Dreamweaver, page 6
My chest felt too tight, and I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips where I sat leaning on one elbow, feeling like one gigantic purple bruise. “How many shots do you have left?”
“Three,” he ground out.
“Two more,” Anessa’s shaky voice offered. She reached for her solargun and pressed it into her brother’s open hand. He held both guns aloft and fired one, singeing away a chunk of the nightmare and it responded in a raging spiral of wind-whipped water that pressed against the dying solarflare’s boundary, like a wounded animal baring its teeth.
“Is that enough?” I asked him urgently. If it was weakened enough, Harvesting it shouldn’t be an issue for him. The stupid sphere camera whirred by my head, and I shoved it to the side. Surely from wherever Flow was watching us, she didn’t intend for us to die. Hopefully.
Cay pressed his lips together in a grim, thin line and didn’t answer.
Which was to say, his answer was nope.
He fired yet another bolt while I turned from him to look at his sister, cowering behind him. Helpless.
Helplessness.
Clenching my jaw, I drew in a deep breath, sharp and freezing as the gnawing dark came spiraling down, ravenous for the solarlight. Well, nothing else to it, then. I had to try. My body shook uncontrollably, and my right side had curled up, locked in a tight grip that shot stabbing pain through my muscles as I tried to straighten my limbs. But I forced myself to stand as best I could on my one good leg, pressing both of my hands above my heart. My fingers dug into my torn-up shirt, and I felt for my warm skin, the rise and fall of my shaky breaths. My pulse.
“Hold your shots,” I told Cay.
In the dying of the last bit of light, his rounded eyes flicked my way. “What? Are you completely insane?” Behind him, Anessa’s jaw unhinged in a gawk. This was madness to them, of course it was. This nightmare essence was going to rip us to shreds and absorb our own essences, stronger and fiercer for whoever had to face it next.
Instead of answering them, I let out a breath and held out my left hand.
Instantly, the nightmare ensnared my wrist, yanking me forward, swallowing me whole into its whirling, bitterly frigid mass of water and darkness, dragging me in a plummet into the nightmare’s center. Buffeted through the water like a leaf in a murderous river, I opened my eyes to find nothing answering my searching gaze. I had only the air held in my lungs, the deafening pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. In a whirlwind of sound and images, the nightmare pried open my mind and poured in, unleashing an onslaught of my worst memories like a dam had burst and I was now going to drown. Unable to look away, the memories absorbed me.
“Get up, trashcan! What’s wrong with you? Get up!”
I hadn’t asked for my body to be the way it was, injured from birth, forever consequently struggling to make it carry out the basics of commands. Things that came so naturally to others I struggled with; walking required so much effort, so much building of strength, and balancing seemed to be a foreign concept to my brain.
A glob of spit hit my cheek and with my hands held behind my back, I couldn't wipe it away. I could only endure. I could only breathe. Everything hurt.
The other children at school were relentless in their bullying, constantly reminding me that I wasn’t whole, that I wasn’t normal. I had constant bruises from tripping, falling, and from their own fists and feet. My mother would try not to show me how she cried over my blackened eyes or my busted lip while she attempted to repair my ripped clothing. My father would try not to let me overhear his heated communications with the school master, demanding consequences, action. Something.
“Unfortunately, there is no set treatment for this. You’ve probably heard as much from the news conference Spinner Bonemender held this morning. I’m afraid… your parents are going to have to fight this off the best they can, but we’ll do everything possible to help them do so.”
I hadn’t asked for my parents to become ill with a merciless viral disease that swept through our country, robbing life from both young and old alike. Dayja gripped my hand so hard my bones creaked as we stood outside my mother’s hospital room and watched the frantic efforts of the healer Spinners answering the blaring alarms from their machinery alerting to a life that was dwindling, a body that was dying. A soul departing. When they called her time of death, Dayja collapsed to the ground, and I crumpled with her.
My father’s death followed three days later.
“How are we going to survive, En? What are we supposed to do? I mean, we’re nine years old! Who’s going to help us?”
