A pillar crashed to the ground.
Swiftly, Sejal sifted through the fabric around him. It felt easy, it felt right. Wherever he found a Silent mind, he touched it and pulled. A crowd of Silent from dozens of races, hundreds of species, appeared around Sejal, all bound to him by the gleaming Dream fabric. Their bodies milled and overlapped like ghosts and their thoughts crowded his mind with questions, demands, terror, fear.
— Who are you?~ ~What are you doing to me?~ ~How dare you!~ ~Help me!~ ~Leave me alone!~ ~What’s happening to me?~
Their voices rose and fell around him, threatening to engulf him. Katsu squeezed his hand, and he drew serenity from her.
Serene must you ever remain, he thought.
He found more Silent, and more and more. Padric Sufur’s mind abruptly joined the pack, as did Chin Fen and Dr. Say. And then he felt another mind, a younger one that he didn’t know but who felt a tiny bit familiar, but he couldn’t say why. It was on a planet named Klimkinnar. Then he felt two more, both on a planet called Drim. All three were slaves. Their voices joined in with the rest, rising into a fever pitch.
— No!~ ~Let go of me!~ ~What the hell?~ ~Sejal, you work for me! I order you to-~
Another pillar crashed to the ground. Sejal yanked the Dream fabric with a sharp jerk. The multitude fell silent, and Sejal continued gathering. He felt Ben and Kendi’s minds and ruthlessly added them to the pool.
— Sejal, what-?~ Kendi yelped, but Sejal ignored him. Silent after Silent fell into his pool. He felt swollen with them. Lights sparked around his body. He felt like he was drinking electric water until it threatened to burst out of him. Only a few minds were left, a tiny handful. He reached for them.
“Sejal, look out!” Katsu cried.
Sejal’s eyes snapped open. A black pillar was dropping straight for them. Reflexively, Sejal yanked on the Silent around them, took them into himself, possessed them fully. As one mind, they all reached up with arms suddenly grown god-like in size. The pillar landed on their shoulders. It was cold as winter, heavy as snow. But Sejal had the strength of nearly every Silent in the universe behind him, and he pushed back. His shoulders rose like Atlas, pushing the pillar back to the sky. The children stormed angrily above him, but Sejal held them back. Then he reached out with one giant hand and grabbed one of the pillars that had already reached the ground. With easy strength, he lifted it back to the sky and added it to his burden. A billion minds cleared and a thousand Silent pulled themselves out of the despair of separation. Sejal added them to his strength and reached for another pillar.
His brothers and sisters fought back, pressing down with their full weight. Sejal lifted despite their power. A small part of him marveled at what he was doing, relished in the strength. He lifted another pillar clear of the Dream, and another, and another, adding more and more Silent as they were freed. Every mind added to his own made the burden easier and easier to lift. The children howled mindlessly above him, clawed at his back, tore at his face and hair. But they did no damage. Sejal lifted the final pillar and stood with the black sky on his shoulders. Katsu was small and far below.
And then Sejal noticed that no more children had left the Dream. There were still fifteen left, had been for quite some time. Had something happened to Prasad and his mother? A bit of uncertainty wiggled through him and his knees buckled for a moment before he could firm them again.
“Katsu,” he boomed. Below, Katsu flung herself to the ground, her hands over her ears. Wincing, Sejal modulated his voice to a whisper.
“Katsu,” he murmured. “Leave the Dream and go see what-”
A shudder wracked his body and Sejal’s grip on the Dream weakened. A jolt of pain ripped through him. His eyes popped open and he found himself staring into the face of a Unity guard.
Ben snapped awake. He was lying on the bed in Kendi’s quarters aboard the Post Script. Actually, he was lying on top of Kendi. He must have fallen sideways when Sejal had taken him into the Dream. Kendi shuddered once beneath him, and Ben sat up. A pounding noise thudded through the cabin. What had happened? One minute he and Kendi had been sitting together in the Dream, and the next he had been dragged into…what? It was like some kind of drug-induced hallucination.
The pounding noise came again. It was the door. Ben called, “Come in,” and the door slid open.
