by Therin Knite
But then, wouldn’t that also make it easier for another maker to influence his dream content?
Is this a challenge? A test?
No, I realize. It was an oversight.
Brennian’s instructions were clear. I’m supposed to be sedated, prevented from discovering a way to communicate with my allies, prevented from interfering in his cleanup. He didn’t know I would end up crossing into his dream again. In fact, by the tone of his voice, he didn’t know I could. Sedation isn’t the same as sleep, so why would an echomaker be able to access their dream powers while sedated?
Things to ask Dynara later.
“But how do I get over there to stop him?” I ask aloud. Superpowers of mysterious origin mean nothing if I can’t use them to save the day.
Another formidable gale shrieks through the neighborhood, blowing fence doors open and leaves over the edge, where they float down. And down. And down. Until they’re nothing but orange specks in the void.
“Oh.” The answer comes to me along with the urge to punch myself in the face. Because it’s obvious. In a dream with far stricter rules, I was able to make my work boots appear. If I have enough juice to do that, then what can I do in a world without the laws of reality?
I examine my dream body. My damp, wrinkled designer clothes sag, weighing me down. The unwieldy sling restricts the movement of my injured arm. Before I can fight the evil king, I need to look the part of the valiant knight.
I close my eyes and recall the Manson death scene. Not the dragon sequence but myself standing before the place where the chatty lawyer took his last breath. I’m surrounded by thirty-odd agents, and Jin is ambling toward me with his donut in hand. He surveys my appearance—redheaded Adem Adamend in his stiff, spotless navy-blue field uniform, gun strapped to his right leg, left arm free to maneuver. That’s who I need to be.
And then I am.
When I open my eyes, I’m dressed in my IBI field uniform, and my sling has vanished. The gun even came along for the ride. I brush it with my fingers, the cold metal feeling as it should, tangible, deadly, flawless.
Now, for my next trick…
I’m seated on a bus between two burly men who are heading to watch an unofficial wrestling match in a nearby park. The bus squeaks to a stop in front of the building next to Club Valkyrie, and I hop off right as the streetlamps power up to max brightness for the night. The stop itself is a ramshackle thing: a wooden bench dotted with stains, a bent metal covering that wouldn’t be much protection in a real storm, a pathetic potted tree on the left side, and a warped signed labeled RED LINE STOP 14 on the right.
Suddenly, I’m there. A burst of air settles around me as I blink into existence, and I curl my toes and fingers to double-check all the right parts arrived in all the right places. They did.
Holy crap. I just teleported. A manic giggle escapes my throat.
There’s nothing funny about this development, but after the day I’ve had, even the briefest moment of levity seems like the world’s best joke.
“Adem?”
The voice smacks the mirth right out of me.
Dynara stands about thirty feet away, a gun gripped in her right hand while her free one points a finger at me. I’ve caught the master of surprises by surprise, and her lips part and close several times without her saying anything. Finally: “What the hell are you doing here?”
Her presence is expected. There’s an echo crime in progress, and Dynara is an EDPA agent, assigned to stop echomaking criminals. But what business does an echomaker in denial have in the dream of a killer?
“I brought myself here just by thinking about it,” I say.
Thinking about killing that motherfucker Brennian, to be precise.
“Where are you in the real world?” She glances at the dream version of the club I’ve come to hate in the course of two days. It’s the same six stories with the same gaudy electric blue sign, and there’s little doubt the interior is a perfect replica as well. When the echo shifts to level three, no one inside the club will notice the difference until it’s too late to escape.
“In the hangar of an abandoned airfield,” I reply, “about to be shipped off to a mysterious villain by none other than Whitford Brennian.”
“Brennian?”
“This is his echo. It was him the whole time. He knew we’d figure it out eventually, once we caught his accomplice, Regina Williams, the good patron of Club Valkyrie, and the lovely lady who took a hit out on me. So he’s making a break for it. He’s got his jet prepped. This is his final detour before takeoff. Williams has outlived her usefulness, so he’s going to kill her.”
