“That won’t help,” Say said dreamily from the floor. Sejal was holding her hand.
“What do you mean?” Prasad asked sharply.
“The Unity is coming,” Say told them.
“What?” Vidya, Prasad, and Sejal’s voices spoke as one.
“I activated the emergency alert system.” Say’s hand crept up to smooth Sejal’s dark hair. Vidya wanted to slap her. “It calls the Unity guard in case of a life-or-death emergency, like if we spring a leak and can’t get to the submersile. Better arrest than death. They’ll be here within the hour, my love.”
Vidya stared at her in horror and hatred. The desire to throttle the stupid woman was so strong, her ears were ringing. Before she could move, however, Prasad’s gentle hand landed on her shoulder.
“If we have little time,” he said, “then we must hurry.”
Practicality won out. Vidya tossed the roll of tape to Sejal. “Tape her up, then come help us in the Nursery.”
Sejal obeyed. Dr. Say accepted his ministrations without comment as Vidya and Prasad left the lab and went into the Nursery. When they reached the first glassed-off area, the one with the oldest children behind it, Vidya saw that every one of them was squirming and convulsing. Not one of them made a sound. Katsu sat in the room’s rocking chair, her eyes shut. Prasad opened the door to the glassed-off area. The only sound was the soft beeping of medical monitors and the eerie rustle of bedclothes sliding over convulsive flesh. The sound made the hair on the back of Vidya’s neck stand up.
“Where are the children that Max Garinn injected with his virus?” Vidya asked. “We should begin with them.”
Prasad quickly lead her down the hallway to another glassed-off Nursery. Eight beds held eight wizened figures. Six of them were squirming against their restraints, eyes tightly shut. The other two appeared comatose.
“Each bed has a cryo-unit beneath it,” Prasad said, moving into the room. “We need to slide it out and put the child inside. The computer will do the rest.”
Vidya followed as Prasad reached under the first bed. A black coffin-sized unit slid out and he pressed a release. The top slid open. Vidya began disconnecting the life support units. Touching the dry skin made her flesh shudder. Grimly she ignored the sensation and helped Prasad undo the child’s restraints. It was a girl, thin and wrinkled.
One little foot lashed out and caught Vidya in the stomach. Breath left her in a whoof. The girl fought and gnashed her teeth but made no sound. She was surprisingly strong, and it took some effort to wrestle her into the cryo-unit. The lid slid shut. There was a whooshing sound, and the glass fogged with condensation. Prasad wiped it away. The girl lay quietly in the unit, to all appearances peacefully asleep.
Vidya realized she was sweating and her stomach hurt where the girl had kicked her. She glanced at Prasad, who looked equally disheveled.
“Only thirty-eight more, my wife,” Prasad said.
Vidya nodded and they turned together toward the second child.
Sejal stuck the last piece of tape over Say’s mouth. Her emotions were a tangle. When he touched her with the back of his finger, he had seen the small part of her that found him physically attractive. It hadn’t been much of a stretch to touch the emotion and make it coil around her like a mutant jungle vine until she would willingly do whatever he asked. The look she gave him, one of total adoration mixed with red lust, made him feel a bit sick. The moment the gag was in place, he let go of the emotion and it snapped back to its original state. Her eyes flickered as the false love died, replaced by confusion, then anger, then rage.
“Sorry,” Sejal said. “But we couldn’t have you locking down the computer again.”
He left her then, moving quickly toward the Nursery. Mom and Prasad would need all the help they could—
Sejal.
Sejal stopped cold. “Hello?”
Sejal, it is Katsu. The voice was tense.
Sejal shook his head. Kendi had told him about whispering, of course, but he had never felt someone speak inside his mind like this.
“What’s wrong, Katsu?” he asked aloud.
I need your help. The new children are entering the Dream, and they’re all angry. They’re going to spread out and I can’t stop them. I need your help. Quickly! They’re splitting apart!
Sejal’s heart lurched. He dashed past the other taped-up prisoners and into the Nursery area. Katsu’s body sat in a rocking chair in the first room. In the second, Mom and Prasad were wrestling a struggling child into a cryo-unit. Sejal did some quick math and realized it would take hours to get every child into a unit if they all struggled and fought. But what if…?
