dreams came. In all of her talks with Troy, she had never gone into any detail about her life. He knew that she lived alone with her mother, but she’d never told him about her father or that he’d abandoned them. It was way too personal to share with a co-worker. But now that they were becoming something different, something more, maybe she could go there.
“Are you sure you want to hear about it?” she asked. “I don’t want to bore you to death.”
“Absolutely, I do,” Troy said, sliding himself behind her and pulling her back against his chest. “There is nothing I would rather hear about.”
CHAPTER 30
Raze stepped through the blazing white aperture and into the room on the other side.
Blake was curled in the fetal position on the sheetless, stained mattress of his bed, moaning and rocking himself back and forth. He looked scrawny and pathetic in his thin, paper gown; but Raze was no longer fooled.
He glanced through the windowpane into the hallway. An oily-faced police officer, who must have drawn the short stick for babysitting duty, was planted in a chair just outside the door. Fortunately, he was completely engrossed with his iPhone: checking his Facebook, looking at porn on YouTube, or IMing his bitch. A little tête-à-tête between Raze and Blake would not disturb him.
Raze turned back to Blake and waited. He knew there was no need to disengage the option-lock command because he knew now—it had never worked in the first place. After a moment, just as he predicted, the tantrum stopped and Blake slowly rolled over. He sat up at the edge of the bed and looked directly at where Raze’s invisible presence was standing.
“That took longer than expected,” Blake said telepathically.
Sure enough. The puppet had a hold of the strings.
Raze wished he had brought his body along with him so he could beat the crap out of the little shit. But he needed to stay focused so he carefully put that energy back in check.
Blake raised an eyebrow at Raze. “I see you’re finally getting a grip on your anger issues. The challenge has been good for you then.”
Raze was both surprised by Blake being able to read his signature fluctuations as well as the massive balls he apparently grew overnight. Blake had never presented himself as anything more than a weak, lonely, and petulant schoolboy. He had a lot of nerve speaking to Raze with such superiority.
“I am full of surprises, aren’t I?”
There was no way Raze was going to allow this brat access to his thoughts. He secured his field into a flat line and decided now that Blake was back inside his body; he could grab ahold of his frequency so he could keep his mind’s eye on him from now on. Raze turned on his receptors and tuned in to Blake’s space.
“That isn’t gonna work,” Blake said, smugly.
Raze ignored him and zeroed in. Blake’s field was emitting only a dense, stagnant black, but just as Raze went to file the signature into his memory centers, the hueless energy shifted and a jumble of static jammed Raze’s receptors.
Blake smirked and his field pulsed again, this time transmitting a deep, blood red. Without warning, another sting of static spewed from him and then, just as suddenly, he began beaming an atomic, sunshine yellow. Blake was changing his frequency transmissions as easily as flipping through channels on a television set, volleying back and forth between static and various colors of the spectrum. All of them inaccurate and, therefore, useless to Raze.
“Told you so,” Blake snorted.
That was it. Raze bundled up a wad of his own hot electricity in the palm of his hand and threw it at Blake, whacking him in the left temple.
“Ow!” Blake hollered out loud, as the voltage threw him backwards.
Raze glanced at the window to see if Blake’s yelp elicited any interest from the gunny sitting watch outside the door. When he failed to appear, Raze looked back at Blake. He was sulking now, rubbing the spot where the energy absorbed into his brain and acting like the twelve-year-old Raze was more familiar with,.
“What’d you do that for? Blake telepathed with a whine.
Raze remained silent. He wasn’t here to answer this twit’s questions.
“I don’t understand. Ichiban told me you’d be pleased.”
Who? Was there someone else involved in all this? “Who’s Ichiban?” Raze demanded, finally breaking his telepathic silence.
“He’s the Master of Worlds, of course,” Blake said, rolling his eyes as if it was a total no brainer.
Master of Worlds? Only an egomaniacal doucher would come up with such lame bullshit. “How did you meet him—this Ichiban?”
“Oh, he would come play with me in Demesne—after you and I were finished—but he would show me all kinds of things that you never did.”
“Like what kinds of things?”
“Like how to change my force field so nobody could ever catch me...and how to get in the game without the visor after Dad took them away from me...and how to access the hidden level of the game.”
So Blake was working for someone else. Of course! It made much more sense. And he was able to access the game and Raze’s playing field in The Stratum without the visor. The only thing was, there wasn’t a single person even close to being adept enough, in either the game or The Stratum, to show Blake how to do those things. Raze’s fury was piqued again.