Dynara marches toward me, suppressed concern in her expression. She tugs on my IBI jacket, testing the stability of the fabric. “Well, this is quite the development. If I wasn’t so pissed right now, I’d be laughing. There’s no one else I want to kick in the crotch more than that asshat Brennian.” She pokes my injured shoulder, but I refuse to acknowledge the resulting throb that slinks up my neck. “Now, did you say you were being shipped to a villain?”
“Someone unrelated to EDPA taught Brennian how to make echoes. I got the feeling he hasn’t known this guy very long, but they’ve been acquainted long enough for this to be the result.” I gesture to the surrounding buildings. “Brennian snatched me so he could take me to this guy. You were right.” My smile is strained. “Apparently, I’m coveted by unsavory characters.”
She grimaces. “Shit. Someone outside EDPA having this much knowledge about echomaking represents a massive security breach. Most rogue makers are amateurs at best. Whoever this ‘villain’ is, he’s dangerous. Where is Brennian taking you?”
“He’s an asshole, Dynara, but he’s not stupid. He refused to tell me the destination, just in case I found a way to pass it along to someone who could help me. Like to you inside his own echo, which I imagine was not something he considered but was covered by his refusal all the same. He’s good at planning, as you’ve discovered.”
“All right. We’ll talk about the big bad behind Brennian later. Our priority is stopping the director before he hurts anyone now. The dream’s already in a pre-breach state. We don’t have long before the shift. We need to find him and subdue him here or wake him up in real life. Do you know exactly where you are?”
I describe the location of the airfield, and Dynara recognizes it immediately.
She holds a finger to her ear-com. “Lance, I need a strike team to report to that abandoned airfield just outside the old Industrial Sector as soon as possible. Adem’s been taken hostage by IBI Director Whitford Brennian. He’s our guy. Tell the team to be cautious. Adem is unconscious and won’t be able to escape any ensuing fray. He…” She pauses and looks to me. “Why are you unconscious? I’m guessing you didn’t decide to take a nap in the middle of your hostage situation.”
“He sedated me.”
“You’re sedated? And you managed to cross?”
“Looks like it.”
Dynara gives me a suspicious look. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“Well, I did. So it’s clearly not impossible.”
“No,” she mutters, “only unheard of.”
“Hey, don’t act like I’m some—”
The air rushes from my lungs. My entire body is rendered motionless by the sensation of being compressed, and a deafening noise consumes my senses. It’s every negative sound I’ve ever heard blaring into my ears at once, and nausea tears through my stomach as the unnatural whine burrows into my brain. Pop goes the world, and then we’re in another.
I regain control of my body and suck in air, trying to fight down the bile rising in my throat. “Was that a…?”
Dynara stands rigid, gaze skimming the two hundred people who just appeared out of nowhere. Her attention drifts up six stories, where it comes to rest on the looming form of the dragon. The beast is perched on the edge of the Valkyrie rooftop, waiting for a specific command from its master: kill everyone in sight.
“
That,” Dynara says, “was a level three breach.”
The flight of the dragon is spectacular. Everybody thinks so.
A couple hundred morning clubbers and a few unlucky passersby watch in awe as the beast takes off from its resting place and soars into the sky. They must think it’s a hologram, an advertising display put out by Valkyrie. They have no idea it’s real, no idea it can actually hurt them.
The dragon circles the club, scouring the crowd for the first victim of what is minutes from becoming the worst day of death and destruction since the Old City Riots a decade ago. With a narrowing of its eyes, the dragon selects that victim: a teenage girl with violet dreadlocks.
Two mighty wings change direction, and the dragon plunges downward.
The crowd hushes in anticipation of the creature’s next great trick.
Dynara gears into action. She surges through the dumbstruck mass and floors the dreadlock girl, turning on her toes and aiming her gun straight for the dragon’s eye. Her first bullet blows a hunk of bloody white out of the beast’s head, and it reels back with a violent scream.
