Forest of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “They tried to take her, too,” I said. I didn’t want to say Clora’s name out loud because Delphine was right there, but the child must have seen it.

  Zizi swallowed visibly, and I could see that it was a painful knot to force down her throat. “How did you…?” she swallowed again and added, “Penn didn’t believe us until it was too late.”

  Zizi’s warm brown eyes dipped to Delphine. “There was a fire,” she said. “In the fields. In a barn outside of the bubble. While most of the others were busy with that, Penn and two others came for her.” She inclined her head at Delphine. “They had guns. They threatened to kill whomever came if we called for help. They threatened the little one. We happened to be in the wrong place, but Clora—” her voice broke.

  Clora had been dragged outside of the tech bubble, and she’d vanished like all the others. All that was left was her clothing and that bracelet. Delphine had lost her mother because of Theo’s machinations.

  I knew that Landers felt my ire rising again, and somehow he helped me debilitate it. There was a rush of what felt like power that flowed into me and then manifested itself into a pool of calmness. We can free them, he said to me. His words were as much reassurance to me as they were to him. We can get you out. Just don’t do anything rash.

  The thought that immediately popped into my head was almost teasing. Wasn’t it you who wanted me to stab something?

  I said don’t poke your damn sharp knife into people until you’re sure they’re trying to kill you. Landers’s thoughts were both rueful and chastising.

  He wants something, I thought as my hands curled around Delphine. Theo’s image flashed in my head. He wants me to do something.

  What?

  I don’t know.

  “Has anyone hurt you?” I asked Zizi and Craig.

  Craig shook his head. There was a bruise high on his cheekbone where he had been struck, and I knew he was minimizing how they had been treated. “Once they got us where they wanted us, they’ve been nice enough.” He laughed shortly and bitterly before adding, “Their people can’t get enough of Delphine.”

  “Canee?” Delphine asked, awkwardly squirming out of my overtight grip. She went back to her toys and began organizing them in a way that only she would understand.

  “I don’t have any candy, sweet girl,” I said regretfully. I pulled back and limped over to a cot. I sat down on it without hesitation and braced my injured thigh.

  “What happened?” Craig asked, his eyes on my leg.

  I could feel Landers in my head, impatient for an answer. Later, I thought, when I know more.

  We’re near, he thought to me. Very near. Then his presence faded away from my brain, and I instantly missed it.

  “I came to investigate this place to see if it was a tech bubble. On Penn’s suggestion, I might add.” I added under my breath, “That little butt-munching dipwa.”

  Delphine cocked her little head at me. “Tek bubba,” she said. One hand reached for mine, and she awkwardly dragged me up from the cot and over to her toys. Then she began to name them for me. “John, Boo, Tu, Moo,” she said and pointed to the dolls in turn. I carefully sat next to her, extending my injured leg so that it wouldn’t cramp up.

  “Let me see?” Zizi asked. She’d been working with the single doctor we had. One might say she was a nurse in training. I unbuttoned my camouflage pants and shrugged at Craig. Craig turned his back with a sigh. I raised my butt up and wiggled the pants down over the bandages.

  Zizi hissed a sharp breath and knelt beside me. She carefully lifted the edge of the bandages and peered at it. “It looks clean,” she said. “Stitches in it. I guess they gave you some antibiotics, too.” She didn’t wait for my nod but continued with, “You’ve got to be careful with this. You rip out the stitches, and you’ll have a big problem. How did you do this?”

  “There are booby traps outside the entrance to Cheyenne Jr.,” I said regretfully. “You know not to trust these people, don’t you?”

  “Can I look?” Craig asked. He didn’t wait but turned around. “Nice underwear,” he commented leeringly.

  I was wearing men’s boxers so I didn’t think it was a problem. They didn’t have holes in them.

  Craig eyed the bandages. “A booby trap? What did they do? Make a pit with stakes?”

  I tilted my head, and touched my nose with my index finger.