He stared at the children in the Nursery and reached toward them with his mind. If he blanked them out, they would stop struggling and Mom and Prasad could get them into the units more easily. More importantly, they wouldn’t tear up the Dream. Sejal reached.
He felt nothing. No minds. The only people he could sense were his parents.
Because their minds are in the Dream, Sejal! Katsu shouted. I need you here. Help me!
Sejal poked his head into the Nursery. “Mom! Katsu needs me in the Dream. I’m going in.”
Before Vidya could respond, Sejal slid to the floor. His insides were tightly wound, and he wondered if he would be able to concentrate enough to reach the Dream. But after two deep breaths, Kendi’s training took over. The outer world faded away, and Sejal reached for the Dream.
He expected his seashore, and was therefore startled to find himself standing in front of the black place. Screams, angry and hungry, crashed over him and he put his hands to his ears.
“Katsu!” he shouted over the noise. “Katsu!”
Even as he shouted her name, he realized he knew exactly where she was. He had touched her in the real world, of course, and that now allowed him to find her in the Dream. She was in the center of the black place.
Sejal hesitated, hands over his ears. When he had played the flute for Katsu, he hadn’t actually entered the blackness. The angry, horrible screams worked their way into his head, and the darkness boiled. Figures moved inside it, and he felt their hunger and their sickness. Evey instinct Sejal had told him to flee far and fast. But Katsu was in there and she was fine. Sejal was her brother, and they were both half-sibling to the children. What worked for her should work for him.
Sejal took a deep breath and tensed himself to leap into the blackness. Before he could do it, however, another cry filtered its way through the noise. Sejal froze. He had felt it more than he had heard it. It was a desperate cry for help, and voice was powerfully familiar. It came from above. Sejal looked up and saw a falcon circling overhead with desperate beats of her wings.
“Kendi?” Sejal said.
“Sejal!” Katsu’s voice cut through the wailing and Sejal could now see her inside the dark place. “Sejal, I need you!”
The falcon cried again, wordless and pleading and Sejal’s earlier resentment toward Kendi vanished. Kendi was in danger. Kendi needed him. But so did the universe itself. Sejal stood at the boundary of darkness.
“Sejal!” Katsu shouted desperately.
The falcon cried, begging.
Tears streaming down his face, Sejal plunged into the dark place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE DREAM
The jailer is also a prisoner, and he is jealous of the prisoner’s dreams.
—Nerval d. Darge, Diary of a Social Dissident
It was cold, and the red cracks in the Dream fabric around Sejal offered only a dim light. He could feel the minds in this place—over thirty of them—and they were hungry. Now, however, he knew it wasn’t a physical hunger, but a spiritual one, a desperate, horrible feeling of loneliness and separation. He could see outside the darkness to the well-light plain beyond. The plain was safe and pain-free and filled with other minds. This was what the children longed for, reached toward. The fact that they could see but not touch it only made the feeling worse.
The wa
iling was quieter in the dark place. Perhaps it was because the children’s rage and pain were directed outward. Their minds flowed around Sejal, cold shadows in a black hole. Icy fingers touched his face and neck. Sejal recoiled, but the fingers didn’t draw away. More touches—hands, fingers, lips, and tongues that flickered over him. Sejal forced himself to remain stock-still, like a man confronting a strange dog that might decide to tear out his throat.
A few steps away, Katsu was dancing. She moved like a young tree waving in an angry wind. She moved toward him, pivoting and swaying, clearly well-practiced. As she approached, the minds around Sejal calmed. He felt from them something akin to admiration, even solace. They liked her. But before she could speak, one of the minds broke away. It flashed toward the boundary of the Dream and the dark place. Snarling gleefully, two more tensed themselves to follow. The ground rumbled.
“No!” Katsu cried, and without thinking, Sejal’s mind snapped out. He reached for escapee just as he had reached for Say. Here in the Dream, however, the action took a physical manifestation. A golden thread snaked from Sejal’s outstretched hand. The other end wrapped itself around the fleeing shadow. The shadow stiffened and halted less than a fingerlength from the boundary.