The people realize.
The people panic.
Several men in suits trample a woman in a white dress. Three older ladies scramble into the nearest parked cab, pushing the rightful pickup out of their way and stealing it without a second thought. A horde of frenzied fools cram themselves into every available nook and cranny, many of them fleeing into Club Valkyrie, where a far more dangerous monster awaits.
The injured dragon makes another swing around the area before diving toward Dynara. Dreadlock girl is running for her life now, and with no one to protect, Dynara faces the dragon unimpeded. She tugs a small metal cylinder from one of her numerous pockets and raps the end three times with her thumb. It activates. She slings it at the oncoming dragon and leaps out of the creature’s path, rolling underneath an abandoned vehicle.
It is a VERA grenade. It explodes with a blinding flash of blue, and the dragon loses control of itself, crashing headlong into the street that was teeming with carefree bystanders not two minutes ago. The beast lifts its head and screeches, struggling to force itself back to its feet. The VERA blast wasn’t strong enough to knock out something so large but had enough power to render the dragon’s legs useless. Temporarily.
Dynara slips out from underneath the truck, gun at the ready. But the grenade didn’t catch the dragon’s spiked tail, and it lashes out at Dynara’s charging form. Somehow, she flips over the tail and lands safely on the other side without losing momentum. Five rounds nail the dragon in the back, but before Dynara can maneuver around to the softer underbelly, the dragon twists its head and lets loose a massive stream of fire. Dynara is forced to dodge, and as she’s recovering her stance, the tail clips her side and her gun bounces away, underneath the dragon’s moving legs.
A retreat is in order.
She bounds over the nearest vehicle to avoid another onslaught of flame and circles back toward me. I’m standing exposed on the sidewalk, watching events unfold like I’m in a movie theater worlds away from it all. If only. Last time that thing set its sights on me, it ran me through in so many places I died several times in a row. Brennian killed me. With no remorse. Because he was inconvenienced by my presence and didn’t care how brutally he shooed me out of his dream.
Dynara almost topples me over as she uses my chest to come to a quick stop. My shoulder complains, but I grin and bear it because I will not show the man behind the dragon any weakness. Not this time.
“Adem,” Dynara says, “I need you to do something for me.”
“You need me for something? Really?”
She elbows me in the gut. “Cut the crap. Destroy the dragon.”
“What?”
“You’re a class five command controller. You can change whatever you want by thinking about it.” She pats my uniform in appreciation. “So change the dragon.”
Said dragon has taken to the air again with a mighty beat of its wings. As it gains speed, its form blurs into a nightmare-black monstrosity, the sort of thing that hides in the corner of your eye and rips your throat out the moment you dare try to find it. It cuts a wide arc through the air and shoots toward us, faster and faster as it falls. It’s going to crash into us. Forget fire. We’ll be crushed.
I make to avoid the collision, but Dynara grabs my arm and holds me in place. “Make the dragon disappear,” she orders.
“How?”
“The same way you made the shoes appear. And the uniform. Will it to happen.”
The dragon is mere feet from us, nostrils smoking.
“Change the fucking dragon, Adem!”
It’s so close I can admire individual scales, lustrous black reflecting the blue glare from the Club Valkyrie sign. Almost like…
The dragon explodes into a swarm of butterflies. They blow past us, a couple landing on my face and chest. They’re black and blue, beautiful harmless things. The bulk of them scatter into the winds.
Poorly hidden bystanders hesitantly emerge from their cover to watch the spectacle recede. Someone starts to clap, and then someone else, and then a third person, and then a manic fever catches hold of the crowd, igniting a shower of senseless cheers.
“Dynara?” I murmur.
“Yes?”
“Did I just turn a dragon into butterflies?”
“Yes.” She grasps my injured shoulder, gently. “Yes, you did.”
Club Valkyrie is a frozen hell, and everyone is dead.