  “Seriously?” Craig said. “I guess you’re lucky you don’t have more holes in you, then.”

  “One through and through is plenty enough,” I muttered.

  “Boo-boo,” Delphine said. She supportively blew a kiss at the bandage.

  “That’ll help me, Delphine,” I said sincerely.

  Zizi helped me with the pants again. I sat and played with Delphine while I cogitated. Here were the stick and the carrot all wrapped up in a neat packet for me. The question was what did Theo want from me? What had he said about having the right contacts to get the job done? “And she’s got connections in the new world. She’s got the means that we need to get it done. Not to mention that a little bird whispered in my ear about her being the one that could get it done”

  “Has Theo said anything to you?” I asked.

  Craig sat on the closest cot and asked, “Who’s Theo?”

  “Martin, then,” I said. I would have preferred another name that used four letters, but I didn’t want to say them in front of Delphine. “That butterfly’s butt.”

  “Oh, him,” Craig said. “No, not much. Asked about the trains. Asked about whether we believe in God or not. Said we wouldn’t be harmed if we didn’t resist. We haven’t been, either.” His face crinkled up in obvious distress and he added, “Unless you count Clora. If it makes a difference, Penn was just as horrified as we were.”

  It didn’t make a difference in my opinion, but no one was asking my opinion. PENN FRICKING SCREWED UP!

  “You’ve got history with Martin,” Zizi said. She paced in front of the cell wall.

  “Yes,” I said shortly.

  “What kind of history?” Craig asked.

  “He was the first person I ran into after the change,” I said. “It isn’t a pretty story.”

  Craig took a moment to digest that. “How much trouble are we in?”

  “A lot,” I said. “Th— uh, Martin wants me to do something, likely in exchange for not doing something to you.”

  “Something,” Zizi repeated. “You should get him to let Delphine go out of the cage. She won’t hurt anything here.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. All kinds of scenarios ran through my head. If Delphine was loose in Cheyenne Jr., then the people here might do something to her. There were Theo and Tate, known psychos even if the tech bubble made them sane. I didn’t care to trust them. I had met Salome and Ariel, too. Both were a couple of dilithium crystals short of a warp core, and who knew what they were like on the outside. Then there was Penn. I had spent a little time with Penn at Sunshine, both inside the tech bubble and outside. I don’t know what his damage was, but he wasn’t a rabid murderer like some of the others under the mountain. Then there were the mermaids who might take it into their heads to find out if Delphine was a little redheaded hors d’oeuvre.

  “This place is like NORAD,” Zizi said. “Like in that TV series except without the star gate.”

  “It was the government’s little secret, like the bunker under the hotel in West Virginia or that other place in Pennsylvania,” I said. “Did you see anything, Zizi? When you touched any of them or rather when they touched you?”

  Zizi’s face tightened. “I didn’t see anything,” she said, and it was the way she said it that set my nerves on edge. It wasn’t “I didn’t see anything in their future that would concern us,” but “I didn’t see anything.” Anything at all.

  “Like it’s blank,” I filled in my interpretation. It didn’t make me feel any better. “And when you touch me?”

  “This bubble keeps me from seeing clearly,” Zizi said, waving her hand around. “
It’s like that at Sunshine and at the Naval Observatory. You know that. We’d have to leave the bubble before I touch you.”

  I nodded. Zizi had told Sophie pretty much the same thing once. We figured that it was the reason she couldn’t see Delphine’s future; Delphine had been in the bubble since birth, and thusly Zizi couldn’t see what happened to her or didn’t. Then something else happened. Sophie had talked about that, too. The future wasn’t written in stone. It could be changed. It changed every moment of every day. There were ways of changing it. Although Theo had come to this place and started a chain reaction that would impact all of us, it didn’t have to end in the way Zizi had foreseen.

  Theo had sent Penn after me. Theo had discovered that I hunted tech bubbles and thought to get me here for ulterior purposes. He’d arranged to kidnap people from Sunshine as leverage against me.