I didn’t ask to take charge, but Dayja depended on me, so I did. Setting my pride to the wayside, we became wards of the government, our only familial attachment being to Arlo and his grandson as they picked up the frayed edges of our lives and tried to weave us into their tapestry. When the time came twelve years later, hiding my physical deficiency was a tricky thing to do in order to sign myself up for the Division of Harvesting, but Daneon, already assigned as a Spinner, forged my medical exam and soon I became Harvester Dreamweaver, inexperienced and naive to what gathering dreams was going to cost me. Dayja’s affinity for Harvesting tears allowed her to help soothe others, giving a cathartic outlet for their emotions. Gathering dreams from others only left me hollowed out, realizing I had no dreams of my own to cling to, to hold and heal with.
A distant part of my mind knew that I was stuck in a loop of illusions, mentally taking the punches like a bean bag being repeatedly thrown against a wall. That same small part of me fought to pull away from the nightmare’s relentless attack, as if trying to rip off a second skin. While I was helpless against this essence, there was an essence I could control, and it was going to require that I make a huge change that I had only managed once before. It was Daneon who had found me back then, curled up in a sobbing ball in the corner of my childhood room mere weeks after my parents passing, too young to understand just what was attacking me.
“Enea? What’s happening? Why is there a rogue nightmare here?”
In my complete terror, the moment Daneon grounded me by placing a hand to my shoulder, something inside of me cracked open, and I delved far into my mind, seeking safety, or some way to fight back. And the nightmare essence had changed.
It had turned into a dream.
Back then, Daneon had been dumbstruck into silence, watching open-mouthed as I had drawn the dream’s essence into the beaded bracelet that he had given me for my birthday the year before. It was the first time I had Harvested.
Now, trapped inside the core of a different nightmare, cracking open the innermost part of my soul felt like trying to pry a mountain from its roots. Deep, deep within myself, I turned like a sunflower seeking the sun, or a bird searching for a place to land. For home. Life. Recalling the feel of Daneon’s hand on my shoulder so long ago, gripping firm, his mere presence offering a respite to my panic, a curling ray of sunshine brushing against the frost that smothered me.
Holding firm to that memory, I pushed back against my snare.
With an ear-splitting rumble that shook the cavern, the nightmare that trapped me erupted.
My hold on the nightmare didn’t last long; it was too immense, coiling around me in a predatory way, fragmenting into shards under the pressure of my pathetic attempt to convert it into a dream. The resulting thunderous explosion tossed me like I weighed nothing, and I tumbled uncontrollably across the gritty ground, both my clothes and my skin shredding. My ears whined as I tried to right myself, sick with the dizzying way the world spun around me. Everything stunk of something metallic, like iron.
Hands grabbed my arms, yanking me up, and a faint buzzing sound made me turn my head to find Anessa standing beside me, dragging me to my feet, shouting something. Sound snapped back into place, rocking me on my feet—oh, wait, no, that was the rumbling of the catacomb itself. Bursts of stone crashed down as the cavern walls cracked, fracturing from the essence’s violent rending.
“Holy shit,” I gasped. I had ripped the behemoth nightmare to pieces. Cay was grasping control of what he could, funneling the energy into his Harvest beads and dodging the chunks of stone that rained down. The sand below sprayed as Anessa threw the two of us to the side to avoid being crushed by a fragmented part of the cavern wall.
“We’ve got to find a way out,” Anessa shouted, waving her solarlight towards Cay. “This place is breaking apart. We’re going to be crushed! Nice going, Enea, you’re going to get us all killed.” She sagged sideways the next instant as my legs buckled. “Stand up, fatty.”
“Can’t,” I grunted, feeling my body screaming with pain, my limbs refusing to obey me. Oh, you need me to move? No thanks, I’m done.
“This entire hellhole is a dead end. There’s no exit.” Cay’s boots sprayed rock chips at us as he skidded to a stop next to us. Reaching down, he hooked an elbow beneath my shoulder, roughly hauling me up with his sister helping. “And I’m out of beads.” He snarled at the sphere camera as it spun lazily towards him. “Hope this was worth it, Flow.”
