Fearsome Dreamer (30 page)

Wren folded his arms, calmer.

‘Well. It doesn't matter any more. In fact, you did me a favour. You really did. So I did you a favour in turn. She was holding you back. Isn't that what you used to say to me? Don't bother with girls. Don't bother with love. It only holds you back from your purpose in life. I used to think you were such a pompous cock, saying that. But you know – you're right. I came to realise that. You are. So I did you a favour, as a thank you. She's gone now.'

White flinched, his body aching to throw itself out of the chair and into that horrible smug face.

Wren smiled, held his hands up.

‘Look, it was just an assignment, at first. They asked me to come back. Check out the competition. Maybe even recruit someone, if I could. I didn't know about your, er, special regard for one of them, not at first. But when I heard about it, I thought … well. What better way to pay you back a favour? What tickles me most, though, is that you didn't even know. Didn't even
know
that I was visiting her at night. And yes – it was always at night. And she's actually quite pretty with no clothes on.'

White's hand tightened on the pistol he had jammed into the seat cushions, and he pulled it free. Fumbled. Pointed it at Wren's chest.

It was a small, ancient thing that Frith had given him last year as a birthday present. He'd practised this earlier, a few times. Pointing it. He hadn't fumbled, before. But then, nothing ever turned out the way it should, when it came to the time that actually mattered.

Wren's jaw fell open, and his features spiked in fear.

‘I'll Jump before you can fire,' he said.

‘Try!' White screamed. ‘Go on and try it! We'll see!'

There was a knock on his door.

‘White?' came a voice from outside.

Frith's voice.

Wren was shifting nervously.

‘I can do it,' he said. ‘Don't think I can't.'

White kept silent.

If you just shoot RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT now.

NOW.

You'll get him. Do it.

The door opened, and Frith came in. And stopped.

Wren took his chance.

White's finger jerked on the trigger.

Too late. The noise made his ears shut down.

Wren had gone.

Frith stood, thunderstruck.

White threw the gun as hard as he could across the room. It smashed into the wall.

He covered his face.

He willed with everything he had that the world would fade away. Fade away and leave him alone in the dark, with only his own breath
ing for company.

In her dream, Rue runs.

The dream is a game in a castle, but more than a game; and if Rue loses, she will die. The humming dread that drenches the walls of this place makes her neck clench and she can taste it, like blood on her tongue.

This place is death and the game is that she has to survive.

The floor is made of cracked, uneven stone slabs that make her footfalls echo so loudly, each separate noise a cacophony that she is sure will bring every horror this place has to offer right to her, to pounce on her like a ragdoll and tear her to strips that they can gobble down.

She comes to an enormous king of a door that stretches up into the rafters. When she touches the handle, it opens easily, despite its size. The room beyond is bigger than a church, with the same dusty walls and echoing space. It is bare, its floor made up of uneven slabs that slope steadily downwards toward a hole in the centre of the room. Like a wound it gapes, coloured in blackness. The slabs disappear into it as if they are being sucked inside.

There is only the smallest ledge of slabs up against the walls that don't slope downwards. She has a feeling that if she steps on any one of the sloping slabs, she will slide helplessly towards the crevasse and disappear into it forever.

Rue knows what lives in the crevasse. She has been here before.

She steps into the room. Her feet slide and slip. She shuffles along. The sense of danger grows so fast she can imagine very strongly that whatever lives in the crevasse is skittering, climbing up the sides of its hole, coming closer to the source of that smell it can smell, the smell of her and of meat. She is halfway across the room. If she doesn't hurry, she will die. Someone enters the room behind her. Rue screams a warning over her shoulder.

Don't come in! Don't come in! Find another way around!

She knows the newcomer has put a foot on the first slab.

Don't come in!

She can see it shifting its bulk from side to side as it heaves up the sides of the crevasse. The smell of meat is stronger now. Double the strength.

She makes it to the other side and wrenches open the door. The newcomer is halfway across. Something slithers out from the blackness of the hole in the middle of the ground. Broken pieces of slab tremble and shift. It moves horribly fast, scrabbling upwards in a massive rush.

I told you not to come in!
Rue screams.

The newcomer looks up, her mouth hanging open in terror. She has long, thin dark hair which shivers wildly around her shoulders as she looks between Rue and the hole, rapidly, again and again.

Cho
, Rue says, her voice clipped and gasping.
Cho, I TOLD YOU NOT TO C—

Rue woke, fighting.

It was too hard to breathe. The screaming had taken away her air.