“What is wrong?” Harenn strode into the room. “You would not answer the chime.”
“I’m not sure,” Ben said. He looked down at Kendi, who was still unconscious. Ben put a hand to Kendi’s neck. His pulse was thready, and his skin was clammy. Harenn took one look and her eyes widened above her veil.
“He is going into shock.” She hurried back toward the door. “Elevate his legs with the pillow and put the blanket over him. I’ll get a medical kit.”
Mystified, Ben did as he was ordered. Had the fight done this?
But why was it affecting Kendi and not Ben? Ben was on the verge of working himself into a panic when Harenn returned. She slapped a monitor strip on Kendi’s forehead and checked the readout on the medical kit’s display. Her firm, decisive movements calmed Ben down.
“Is he going to be all right?” he asked.
“He is still in shock,” Harenn reported. She racked an ampule into a dermospray and pressed it to Kendi’s arm with a thump.. “This should take care of it.”
A few anxious moments later, Kendi’s eyes opened. “What’s going on?” he asked in a blurry voice.
“What do you remember?” Ben asked.
Kendi shook his head on the mattress. “It’s all fuzzy. I can’t focus.”
“Do you remember the fight?”
“What fight?” Harenn said.
“Sort of,” Kendi slurred. “I feel like ‘m…half outside my body. Help me sit up.” They did, though Kendi had to lean heavily on Ben.
“What fight?” Harenn said again. “What happened?”
Ben explained while Kendi took several deep breaths. His head apparently cleared a little, for he sat up straighter, though he left an arm around Ben’s back. Without even realizing he was doing it, Ben pulled Kendi closer while he spoke, as if he were afraid Kendi would disappear. It felt good to hold him.
“So why did you leave the Dream?” Harenn asked when Ben finished. “Did your drugs wear off?”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t need any. None of us did as long as Sejal held us there.”
Harenn put the dermospray away and reached up to remove the monitor strip from Kendi’s forehead. “What about these children you spoke of?”
“I don’t know,” Ben admitted. “Sejal disappeared. I think that broke the rest of us up.”
“It hurt like hell when he did that,” Kendi put in. “At least, it did me.”
“Can you feel the Dream?” Harenn asked.
Kendi closed his eyes. “Sort of. It’s there, but not there. I’m having a hard time concentrating, though.”
“The question is,” Ben said, “what the hell happened to Sejal?”
Vidya’s terrified mind raced through a dozen options and discarded all of them. She was standing with her hands laced over her head in the Nursery. Prasad lay at her feet. He was breathing, which meant he was merely unconscious, not dead. The four guard had spread into the room, pistols trained on her. They had not searched her yet. They seemed to be waiting for something. The cattle prod pressed against her stomach beneath her shirt. She could probably whip it out and get off a shot, but that would leave three other guard to react.
Life support monitors beeped softly, and over that Vidya heard shouted orders and crashing sounds from the lab itself. Vidya’s nostrils were dilated with fear. There had to be a way out of this. If she didn’t find a way, life as she knew it would end everywhere. It was no use trying to explain this to the guard. It would sound like the babblings of a lunatic.
A new guard appeared at the door. “We found two more,” he said. “A boy and a girl. They were obviously in the Dream, but we hit them with the pistols until
they came out of it.”
Vidya’s legs went weak. The fifth guard shoved Sejal and Katsu into the glassed-in portion of the Nursery. Katsu looked dazed and Sejal was barely conscious. As one they stumbled and went to their knees. Vidya started to rush toward them, but two guard leveled their pistols at her, and she stopped.
“Are you all right?” she asked them.
Katsu looked up. “We’re fine, but the children will soon go back to devouring-”
“No talking,” the guard said, and fired his pistol at the ceiling. Katsu clamped her mouth shut. Sejal slumped down beside Prasad just as another guard entered the room, a sharp-faced man with a whipcord build and thinning blond hair. The bars on his sleeve indicated his rank.
“I’m Lieutenant Arsula,” he said. “How many are on this station?”