Being moments from death probably made me a bit delirious, but laughter bubbled up my throat and spilled out, hysterical and sharp. Cay would be court marshalled when we—he would have been, that is. I was going to miss gentle-hearted Aro and his baking. Regret at how upset this mess was going to make Dayja cut my laughter off. And Daneon… well, he’d be freed of his continual nuisance.
“Can you weaken it any further?” Cay questioned, pointing and firing Anessa’s solargun. But the scattered essence crawled forward, bits and pieces of it solidifying into eyeless creatures that dripped thick saliva from their mouths bristling with jagged razors. They slowly gathered themselves to their feet, whether they had two, three, or more, and their pace increased.
“Doubt it.” My reply was a dry croak. I grimaced at the blood flowing over my lips. What exactly had happened? Why hadn’t the nightmare changed like it was supposed to?
Anessa whimpered. “I’ll never get to wear those new boots I ordered.”
“Always with the shoes,” Cay grumbled. He shot his last solarflare.
“I guess I’ll miss you, too,” she added vaguely.
Cay holstered her gun and crossed his arm over me to pull her daggers from my belt. To the camera sphere he said bitterly, “I don’t want flowers at my funeral.”
Anessa was crying now, but she took one of her knives and she ducked out from beneath my arm as Cay did the same on the other side. Boulder sized chunks of rock smashed into the ground around us, throwing up a dust storm, half-blinding and nearly choking me. I wobbled on my left leg, trying to stay upright.
“Five seconds,” Cay called out, widening his stance and lifting the dagger. Gulping, his sister echoed his movements.
The whir of the floating camera next to my ear made me look towards it. Taking in a shaky breath, my voice hoarse with grit, I said, “Bye, Dayja.”
Then the solarlight died and the horror creatures reached us.
Chapter Six
There was someone crying. Someone was crying in great, gulping sobs that were out of sync with the steady beeping of a heart monitor and the low hiss of oxygen. I knew those sounds from the many times I would drop by to visit Daneon on his hospital shifts. In an effort to open my eyes, I recoiled the next moment as brutal, sharp pain detonated throughout my entire being. The beeping on the monitor sped up.
“Hold on, sweetie, hold on. I’m here to help you.”
Something cold flew through my wrist as a pair of hands pressed down on my skin, giving off a flare of soft green light behind my eyelids, and the pain—along with everything else—faded away.
My next awareness was of someone humming gently and the feel of warm fingertips trailing over my forehead. Recognizing the song, I let it waft forward recollections of Dayja singing me to sleep on the nights I was excruciatingly panicked that a roaming nightmare would attack me, mollifying my concerns enough to allow me to drift off to sleep. It was the sound of safety, of reassurance that my twin would always be there for me.
Prying my eyelids apart felt akin to lifting stones, but I managed to look though small slits at my hazy surroundings, pinpointing the darker blur among the striking white of the room. A small turn of my head pulled the nasal cannula set inside my nostrils and I blinked away the stinging tears the overhead solarlights brought to my eyes. The trailing hand left my forehead to grasp hold of my cold fingers with a gasp.
“En?”
“Dayja,” I croaked. I sounded like I had aged fifty years.
“I’m so glad you’re awake.” Something smooth and cold slipped over my ears and I blinked my sister into focus behind new glasses; she knelt by the bed cradling me, leaning her face towards mine. “How do you feel?”
How did I feel? A slow assessment over my body, head to toe and back, summarized into a long list of throbs and aches and other pains. Honestly, I felt like I had been sliced to ribbons and someone had attempted to tie me back into some semblance of a person. Glancing down only verified my appraisal; I had more bandages than skin showing, and what little skin showed was purple-black with bruises. Unbidden, the memory of the desperate fight in the dark against the nightmare creatures made me start to shiver violently and I clenched my eyes shut, only to find that the blackness behind eyelids made it worse, and my gaze desperately threw itself up towards the solarlights. How did I feel? There was no way I was going to tell her the truth.
