Authors: Erin Kellison
They moved through an iron gate and off the path onto grass—the texture of his footfalls almost crunchy realistic—toward a black tree, where she knelt. “I buried it here, just in case they came looking.”
“Has Graeme been in your dreams?” The thought pissed him off.
“Someone was, not Graeme.” She scooped handfuls of dirt away from the roots. “Graeme can’t do jack Darkside.”
“What did you do?” Steve wasn’t one to jump to violence, but Darkside, the urge to strike flared to the surface. In dreams, emotion wasn’t easily contained.
“I hid.” She worked her fingers deeper and deeper into the black soil. “
They
were the ones at risk of getting lost or trapped. Not me. Not here.”
A quick upward tilt of her head meant she’d found what she was looking for. She worked a little more, edging around a circular shape with her fingers. At last she pulled out a dirt-covered lump, the shape of a small ham.
She handed it up to him. “There you go.”
Steve took it, surprised at the bowling-ball weight of it.
“And you’ve never opened one of the packages?”
“I answered that already,” she said, standing up and dusting off her butt.
Well, he was sure as hell going to open it, but not here, in her dream. The only place to do it was the Scrape, the desert beyond dreams. At present the Scrape was off limits to everyone but those involved in the search for Vince Blackman, Raymond’s son, who had been lost there when Maisie’s sister Jordan drowned him a few days back.
There were now reports of something else out there too—a creature of sorts—something Steve never would’ve believed if the report hadn’t come from Jordan Lane and Malcolm Rook themselves. Apparently the creature had taken the form of Rook’s most troubling nightmare—his dead younger brother.
The true nature of the creature was something Chimera could only speculate about, but its existence made even more problematic the criminal activities of people like Graeme and whoever was behind him. Chimera couldn’t be fighting on two fronts.
Nevertheless, the Scrape was where packages from people like Graeme should be opened, or whatever awfulness Graeme sought to transport might pollute Maisie’s city. Might weaken her boundaries. Who knew what was inside the thing?
As a courier, Maisie had to have crossed the Scrape at some point, but Steve asked anyway. “Do you know the desert beyond the dreamwaters? Very windy. Desolate.”
“Oh, you mean the big haboob?”
“Chimera calls it the Scrape,” he told her.
“That’s a stupid name.”
He grinned. “I named it.”
“Figures.”
“I was
five
at the time.”
Her eyes widened slightly, and he got the sweet satisfaction of having finally impressed her. He didn’t know why he’d said it—he’d told no one else; the name had simply caught on in conversation—but he didn’t regret it.
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned being Darkside before Rêve was invented,” she said.
It was his turn to smile enigmatically at her. “How do we get out of the city?” Which he presumed was the boundary of her dream. If she’d made a whole world, he was going to have to brag again, and it really wasn’t his style. “We need to open the package there.”
“Okey-doke. Follow me.”
She led him down streets, turning into alleys and climbing over walls, and the more he saw, the more he recognized her genius. Some concrete staircases jutted up into the sky, but went nowhere. What seemed like an artistic sculpture in front of a building was actually an access to another street. Finally the buildings lowered in stature to identical three-level walkup row houses, and beyond that, warehouses where desert sand from the Scrape had blown up to the bases of the buildings.
Only a city, then, thank God, but how the hell did she do it? How did such a puny little woman, at twenty-one for chrissake, have such an elaborate and expansive dream inside her?
She blushed a little and laughed. “Puny! I’m not puny.”
Steve started. Had he spoken out loud?
“And actually, my nickname gave me the idea.”
No, he hadn’t spoken out loud.
An electric current of alarm zapped through him.
Careful.
He had to be very careful with her.
She’d read his mind. In her dream, she could read his mind, just as he’d read a bit from hers when they’d arrived—
Trespasser.
She didn’t seem to be aware that she could do this. Although, considering the line of his thoughts, on some level she might know that he desired her. But as she didn’t seem wary or outright scared, he didn’t think she’d perceived more than that. But then, concealing the darkest parts of his mind was second nature to him.
“You know, a
maze
,” she went on. “I’ve been getting maze books since I was, like, three—everyone’s favorite birthday present for me, so clever to play on my nickname. Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good at them.”
“Never buy you a maze book,” he said, testing her. “Got it.”
