by Therin Knite
“You think so badly of me, Adem? It came up. That’s all.”
“You can’t fool me with lies anymore. Do you know why?”
He darts around the sofa and pauses at the opposite end of the long table. “Why?”
“Because only my friends can lie to me, Director. You’ve lost that status.”
An air of frail authority condenses around him, and with a tug to straighten his suit jacket, he replies, “That’s a pity. I’ll be sure to try my best to regain it when we get where we’re going. Which we will, right after I finish what I came to do.”
He heaves himself over the corner of the table, grabs Regina before she can scream, and throws her toward the wall with inhuman strength. I can see the outcome before it happens: she sinks into the water-wall, drowning or suffocating or suffering whatever other grotesque fate Brennian constructed beyond the white façade.
I can see it before it happens. So I stop it.
Regina slams into the wall and bounces off, hitting the floor with a dull thud and a low moan of pain. Ripples form, but they do not calm this time. They freeze in place like the poor patrons froze downstairs, and just like those who shattered from an impact, the wall explodes into a cascade of gleaming white splinters. Regina covers her head and shrieks in fear, and Director Kill-us-all, knowing he’s beaten, sprints for the disappeared door, calls it into existence again, and exits with his tail between his legs.
“Are you okay?” I ask Regina. I don’t sound concerned or consoling. To be honest, I don’t care.
A pink, tangled nest of hair bobs in response, so I turn to follow the good Director, only to find the door has again become one with the wall. Shrugging, I pick an alternative route. Through the wall and out into the hall, where I track Brennian to his preferred method of escape: the elevator. It descends before the doors even have a chance to close, travelling many miles faster than it dared during my trip up from the first floor.
Dynara, who trudges around the corner at the same time I exit the water-wall room, glances from the elevator to me to the elevator to me again. “Was that Brennian?” Having already put half the pieces together, she proceeds toward me with caution in order to reduce the likelihood of setting off the nuke inside my head. “He got away?”
“Not for long.”
“What happened?” The not-a-door-now and the get me out pleas from Regina Williams let her in on part of the secret, and her gaze lingers on me a second too long for her to feign complete ignorance of the remainder.
“When were you planning on telling me I killed my mother?”
To her merit, Dynara’s expression remains apathetic. “When were you going to figure it out? I gave you all the clues you needed.”
Puberty suppresses the echo-making ability.
“So children can make echoes, too.”
“Yeah. But they can’t control them. Unlike adult echo makers, the lack of development in children’s brains renders them unable to consciously alter their echoes.”
“So, if a child has a nightmare about the monster in his closet…”
“The monster comes to life, yes.”
I flinch, and all the doors in the hallway slam shut. “This is why you were so sure I’d join EDPA. Because my duty is not to find a killer. It’s to atone for killing my mother. I’ve spent my whole life walking in the wrong direction, and you knew once I figured out the truth, I’d do an about-face and start marching the other way.”
“And you will, even if you hate me for not being direct about it.” She kicks at the outline of the not-a-door-now with her boot and unclips an unidentifiable piece of tech from her belt. “So why don’t you get through your hissy fit by pursuing your dear old Director and talk to me again when you’re not ready to blow your stack?”
“I’m tempted to never speak to you again.”
“Don’t be so fucking dramatic. It’s unbecoming of a genius.” She holds the machine against the rectangular outline where the door once was and presses a button. The wall reverts to its original form. A panicked Regina yanks the again-a-door open a second later, her face a splotchy ruin of color. “Good morning, Ms. Williams,” says Dynara.
Those are the last words I hear before I teleport myself to the stairwell door, from the top-floor landing to the first-floor landing, from the melted ice garden horror show the Club Valkyrie dance floor has become to the sidewalk in front of the building. Thirty-six people pull out various types of weapons and aim them at my face when I appear—all are garbed in EDPA uniforms, and one of them recognizes me. It’s the gruff Murrough, who shouts at the army of agents to stand down. He doesn’t do echo field though.
They’re in the real world, corralling innocent 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 have slipped through the cracks in the fray created by their arrival on the scene. The highway back to Pennimore Street is too far for him to run, and Brennian has shown no aptitude for teleportation. He must have hidden himself within the vicinity of his six city buildings.
“Is everything all right in there?” Murrough closes in on me, wary. Not from suspicion but from decades of experience. How many echo makers off their rails has he seen? How many psycho criminals unleashed? How many raging lunatics has he had to gun down? The hardness in his expression suggests too many to live a happy life after.
“Everything is fine. Did you see Director Brennian run by a few minutes ago? He’s in his early nineties. Gray hair. Moderate height.”
Murrough wrinkles his nose at the thought of missing his perp and relays the question to his men. One of them pipes up that he 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 an agent with us yet.”
“You can’t stop me.”
His demeanor shifts into defense mode in an instant. “Is that a threat?”