Katsu sighed with relief, though she continued to sway to music that only she could hear. “This is why I need you. There are so many. If I stop long enough to chase down the ones that break away, the others—”
The shadow yanked on Sejal’s thread. He the sudden pain drove him to his knees. Blind fury and all-consuming hunger flooded Sejal’s mind. He was flashing on the shadow, feeling what it felt. The thread flickered and weakened. The shadow yanked again and Sejal gasped in pain and confusion. No one had ever been able to fight him before. He touched people as he pleased, made them do what he wanted.
But, a part of him realized, these weren’t normal people. They were like him. Their DNA had been given to them by the same father and shaped by the same retrovirus.
Hands landed on his head, warm and friendly. Katsu. Sejal drew strength from her, braced himself, and pulled back on the thread. The gold thread thickened. Screaming in hostility, the shadow was dragged back from the boundary. Katsu left Sejal and danced toward it. The loneliness from the other shadows lessened a bit at the sight of her graceful movements. She caressed the bound shadow and it calmed.
Another one used the distraction to leap away, but Sejal had felt its tension and another thread whipped outward to catch it. It fought, clawing and snarling, until Katsu was able to calm it down like she had the first. The others swarmed about uncertainly.
“How many can you hold?” Katsu asked.
“I don’t know,” Sejal replied through gritted teeth. “I could take a dozen regular people without working up a sweat, but this is something else. How many are there?”
Katsu glanced into the blackness. The red cracks formed glowing, distorted ladders in every direction, and the weird light made her face take on a spectral aspect.
“Thirty-seven,” she said.
Something shifted, and the darkness rippled slightly.
“Thirty-six,” Katsu amended. “Father and mother must have—”
A crashing howl broke over them. Betrayal and anger and the constant overwhelming hunger smashed at Sejal as the twisted children screamed in unified fury. Five shadows rushed away. Sejal lashed out with more threads. He caught one, two, three. But the other two broke free of the darkness and raced across the plain. The ground cracked and crumbled beneath their feet. The sky darkened as they swallowed the minds that made up the Dream plain. Katsu dashed after them, quick as a fox. She caught one by the heel, and the second stopped to see what had happened. Katsu caught that one as well. Her touch, as always, brought them some kind of comfort and she was able to bring them back. They followed her, twisting clouds of darkness and gray mist. It came to Sejal that the children had no personal physical picture of themselves, which was why they remained amorphous in the Dream.
As Katsu and her two captives re-entered the dark place, there was another delicate shudder. One of the minds Sejal had bound disappeared. Prasad and his mother had put another child into cryo-sleep. Thirty-five left. The red lattices glowed with suspicion. The children knew something was wrong, but they didn’t know what it was. Sejal hoped Mom and Prasad would be able to finish the job before they figured it out. The children he held in the threads were quieter, but they were whispering to the others around them, and Sejal couldn’t make out their words. He glanced uneasily at Katsu, who shook her head.
“I can’t quite hear them, either,” she said.
The blackness shifted, and a familiar cry rang overhead. Sejal looked up sharply and saw the falcon. In desperation she had pierced the black place. Instantly, one of the children lashed out and caught her. The falcon shrieked in pain.
“No!” Sejal yelled. “Let her go!”
Another thread snapped out and wrapped around the grasping child. It released the falcon, who dove down to land at Sejal’s feet. The child drew away, hissing softly. Sejal reached down to stroke the falcon’s feathers. She made soft meeping sounds.
“Who is this?” Katsu demanded.
“It’s part of…of a friend of mine,” Sejal told her. “He’s in trouble, but you needed me more so I came here instead.”
Another shudder. Another child disappeared.
“Listen,” Sejal said, “Kendi must be desperate if his falcon came in here to look for me. He…I really want to help him. Can you hold them back for just a few minutes?”
