The Awakening

by K. E. Ganshert

  I turn around. “Awe?”

  “I was a little afraid, to be honest. You’re like a …” His attention slowly moves from the tip of my feet to the crown of my head, making my skin flush with warmth. “A tiny, lethal ninja.”

  “I can take Claire, that’s for sure.”

  “Think you could take me?” He holds up his fists in a mock fighting stance. “Come on Karate Kid, put down the books and show me what you got.”

  My left cheek pulls in with the makings of a smile. I set the notebooks on the tattered, yellow armchair. “I could take you. I’m a powerful Fighter, remember?”

  Luka does an arm drag, so quick I don’t even see it coming. The motion is light and playful. It puts my back against his chest and his lips near my ear. I spin out of the hold, but this is real life, where I’m small and he’s strong and before I know it, he’s wrestled me to the ground and I’m pinned beneath him.

  “You’re lucky we’re not dreaming,” I say, attempting to squirm free.

  “You think you could take me in a dream?”

  “You saw me fight Claire and Jose.”

  “But I’m your Keeper, created to protect you, which means I must be stronger. Otherwise, who are we kidding? And besides, you haven’t seen me train.”

  I stop my struggling. “Claire has.”

  “Why Miss Eckhart, is that jealousy I detect in your voice?”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “You are.” He releases my wrists and gives my forehead a quick kiss. “It’s cute.”

  Cute? Cute is for little kids. Cute is for bunnies. Cute is not what I want to be to him. With the element of surprise on my side, I flip around and pin him beneath me.

  He flashes me a dazzling smile, and whatever threat Claire posed this morning ebbs away. She might have gotten Luka’s first smile of the day, but I got the bigger one, and his lips have never looked more enticing. I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that I am straddling him. I’m straddling Luka and he’s not exactly objecting. In fact, his hands move to my thighs, then slowly slide up to my hips.

  Before I can process what’s happening, a frantic scream for help splits through the hub. I scramble to my feet. Luka and I exchange a look of alarm, then take off running toward the noise. We don’t stop until we’re standing in the doorway of the greenhouse. Anna is the one screaming, tears streaming down her face as Fray lays unconscious at her feet. Luka slides to his knees and presses his ear to Fray’s chest. “Tess, get Cap! Hurry!”

  He folds his hands over Fray’s sternum and begins administering CPR. I stare in horror, because we’re too late. We have to be. Fray already looks dead.

  *

  Another image permanently seared into my memory—Luka resuscitating a lifeless, gray-skinned Fray on the greenhouse floor. For obvious reasons, Cap couldn’t call 9-1-1. But he did call Dr. Carlyle, who gave him specific instructions regarding Fray’s care until Dr. Carlyle himself arrived. Non helped Anna calm down so she could focus on casting a cloak, and Sticks shuffled me and the rest of my gaping classmates into the common room, where a somber mood has descended.

  The rest of morning classes have been cancelled. Afternoon training, too. We all sit on the couches and chairs, scuffing our feet, looking down at the ground, unsure what to say. My attention alternates between the entryway, waiting for Luka to appear, and Gabe standing guard at the door to the hub, anxious for Dr. Carlyle’s knock to announce his arrival. What’s taking so long? Doesn’t he realize a man’s life is on the line?

  Luka shows up first and we all come to the edge of the couch cushion.

  “He’s alive.”

  A loud exhalation fills the common room—a collective sigh of relief. I didn’t even realize I’d been holding my breath.

  “Where did you learn CPR?” Claire asks.

  “I was a lifeguard at the beach last summer.”

  It sounds so normal. A thousand lifetimes ago.

  “Good thing.” Jillian shudders, as though imagining what might have happened had Luka not known CPR. Surely one of the adults would have stepped in.

  Luka nudges Rosie’s foot with his shoe. “You doing okay there, Rose Bud?”

  She sits on the floor with her knees tucked to her chest, hugging her shins. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look every bit the little kid that she is. She looks up at Luka with those deep, obsidian eyes. “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

  “Hopefully Dr. Carlyle will be able to figure out what’s wrong.”