“I don’t understand why are you’re so angry, Sir. Ichiban said you’d be pleased.”
Raze noted that Blake still acknowledged him as a superior. That was a positive sign. But the little shit had found his way around his firewall and had read his emotional field again. Raze readjusted his frequency.
“Why would he thin
k I’d be pleased?” Raze asked.
“Ichiban said that you have too much work to do—that you have to do everything—all by yourself—and that you needed a helper.”
Raze recognized the sentiment as his own. Someone is using my own words against me, he thought to himself. And there was only one person that could be. It had to be Grant! Raze had just had that conversation with him yesterday. And didn’t he tell Raze that he had his eye on a new talent? Someone who could possibly surpass him? He must have been talking about Blake, which meant the asshole had been trying to undermine Raze and The Project all along.
Raze moved in closer and got his phantom face down into Blake’s. “Then why didn’t he tell me about you, little boy? Why didn’t he tell me that the plan had changed and that we weren’t killing you after all?”
Feeling the menacing proximity of his presence, Blake pulled his head back. His brain began to stutter. “Uhhhh...well...uh, he said that...that...no one was supposed to know about me until the right time. I’m supposed to be a secret.”
Really? Grant told Raze that he had informed The 8 about his new prodigy. The liar! Was that fawning sycophant so bold as to do what he wanted, with blatant disregard for The 8’s objectives?
“Ichiban said The 8 are a bunch of buffoons and that they can go fuck themselves,” Blake answered, finding a way around Raze’s firewall yet again and reading his thoughts.
Raze was stunned. How was he doing that?
“Ichiban taught me how,” Blake said.
It took everything in Raze’s power not to knock the smart aleck unconscious. He updated his firewall again, locking Blake out and moved toward the far wall of the room.
The 8 can go fuck themselves? Raze couldn’t believe it. The Grant Parker he knew would never say such a thing. The 8 had made Grant who he was. They could have easily eliminated his obsolete ass years ago. But they didn’t. They saved him. They took care of him. And they rewarded him far beyond merit.
The ungrateful bastard. He was a fucking traitor and that was a death penalty offense within the Protocol of the company. Raze would be all too willing to handle that assignment himself.
“Ichiban says that your talents are wasted working for The 8,” Blake continued. “He says—you need to look out for yourself from now on and that you should join us. He says that the only thing that matters right now is that pretty lady.”
At the mention of Aislen, Raze’s gut clenched. Aislen was a fighting word. And she was supposed to be his secret.
“Did you tell him about her?” he asked, trying not to let the charge of apprehension leak with the transmission.
Blake shook his head. “I didn’t have to.”
“What do you mean, ‘You didn’t have to’? Someone had to! You and I were the only ones in Demesne when she showed up.”
“No, we weren’t. Ichiban was there.”
Raze thought back. Blake was wrong. The only conscious entities in Demesne that night were Scott Parrish, Blake, Aislen, and Raze himself. Parrish was dead before the girl reared her pretty head and the drones were nothing but holographic shells.
“Where?” Raze demanded. “If he was there, where was he?”
Blake reached up and touched the center of his forehead. “Ichiban was with me.”
Raze was flabbergasted. If his jaw was with him it would have dropped open. It was genius. Grant was riding the boy’s more advanced consciousness into frontiers that his own couldn’t take him. Raze didn’t realize Grant had it in him.
“Is Ichiban in there right now? Can I talk to him?” Raze asked.
Blake tapped around the top of his head and frowned. “No, he isn’t in right now. I think you knocked him out with that ball of lightning. That was a pretty, neat trick. Can you teach it to me?”
Raze ignored him. That was all what he needed right now. “Where did Ichiban go?”
“Oh, he’ll wait for me in Demesne. And once I get back, we are going to meet our buddy, Mathis! And he is going to tell us where to find the lady!” Blake’s eyes began to gleam with excitement.
The once unfamiliar sensation of possessiveness fisted up again. Raze could feel it twist underneath the steely reserves of apathy that normally fortified his interior.
“Ichiban wants you to meet us there, too,” Blake continued. “And when he finds out where she lives, he wants you to go and get her for him.”
“Me?! To go get her for him?!” Raze was unsettled by the request and it was hard not to let it seep out.
“Yep. Ichiban wants her captured. But you can’t kill her. Ichiban has other plans for her first.”
