Students had come out of their dorms now, awoken by the commotion.
At the heart of it all stood Melinda. She was in the center of the foyer, her eyes hollow and dazed as they had been the other night. Before her, the piano churned out a low and dangerous melody. It only added to the frenzied chaos of the newly animated things and the students rushing past.
The students poured out of the building, racing past Plum and Artem and Melinda, bumping their shoulders as they went.
“Plum!” Vien was the first to spot them, and then Gwendle was right behind him. “Artem!”
Gwendle threw her arms around them both. “You found him!” She took Artem’s face in her hands. “You’re okay.”
Artem was still watching Melinda, who was working the metal wires of the piano, her face unmoving. “I’m not sure any of us are okay.”
Plum could see in Vien’s eyes that he had questions but there was no time to ask them in all this uproar.
“Is this a dream?” Gwendle asked.
“I wish,” Plum said. The school seemed to be crumbling all around them, but she had stopped counting to ten in her head. She had learned in the past several hours that reality could be just as strange as her wildest dreams.
They were the only students left at Brassmere now. Even Melinda’s three partners had fled, one of them screaming for her to stop as she raced past. It occurred to Plum now that she, Vien, Artem, and Gwendle were the only ones brave enough for this. In an academy of exceptional students with extraordinary abilities, years of battling monsters in dreams meant that those four were the only ones willing to face this particular nightmare.
Overhead, the insects and birds were still screeching and fluttering into and around one another. One of the gargoyles was destroying the side of the building with his tail, while they could hear the other stomping about somewhere on the roof. When the music hit a rift, the chaos seemed to intensify.
“The gargoyles didn’t come to life on their own,” Plum realized aloud. “It’s the music. The music is doing it.”
“Melinda,” Gwendle cried. “You have to stop.”
Plum moved closer, until she was standing face-to-face with Melinda. “Look at me.” She had to shout over the music. “You’re asleep. You have to wake up.”
The music went on.
“Melinda!” Plum grabbed her shoulders.
When they touched, the music came to a sudden halt. Melinda raised her head and looked at Plum, her mouth curled into a vicious snarl.
And then, Plum was airborne, flying backward by the metal in her boot buckles and the buttons of her coat, until she hit a wall, hard, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER 18
In the dream, Plum could hear Vien’s scream the loudest. She tasted blood on her tongue.
She wasn’t all the way asleep. She could still feel a little bit of reality trying to steal its way in. She felt her bones, all broken and shaking loose in her skin. She saw the birds and owls and gargoyles flying overhead in the blood red sky of her dream.
The piano music had stopped, though, and everything was quiet.
“Plum?” Vien’s voice echoed.
She couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t move. Even in her dream, her entire body was broken.
CHAPTER 19
In this part of the dream, Plum no longer had a body. All she had were eyes and ears. All she could do was watch and listen.
She saw the beautiful woman with the short dark hair from her earlier dreams. She was alive again now, holding a baby on her hip. The baby looked quite a bit like her, with dark hair and eyes and round cheeks.
There was a man standing beside her. He was the same man Plum had dreamed earlier, only this time he wasn’t wearing a pinstriped suit. He was wearing a crisply pressed white button-up shirt with a tie, and starched gray pants, and perfectly polished shoes.
It took a moment for the background to materialize behind them. And then Plum realized, with dread, that they were standing in a room of the very same building from which she and Artem had escaped.
“Is a hospital really necessary?” the woman asked. Hospital. The word was new to Plum. She knew there were all sorts of buildings outside Brassmere, but she hadn’t known that they had their own names.
A man materialized before the couple and their baby. Dr. Abarrane. He looked young, just as he had in Plum’s earlier dream. He held out his arms for the baby. “May I?”
Hesitantly, the woman handed the baby over, and Dr. Abarrane hoisted her into his arms, weighing her and assessing her as he so often did with all his students. “You said that she has trouble with sleeping ever since her first treatment.”
“Not trouble sleeping,” the man said. “She has no trouble sleeping. The problem is that she sleeps all the time. All night and sometimes even all day. More than once we’ve thought she was dead.”
Dr. Abarrane set the baby on the bed. She was just old enough to sit upright, and she giggled and kicked her feet at him.
“She seems perfectly awake right now,” he said. “Have any of the other children responded to their treatment this way?”
“Three of them,” the woman said. “Another girl and two of the boys.” She looked horribly worried.
“But she seems the most affected,” the man said.
Dr. Abarrane crouched before the baby, shining a flashlight in her ears and down her throat. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “The serums will have side effects, but that’s a small price to pay for these children not to be taken down by the Red Flu.”
The dream faded.
The next dream came fast in its place, filled with fire and ash and screaming. Plum watched on, powerless, unable to move, unable to do anything but look as she once again saw the burning house.
There was a room filled with at least a dozen cribs, all of which were empty now except for one. The baby from the first part of the dream was standing, trying to climb over the bars as smoke blackened her view. She was going to do it, too, Plum could see. She was quite a determined little thing. But the woman came running in and scooped her up before she could make it all the way.