  “What happens if he can’t?” Ashley asks.

  “Ash,” Declan warns, his attention shifting to Rosie.

  “It’s a legitimate question.” She looks around—wild-eyed. “Anna can’t keep the cloak up twenty-four seven. It was hard enough with two of them.”

  Nobody has a response for this. We all just look at one another, as if waiting for someone else to offer a solution, or maybe at the very least, a bit of comfort. I find myself watching Luka, taking my cues from him. But his only movement is the muscle ticking in his jaw, as though he’s grinding something between his teeth.

  A quick knock-knock, pause, knock-knock, pause, knock-knock fills the common room.

  Gabe doesn’t wait for the person on the other side to knock again. He unlatches the bolts and the steel door groans open. The man we met at the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in downtown Detroit steps inside with a black medical bag and an air of distinct authority. Gabe doesn’t even have to point him in the right direction. Without a second glance at any of us—not even me or Luka, who you’d think would draw his attention—he heads down the hallway.

  Luka peers after him, then turns to Gabe and asks if they can pick up where they left off on Sunday. There’s an urgency to his question, as though learning how to protect me will somehow cure Fray of whatever made him stop breathing.

  “I have to stay here,” Gabe says, his baritone voice devoid of inflection. “But you and Claire can continue where we left off.”

  Whether to irritate me, or to escape the heaviness in the room, she quickly and gladly stands from her seat to follow after Luka. As they disappear together, I push out a frustrated breath and grab the stack of composition notebooks I brought with me from the library. I tuck them beneath my arm and separate myself from the group like Ellen, only I’m not reading Gone with the Wind. What I’m reading doesn’t make any sense at all.

  They are journal entries—recordings of dreams and real-life battles, lists of names, locations, even a few obscure hand-sketched maps of places I don’t recognize—with dates stretching all the way back to the 1300s. Which sort of refutes everything in them, seeing as composition notebooks didn’t exist during medieval times.

  I flip to a page dated 1756 with Fire Heart, Shawnee transcribed above it. I know enough about American history to know that the Shawnees are a Native American tribe, and judging by the odd wording of the passage, which I think is a recording of a strange dream on the eve of battle, it was written by Fire Heart himself. I’m fairly certain, though, that if this were authentic, Fire Heart wouldn’t be writing in English. I’m squinting at the neat, black-inked penmanship, trying to make sense of it all, when Link and Jillian join me on my couch.

  “What’s got your brow all furrowed?” Link asks, peeking over my shoulder.

  “Some notebooks I found in the library.”

  Jillian picks one of them up. “I’ve seen these on Non’s desk before.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m almost positive.”

  Link untwists the cap off his water bottle. “We need to find another Cloak.”

  He’s right. Even if Fray recovers completely, his collapse today made it abundantly clear that two Cloaks are not enough to keep us safely hidden. Without them hiding us, we are ducks sitting in the wide open. It’s only a matter of time before the other side finds us.

  “Link and I are going to pore over the databases,” Jillian says. “See if we missed anything the first time around. We thought you’d want to join us.
”

  “Yeah, I do.” It’s better than sitting here trying to decipher meaning from journal entries that could very well be Non’s work of fiction. I collect the notebooks into a pile as Jillian starts walking toward the computer lab.

  Link takes my hand and helps me up, then leans close to my ear. “Stop hiding from me, Xena. Training has to start tonight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Jump of Crazy Proportions

  I open my mind to Link. I don’t think about my family or Luka or Fray’s fragile condition. Even though I want to see my mom, convince her to do whatever she needs to do to bail Dad out of jail and move far away from Thornsdale, this has to come first. I need Link to teach me everything he knows, because maybe then I can help awaken more of The Gifting. And once they’re awakened, we can break them free. And once they’re free, we’ll have more people fighting on our side.