  But the truth was simpler than Theo would ever realize. Nothing was concrete.

  Chapter 15

  Lulu Has Another Chat With Landers

  The Present - Colorado

  I was so tired that I lay on the cot with Delphine cuddled in one arm, and my eyes fell shut like they were weighted. It didn’t seem like it was more than an instant later that I sat up, careful not to disturb the sleeping toddler.

  Not surprisingly, Landers stood beside me. The light from one of the rechargeable lanterns revealed his wintry hair and emphasized his pale blue eyes. “How is Delphine?” he asked quietly.

  “She’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think she realizes what happened to her mother. She’ll probably forget over time. Because she’s so young.” My voice trailed off because I didn’t know what other platitudes I could say. I was full of crap. Nothing was ever going to make up for losing her mother.

  Landers glanced at Craig and Zizi, who lay silent and still in the other two cots. Craig snorted and rolled onto his side. Zizi was a motionless lump under a thin military blanket. “And them?”

  “A bruise or two,” I said. “They said they were treated all right. They said Penn didn’t really believe them when they said that Clora would vanish.”

  Landers’s lips flattened into a grim line. “And that matters how?”

  “It doesn’t,” I answered. I stroked a beaded braid away from Delphine’s forehead. I had liked Clora. She had been a good and kind person. She was the kind of mother that any person would have wanted. She cared about people. She had been upbeat nearly every day of the time I had known her. Even when she had been giving birth to Delphine, and she had lost her hand, she was positive. The prosthesis that the doctor had brought back from Denver hadn’t fit her exactly, but Clora had learned how to use it effectively. She’d made jokes about having a hook like a pirate. Someone had even given her a fancy eyepatch as a gag gift the previous Christmas, and Clora had laughed about it until she’d cried.

  “You can’t come in here,” I said, meaning that he and the others couldn’t simply waltz into Cheyenne Jr.

  “And just why in holy hell not?” Landers snarled.

  “There’s a few reasons,” I said calmly. “They’ve got lots of guns, and I’m guessing they work, so I’m sure they wouldn’t hesitate to blow some holes in you should you be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’ve got blast doors that you and two or three armies couldn’t get through if they’ve got them closed, which I kind of think they might. They’ve got booby traps by the door.” I motioned at my leg. “I found those already. I suspect they’ve got more elsewhere and probably much worse than pits with stakes. They’re suspicious, paranoid, and prepared in a way that would make Oliver Stone deliriously happy. They’ve also got—” I stopped abruptly because I didn’t want to state the obvious.

  “You,” Landers supplied instantly.

  “Delphine,” I corrected. “I don’t know what they would do. I know what Theo would have done if he was on the outside of the bubble, but here…I just don’t know.”

  “Theo?”

  “The one I alluded to before,” I said shortly.

  “The one who hurt you,” Landers finished, and his voice was wintry. “He’s the one who left those scars on your back.”

  I didn’t want to admit it. “I tried my best to kill him. Once on purpose. The second time had been…happenstance.” The knife inserted in Theo’s hand and his overbalancing hadn’t been blatant plans of Theo’s death, but I hadn’t tried to save him, either. Somewhere deep inside of me, I was truly sorry he wasn’t dead.

  “The Golden Gate Bridge,” Landers said.

  “Are you picking that out of my head?” I demanded.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I asked about you. Gideon told me a few things. So did Leander. Leander forgets how much he projects when he’s talking, and he forgets that I can do what he does except on a whole other level.”

  So much for having secrets. I stroked Delphine’s forehead. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I think you should know,” was his plain answer.

  I didn’t have a response to that. “I think they’ll treat us okay until my leg is a little better healed. I’ll try to get them to give up Delphine.”

