by Therin Knite
They’re in the real world, corralling bystanders into areas beyond the boundaries of Brennian’s dream space. Since the EDPA agents aren’t involved in a shootout with him, the director must’ve slipped through the cracks in the chaos created by their arrival on scene. The highway back to Pennimore Street is too far for him to run, and Brennian has shown no aptitude for teleportation. He must’ve hidden himself somewhere in the confines of his six city buildings.
“Is everything all right?” Murrough draws closer to me, wary.
“Everything is fine. Did you see Director Brennian run by a few minutes ago? He’s in his early nineties. Graying hair. Moderate height. Nice suit.”
Murrough wrinkles his nose at the thought he missed the perp and relays the question to his subordinates. One of them pipes up and says she spotted a guy matching that description heading toward the north end of the dream but was too busy to check him out.
“We’ll hunt him down,” Murrough says.
“No need. I’ve got it.”
“I can’t let you. It’s against protocol. You’re not employed with us yet.”
“You can’t stop me.”
He bristles, shifting into defense mode. “Is that a threat?”
“Only if you make it one.” I abruptly teleport myself to the shoddy bus stop, tossing a look over my shoulder to see Murrough scowling at me. He’s split between ordering his men to detain me and letting me take my revenge. He works with Dynara though, and has for years, I can tell—he’s probably seen her sadistic side many times—so he chooses the second option and tells his underlings to get back to work.
From the bus stop, I head to the nearest intersection and peer down the road to my left. Brennian is pacing back and forth along an invisible line on the sidewalk, something held to his ear. An Ocom. Like Dynara, he has a way to communicate with someone outside the dream.
I recall that he claimed it wouldn’t take him more than thirty minutes to off Williams and return to the waking world. There are somewhere between five and ten minutes left on the clock, and though Williams isn’t dead, Brennian hurriedly requests that one of his mooks wake him from his “nap.” He’s admitted defeat and is withdrawing.
The miserable bastard is still convinced he’s going to get away.
I come to a stop thirty feet from him, remove my gun from its holster, and aim it at his chest. He blathers into his Ocom for fifteen seconds before realizing fate has caught up to him. He jumps, startled, and the tablet slips out of his fingers. It disappears as it crosses the invisible line. The edge of the dream. The edge beyond which is an endless void.
“Adem, wait! Listen to me, I—”
I shoot him dead center.
Instead of falling, he teeters on the brink as the world beyond his echo fades away to reveal the infinite blackness. Unlike a level three breach, the reversion to level two is smooth and painless. The real world simply disappears.
A harsh whisper in my brain wishes the same could be said of the deaths caused by Brennian’s cruelty. And not only are those lives destroyed, but the odds of the director doing significant time for his crimes are slim. He’s too well connected, something he proved when he one-upped Dynara last night, snatching away her jurisdiction using a “friendly” judge. A minimum security prison with cushy amenities will be his home for the next few decades, and then he’ll be released with twenty years left in him, free to return to his back-alley deals with people even more dangerous than himself.
“Adem, please. It’s over. You win. I concede. That’s it.” He babbles on until bloody saliva dribbles down his chin. Wet coughs rack his chest, but the force isn’t quite enough to make him tip the one degree back that would throw off his balance.
“No, this isn’t it. It will never be over with you. I’ll never be free of you if you live. You’ll plague me like a charming disease, threaten to ruin me if I don’t comply with your every whim. And you know that, you self-centered, manipulative piece of shit. That’s why you’re giving up. Not because you’ve lost, but because there’s only one way for you to lose. Death is your only true defeat.”
I haven’t moved an inch from the place where I shot the man who dirtied me by labeling me his protégé. And I don’t move an inch as every possible gruesome death I can conjure up for this man flashes through my mind like a sordid library catalogue. I don’t move an inch when Brennian’s eyes drift to something above my head or when that thing moves into my field of vision. I don’t move an inch as the black butterfly lands on Brennian’s forehead and makes him jerk backward in fear. I don’t move an inch as he slips off the edge with a strangled gasp and tumbles down into the dead space beyond his own echo.
I don’t move an inch.
But I think for miles.
Chapter Seventeen
The apocalypse tastes like rust.
Club Valkyrie crumbles from the top down in a deafening roar, the VIP rooms disintegrating in a burst of white flame, the elevator shaft blowing out the side of the building, the rainbow lights sparkling in a vortex of color until the dream’s electricity fizzles out. Under the rain of fire and ash, a small form sprints through the collapsing doorway. It leaps over a five-foot-high section of charred wall and slides along the top of an intact pane of glass. When it lands on the other side, I recognize it as a soot-stained Dynara.
She coughs up debris, and beads of blood roll off her face and neck, where a whirlwind of broken glass and wood and metal consumed her on the dance floor. She watches the skeleton of the club fall in on itself. Its once grand walls topple over as their innards soar through the air and crash headlong into neighboring buildings. The one behind the bus stop succumbs to the force of the collision. Its thousand reflective windows explode outward, each shard catching the blinding daylight that no longer has a source.
The sky is gone. Empty dream space has eaten it.