The moment Dynara and I step into the club, my breath turns to fog in the frigid air. Frost coats the walls and the floor and the ceiling, and the spaces between have become a morbid ice garden. All the patrons are the statues, socialites garbed in expensive clothing frozen mid-gesture, mid-step, mid-word.
An elderly woman in a sunshine-yellow suit sits in a chair near the entryway to the dance floor. Her hand is motionless in the air, pointing to something inside the room. Whatever she saw, she saw it too late, and her parted lips and wide eyes are caught in the instant before the release of a blood-curdling scream. Three feet away, a troupe of belly dancers attempted to flee from a small stage erected near the doorway, and several of them tripped over one another, creating a pile of bodies frozen in anguished poses. The young woman leading the pack must’ve made a desperate lunge in the second before she was flash-frozen, because one of her arms broke off when she hit the floor. The tips of her blue-tinged fingers lie just over the threshold.
Nausea twists my gut as I follow Dynara onto the dance floor, where a good seventy-five more rich patrons were enjoying a fancy morning party before the club opened its doors for the low-class crowd at noon. Bodies at crimes scenes never bother me, but there’s something about this that sickens me to the core. Did they freeze instantly? Die instantly? Or did they suffocate, aware of their impending fate until their chilled brains ran out of oxygen?
Did the man who fell down the stairs feel pain as his head shattered into a hundred pieces, a large chunk of his frozen brain coming to rest at the feet of a girl clad in scarlet? Did the beautiful model in the pink, see-through gown pose like a sculpture from antiquity on purpose, knowing what was coming? Did the waiter in the corner realize his tray was a useless shield, even as he held it over his head, praying to be overlooked? Did the girl in green no older than twenty notice all her limbs shattered when she fell out of her chair in a failed rush to get away?
Brennian killed all these people just to punish one.
“This is an absolute disaster,” says Dynara, staring at a man who tipped over sideways after something sheared off both his frozen legs.
My throat constricts, but I force myself to reply, “Not good for your PR department?”
“That’s the kicker, isn’t it? EDPA doesn’t have a PR department. The whole point of ‘top secret’ is that no one’s supposed to know about it.” She weaves carefully around the people statues. Some were running like the dancers and suffered the consequences, but others failed to see the t
hreat. They were chatting, laughing, drinking, eating. Upper-class normality at a moment in time, paused for the world to see. “Stuff like this happens every now and then,” Dynara adds, “but not on this scale. This is nearly a tragedy on the meter of echo crimes.”
“You don’t think it qualifies as a tragedy?”
“No. It’s awful, for sure, but a tragedy is…something else.” She crosses the dance floor and gestures to an exit that leads to the main hallway, a stairwell and elevator placed side by side. “We need to find Brennian and end this.”
“How do you know he’s still in the building?”
She halts at the edge of the dance floor and gives me an annoyed look. “Details, Adem. Details. I know this is gruesome, but don’t start blocking out the obvious, even if you lose your breakfast.” She nods to the head patron’s stage, where a Williams statue should be sitting but isn’t. Brennian has destroyed her world in the worst way imaginable, but her humiliation isn’t over yet. He’s going to draw it out some more before he ends her life.
“A VIP lounge,” I say. “Brennian usually rents one whenever he goes to a place like this because he doesn’t like too much company.”
My boot swipes a section of some poor man’s arm. It comes away wet. The nightmare ice garden is beginning to melt.
Acid burns the back of my throat. “Let’s go.”
As we approach the stairwell door, the elevator dings. Dynara adjusts her grip on her gun, and I unclip the holster strap for my own, but when the doors roll open, an empty car greets us. Sweet, melodic music pervades the air from the small speaker in the ceiling. The ballad sends a chill scuttling down my spine. Dynara steps closer to the elevator, eyes focused on the doors. I get the sense she’s seen dream elevator rides end in unpleasant ways before.
“He’s inviting us to a battle,” she says. “Arrogant.”
“No more arrogant than you or me.”
“Yes, but neither of us are indiscriminate killers.”
“So you say.”