It took a while to realise that wherever that place had been, she wasn't there any more; she was here where things were real, and normal, and safe. The overwhelming sense of relief she felt brought tears to her eyes.

Underneath it there was the other emotion she confessed to no one; the one that made her want to go back into the dream, nightmarish though it had been. A slick, slimy kind of fascination to the place she had visited. A desire to know more about it.

It was the second time in a week that she had dreamed of that castle, each dream in a different room; but always that sense of sick-hearted fear to it. The whole place was wrong, so why did she want to go back there? Was it a real place; a dream caused by her Talent? Or was it something she had made up? She wasn't skilled enough to tell.

That girl, Cho. She was new this time. Rue had never seen her before. She didn't know who she was, or if she was real, a long ago memory of a name and a face that she had pulled from the back drawers of her mind and slotted into the dream. Some girl.

Sometimes, being Talented was, simply put, a pain in the arse. Since she was little she could remember dreams like this, dreams of other places and other people, real places she could not possibly know of but visited nightly, through no will of her own. Being Talented meant you could travel in your dreams, spy on people and places with your mind, and without them ever knowing you were there.

And if you were freakishly Talented, it also meant you could Jump your entire body between points, stripping away everything between you and somewhere else six feet or even a thousand miles away; treating distance and physics as a second's inconvenience.

Rue couldn't Jump yet; or at least not without help. She couldn't even control where she visited in her dreams; it happened randomly and without her input. She felt helpless, but there was no denying the thrill that rippled through her as she went to bed each night. Where would her mind take her? Would she learn a great, secret truth?

She stretched, feeling her back press satisfyingly into the bed, and then realised.

Wren was not here with her.

She felt a stab of panic, then annoyance like a soothing wave. She wouldn't be a stupid, nervy mouse. She would show everyone that she wasn't afraid of being alone in a strange place. He was probably out getting food, or doing something important. He would be back.

She turned on her side and switched off the bed comforter on the third attempt. Wren had shown her how to do it but she was still nervous of getting it wrong. At least here there were no sheets to wash her buckets of sweat from. Although the bed comforter mimicked the warmth and weight of sheets, it wasn't real in the same sense.

Rue lay, thinking.

The small room around her was a dull, metallic grey. The walls were grey. The floor was a soft, fuzzy grey. The bed she lay on was grey. The ceiling was actually white – Wren had told her why it was a different colour, but she couldn't quite remember. Something about how Life worked when you looked upwards. There were a lot of the last few days that she couldn't quite remember. Strangeness upon excitement upon strangeness had taken its toll.

Rue had come to realise that a lot of her reactions to things were considered, by general people, to be odd. It had taken a while as a child, but eventually she had realised why people pulled faces when she said or did certain things. So finding out that she had a mysterious, rare ability like the Talent had failed to surprise her one bit. Of course she did. It explained everything. It explained the fascinating, frightening dreams she had, that were rich and thick as velvet and felt so real that it was like living another life while she slept. It explained her constant itch, the craving she had to be away from here, wherever here was. To be doing extraordinary things.

So being recruited to train in the Talent at Angle Tar's premiere university seemed obvious to her. Why have such a skill, if it was never to be used? She had gone willingly, leaving her old life behind, her life of routine and learning and banality, and the dull ticking of hours and days and weeks.

And everything would have been fine if she hadn't met White.

He made it easy to leave, when Wren asked her to. He made it easy because when she thought about him she felt a burst of pain, and humiliation, and a horrible, embarrassing, overwhelming desire to be near him. To have him think well of her.

Want her.

But he didn't want her. He probably, all things considered, hated her. He thought she was a rude, stupid girl. And he'd done things that made her feel savage towards him. She had pushed, and she had broken something past repair, and part of her was glad, because if there was one thing guaranteed to make her lose her mind in rage, it was being lied to. It had happened too many times in the recent past. It would not happen again.

So she had left Angle Tar, and everything she had ever known. She hadn't seen it as treason, coming with Wren to World – but now she'd had time to think, she knew that Angle Tar probably would. It was illegal for Angle Tarain citizens to travel outside the country. To keep them ignorant of how amazing it was everywhere else, she had bitterly decided. It didn't make a difference, though. She had crossed a very thick, unyielding line.

Maybe, just maybe, that meant she could never go back.

And maybe you'll never see him again, said a small, treacherous voice in her mind.

She tried desperately not to let it feel so final. She tried to leave it open and vague. Surely they might make an exception for her. Surely Frith would allow it. He knew people in government – he practically was the government.