“Adem, the dream’s been destabilized. We need to leave.” Dynara staggers over to me, a bloody eye screwed shut. When she reaches the place where the sidewalk ends, she peers over the edge and spots what I’ve been staring at since the chaos commenced. “Oh, that explains a lot.”
Brennian spins around and around as he sinks into the blackness. It isn’t a tangible darkness, like smoke, but an endless, lightless space. An empty universe. The director is a speck in the distance now. His hands grasp for a ledge that isn’t there, and his feet try to walk on nothing. Composure thrown out the window, all he can do is flail his way down into oblivion.
“Will he die?” I ask.
“Worse.”
“How?”
“When you fall off the boundary of an echo, your mind becomes detached from your real body and gets stuck in this dimension. Your brain in the real world short-circuits, and your body ends up a vegetable. As for what happens to your dream self…well, you float. You fall. Forever.” Her voice grows solemn. “You can’t be retrieved. We’ve tried. But this is a dimension within our infinite universe, and therefore, it’s also infinite. Once this dream ends, we’ll never find this exact place again. The next echo we enter will be light years away from here.”
“I see.”
Four broken levels of the tallest building in the area careen through the air and take out the ruins of Valkyrie. The impact cracks the asphalt in the street, and the entire swatch of city shakes with the violence of a powerful earthquake. Pieces of the ground rise up above others, and several break away and fall into the empty space beneath us. The end of the sidewalk splits from what remains and begins to tip over.
Dynara lugs me to safety, and we land on the other side of the gap right as the patch of sidewalk soars off into the abyss. “Okay, time to go.” She taps her ear-com a few times. “If we stay here any longer, we’re going to end up like Brennian. I’ll meet you back in the waking world, okay?”
“Um…” I cough, ash and debris clogging my throat. “How do I leave the dream?”
She stares at me like I’m the biggest idiot in the world. “Usually, you wake up.
”
“I was sedated. I can’t wake myself up.”
“Well then, you just concentrate on leaving the dream. You know, like when you thought about coming here? Same principle.”
A ten-ton pane of marble flooring hits the ground across the street from us and goes straight through it. The entire area is more nothing than something at this point, and across the highway that is now in floating bits and pieces, Pennimore Street has suffered a similar fate.
My fingernails eat into my temples as I try to will myself to leave the echo.
No go. I’m still standing in the death zone.
“I can’t get it to work.”
Dynara smacks the side of my head. “Are you kidding me? You have enough control over your powers to enter a dream on command, manipulate whatever you want, and overpower the echo’s own maker. But you can’t leave the dream? That’s a crucial ability to be missing, Adem.”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve had any training!”
The thunderous breakdown of what’s left around us pounds against my eardrums. Coherent thoughts elude me. Apprehension churns in my stomach. All that driving rage from my showdown with Brennian is gone, and I feel faint.
Gloved hands grasp both sides of my face, and Dynara pulls me close. “Okay, listen to me. Picture yourself walking through a door that leads from here to your real body. It doesn’t matter what you represent your body with. Anything. Your bedroom. A park. Whatever. Just label it ‘my body,’ and imagine yourself settling back into where your mind belongs. All right? In three, two—”
Dynara vanishes into thin air, and I’m left standing alone on the one piece of solid land in the middle of a minefield of sharp-edged debris. The ground at my feet is eroding, and the black pit below seems to be getting closer and closer. Oh, crap.
I hastily imagine a door in front of me. A simple wooden door with a polished silver knob. I make the motions of stepping through that door, expecting to see some representation of myself on the other side—my living room with its worn-out couch or my kitchen sink full of dirty dishes—but as a warm feeling of familiarity brushes over me, so does a fast-moving shadow.
The entire dance floor of Club Valkyrie is heading my way.
I can’t avoid it.
I’m going to—
I’m wrenched out of the dream and beaten back into my body, the destruction swapped out for the view of five medics hovering above me. The shock of the shift is so intense I vomit. Three of the medics hold my flailing body down while a woman preps a syringe, tossing the one she jabbed me with a second ago onto the concrete floor of a small room adjoining the airfield hangar.
“Vitals?” she asks.
Another answers, “His heart isn’t doing well. We shouldn’t have woken him up.”
“Chamberlain told us to,” says a third. “It was that or dream death.” He runs a quick scan with his handheld. “Aw, shit! He’s having a heart attack.”
I don’t feel any pain as the medics scramble to prevent my heart from failing, and I locate two more spent syringes discarded on the floor. They’ve got me so numbed out of my mind it’s a wonder I’m not hallucinating. One of them rushes to the door, calling for a gurney. It’s wheeled in a second later by two additional medics, and they help lift me onto the cushion and strap me down. Faces appear and vanish from my line of sight as my head is secured in one position, and I’m left to stare at the short, curly-haired woman who keeps trying to soothe me with meaningless pleasantries.
“Adem!”
Oh, so I am hallucinating. Jin’s worried face peers down at me, his hand running through my hair while he walks alongside the gurney on its trip through the hangar. “Hey,” he murmurs, “can you hear me? You don’t have to say anything. Blink or something.”
“I’m having a heart attack, Jin,” I reply to the strangely realistic illusion, “not a stroke.”