  I lay in bed with my eyes closed, thinking about Link—his shaggy hair and the light spray of freckles across his nose, the fast way his fingers navigate a keyboard or twist his Rubik’s Cube, his lopsided grin, the mischievous twinkle in his eye whenever he calls me Xena and everything he told me the evening we lay under a plant in the greenhouse.

  When I wake up, I’m surrounded by trees. Not the impossibly-tall redwoods that grow up from the ground outside my home in Thornsdale. But oak and ash and birch. This wooded area is so generic it could be anywhere.

  A twig snaps behind me.

  I turn around and Link is there, leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. “I found you.”

  “That’s because I made myself easy to find.”

  His grin grows wider. “Can’t give a guy a little credit, huh?”

  A gnat buzzes by my ear. I swat it away, then remember that this is dream world. There doesn’t have to be gnats. Or ants or spiders or any other creepy crawly thing that makes people like Leela prefer the indoors. I look up at the canopy of leaves above, where birds chirp and a squirrel scampers across a tree limb. It’s the perfect environment. “So Teach, here I am. What’s first on the training agenda?”

  “Whatever you want to be first. There’s dream hopping, dream linking, dream spying, dream searching, scouting—”

  “Wait—dream spying?”

  “It’s one of our most valuable assets. Dreams are incredibly revealing, you know. They tell you a lot about a person’s emotional state. Their fears, their weaknesses,” Link ticks each item off on his fingers, “their secrets.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “The only difference between dream hopping—which apparently, you’ve already done—and dream spying is that when you enter somebody’s dream, you don’t reveal yourself. You stay hidden and you observe.”

  I tuck that morsel of information away for later. “Okay, so what’s scouting?”

  “The lack of a modifier there was intentional, just so you know. Scouting isn’t actually done in a dream. It’s done after crossing through a doorway and it comes in handy when you want to scope out a specific location while remaining unseen by the physical eye.”

  “Dream searching?”

  “Ah, that’s how I awaken those with the gifting. At least it’s how I awaken the ones in medically induced stupors. It’s not easy. Anna’s mind was so mired in the medicine that was being pumped into her system, that it was almost impossible to access. I had to go very deep. When you finally find the person, you explain what’s going on. It’s the first step to freedom, since a lot of times, they aren’t even aware. Searching’s also useful when someone’s being hijacked.”

  “Hijacked?”

  “Controlled. Possessed. Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “It happens enough.”

  “What happens to the person who’s being hijacked?”

  “They’re like an oblivious hostage. Stuck in dream world, with no idea that they’re actually stuck. Which isn’t good, because when they’re oblivious to what’s happening, they can’t fight the entity that’s hijacking them.”

  Out of habit, I scratch the inside of my wrist. “Are they trapped in dream world forever?”

  “Not likely. Usually, the entity uses the person they are hijacking to accomplish something specific and once it’s accomplished, the entity leaves. Except for some gaps in memory and the fear of Alzheimer’s, the person who was hijacked remains completely clueless. I have some suspicions, though, that some people in power are being hijacked indefinitely.”

  A puzzle piece clicks into place—the government official who shot me in the neck with the needle, the one who dragged me out of Mr. Lotsam’s Current Events class and called me Little Rabbit. It’s a name I’ve only ever been called by one person. Was he possessed by Scarface? My mind spins around the thought. Who else might darkness be using to do their bidding? If I can find a way to search for them, awaken them, get them to fight their hijacker … then surely this will give our side the upper hand. Being a Linker is more than I ever hoped it could be. Maybe even more useful than being a Fighter.

  “So what do you want to try first?”

  “My grandmother,” I blurt.

  “Huh?”

  “I want to awaken her.” I couldn’t save her when I was younger, like she hoped I could when she wrote in her dream journal all those years ago, but maybe I can save her now. Maybe rescuing her is the first step to restoring my broken family.

  “Your grandma is in Shady Wood.”

  “So?”

  “Shady Wood is in Oregon. We are in Detroit. There’s a limit to how far we can hop, remember?”

