Dreamfall (40 page)

“
(Miya! Nasheirtah
—
!)
”
I shouted with
every cell in my body, making heads turn in the claustrophobic press of
unreadable strangers around me. I ducked my head, cursing with frustration, and
pushed deeper into the mob before anyone realized what I was.

I’d been able to reach Miya’s mind, she’d been able to find me,
in a way that had never happened with anyone else. The bond was forever ...
whoever or whatever came between us, I had to believe that.

I found a recess in the wall I’d been shoved up against and
slid into it, trying to clear my thoughts of everything and everyone but Miya:
her face, her mind. The way she moved, smiled, held Joby, touched me ...
bringing my soul to life, like water in the desert. The feel of her mind joined
with mine as our bodies joined, transforming the heat of physical lust into
something truer, purer, more ...

(Miya?)
I sucked in a startled breath as she
completed the contact; almost severed the fragile link between us with my
surprise. And in that moment I rcalrzed she could have avoided me or shut me
out. Instead she’d been open, waiting ...

(Cat—) Her thoughts were as clear as my own, and as much a
part of me. (Bian!)

I stayed where I was, crushed against the wall until I
couldn’t have moved if my life depended on it. The mood of the crowd began. to
seep in at the interface of thought linking my mind to hers, until my mind was
as desperately aware of their presence as my body was. I held the contact open
against the
anger/frustratiordhunger/grief
of the crowd, but the effort
drove spikes through my eyes. I wondered what was keeping Miya, when she could
just
come
to me.

The alternating culrents of sensation feeding through my
brain began to make my thoughts strobe; made me want to let in the crowd’s
emotion, drown in it, be one with it ....

I imagined what would happen if I did; or if anyone in the
crowd paid me enough attention to notice that I was different. I closed focus convulsively,
almost losing Miya before I got control of myself. Searching the crowd again, I
realized that most of the people I saw had turned toward the bridge, rapt with
anticipation.

A new voice was drawing the crowd—not Borosage’s distorted
threats, even though they still echoed over every corner of the square. This
voice wasn’t spoken, couldn’t be heard; instead I felt it feeding directly into
my thoughts through my bond with Miya. One mind—
Nas4t’s
—amplified
through a network of other minds all repeating her message: This
would be a
day like no othen Cross over to the other side. Thke back our world. The future
is waiting. The Humans cannot harm us, nothing will stop us, tf we go forward
to claim our future with one mind. Believ
—

The crowd pushed forward around me, surging toward the
bridge.

(Miya!)
I threw everything I had into the cry,
willing her to keep the promise she’d made to me—

(Bian!) She was beside me suddenly, clutching at my arm to
steady herself against the current of bodies pushing past. She was still
wearing the same muted earth colors, the same traditional loose tunic and
pants, but with a fringed scarf muffling her face as if she was trying for
anonymity. People around us stumbled or moved out of her way without giving us
a second look.

“Where were you—?” I broke off as she looked at me. Her incandescent
relief swept my brain like burning phosphor.

(You came back! You are with us! I knew your heart ....) She
pulled the scarf away from her mouth and kissed me. My body answered her, ready
to follow her anywhere, blindly, eagerly ....

But I tasted the residue of Naoh’s suspicion in her relief
as the doubts that had made her doubt me disappeared. With her arms still
around me, she started to pull me forward into the mob.

I broke away. (Miya, stop!) “What the hell are you doing
here?” I shouted. “This rs crazy!” Blurting out the words before my tongue
could turn traitor, before my brain could: “How could you leave me behind like
111a1—’!”

She looked at me with dazed imcomprehension. (I had to,) she
answered finally, faintly. “Naoh ....”

“What the fuck does Naoh think she’s doing?” I demanded, not
even trying to focus my thoughts anymore. “She’s setting these people up for a
CorpSec massacre!”

“No, Bisn—” Miya shook her head. “She has seen the Way. We
can protect ourselves from them without hurting them, if all of us join
together. They’ll be powerless to stop us. Belief has moved mountains. We can
make them disappsvr—”

“Miya, listen to me!” I caught her by the shoulders, hard
enough to make her grimace. “Your sister’s infecting your mind. She’s—sick, and
she’s infected all of you. Everything you think you believe is twisted, it’s
wrong.”