“Only if you make it one.” I swivel around and arrive at the shoddy bus stop in a blink, tossing a look over my shoulder to see Murrough gnawing on his cheek, split between ordering his men to attempt (and fail) to detain me and letting me take my revenge. He works with Dynara, though, and has for many years, so he chooses the latter option and tells his loitering underlings, “Get back to work, fools!”
From the bus stop, I head to the corner and peer down the road to my left. Brennian is pacing back and forth along an invisible straight 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 his thirty minute claim. There can’t be more than five or so remaining, and however Brennian put himself to sleep is bound to wear off soon. He’s admitted his defeat and is withdrawing.
The miserable bastard is still convinced he’s going to get away.
I come to a cold 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. The tablet slips out of his shocked fingers and disappears as it crosses the invisible line. The edge of the dream. The edge beyond which is an endless black 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 as if it was never there at all, and a harsh whisper in my brain wishes the same could be said of the injuries and death caused by Brennian’s cruelty. And not only are those lives destroyed, but the odds of the good Director doing significant time—even for a global conspiracy with an unnamed second party—are slim. He’s too well connected. A minimum security prison with cushy amenities will mark the next few decades of his l
ife, 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.” His babble stumbles over itself until bloody saliva dribbles down his chin. Wet coughs rack his chest, but the force of them 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 while threatening to ruin me to the world if I don’t comply with your every whim. And you know it. That’s why you’re giving up. Not because you know you’ve lost, but because there’s only one way for you to lose: die.”
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 bastard 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 and blue 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 beloved echo.
I don’t move an inch.
But I think for miles.
Chapter Seventeen
The Apocalypse tastes like rust. Club Valkyrie dies in a deafening roar as it crumbles from the top down, the VIP room level disintegrating in a burst of white and flame, the elevator shaft blowing out the side of the building, the rainbow lights sparking on high, 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 five-foot-high sections of charred wall and slides along the top of an intact pane of water-wall glass from Brennian’s room. When it lands on the other side, I recognize it as a soot- and plaster-covered Dynara.
Her chest hacks up a pound of 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 the neighboring buildings. The one next to the bus stop succumbs to the force of the collision. Its thousand reflective window panes 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 before the chaos commenced. “Oh, that explains a lot.”
Brennian’s body spins around and around as it sinks farther down 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—his hands grasp for a ledge that isn’t there, and his feet try to walk on nothing. Composure thrown out the window, he lacks the necessary concentration to create any new dream content. He’s too scared to save himself.
“Will he die?” I ask.
“Worse.”
“How?”
“When you fall beyond 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 never be retrieved. We’ve tried. But this is a dimension within our infinite universe, and therefore, it is 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 Club Valkyrie. The impact cracks the asphalt in the street, and the entire swatch of city shakes with the violence of an off-the-scale 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.” Her fingers tap her ear-com four times. “If we stay here any longer, we’re going to end up like Brennian. I’ll meet you back in the waking world, all right?”
“Um…” A violent cough cuts me off. Thick ash and debris clog my throat. “How do I leave the dream?”
She stares at me the way a teacher would if a kindergartner said, I don’t know how to finger paint. “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-plus-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 a highway now in floating bits and pieces, Pennimore Street has suffered a similar fate. My fingernails eat into my temples as I think leave, leave, leave so many times I start repeating it out loud.
No go. I’m still standing in the death zone.
“I can’t get it to work.”
Dynara punches me in the face. “Are you fucking kidding me? You have enough control over your baby echo-making powers to enter a dream on command, to manipulate whatever you want, to overpower the maker of the dream, and to do who knows what else. 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 with this sort of thing!” The thunderous breakdown of what’s left around us pounds against my eardrums. My lip throbs where Dynara’s fist split the skin. Coherent thoughts are tossed out my mental windows as soon as they form. 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, Adem. 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. I imagine a door in front of me. A simple wooden door with a polished silver knob. I make the motions of stepping through this invisible door, expecting to see some representation of myself on the other side—my living room with its worn-out couch or my kitchen with its dirty sink—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 image of five medics hovering above me. The force is so intense I vomit. Three of them hold my flailing body down while another preps a syringe, tossing the one she jabbed me with a second ago onto the cement floor of a small room adjoined to the airfield hangar.
“Vitals?” she asks.
Another answers, “His heart isn’t doing so well. We shouldn’t have woken him up.”
“Chamberlain told us to. It was that or dream death.” A third runs several simultaneous scans with his handheld. “Aw, shit. He’s on the verge of a—nope, there he goes. Heart attack!”
No violent pain assaults me as the me
dics scramble to prevent my heart from failing, and I locate two more 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 blabbing medical terminology to me as if I can memorize it all with ninety percent of my brain swimming on the ocean floor.
“Adem!”
Oh, so I am hallucinating. Jin’s very-much-not-a-party 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 says, “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 overly caring manifestation, “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. He’s like most people.”
We pass a mixed group of IBI and EDPA agents working together to search Brennian’s now 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 at intervals.
