Dreamweaver, page 13
Everything shuddered as the maze walls around us sank downward, disappearing into slender slots that swiftly closed over. The expanse of the arena opened up around us once more.
“What just happened?” Dane’s voice shook.
Before any of us could respond to him, Flow’s sharp command brought our attention her way. She stood on the balcony, hands behind her back, her braid like a black snake across her shoulder. Considering I just managed to do what Allones had wanted me to do, I thought she would look more pleased when she surveyed us. Instead, her expression was grim.
“Go clean yourselves up and make yourselves presentable. The Chancellor is on her way.”
Dread bit into my chest at her words, burning like venom. She left us at that, striding away without so much as a glance. Cay flipped her off as she went, signaling how we all felt.
“Healers,” Venny grunted, gesturing towards a team in white entering from a far door. Stretchers floated beside them, which was good, because I knew I wasn’t going to be walking again right now. My right leg was an iron bar of clenched muscles and my right shoulder throbbed abominably. I worried for Kenji, who moaned a bit when Norie crouched by him, talking to him soothingly. And I worried for Dane. When I looked to him, he was grimacing, sinking to his knees with his hands cradling his head.
Overhead, the remnants of the dream swirled this way and that, like fragments of glass casting off sunlight.
Chapter Eleven
“You must stay here, Dreamweaver.”
“Let me out!”
“You must stay here,” the healer repeated, expressionless. “If you continue to resist treatment, we will be forced to sedate you.”
That made me settle, if reluctantly. Letting someone other than Dane heal me felt strange, like replacing pieces of myself back into the wrong place. It didn’t feel right. I hated everything about the blank shiny metal walls and the table they had laid me on, stripped practically bare for their examination. I especially hated not knowing what had happened to Dane. “I just want to know if he’s okay.”
“In time. Lie still.”
Heels clicking against the pristine tile flooring of the medical ward brought my attention around. My gut clenched when I saw it was the Chancellor approaching, wearing sheer delight on her face. Greed and hunger. Her eyes were trained on the essence beads across my uniform, which was in a discarded crumpled ball on another table.
“You’ve done it.” The tone in her voice made my skin crawl and I couldn’t track her through the room as she went straight for my essence beads. Shoving away the medics bowing over me, I cleared a view to her, not wanting her out of my sight for a moment. “I knew all you needed was some persuasion to make it happen. It took some convincing on my part to get my council on board, but you’ve proven me right, haven’t you?” Plucking up a bead, she drew it closer, twisting it in her fingers, the essence inside of it shimmering this way and that. “All it took was some persuasion in the form of your friend. I must say, his curiosity had gotten out of hand and needed to be dealt with. Naturally, you’re concerned about his wellbeing. Don’t mind that right now; we are going to focus on you. Allow me to address the changes that will come into your life now.”
I shook as I stared, her words sinking in slowly. The papers across the kitchen. Dane’s probing into information that he had no business looking for. No doubt Allones noticed the moment that realization clicked into place for me, dread shivering through my veins like I had been coated in snow. She had known about his inquiring all along.
“You are going to be held here. There’s someone who is particularly interested in meeting you and we can’t have you getting any rash ideas and trying to run away to save your beloved family members now. Heroism would simply get you recaptured and punished for making him wait to meet you.”
I wanted to ask who she was talking about, but my attention as snared by the hands pressing me down as I fought to get off the exam table, shoving at me with bruising force as I struggled against them. A sharp jab at my neck, and one of the healers was plunging the contents of a syringe into my veins. At my wrists and ankles, metal straps coiled over my limbs, clicking into place, locking me down. The world swirled around me, heavy and thick like warm syrup, the edges of my vision dimming.
“Stop struggling, Enea. You’ll only end up hurting yourself. Wretch will be here soon enough.”
Wretch? What was she talking about? What was happening? Intense, sluggish drowsiness swept through me, like a tide claiming a shell and drawing it into the ocean. Down and down and down. Deep and dark.
Nothing.
Fingertips trailed over the bridge of my nose, across my dry, cracked lips, and down my jawline. I couldn’t turn my head away despite how badly I wanted to; the touch made my skin shiver with cascading chills. My eyelids seemed glued together, resisting my attempts to open them. My entire body felt carved from stone, unmovable and cold. The metal slab I lay on bit against my shoulder blades.
“If it weren’t for the proof within these beads, I wouldn’t believe you,” a scratchy voice said, the words skimming over me like they were probing for a weak spot. “What a pathetic specimen. She’s defective.”
“I assure you, sir, she’s the one you are looking for.”
“You’ve requested my presence with only one transformation to prove that she is. I don’t take kindly to my time being wasted.”
“Never that, sir. Try her again if you want to. She’ll cause the change again.”
“Have you gathered enough nightmares for testing?”
“Certainly. And I can always have more extracted at your request.”
“Only one side…. Not exactly favorable.”
“We can find the other half, sir. Believe in me. Please.”
“I want the change proven. Submerge her. Don’t let her surface until she has changed every speck of nightmare that encloses her.”