Katsu looked at him for a long time. Then she backed away and started to dance. It was a faster dance, one with a clear rhythm. Her feet struck the dark ground, and she twisted between the red slashes cut into the Dream fabric around them. The movements were lovely and hypnotic. Sejal stared, then noticed the children had calmed considerably. He also noticed the sweat appearing on Katsu’s face. This dance was clearly costing her a lot of effort. He had better move quickly.
He released his captives. The threads vanished, but the children didn’t seem to notice. They were watching Katsu. Sejal put the falcon on his shoulder and wove between the red lattices toward the boundary. The moment he was clear of the dark place, the falcon exploded from his shoulder and fled across the plain.
Sejal ran after her. He hadn’t gone fifty meters before he saw the stone block. It was about twice Sejal’s height and six or seven meters on a side with no openings. The falcon circled over it, crying in its high, shrill voice. Sejal put out a hand. The moment he touched the block’s icy solidity, he felt Kendi. His empathy switched on, and Sejal was caught in a wash of terror and…guilt? The falcon shrieked again.
“Kendi!” Sejal shouted. “Kendi! It’s Sejal.”
No response. Sejal’s empathy switched off. What was going on? Could one Silent imprison another? He had never heard of such a thing, but that didn’t mean much. For all his power, Sejal was still new to the Dream.
A sense of urgency tightened his chest. Katsu was holding the children back all by herself, and she must be getting tired. He had to help Kendi and get back to her. He hit the block with a fist, and yelped in pain. Nursing bruised knuckles, he next concentrated on his body. It was solid now, but when he reached toward the block, it would be insubstantial. It would be insubstantial now.
Sejal reached. He encountered solid stone.
“Dammit!” he spat. “Kendi! Let me in!”
The block remained unmoved. Frustrated, Sejal kicked it, though not hard enough to damage his foot. No reaction. Katsu would be more tired now. Perhaps he should give up and leave. Perhaps he should—
Then he felt it. Another familiar mind, one that wasn’t in the Dream but was nearby nonetheless.
“Ben,” Sejal whispered.
He had always gotten the impression that Ben and Kendi were close friends, though Kendi had almost never talked about him. Ben might better know what to do. Sejal closed his eyes, feeling for Ben’s mind. When he found it, he reached.
/> Ben looked down worriedly at Kendi, lying motionless on the bed in the empty cabin. It seemed like Ben had done this too many times before. Kendi was always falling into trouble. Getting arrested, being abducted into the Dream by Sejal, going suicidal on Bellerophon. Now Kendi was spending time in the Dream when it was dangerous to do so, and according to Ben’s watch, he’d been in there far too long.
Ben sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. He should walk away, sever all ties completely instead of waffling back and forth. A relationship with Kendi meant spending a lot of time waiting for him, and Ben hated the very idea. But then he would look at Kendi’s face and his resolve invariably failed him. Kendi was infuriating, irreverent, and impulsive. He was also funny, kind, and suprisingly romantic. He could always think of something fun to do when Ben got bogged down by work. And Ben never felt like he had to be so damned competent at everything when Kendi was around.
Kendi’s face was relaxed in Dream sleep. Ben brushed his fingers over the smooth dark forehead. Maybe a little worry was all right. Concentrating on Kendi was one way to keep thoughts about his mother at bay. Maybe he should try to wake Kendi up, bring him out the—
Ben.
Ben’s head snapped up. “Who’s there?”
Ben, it’s me. Sejal.
“Sejal?” Ben echoed stupidly. “Where are you? What’s—?”
I’m in the Dream. I’m talking to you from the Dream.
Ben blinked. “How can you talk to me from the Dream? I’m not Silent. What is this, a joke?”
Ben, I don’t have time to screw around. I can’t leave Katsu alone much longer. Kendi needs help, but I can’t reach him.
Chill fear stabbed through Ben. He glanced over at Kendi, who hadn’t moved or otherwise changed.
“What do you mean he’s in trouble?” Ben demanded.
He’s inside some kind of stone block and I can’t get him out. The falcon is screaming bloody murder, but I don’t know what to do. Can you get him out?
“I’ll try.” Ben leaned over Kendi and shook him. “Kendi, wake up! Snap out of it!” No response. He slapped Kendi’s cheeks and pinched his wrists. Still no response.
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