  “I thought that was only for Fighters. I thought the limit only applied to the supernatural realm. This is dream world.”

  “There’s always a limit. Same rules apply here. You can’t hop into someone’s dreams when they’re so far away.”

  “I can.”

  “Whoa there, cocky.”

  “No, for real. The other day, you asked where I was. Well, I was in California. I hopped into my brother’s dream.”

  There’s a long pause. A few birds, perhaps unhappy with the sudden silence, flutter away from a branch, up into the sky. Finally, Link crosses one of his ankles over the other. “You must have been constructing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just like you can construct a place, like this, you can construct people, too. You thought it was your brother, but it was just a construct of your brother. You made him appear in your dream because you were missing him.”

  “It wasn’t a construct of Pete. It was Pete.”

  “Show me, then.”

  He might as well have thrown down the gauntlet and said prove it. He doesn’t believe me. But I know I’m right. The Pete from the other night was too real to be a construct of my own imagination. “I don’t know how to show you.”

  Link’s cheeks pull in, like he’s sucking on the dilemma. “There’s a way to tell whether you’re constructing or hopping.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you hop into somebody else’s dream, you can’t control it. You’re a visitor. What happens is up to the person dreaming. Take right now, for example. This is your dream. You can do what you want. Create what you want. I can’t, since I’m a visitor. So if you want to know whether you’re hopping or constructing, you do a test.”

  “Try to create something.”

  “Exactly.”

  A tree grows up from the ground beside us. Up, up, up into the air. A towering redwood in the midst of lesser things.

  Link looks up at it.

  “Now what?”

  “Can I make a suggestion? Next time, make your test something a little quicker. Like a penny appearing in the palm of your hand.”

  “Okay, fine. A penny. Now how do I prove to you that what happened the other night wasn’t my own construction?” In the past, whenever I’ve hopped, I’ve woken up in the place I’ve hopped to. I have no idea how to do it when I’m already inside
my dream.

  Link steps closer and threads his fingers with mine. His hand is smaller than Luka’s, his palm smoother. “Close your eyes,” he says. “Focus all your thoughts, all your attention, on the person whose dream we’re jumping into.”

  Okay, so who will that person be? I’m not eager to visit Pete again, not after seeing his nightmare first hand. There’s no way I’m bringing Link to my mom or my dad. But what about Leela? My heart twists at the thought of seeing her.

  With my mind made up, I squeeze my eyes tighter and focus on everything I know about my friend—her obsession with pink, the way she squeals in terror at the mere mention of spiders, the warmth of her brown eyes, the way she hardly pauses between words when she’s talking about something that excites her. Her hugs, her bubbly handwriting, her busy room—every inch of wall space covered with posters of her favorite musicians. The way she used to blush whenever Pete paid her any attention.

  Leela, Leela, Leela. I want to see Leela.

  I repeat her name over and over in my mind until my stomach drops—like I missed a step. The wind no longer rustles the leaves and the birds no longer chirp. I open my eyes. Link and I are standing inside my old high school. We’re in the upstairs hallway, right outside of Mr. Lotsam’s classroom. There are familiar faces—Bobbi and Chet and Serendipity. For a moment, I forget myself and wave at them. They walk right past, like I’m not there. But really, they’re the ones who aren’t there. They are figments of Leela’s dream. I spin in a circle, searching for my friend.

  The hallway clears and there she is, walking and talking with … Vick Delaney? Yep, it’s him. Vick Delaney, former boy band singer turned heartthrob actor for some zombie show that won him more MTV people’s choice awards than anybody else has ever won in a single night. Oh, Leela. I hate to interrupt her moment with him, but I can’t help myself. I push through the crowd, pulling Link with me, and wrap my arms around her neck.

  “Oh my gosh!” She hugs me back in one of her tight Leela hugs. “I can’t believe you’re here. Tess, this is Vick Delaney. Like, the Vick Delaney. Can you believe he transferred to Thornsdale?” She looks from me to him, a swoony-sort of expression on her face. “I’m his ambassador.”