Chains rattled, and the slab that bore me shuddered before lowering. Peeling back my eyelids, I couldn’t bring anything into focus; the world had become nothing more than black and white splashes of indistinct shapes. The dark swallowed up the light as I continued to descend. Was I in some sort of tunnel? A hole? A well?
A grave?
I could feel exactly what awaited me. The harsh essence of rogue nightmares fizzed angrily against my body, stretching eagerly for me. When the tendrils first swarmed over the slab and brushed against my skin, which was when I discovered that I couldn’t move to defend myself due to the restraints tying me down. Like a sinking stone, I was pulled under the surface, swallowed whole by the pit of jagged ice. A storm engulfed me, howling deafeningly and I struggled for breath against the pummeling, fighting the ties that bound me, but I moved so slowly, my entire body cumbersome. I may as well have been trapped in quicksand.
The nightmare raged through me, slashing against my skin, and I screamed as it burned.
Somewhere in the room, someone was speaking, his voice grating and rough. “Change the essence. That’s all you have to do, Harvester Dreamweaver.”
I couldn’t. The barrage was all encompassing, driving all thoughts out of my head. There was only instinct, screaming at me to escape. To flee. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t—
Trapped.
Helpless.
They sedated me soon after they pulled me from the cage that they held the nightmare in. Aware of the blood spilling from my limbs, I only had moments to be surprised that they had not simply allowed the nightmare to kill me, and to hear that scratchy voice tsk in disdain.
“A shame. A waste. And as I said, defective.”
“I swear to you,” Allones said, her voice dripping with deference, “she is capable of it. She has done it. Twice!” She suddenly elicited a strangled sound, her stream of words cutting off.
“We will try again. Meanwhile, I suggest you make yourself scarce from my presence. Bring me her sister. That should motivate her properly into action.”
Dayja. No. No, no, no.
A needle jabbed into my neck as I thrashed against my restraints, and everything was torn away from me in a sickening spiral.
When they submerged me in the feral nightmare again, I tried to hold onto the image of my twin. My bond with my sister was the lone spark within the tumultuous waves that tried to drown me. But the memories that I tried to play through my head were snatched hold of and twisted.
The time she had fallen asleep on my shoulder as we watched a rainstorm, and suddenly she coughed blood over the window, slumping over, white as the blanket wrapped around us—
We were playing hide-and-seek with Daneon and his sister outside in the field, carefree under the billowing clouds of a summer afternoon. And then shots rang out and Illie was screaming and screaming, but I couldn’t make my legs move fast enough to get to her. Dane’s answering screams rent the air as a bullet pummeled through his chest too—
My father’s body was still warm as I shook his shoulder, trying to wake him up. In reality he hadn’t responded to me, but in this nightmare, he opened his eyes, blood streaking from them like macabre tears. “Go,” he rasped, choking. “Don’t let them find you.”
Then I remembered Aro trying to teach me how to crochet, but instead of hooks, I was using fingerbones, and the entrails that he tried to coach me into making a scarf kept slipping from my hands, pooling into my lap in a slimy mess.
And outside the cage that I struggled in, Allones was shrieking at me furiously. “I will peel your sister’s skin from her body while she still breathes if you don’t make this change, Enea! I swear it on my own life! You complete worthless, insufferable excuse for a person! I won’t be killed for your utter incompetence!”
Then… Then a spinning mass of color, and there was a hand—a hand with brownish-maroon skin and black, knife-like nails, holding out a ladle my way. My own hands shook as I reached for it.
“A half is not a whole,” a stringent voice said, the words slithering through my head like a snake winding its way up a branch. “What good are you broken?”
My heartbeat pounded against my eardrums. The vision broke.
Instinct. Didn’t Dane say that it may come down to instinct? I knew how to rely on it. Hadn’t instinct driven me to Aro’s door after the death of my parents, dragging my sister without a thought behind me as I went? Wasn’t it instinct that had woken me from my sleep the night that a rampaging nightmare first sought me out, trying to destroy me?
Maybe… Maybe it had been instinct that had brought Daneon to my aid that night as well. That first time I had changed essence.
Light bloomed to life within my veins, pushing back against the swarming nightmare in an amethyst glow that wavered feebly. These were my memories the nightmare tried to distort. I’d fight back even if it killed me. As my blood coiled with the essence around me, I knew there was a very good chance of that.
But finally, thankfully, the energy nearest me responded. It shimmered, scattering a rainbow through the room, brightening, and softening. Within its drifting mass there was tranquility. Twining it around me, the dream essence shielded me from the nightmare that tried to eat me alive. Contained by this shell, I was safe.
“She’s done it.” Allones’ voice was so shrill I hardly recognized it. “Fetch him. Fetch him now! Yes, you—go. Leave her in there. No one touch her.”
Gathering the dream energy around me, I felt for the essence beads sewn along my clothes and braided through my hair, filling them. Every one of them. Then I felt for the beads throughout the rest of the room.
With a massive shove, I Harvested the dream essence, sending it towards those beads.