“What could Ichiban possibly want her for—besides getting rid of her because she knows too much?”
“Ichiban says that she is the key to getting everything he has always wanted.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense. She’s a nobody. An accident. She doesn’t know or even understand anything!”
“That’s not what Ichiban says. He says she is someone very special.”
“And how does he know that?”
“Because he was fishing for someone else that night and she showed up.”
“Fishing?”
“Yep. He was sending out a special frequency hoping to lure someone else with it. But caught her instead. He says she’s even better because now we can use her to get to who he really wants.”
“Who’s he looking for?”
“None of your business.”
Without thinking, Raze slammed a healthy dose of wattage into Blake’s head again.
Blake yelped. “Sorry! That’s what Ichiban said when I asked. ‘None of your business.’ He said we just need to find her, bring her to him and that once we help him do that, he will handle the rest.” Blake’s eyes lit up again and he smiled. “Then he says that my work will be done and that he’ll take me to my Dad.”
Raze stopped and contemplated Blake for a moment. Didn’t the boy understand that his father was dead? Raze realized that with another consciousness channeling through him that night, Blake may not have been the one who really shot his father. That it would have been Ichiban—that it would have been Grant!
Again, this was not the Grant that Raze knew. That Grant was a pussy, a man without a backbone, who had always claimed the moral high ground and frowned upon the dirty work that kept him living the high life. Was he actually a cold-blooded killer after all? A cold-blooded killer now after Aislen?
A monster roared inside of Raze.
There were emotions that were prohibited in his line of work: pity, guilt, jealousy—any kind of giving a damn—were completely forbidden. If even one caught hold of him, it could destroy him from the inside out. Raze realized it may have been too late.
The mere thought of Grant getting his grubby hands on Aislen, having his way with her, then killing her, sent an uncontrollable urge to annihilate Grant racing through Raze’s veins.
Raze needed to get to Aislen before Grant did. He needed to find her and figure her out so he could figure out what was happening to him.
And sometimes in order to beat someone, you had to join them.
“What does Ichiban want me to do?”
CHAPTER 31
Aislen relaxed in Troy’s arms for another hour. She felt so comfortable in his presence, so secure that he wouldn’t find her crazy that it was easy for her to open up and tell him about her other dreams.
She shared the vision of her father as a homeless man and how he’d begged her to ask her mom about the teacups. She explained to Troy about her father abandoning them before she was ever born, how she had only met him one time her whole life, but that he had sent her mother a teacup from a different place around the world every year.
Then she told him about her dream that morning, how her father had held her with an invisible force to make sure she would listen to him and that he had made her illness go away with practically a wave of his hands.
“He told me I was waking up,” she said. “That I had special abilities t
hat were activating and that he needed to show me how to use them because I could be in danger.”
Aislen felt Troy stiffen behind her and he sat up straighter. “What kind of danger?” he asked, sounding pensive.
Aislen didn’t want to worry him, so she backed off. “Nothing bad,” she lied. “Just that people would be looking for me, wanting to use these abilities for themselves.”
“What kind of abilities was he talking about?”
“I don’t know all of them. He only showed me how to do one thing.”
“And what was that?”
Aislen opened her mouth to answer, but the long wail of a distant train interrupted her. She could have sworn that she heard it calling out “Doooooooooooon’t!” and she remembered that her dad had told her not to talk about her dreams. But he wouldn’t have meant Troy. Troy was being so understanding and helpful.
“Well, he taught me how to travel to different places using balls of energy,” she decided to tell him. “It was just like Gen said this morning. We created these orbs of energy—he called them signal lines—just by thinking about a place. Then we stepped into them—and went to that place. It was amazing! And don’t you think it’s strange that Gen would dream something that actually happened in my dream, too?”
Aislen felt Troy’s body tense up again and thought that maybe she had gone too far. Maybe she had gone beyond what Troy could handle.
“Go on,” he said, but his voice was tight, almost stern.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” he said.
The train hollered at her again, closer this time. “Stoooooooop!”
Aislen sat up and turned to face Troy. The intensity that had clouded his face at breakfast that morning was written all over his face again.
“Are you changing your mind now? Are you starting to think I am crazy,” Aislen asked. “You know, maybe the dream is crazy, but I still find it strange that Gen had a similar dream as mine—and I want...”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Troy said, cutting her off. “It is unusual, yes, but I don’t think you’re crazy and I am very interested in what you have to say.”
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