by Andy Kaiser
I stretched out on the ground close to her. I moved around and tried to get comfortable. I turned over on my side and used my arm for a pillow. I stared at Eena as I grew more and more drowsy. My eyes began to close and my vision blurred and wandered.
I saw Eena laying in front of me, now sleeping peacefully, her face a mask of calm. I saw the box on the ground next to us.
I slept.
Chapter 33
With the sun in the sky, I knew what direction we were heading, so I knew roughly where the camp and the lake were. It was a long walk, but we did find our way back to Lone Wolf Lodge.
Eena and I stumbled into the resort, holding on to each other, limping, clothing ripped and looking like crap. Police were there. More were searching the woods for us.
My parents and the other adults were frantic.
The kids at the Lodge all thought we were awesome.
To keep Eena's secret safe, we told the police the easiest lie we could think of – I'd sneaked out of the cabin at night and found Eena. She said pretty much the truth - that she'd escaped from Nyhill Industries – but that she had no memory of what had happened to her.
Then she and I ate the biggest meal of our lives.
Zack had given the police the location of the building, but the rescue had been too late. The police went there and found no one - by then Eena and I were already running through the forest.
Talia was gone.
Zack wasn't stupid: As soon as he'd escaped outside, he'd called for help, though he'd needed to run a while before he got a good enough cell signal. We never showed Zack's cellphone to anyone. Our parents never made the connection that Zack had called the police from his cell - he'd gotten back to the Lodge by the time they were waking up.
As for the building itself, it was there, but it was deserted. Talia and her partners had cleared out the entire building ahead of time. The offices were empty. The prison cells too were gone. Everything had been stripped, even the doors and their elaborate locks. That deserted building left the police with a much bigger mystery than just what had happened to Eena.
Talia was gone, too. Whatever we'd done to her, whether it was knocking her out from the explosion of the building doors, or somehow hurting her from inside the dreaming, she'd recovered quickly enough to retreat. She also had enough people available to help clear out the building, perhaps guessing the police would be on their way. This wasn't a one-person mad scientist. What she did – what Nyhill Industries did - required a lot of people and tons of money.
The video and pictures Zack took were in our hands only. We had a lot of work to do if we wanted to find out who Talia was and who she worked for. In the video she'd showed to Eena and me, she'd called herself “Talia Dunning”, but that told us nothing until we had time to research and find out more about her and Nyhill Industries. It would be us three kids against a shadowy organization who would probably come after us hard, once they had time to recover and build a new base somewhere.
We still had Talia's box, the strange little metal square that was obviously meant to be unlocked and opened, though we had no idea how to do either. Something this secure would have to hold something important. If it was that important then Talia would want it back. Hopefully we'd be able to open it before we saw her again.
Because of that, of not knowing what Talia planned for us, our lives were going to change forever. We had to help each other, watch out for each other. Eena had my back and I had hers. Zack had insisted he be included on whatever we did.
Right about the time the police officially left Lone Wolf Lodge, that's when I really realized it: The three of us would be something special.
Zack, Eena and I were sitting in the cafeteria. Eena and I had just gotten done with the first thousand questions from the police. Dozens of people milled around, pretending to get food and drink, but really they were staring at me and Eena and trying to figure out what had happened. My mom and dad sat a couple tables away. My mom had insisted that I never leave her sight again. Zack, as usual, could do whatever he wanted. I hoped my mom's level of paranoia would last no more than a week or two. A month at most.
The three of us talked in low voices to keep our conversation private.
“I can't believe the police let you stay here,” Zack said to Eena.
“Hey, if I say I'm eighteen, then I'm eighteen. The police can't take me anywhere.”
“Too bad you don't have any ID,” Zack grinned.
“Yeah, too bad.” Eena laughed. Then her face changed and she got quiet. She looked softer, and then sad. “I don't have ID. I never will. I don't know who I am.”
“We'll figure it out,” I said, ignoring Zack's confused expression. “You're not alone any more. I mean, my mom is freaked out by you, but she and Dad both like you. Really. I think.”
“So we can still hang out?” She said, half-joking.
“I'd like you around,” I said. “But you're free to do whatever you want. We all are.”
I was wrong, though, and knew it before I even said it. We were free, but there were limits. Eena had no money and no place to live. We had to help her. We had to find out about Talia. About Nyhill Industries. We had to figure out everything we could about them before worse things happened to us.
I watched Zack as he stared at Eena. I saw the way he'd been with girls in the past. I was pretty sure he was falling for her now. He was paying super-close attention to every single word that came out of her mouth. So was I.
Eena was different than before. Back when we'd first met, she'd been super bubbly and happy. I realized now it had been an act. Mostly. She was really friendly and outgoing so we wouldn't suspect anything, until there was no turning back. Now she was still happy, but there was a sadness too. I could see it. When others weren't looking at her, I was. I saw some of the emotion from before slip through. How would I handle it if I found everything I thought about my life was wrong? If I knew that compared to the rest of the world, I'd lived no different than a lab animal in a cruel experiment? And worse: What if I couldn't do anything about it? Eena not only had these questions, she actually had to figure out the answers.
I didn't know if Eena really was fourteen months old. I didn't know how she knew so much about the world if Talia had held her trapped for so long. It was one more mystery to solve.
Eena had it the roughest out of all of us, for sure. But at least after everything she'd been through, there was someone who knew what had happened to her. There was something else she'd never had before, a person who really cared about her.
She had me.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized we'd make a good team. Zack was the muscle, the athlete. Eena was the charm, the center of our little group, and the hidden firepower.
As for Tyler Ford? I wasn't as confused about who I was any more. I had a direction, a goal. I knew what was important, who was important. The dreaming power would take a long time to figure out, but so far it was cool and I was good at it. I looked forward to practicing and seeing what I could really do, beyond just getting myself in trouble. That was, I knew, still a major problem: We had to find out about Talia and Nyhill Industries, before they found all about us. As we had just discovered, our lives could depend on it.
We had a mission.
About the Author
Andy Kaiser was born in a small town that grew up into a big town. When he was younger, the town was filled with acres to explore, forests to conquer. Even after scraping up his back after jumping into a sand pit while conquering an open field, Andy loved his childhood.
Andy got older and left the big town for a tiny town. While at college he biked and gamed and read and sometimes went to classes. He spent a lot of time on computers because he liked them, but also because the Internet was just getting popular and an amazing new world was literally being created from nothing.
Access to the knowledge core was slow and fragmented, and pieces of it had strange names like alt.binaries and rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc. The
se were the next places to explore and they too would eventually be conquered.
New names appeared, like Gopher and Mosaic and Netscape. Soon everyone started all conversations with the same three letters: WWW. The Internet grew from a tiny town to a world-spanning empire. Andy feels lucky to have seen it happen.
After Andy had spent a lot of time in the world-spanning empire, he came back to the big town and it had grown even more since he'd been gone. He really liked a girl and she really liked him, so they got married. They're still in the big town today, though with our worldwide instant culture, towns and sizes are meaningless abstractions that serve no purpose, unless you're looking for a good place for pizza, in which case Big Bob's is about the best you can get.
Find Andy at http://www.andykaiser.com.