Frith would help her, if the time ever came. She was sure of it.

Right now, though, there was no space in her head for dwelling on the past, waking up to that chest ache every morning as the memories of what had happened took hold of her again. She had to put it all away, grow up, and deal with where she was now.

When she had come out of the Jump from Angle Tar with Wren that first night, head spinning, the thing that caught her attention was the light.

She leaned against him and he held her, until the nausea passed and she could stand up straight. They stood on what was clearly a street, though it was starker and cleaner than any in Angle Tar. The buildings were flat and strangely angular, with smooth, colourless surfaces. The street itself was so wide, an airy stretch of space. Nothing like the tiny, penned cobbled mazes of Capital City.

And all the while she looked around for a source of light; but there were no street lamps to be seen. When she glanced up into the sky, she couldn't see the moon, despite the fact that there were no discernable clouds. But she could still
see
. It was dark, like it should be at night; but then it wasn't, somehow.

Wren was smiling. ‘It's strange,' he said. ‘I know it. But you're not seeing World how everyone else sees World. This is just the platform for World.'

‘The what?'

‘The platform, the basic “real” version. When you jack in to Life, you'll see it very differently. You'll see a sky filled with stars, and a moon. Over there, those long stretches of ground with nothing on them? In Life they're covered in trees. The buildings here, look. To you they're just blank, right? Well in Life, that one is covered in a ten-foot-high mural. And that one, there; it has an advert for Lost in Time, it's a Life game. It's got a train exploding on it. I mean, the train is actually exploding, right now.'

He threw his hands wide, and Rue looked around, fascinated. There were no trees anywhere. And there was nothing on those buildings. Nothing at all. But she could almost believe there was, if she watched him.

‘I'll be honest with you. Out of Life, it's pretty dull,' said Wren. ‘They whine about the sociological problems Life causes, but then they offer us the platform as an alternative. So our choice is trees and beauty and colour and amazing,
amazing
things. Or this grey nothing of the real. It's astonishing that they think that's actually a choice.'

An uneasy frustration crept over her. She couldn't see what he saw. She couldn't understand this place yet. She needed to know how it worked, and what it felt.

‘Come, Rue mine,' he said, putting his arm about her shoulders. ‘We'll take you home.'

She felt immense relief, and sank into his side as they walked.

‘Where am I to stay?' she said.

‘With me, of course.'

She stopped in surprise.

‘It isn't like Angle Tar, Rue. There's no oddness involved in men and women of age living together without being married. And I live with many people; it won't just be us. You'll see.'

She had seen.

Wren's building looked just like every other building around it. It was a wonder he could pick it out. It was an enormous building, too; a little more like the tall houses in Capital City that held twenty or thirty different families inside them.

‘It smells funny, here,' said Rue, sniffing the outside air.

‘No; it doesn't smell of anything. It's a relief after all the stench of Capital, right?' said Wren.

He was right. She inhaled deeply. That was what had been confusing her. There was nothing there to smell.

Wren walked up to what was presumably the main entrance, though the door looked just like a number of any others set into the wall that faced them. He pressed his face close to a flat, black decoration at head height.

‘What are you looking at?' said Rue.

There was a series of quick beeps, a little like the noise of droning bees, thought Rue, cut up into slices. Wren leaned back. The door opened smoothly, disappearing into the wall rather than swinging in or outward.

‘It's like a key,' Wren explained. ‘Only you use your eye.'

‘You use your eye as a key!?'

‘We'll have to get you registered as quickly as we can. Until you're given citizenship, we won't be able to put your eye pattern on the door key.'

Rue didn't think much of that. Using your eye to open doors! She tried to swallow her fear of this strange culture and its magical way of living, tried instead to concentrate on the incredible things she knew it offered her.

‘Where's the box? You said you had one,' she said, as they passed through a corridor much like the one at Red House, except it was coloured a uniform grey. He had promised her another world in that box, and she had not forgotten.

‘Patience, Rue,' said Wren with a grin. ‘We'll get to it. It's in my room.'

His room had turned out to be quite ordinary. The box he had shown her before, or one like it, was there, on a thin side table that looked like it couldn't carry the weight of a chicken. Wren told her that it was made of one of the strongest materials in World. She'd considered testing his assurance by standing on top of it and jumping up and down, but didn't have the courage.

He had insisted she sleep for a while. Though she protested vigorously, it turned out that once she lay down, sleep overtook her almost at once. She didn't remember if he'd stayed with her or not. She hoped that he had, at least for a little while.