She shook her head again.

“
Please,
Miya,” My voice cracked. “If you lOve me, if
you love Joby, then look at Naoh with my eyes, see her like I do. You know she
can’t get inside my head. You know what I am; it makes me ... immune.” I waved
my hand. “Look at this mob through my eyes, and then tell me it doesn’t look
wrong.”

She looked at me== vacant-faced for what seemed like an eternity,
while the crowd swept past, crushing my hopes underfoot. But then at last I
felt her mind stir, like a sleeper waking: the unquestioning belief gave way
like a dam of ice, setting free a flood of questions without answers. (Bian—?)

I opened my thoughts, let her see for herself the things
that I could see, that her sister and the rest of the Satoh refused to believe.
I tried not to push her toward the truth, knowing that if she even imagined I
had, I’d lose her forever.

(Nephase ... ?) The color drained out of her face, like she’d
forgotten she’d ever even known about it. (This is the Way that you always
saw—?) She clutched at my clothing, hanging on to me like suddenly she could
barely stand. (Our people—Tau will ... they will ... ?)

I nodded, feeling something break inside me and fill me with
pain, as the truth shared became twice the burden for us both. But what choice
did I have ... ? There were no choices left, not for me, not for her. “Have ...
have you seen the oyasin?”

She pushed away from me until she was standing alone. She
shook her head again—meaning both
(no)
and
(she didn’t know wlty I
was asking.)

“She’s here. She said this was where the Way led her. Maybe
she saw a chance of stopping Naoh.” I tried not to think about how little hope
she’d foreseen of anything but failure. “Can you find her?”

Miya half frowned, craning her neck; even I could barely see
more than three meters through the crowd around us, and I was taller than most
of them. If her mind was as choked with strangers as the street was, she wouldn’t
have any better luck searching that way. She glanced at the wall above us. “{Jp
ffue1s—” She pointed.

I nodded, tried to relax and let it happen as she lifted us
straight up. We settled on top of the wall as if we were massless. I clung to
the ledge, its gritty surface biting into my hands as I steadied myself. As I
looked out over the crowd, I knew that finding Grandmother by sight alone would
be impossible. Maybe Miya could do what I couldn’t; I didn’t know whether even her

Gift, even from this height, could pinpoint Grandmother in
that molten sea of thought.

Looking out from here I saw suddenly that there were
children in the crowd. My heart sank; the Community had so few children left,
after Tau’s biowarfare. I wondered why their parents had brought them here,
risked their last hope for the future ... whether they really believed Naoh’s
claim that Human weapons couldn’t harm them or whether they simply believed
there wouldn’t be a future worth living if this failed. I thought about Joby as
I raised my head to watch for CorpSec flyers. Borosage’s amplified threats
droned on in a surreal counterpoint as I murmured, ‘Any luck?”

(No, I—)

“Talk out loud,” I said. I felt her surprise as she heard
the hardness in my voice. “If they use gas on us, at least we’ll know it.”

She nodded, her expression strained. “I’ve found Naoh.” She
pointed. “She’s all in white; you can see her at the bridge.”

I followed her pointing flnger until I found the figure in
white, glowing like the dawn as she hovered above the muted colors of the
crowd. Naoh had set herself apart, drifting a meter or so off the ground,
&S if she’d declared herself Chosen. There was a force field at both ends
of the bridge: I could see the crowd around her pressed up against the
invisible barrier like insects in a bottle.

And then, as I watched, Naoh was suddenly beyond the
barrier. It happened so quickly that I hadn’t even seen the change. Two Satoh
joined her, and then two more, as they got their bearings and teleported beyond
the barrier. More Hydrans followed, no longer just Satoh now, in twos and fives
and dozens until they filled this end of the bridge span. I watched the mass of
people pour on across; saw Naoh floating like a pale angel of death above the
crowd. “Grandmothel—J” I murmured, barely remembering to ask, hypnotized by the
sight like all the rest.