  Landers crouched beside the cot and put his hand on my knee. I could feel the warmth of his palm radiating out onto my flesh. It made goosebumps break out along my skin. Certainly people had touched me before. A few men had tried to kiss me. Even the not-so-good Lieutenant McCurdy in the District had tried to put the moves on me. (Or whatever his rank had been when the President had been tossed out of the tech bubble.) But this was something new. I wanted to do two things at the same time; I wanted to cover his hand with mine and hold it there, and I wanted to yank my leg away. I hated being contrary.

  My mouth opened and shut like a fish gasping for oxygen. Surprisingly, Landers appeared somewhat shocked, too. His fingers twitched, and his pale eyes seemed to burn like icy blue fire for an instant.

  “What does he want?” Landers asked, clearly referring to Theo.

  “I still don’t know,” I murmured. “Theo’s got an agenda. He says he has all the time in the world, but he sounds impatient.”

  “Is he sane?”

  “I think he is,” I said and added, “in here. In this place. But,” I added and trailed off again because the “but” was implicit.

  Landers said a bad word. “We’re outside, not a mile away,” he said. “We have a group. We have weapons. They don’t know about our ability to communicate, so you shouldn’t tell them. And you shouldn’t tell Zizi or Craig in case they’re listening to you. Remember their tech works. I see security cameras in your head.” If I lifted my eyes away from Landers, I could have seen the cameras in the corners of the room. I don’t know if they were on or off, but their little black lenses were like staring eyes that would never blink.

  “They’re saving their power for other things,” I said. “There’s a greenhouse. And I suspect there’s something else going on here.”

  “We’re waiting,” Landers said. His hand squeezed my knee, and his mouth twisted. “The pixies are upset. They can’t speak English when they’re like this, and none of us know their language.”

  I sang something in firefly pixie language. It translated into a version of a Bobby McFerrin song. It was something like “Don’t worry, be happy.” Then I added in English, “Just tell them that.”

  “They have pointy, little silver toothpicks,” Landers said. “I’m not going near them when they’re frothing. They’d already be here if something wasn’t stopping them.”

  “I’m not sure why that is,” I said. “This bubble is different than the others. There’s something about it that keeps them out. Even those turtle-spiders aren’t keen on coming in.”

  “Turtle-spiders,” Landers repeated.

  “They were hanging around the main entrance waiting for a certain someone to step over the bubble’s line. Maybe you don’t know that story,” I said. “Ask someone in the Redwoods Group, but you might not want to rush in and tell Sophie and Zach. I guess they need to know, but it
isn’t good news for them.”

  “You’re talking about the Burned Man,” Landers said.

  “Yes. Not really burned because the turtle-spiders healed him. However, they didn’t heal him when Sophie sliced off one of his arms.”

  Landers’s face was incredulous.

  “Come on,” I said. “You’ve heard better stories than that! You’ve seen as many things as I have. It is what it is.”

  “Lulu,” Landers said and paused. “Will this Theo kill you?”

  “Maybe,” I answered honestly, “but it won’t be until after I’ve done whatever it is he wants me to do.”

  Louise would do something about that. She might even vamp the “normal” Theo. She could get him to agree to just about anything.

  “You’re not Louise,” Landers snapped. “Why do you separate yourself like that? You’re who you are right here, right now. Lulu. You’re the one who helps out when no one is asking. You’re the one who saved Sophie’s butt on more than one occasion. You’re the one who made certain that everyone was okay when we ran for our lives from McCurdy. I don’t understand why—”

  I touched his mouth with the tips of my fingers. “I know who I am,” I said softly. “Old habits die hard. She’s still inside me, rattling around, waiting for an opportunity to take me down. She didn’t like it when I took over, so sometimes she whispers a little something in my ear. Most of the time I don’t listen because Louise has lost all of her power.”

  The expression on Landers’s face was very nearly comical as he tried to understand what I was saying. Then he said, “Wake up, Lulu.”

  Wake up, Lulu.

  Wake up, Lulu!

  I opened my eyes.

  What Theo/Martin/Marty/Nutjob-in-Waiting

  Really Wants