Vidya considered remaining mute. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Sejal stir slightly and changed her mind. She needed to keep the Lieutenant talking until Sejal recovered.
“We are nineteen,” Vidya replied. Something else, some important oddity, nagged at her, but she couldn’t place it. “That includes the twelve slaves.”
Arsula whispered something over his shoulder to someone in the hallway. The oddity continued to poke at Vidya. What was it? What was wrong besides the obvious? Her teeth tried to chatter and she kept her jaw firmly clamped to prevent them. Visions of a Unity prison swam through her mind, and she almost snorted. If they couldn’t do something soon about the children, prison would be the least It hit her. The children. That was the oddity. The children no longer squirmed in their beds. The room no longer whispered with the rustle of flesh against linen. Vidya stole at glance toward the fifteen Nursery beds and a chill trickled down her spine. Every child wore a beatific smile on its wizened face.
Kendi turned the dermospray over and over in his hand. “I need to go back in.”
“Out of the question,” Harenn said, sounding a lot like Ara. “It might be even more dangerous now than before. Besides, you are still weak.”
“I feel fine now,” Kendi objected. “And we need to know what’s going on.”
Ben tightened his arm around Kendi’s body hard enough to make Kendi wince. He’d forgotten how strong Ben was, though it was wonderful to be reminded. It had been so long since Ben had held him.
“You aren’t going in there without me,” Ben told him firmly.
“We don’t even know what drug dose you need,” Kendi said. “And you haven’t had any training.”
“I did all right before,” Ben replied gruffly.
“But you were only working with me,” Kendi said. “You’ve never had to move around the Dream when it was dangerous.
They argued further, but Kendi ultimately won out, though he promised to exit the Dream if anything looked even vaguely dangerous. He also had to concede it would be better if he lay on the bed instead of standing propped up in the corner.
“Besides, you didn’t bring my spear,” he groused, then tousled Ben’s hair to show it was a joke. Ben gave a small smile, and Kendi’s heart sang. They were together again. He lay back and let Harenn administer the dose. It would be harder for him to enter the Dream without using the proper ritual pose of the Real People, but he could do it. He breathed deeply. After a long moment, the familiar colors swirled. Kendi reached for the Dream, and opened his eyes.
Everything looked wrong. Instead of being in his cave, he was far above the ground. The world spun crazily before he realized he was a falcon flying high in the air, though at the moment he was actually plummeting to his death. He regained control with frantic beats of his wings and leveled out. Below, the Outback looked thin and wavery, like a spirit version of the land. Above, the sky was pitch black, and it was laughing.
Why was he a falcon? This had never happened before. Though Kendi knew Silent who changed shape in the Dream, Kendi himself couldn’t do it. The falcon was a manifestation of part of himself, but never the main part. What was going on?
A black tentacle shot down from sky to earth, followed by another and another. One of them skimmed past Kendi’s right wing and he banked in panic. Wherever the tentacles touched the ground, a black pool oozed outward. Screams of pain erupted from the earth. Suddenly Kendi was so tired of a Dream filled with pain and screams. He longed for the time when he could go there for peace and serenity.
Kendi clacked his beak in annoyance with himself. There were real problems to concentrate on now. It was obvious the thing in the Dream was swallowing minds again. Sejal’s attack may have pushed it back, but Sejal had been yanked out of the Dream. Kendi cast his mind outward, and felt a few Silent, but only weakly, as tenuous as the Outback below.
Feeling frightened and alone, Kendi continued to fly until a tentacle flashed downward and slammed him into the ground.
“We have found nineteen people,” Arsula told Vidya from the doorway. “One of them, a woman with dark hair, is unconscious. Do you know why?”
Vidya shook her head. “That is Dr. Say, and I do not know.”
“Did you signal the alert?” Arsula said.
“What alert?” Vidya replied, deciding to play stupid.
Arsula leaned casually against a wall, though his body was tightly coiled. His expression remained calm and relaxed. Vidya found herself admiring his poise.
“The guard received a recorded emergency alert that gave us the location of this base,” he said. “We had to divert a ocean battleship to investigate. No one at any level of government claims to have any idea that this place existed, and we had a hell of a time finding an airlock through all that camouflage. Who’s in charge here?”