The force of the energy smashed against the glass cage I was in, splintering it, fragments plinking as they scattered to the ground. The nightmare essence flowed out through the cracks, decimating the rest of the cage. I pulled back the dream energy before it could curl into the beads, wrapping it around myself again. Grasping a shard of glass in one hand, heedless to it biting into my fingers, I turned my wrist to saw at the leather restraint holding my arm down. Everyone inside the room shouted in pain as the nightmare began to batter against them. Without Cay here, there was no one to Harvest it. And I certainly wasn’t going to help them out by changing any more of that energy into gentle dreams.
Successfully cutting through one restraint, I was able to curl over to start sawing at the other one to free my right arm.
“Drug her!” Allones was screaming. It was difficult to hear her beyond the destruction the nightmare was causing throughout the room. The lights overhead spat, flickering in and out. Solarflares burst to life as her guards lit them and held them aloft, driving the nightmare back towards a corner of the room. “Get her under control! Don’t—”
All of the energy in the room funneled without warning into a tight, spiraling mass. The dream essence was ripped from my control, absorbed deep into the nightmare once again. Heavy footfalls clicked against the tile flooring and a figure emerged in the periphery of my sight, one hand lazily directing the essence into a sphere that fizzed as he pressed it smaller and smaller.
He was remarkably short, slight in stature, wearing a simple ivory button-down shirt and gray trousers. A large greatcoat covered most of his frame. His thin face was adorned by a wispish mustache over thin lips and bright blue eyes that had no eyebrows to frame them. When he removed his gray hat, the rest of his head was bald, reflecting back the solarlights. His skin was so pale his purplish veins stood out, winding through his body.
There was a coin-sized hole at the bottom of his throat, through which he held a cigarette, taking a long drag as he eyed the mass of energy he kept contained with no effort. When he exhaled, smoke plumed through his stoma. Sweeping his fingers to cover the opening, he said in a gravely way, “You’re an awful lot of trouble, Dreamweaver. But given what you’ve managed to do, I’m inclined to put up with you regardless. We have a lot of work to do, you and I.”
“I want nothing to do with you,” I said, wishing my words weren’t slurred and pathetically weak. “Who do you think you are, kidnapping me and experimenting on me like some lab rat?” Nervously taking in the ball of essence he was manipulating, I wanted to ask how he could control it so easily, both kinds at the same time, but I didn’t quite have the guts for that. When the man’s eyes zeroed in on the shard of glass I grasped and the half-sawed-through restraint on my right arm, I clenched my jaw.
He tilted his head at me. “What did you presume you were going to do the moment you got free, hmm? Would you fight against all of my guards? Assuming you had the strength to even take a few steps together, you could never overpower so many Spinners. You could hardly handle this measly little nightmare.”
“What do you want?”
Allones’ high heels snapped against the ground as she emerged into my line of sight. I winced against the neon yellow suit that she wore, the harshness of it drilling into my brain. “Sir, you don’t have to spend your time handling her. I can take care of everything here. We’ll be ready for further testing tomorrow now that you—”
“I want quite a few things,” the man answered me, completely ignoring the Chancellor. “None of which the universe has thought fit to grant to me just yet. I think you are about to turn things towards my favor, though.”
“I’m not helping you with shit.”
“Perhaps not voluntarily, but you will help. You will not have a choice.” He pulled his attention from me, dragging in a breath before covering his stoma again. “Sedate her. We will prep for tomorrow.”
“No!” Gripping the glass piece, I swiped at the first guard that approached. He snatched my wrist, yanking my arm down against the slab despite my struggles. When my elbow smacked against the metal it jarred my fingers, spasming them open and my puny weapon fell. A second guard coiled a fist into my braids, my scalp stinging as he smashed my head to the side, barreling down with a syringe that stabbed into my neck.
I was still shouting when the drug stole my awareness away once again.
Chapter Twelve
My body was full of sand, gritty and heavy, holding my bones in place. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow properly. Trying to pry my eyelids apart didn’t benefit me at all; everything was shapeless and gray, like a color-drained rainbow. I was so cold I felt carved from ice, still submerged in artic waters.
A pair of hands was cradling my face; someone’s palms were almost searingly hot against my skin. “En. Wake up. Can you hear me? En?”
The breath I exhaled pressed out from my tight chest, my ribcage sore as it expanded to draw in more air. How long had it been since I had taken a deep breath? How long had it been since I had moved? I had no idea that even my fingernails could ache.
“We don’t have time,” another said, sharp and impatient. “Let’s go.”
“What did they do to her?” asked someone else. Someone I almost recognized but couldn’t dredge up their name in my sludgy mind. “Will she be okay?”
The first person shifted their arms beneath my knees and my shoulders, drawing me towards them. My head flopped against their chest, the muscles in my neck as supportive as melted wax. “We have three minutes left until power returns. What’s their status?”
“Currently scrambling,” said the sharp voice. “We’ve got incoming down the west hall.”
“Kenji and Venny will take care of them,” said the second voice gruffly. “Start moving. I’ll carry her. Don’t look at me like that, boy, you have a job to do still. I’ll take her straight out.”
In a moment, I was shifted over into someone else’s hold, someone with bigger arms and a beard that dragged against my forehead as my carrier twisted his head to the side. Aro, I wanted to say, but even though my throat worked, I couldn’t get a sound out. My hand against his shirt tremored.