Coughing and running, the woman hurried the baby down a staircase. The room at the bottom was engulfed in flames, but there was still a path. There was still a chance.
The woman ran for the door. The baby was wriggling in her arms, as though she had a better escape plan.
But it wouldn’t have mattered if she did. The door swung open, and there stood the young Dr. Abarrane. Something was in his hands. It was a weapon. Plum knew that much. But she had never seen one like it before. It had a barrel and a trigger of some sort, but there were no blades. Maybe the blade was hidden, and pulling the trigger would release it.
Whatever the weapon was, the woman recognized it. Fear filled her eyes. She hugged the baby against her, shielding her head with her hand. “No,” she said. “You aren’t going to take her from me. Not this one. Not my own.”
Dr. Abarrane didn’t bother to argue. He pulled the trigger, and before Plum even had time to see what was happening, the woman had fallen to the ground. Dead.
The baby screamed and fell into a fit of tears. Dr. Abarrane picked her up and whisked her outside. He didn’t bother to comfort her. He just ran.
Plum dreamed on. The dream turned feverish after that. They were back at the hospital. There was a room filled with cradles and babies, many of them with ash and soot in their hair and on their cheeks. There were nurses wiping their faces and comforting them and offering them bottles of juice or milk.
Dr. Abarrane sat in a chair, comforting the baby he had taken from the burning house himself. The baby was calmer now, staring back at him as she drank from the bottle in his hand.
“It’s all right now,” he said. “You’re home now, Plum.”
CHAPTER 20
When Plum opened her eyes, this time she knew that she was awake. She knew, because the first thing she saw was a clock ticking above the door to an all-white room that smelled o
f strange chemicals.
Her heart sank.
She was back in the hospital she’d escaped with Artem.
Where was Artem? Where were Vien and Gwendle? Around her, the room was empty. There was a window, but she could see from her bed that it had been nailed shut. It was dark out again, which meant that Plum had been asleep for at least a day.
Her ribs and head ached, and she tried to push herself upright, but she could hardly move.
Dully, she remembered Melinda at the piano. The wicked look in her eyes. And then, being thrown back.
Again she tried to sit upright, and this time she managed it, biting hard on her lower lip to stifle her cry of pain.
There was an IV stuck in her left arm, and slowly, carefully, she pulled it out. Blood welled up in the spot.
The door opened, and there stood Dr. Abarrane. He was smiling, and he brought his hands together in a clap, and then another.
“Well done, Plum,” he said. “I was impressed by your escape, but then, I shouldn’t have been. You’ve exceeded my expectations right from the start.”
Her head felt as though her skull had been cracked open. She was tired and sore. But more than that, she was angry. Her jaw swelled with all her anger. For the first time in her life, she understood what hatred was. She hated Dr. Abarrane.
“Was it true?” she asked.
He pulled up a chair and sat by her bed. “Was what true?” He seemed fascinated, as though she were a specimen under a microscope for him to examine. “What is it you dreamed, Plum?”
Plum told him exactly what she had seen, the hospital and the boy who died and the burning house. But whatever reaction she might have expected from Dr. Abarrane, he didn’t give it. He only smiled, like he was proud of her.
“You have always exceeded my expectations.” He echoed his earlier sentiment.
“Who was that woman you killed?” Plum demanded.
“You mean you haven’t figured that out?” Dr. Abarrane said, as though it should be obvious. “Plum, that was the woman who gave birth to you.”
Plum’s anger went wild. She forgot her pain and jumped out of the bed.
Dr. Abarrane didn’t try to stop her.
“Why?” Her voice was a gasp. She was normally so good at controlling her emotions, at not being upset, at letting logic and practicality prevail. But not now. She had never had a mother before, and it stirred a torrent of feelings she never knew she was capable of having within her. “Why did you kill her?”
“She had fulfilled her use to me,” Dr. Abarrane said. He nodded to the bed. “Please, sit. There’s no need to be hysterical. I’ll explain everything.”
Plum did not sit. He went on nonetheless.
“The year that you were born, several thousand children all across the country died of what came to be known as the Red Flu. I was the one to develop the vaccination. You were among my very first test patients, and the results were successful, but there was a happy and unexpected side effect. Several of the children to receive this vaccine developed extraordinary gifts. You can’t do it anymore, but when you were a baby, objects would float over your cradle as you slept. Eventually it turned into tandem dreaming with three other subjects.”
Three other subjects. Vien, Gwendle, and Artem.
“Your parents were ordinary,” Dr. Abarrane said. “They couldn’t know how to handle such precious gifts. They didn’t deserve to raise you.”
Plum stumbled back, toward the door.
Dr. Abarrane stood to go after her. “Don’t you get it? At Brassmere you’ve learned to be the best of the best. Your ability to dream gets stronger every day. You’ve begun even dreaming of real things that happened in the past, things you couldn’t have possibly remembered on your own.”