Sejal’s eyes were open and he looked like he was trying to speak. Vidya willed him to remain quiet.
“Dr. Say is in charge,” Vidya replied. “The woman who is unconscious.”
“What is this installation doing?” Arsula demanded. “Who are these…children? Why are all those people out there taped up? I want answers, dammit!”
Sejal turned his head very slightly, bringing the guard and their pistols into his line of sight. Vidya flung up her hands to ensure the guards were watching her instead of him. “I know very little. I am a mere slave who only does as she is told.”
“Bullshit,” Arsula growled. “Someone had to tape those people up and someone had to sound the alert. That someone had to be you. You can start by telling me your-”
He stopped in mid-sentence. His feature froze, as did the other five guard. Sejal stared at them with glassy eyes. Vidya all but leaped across the room and snatched the pistols out of their unresisting hands. Then she slammed the outer Nursery door shut and locked it. Katsu got dizzily to her feet. Vidya shoved aside the concern she felt and turned to her son.
“Sejal,” she said, “can you make these men help us put the children into the cryo-units?”
Shouts rose from outside the Nursery door and something banged against it as Sejal nodded. The five guard and Lieutenant Arsula stiffened, then moved swiftly toward the beds. Vidya checked Prasad. His breathing and heartbeat were steady.
“Hurry, Sejal,” Katsu said. “The children have re-taken several planets, and they will soon devour Rust.”
“I’ll try,” Sejal said.
“I’ll try,” all the guard echoed, and the sound made Vidya’s skin crawl. Something slammed against the door again.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Sejal said.
“…to do this,” echoed the guard. They and Sejal were staring at her. Vidya would have expected them to have glassy eyes and glazed faces. They didn’t, but they did look odd somehow. It was their expressions. Every one of them had the same facial expression, and it looked vaguely like Sejal’s face.
“Hurry, Mom,” Sejal said. “Come on.”
“…come on.”
Vidya went to the nearest bed. The Child lay motionless. Only its breathing and the sickening smile on its face said it wasn’t dead. She disconnected the first lead.
The thudding at the door wa
s becoming rhythmic. Vidya disconnected the rest of the tubes and slid the cryo-unit out from under the bed. Two of the guard lifted the the child into the unit. It slid shut and hissed into activation. The door was beginning to buckle under the repeated buffeting.
Fourteen left. The guard spread out, two to a bed, and went to work. Sejal stood to one side, watching. Eleven left. The door shuddered hard and Vidya could see light leaking through from the other side. Katsu, still looking dazed, fumbled for one of the pistols Vidya had gathered from the guard and put on a table. Vidya dashed across to the door and pulled the cattle prod from her waistband. Eight left.
Vidya set the prod at its highest level and placed the business end against the door. When the next thud came, she thumbed the trigger. Electricity snapped and there were howls of pain from the other side. Vidya nodded in satisfaction. The door was a poor conductor, but the prod put out enough power to cause some damage.
The possessed guard finished another set of children. Five left. The thudding resumed on the door, and Vidya assumed they had found another, non-conductive battering ram. The prod was drained in any case. She hung it from her belt and, like Katsu, took up a pistol. On the floor, Prasad stirred and sat up. Two left.
The door smashed open. A stone-topped table-the new battering ram-wedged itself into the doorway. Vidya crouched behind one of the beds and fired blindly in the direction of the door. Katsu did the same, and the guard outside returned fire.
“Sejal!” Vidya barked. “Take cover!”
But one of the bright beams caught Sejal’s shoulder. He screamed once and dropped. Every guard in the room cried out in unison and collapsed in an eerie parody of Sejal. The last two children continued smiling on the beds.
Kendi flopped and writhed on the ground. Blackness surrounded him, thick and impenetrable. His talons curled with cold. He could feel the heat being leached from him like water being sucked from a glass. How many voices were in the blackness? He couldn’t tell. Twice he had tried to leave the Dream, but the pain was too great for the necessary concentration.
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