“How am I alive?” I didn’t kid myself that I should have been dead. I had fully expected to be dead.
Dayja’s jaw wobbled but she bravely swallowed down her emotions and answered, “Flow sent a troop to rescue you. Maybe you remember some of them: Kenji Won, Norie Salt, and Venny Walton if I remember right. There were some others, but I don’t know them. They… they reached you… they reached you just in time.” Now tears were dripping from the end of her nose, from the bow of her upper lip, and her voice shook. “How dare you say ‘bye’ to me, you big brute!”
I could only blink at her. “What?”
“The camera feed, En. We all saw it. That is, those of us with access to the military feed. I was at work when Aro pinged me an emergency alert on my band and the next thing I know I’m shoving my clients out of the room and pulling up the live feed of… of…” Her breaths started to come in frantic heaves.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I said, like a stupid robot, trying to touch her arm but only managing to paw at her with my heavily bandaged hand. She snatched hold of it like a lifeline and I tried not to wince.
“Ene, I thought you were going to die!” Now her voice was a shrill wail that sent chills down my back, and she dropped her head to my shoulder, shaking with gigantic sobs that quickly started to drench my hospital gown with tears.
Her voice must have alerted someone outside the room because the next moment the door swung open and a healer nurse walked in, offering me a bright smile when she saw me look towards her. “Enea, I’m so glad to see you awake. Dayja, would you like to step out and take a break, honey?” When my sister adamantly shook her head, the healer nodded and removed the stethoscope from around her neck. “How do you feel, Enea? Can I take a listen to you?”
“Fine. Yes.” Hiding the urge to flinch as the stethoscope’s diaphragm touched my chest, I endured the healer’s quick assessment, giving blunt answers to her questions. Any honest responses were going to have to wait until Dayja wasn’t nearby. Mercifully, she delivered another round of painkillers and an administration of healing essence from her Spinner beads.
“Your bandages look good. I’m going to step out now and alert Spinner Bloodthreader that you’re awake and responding.” She pulled back, the green glow from her Spinning dying away, and I tried not to smirk at the ever-odd way of hearing Daneon referred to so formally. “He made me promise I would let him know right away when you’re up. Is there anything I can bring you, dear? You’re clear to eat and drink if you want, but take it slow.”
“I’ll send Dayja for something, thanks.” As I sank back into my pillow as the painkillers began to take effect, Dayja waited until the healer had closed the door on her way out before holding out a mug of water for me. As I made pitiful attempts to take some swallows, dribbling all over my chin, she said in a rush, “Are you sure you’re really okay, En? Is there anything you need? I’m sure you’re starving. It’s been three whole days! Aro has been messaging me every five minutes wanting to know if you were awake yet. I’ve got to send him a reply. I’m sure he’s still sitting in his chair, squeezing Poppy Muffin and bawling his eyes out. And Daneon”—her coffee colored skin lightened a few shades and she set the mug down on the bedside table with a harsh thunk—“I thought he was going to go to Flow’s office and shoot her himself. He refused to even look at the Molts until you had… until he treated you and you were stable. I mean, Aro had a hard time calming him down.” Her eyes were mystified as she looked straight at me. “I’ve never seen him so upset.”
Well, with how distraught Dayja was now, I could only imagine how she was when I was first brought to the hospital. No wonder Dane had been so livid. He must really love her. The thought stabbed me in the chest, untouched by the painkillers. With a sore sigh, I fell back on the safest question to ask her. “They’re doing okay, then?”
“Yes.” She rose to sit on the edge of my bed, still grasping my hand carefully. “He’s not supposed to, but Dane’s been keeping me up to speed on how they’re recovering. They weren’t as...” She cut herself off, though I knew she was going to say they weren’t as rough off as I had been, and I found I was actually, sincerely, relieved. “I have so many questions for you, but you probably should sleep some more.” She drew her fingers across my cheek in the shape of a heart and my eyelids fluttered shut without my permission. With the pain dulled to a soft whisper, my exhaustion had come running full steam ahead to the forefront. “I love you so much. Don’t ever do something like that again.”