His expression relaxes. “You’re still in there. I was afraid something happened to you in the dream. They told me you could die.”
“Well, now I’m sure you’re not real. Jin doesn’t know about echoes.”
Jin blinks at me. “Wait, you think…?”
We pass a mixed group of IBI and EDPA agents miraculously working together to search Brennian’s handcuffed lackeys, and I ponder what sort of strange fantasy world I’ve been drugged into. When the medics wheel me inside the emergency copter, they spin the gurney around, and a lump covered by a white sheet comes into view. It rests near the director’s private jet, a red stain darkening the center. The more I stare at it, the more human-like definition it takes on. Two people loiter next to it, talking animatedly and gesturing toward it.
It’s Brennian’s body.
Jin situates himself on a passenger seat as the copter’s loading door begins to close. “Adem, they told me about echoes. Some guy named Lance filled me in a few minutes ago.”
Clarity strikes me. Jin is dressed in a bulletproof SWAT suit, sans helmet. He’s not an illusion. He’s part of the assault force that stormed the hangar.
“Jin,” I say, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“Hey, don’t yell at me.” He pouts. “You told me to help. I panicked, thinking you were being murdered, and called Briggs. He called EDPA, who’d already been told you were in trouble and were dispatching a team to your location. Briggs demanded he be allowed to send a team too, for a joint mission. So don’t get mad at me. It was your idea to call for assistance.”
“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. You could’ve gotten hurt.”
He intentionally bangs his head against the side of the copter, rattling an overhanging rack of medical supplies. “Are you serious? You’re having a heart attack, and you’re worried I’ll get hurt? By the old gods, Adem. I’m willing to take on a few injuries now and again if it’ll stop you from suffering near-death experiences every other day.”
“We’re putting him under now, sir,” the curly-haired woman says to Jin. “They’re prepping med-four at the hospital. He needs to be anesthetized on arrival.” Another medic off to the side hands her a plastic mask that she settles over my nose and mouth. “Deep breaths, Agent Adamend. Count backward from ten.”
“Jin.” The scent of lavender overwhelms me.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
I’m out at seven.
“How many more times do I have to sign this thing?”
“It’s thirty-seven total. Had you not hacked our files, you would’ve gotten the short version, but you had to be a nosy little ass. Consider this your penance.”
“Damn. Thirty-seven? I lost count after page two hundred.”
“Not my fault.”
My eyelids are heavy, but I manage to lift them long enough to get a peek at the argument taking place on either side of me. To my right is Dynara, reading the same book she started in Pentagon Park. To my left is Jin, who’s leaning on my bed railing as he scrolls through a document labeled EDPA Nondisclosure Agreement V6.5 on his Ocom.
The hospital room appears identical to the one I got stuck in after my dragon mishap, which probably means I got airlifted to the same hospital after my heart attack in the hangar. I imagine the nurses and doctors were none too happy to see me brought back in a day after they patched me up the first time.
“Are you implying I have a short attention span?” Jin snaps.
“Do you know what ‘imply’ means?”
Jin points a finger at her in the most threatening way he can manage, which is about as threatening as a yipping puppy. “I am perfectly capable of paying attention.”
“If that were true, you’d have noticed Adem’s been awake for almost two minutes.”
“Huh?” He looks at me, and a bright smile stretches across his face. “Firecracker! There you are. I was starting to think they’d dosed you with one too many sedatives.”
My tongue is made of cotton. My head is stuffed with fur. The world is hazy and filled with colors I’m pretty sure aren’t on the visible
spectrum. And something tastes suspiciously like mushrooms. “They did, I’m pretty sure.” The words emerged garbled, and Jin breaks out into a fit of laughter.
“Man, you sound like me on a really bad night.”
“The fact you can drink enough to make yourself sound like that and not die of alcohol poisoning is disturbing in and of itself. The fact you can drink that much and remember sounding like that is even scarier.” Dynara sticks her Ocom on top of her folded lilac coat on my bedside table and maneuvers closer to me.
Jin’s face sours. “You don’t know anything about me, so you can shove it.”
“Honey, I know everything about you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s my favorite color?”
“Periwinkle,” she answers without hesitation.
Jin scoots his chair a few inches away from the bed, eyes transfixed on Dynara with a look of sheer horror. “How did you know that?”
“Because someone like you could only have periwinkle as his favorite color.”
“W-What’s that even supposed to mean?”
A well-timed cough breaks through my teeth, cutting off their argument. “Hey, guys, this is a fun conversation to watch and all, but can someone fill me in on what’s been happening since they knocked me out?”
Conceding defeat, Jin sinks deeper into his chair cushion and motions for Dynara to explain. Dynara tips up her chin, acknowledging her victory, and replies, “All but two components of the Manson murder have been solved at this point. IBI Director Whitford Brennian was confirmed to be the echomaker responsible for constructing the dream that killed Manson. His motivation was, presumably, to keep his involvement with Regina Williams as it related to the death of her partner a secret. The revelation that his affair with Williams contributed to the fight that resulted in Lionel Rampart’s death would have ruined him. And her too, I suppose.”