“Not with her. I’m searching ...” Miya answered like only
half of her mind was listening to me.

I tried to go on searching visually. My eyes kept being drawn
back to the mob moving farther out onto the bridge—and beyond them to its far
end, where Tau’s world began. They called it the

Bridge of Sighs over here. That wasn’t what they’d be
calling it

. tomorrow.

DKEAMF’ALL I 269

At the far end Borosage and a small army of Corpses were
waiting. Body arrnor glinted in the early morning light—which meant they’d come
armed with weapons systems I didn’t want to think about. CorpSec flyers were
taking up positions overhead now. There was no chance at all that they were
only here to observe.

The force barrier I’d collided with the other night wouldn’t
stop the Hydrans any more than this first one had, once they got a sense of the
dimensions and densities of the farther shore. Maybe with enough of them
together, their minds linked, they actually could disable every weapon, block
the wills of every Human waiting to use one, without anybody getting hurt ....

Maybe hell was about to freeze over.

I watched as the space between two worlds in collision kept
shrinking, watched it until my eyes ached, not able to look away.

“There! The oyasin!” Miya cried.

I strained to see what she saw without losing my balance,
felt her hand against my chest, steadying me. Her mind guided my senses with a
thought to Grandmother.

I watched Grandmother move through the mass of believers
still waiting in the square, saw her touch one person and then another. usually
they were ones with children. Almost always, as she let them go, they
disappeared, taking their children with them. “What’s she doing?”

“Sending them away—the ones who’Il listen.” Miya glanced at
me. “I want to go to her. Maybe together we can reach Naoh and make her stop.”

I shook my head. “It’s too late. Nobody can turn them all
back. Is’s too late to shtop i’—” I broke off. “Shid. Miy’—?”

She looked at me in sudden panic, back at the crowd. “No! Oy’sin—”
I felt her mind take me, try to pull us through a jump to reach Grandmother in
the heart of the crowd.

It didn’t work. The world tilted out from under me as we
lost our balance and went off the edge, falling into the crowd below.

I hit bodies and then the ground, landing hard enough to
knock the wind out of me. I staggered up, feeling as if every breath I took
drove a stake through my lungs. But the pain should have been worse; Miya had
managed somehow to break our fall.

She struggled to her feet beside ffi€, shaking her head. A stranger’s
flailing arm knocked her against the wall as a ripple of panic spread through
the crowd around us.

At first I thought we’d caused the crowd’s reaction by the
way we’d dropped in on it. But the rising levels of noise said I was wrong: the
people around us, who had always relied on their network of psi awareness, had
all discovered at once what I already knew: how it felt to have something as
integral as their soul suddenly ripped out of them. Hundreds of people all
around me were living the moment when I’d lost my own psi, and I remembered
what it had done to me—

I slammed into Miya as someone else collided with me. Physical
pain crushed the pain of memory and let me see again with the clear hard vision
of anger ... letting me see, as I turned around, that Miya had disappeared from
beside me.

“Miya!” I shouted her name. It was lost in the cacophony as
the crowd found the only voice it had left, and the noise and shouting rose. I
looked around, frantic; saw Miya struggling through the riptide of bodies on a
trajectory that would take her to Grandmother, if the crowd didn’t swallow her
first ... if CorpSec lightning didn’t drop out of the sky and strike us dead.

I saw more bodies wink out of existence here and there—lucky
ones who hadn’t been incapacitated by the gas before they realized what was
happening. But the rest of them were trapped, blind targets. And so was I, if I
didn’t start back down the alley now.

But I knew I wasn’t going anywhere without Miya, and she
wasn’t going without Grandmother. I fought my way deeper into the crowd, going
after her ... realizing that in a panic-stricken mob, being too Human—
ruthless,
senseless, used to doing everything the hard way
—was actually working in my
favor.

But then I heard the screaming start in earnest, screams of
terror and pain. The Corpses were making their move, now that the demonstrators
were helpless, trapped on the bridge or here in the crowd-choked square.
Hydrans screamed just like Humans when their bodies broke and bled like Human
bodies ....