Plum shook her head. For the first time in her life, she didn’t want her extraordinary gift. She didn’t want to be exceptional. All those years of being the fastest runner and the sharpest reader and the coolest head in a frenzy—all of it had been at the cost of having a family. Her mother and father died for it. It wasn’t worth it, not a single moment of it.
“I’ve been watching your progress this week,” Dr. Abarrane said. “I suspected you would come after Artem and that you would think to use the vents. There were cameras on you the whole time. It was astonishing to watch.”
Plum was hardly listening to him now, her mind was racing so loudly through her ears.
She wished she were ordinary. She wished she were in a normal house with her normal mother and father, and that each morning she awoke from normal dreams.
Dr. Abarrane reached for her, and she ran. She ran down the hall, shouting for Vien and Artem and Gwendle.
She ran until she reached the stairwell, and she pulled on the door handle. It didn’t budge. Locked.
Dr. Abarrane was coming for her, and Plum realized now that she had cornered herself here in the hallway. He was still smiling, a syringe in his hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Nobody is going to hurt you. You’re going to rest now, and you’ll feel better—”
He didn’t have time to finish the sentence before a metal tray hit him in the side of the head, hard. All it took was one blow and he was down. When he fell, Plum saw Vien standing with the tray in his hands. He was pale and gasping, blood leaking from his arm.
He gave Plum a weary grin. “All that talk of how exceptional we are,” he panted, “and Dr. Abarrane still underestimates us.”
Gwendle and Artem were easy to find. And then, wrapped in hospital blankets, the four of them made their escape into the cold night air.
When they reached the fork in the road, Plum could once again hear the cars and the signs of life outside Brassmere.
Tired and holding one another up for support, they trudged on.
The path went on for so long that the sun was once again starting to rise when they finally reached the end of the woods.
“Where do you suppose the others are?” Gwendle asked, the first to speak in a long while.
“What happened to them after I blacked out?” Plum asked.
“I don’t remember much,” Gwendle said.
“They ran into the forest,” Vien said.
“They probably went back to Brassmere,” Artem said. “Even if the building was starting to fall apart. It’s cold out, and that’s the only home they know.”
The road rose at a sharp incline, and they were all dragging their feet now.
“We’ll come back for them,” Vien said, reassuring Plum, whose guilt he could read. “We have to find help. We can’t do anything for them on our own.”
Plum gave him a weary, grateful smile.
The sound of traffic had grown louder now. They walked in silence, until they finally reached the top of the hill, where their road snaked out into another road, this one filled with cars. They gasped at the sight of them.
Beyond the roads, over the trees, the sun was rising over a brand-new day.
EPILOGUE
There were no monsters in this dream.
At first, there was the night sky and its smattering of stars. Then, gradually, the silhouette of a mountain appeared in the distance. Then crickets, blades of grass, and Plum, who was so often the first to arrive.
She heard Vien’s approach. He wasn’t quiet about treading through the rocks and the gravel path that appeared below his feet as he moved.
Plum spun to face him. He was not entirely the same as she remembered. Taller now, and willowy, with thin silver-rimmed glasses and hair that had grown long enough to be tied back into a neat ponytail.
He smiled when he saw her. “You remembered.”
“I always remember your birthday,” Plum said, pretending to take offense. This had become their ritual in the five years since they’d left Brassmere and found their true families. Plum lived with an aunt in a house that wasn’t very far from the forest that once held Brassmere. It was a lovely sort of cottage with window boxes filled with red roses. But even better were the stories Pl
um’s aunt told her of the parents Plum never got to know. There were hundreds of stories. Thousands. Enough to fill all the shelves in the library. And there were photographs of a woman with Plum’s dark, confident eyes, and a man with her same smile—sly and toothy, like he was about to give up a secret.
Still, these stories did leave Plum with an aching in her chest. Of all the things Dr. Abarrane had cost her, this loss was the greatest.
Though Brassmere had once been Plum’s entire life, it was never spoken of again as she grew, though it was often in her thoughts.
Gwendle and Artem were reunited with their parents in other parts of the country entirely. But Vien, it turned out, was the son of world travelers who had been looking for him his entire life. Vien often entered his friends’ tandem dreams, bringing them dreams of Paris or Spain, or the rainbow patterns of the northern lights, like a silk scarf swimming in the stars.
Even though there was distance between the four of them now, their tandem dreams held strong. They had all learned to control them better, though, and there were rarely monsters anymore. Plum had even learned how to build walls around her mind and sometimes dream alone.
But the four of them had always vowed to dream in tandem on important occasions, such as the anniversary of their escape from Brassmere, or birthdays. Gwendle and Artem would be along eventually, stirring the clouds with their laughter and filling the dream with bright and happy energy.
But Plum and Vien had a vow of their own. They met early and talked about their lives. About the day they would meet again. Happy things, mostly. Sometimes sad. But always honest.
They stood on a mossy cliff side now, and Vien had painted an ocean below them. It sparkled like millions of stars.
The waking world was nowhere to be seen.
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