He was reeling from her formidable talent. No, she had more than just talent, she had skill, too, and the perseverance it took to build so meticulously over time. And she was incredibly receptive to thought within the dreamwaters, as well. Of course she’d dominate in her own dreams, but she could learn to master the rest of Darkside as well.
It was critical that she become Chimera. Her business idea, which wasn’t bad, could never be realized.
They walked on, into the howling, whipping wind, the grains lifting into the air and stinging like minute shards of glass. He’d always imagined that too long in this wearing nothingness of the Scrape, and a person would erode into nothingness, too.
The package had gotten heavier past the boundary of her dream. If the contents proved safe, they’d take it to the Agora where they could leave it in Chimera’s keeping until an exchange for Raymond Blackman could be arranged with Graeme.
Steve crouched so that he could unpack on the ground whatever was wrapped so tightly, though gusts buffeted the package and grains got in his eyes. The paper around the object was a shiny gold, which he peeled away carefully to conserve for a second use. Beneath was a tighter, flesh-colored, rubbery thing. He attempted to pierce it with his fingers, but the lump wouldn’t tear. With both hands, he twisted and struck it against the sandy desert ground to break the mass open like a geode.
But when the object finally gave, it unfolded like a thick, somewhat soft, multi-jointed contraption and grew in size to become a naked person. An old man, collapsed on the desert floor, shivering, hands raised as if to ward off a blow.
“Um?” said Maisie.
Steve knew exactly what she meant. “Yeah.”
***
“Please, no!” the naked old man whimpered.
The dust storm howled around him.
His existence boggled Maisie’s brain. She shook with alarm and shock. How’d he get in the package? Sure, she’d helped people cross from one dream to another before—it was a common request, which is what had given her the idea to start a business—but she’d never imagined that any of the packages she handled had contained an unwilling
person.
Dread pooled in her belly, making her nauseous. She should’ve been checking her packages. She should’ve considered the worst, especially toward the end, when she’d started feeling pressure from Graeme. And, thinking of where she was supposed to have delivered the old man, she grew more horrified still. The evil dream.
Did the old man have information that Graeme’s boss needed? Why else—?
The package’s captive was old and skinny and kind of stringy, his skin blotchy blue and red with fear. She wanted to create some clothes for him, but outside her own dreamspace, creation was very difficult to manage. The clothes wouldn’t stick very well.
She’d wanted money to set herself up, and this frightened man was what her business really cost.
“It’s okay,” Steve was saying to him, yelling over the storm. “We won’t hurt you.”
But she had. Oh God, she had. She was going to throw up.
Anger rushed over her as tears welled in her eyes, a sob clogging her throat. She was going to kill Graeme. She hadn’t felt truly capable of hurting anyone until this moment. But now, yeah, she could kill. Graeme was going to pay.
“What’s your name?” Steve asked the old man.
The old man made incomprehensible sounds of fear. Tears streaked his cheeks.
What had she really been a part of? Had there been others?
“We need to get him to the Agora,” Steve yelled.
“Yes,” she said, but the word was soundlessly whipped into the wind, so she nodded to agree. Maybe the Agora had a purpose after all. Maybe she’d been wrong about everything.
She and Steve each lifted the man under an arm to get him to stand. He weakly fought them, but it was his unsteady legs that were more difficult to manage. Once they had him up, they drove through the wind, Steve leading.
Progress was slow and difficult, and Maisie had an itchy feeling on her neck, as if something was watching her, but she pushed forward with every ounce of energy she had. She had to get the old man to safety and comfort as quickly as possible.
Steve, again, was on her wavelength, because he was moving fast. Didn’t matter that the grains of sand cut as they scraped across her skin.
The Agora’s perimeter was easy to spot, a shimmery gold oasis that could keep just about everyone out. She’d been in there a couple of times before, the dream police in hot pursuit.
Her own legs were about to give out by the time they reached it.
They forced the old man out of the wind, through the boundary, and into a sudden vacuum of silence. When a Rêve wasn’t active, the Agora was a dark, boundless space punctuated by extremely tall Corinthian columns, which floated in the air, but seemed anchored as well.
Agora
was the Greek word for
meeting place
. It was here that people could safely share dreams in contained Rêves.
“Help!” Steve shouted into the darkness. To the man, he said, “You’re safe. You’re safe now.”
Instantly, another Chimera materialized, a woman in a blue uniform jumpsuit, who approached, motion-stretched color streaking behind her as she became part of their dream.
Maisie stepped back out of the way to let the new Chimera attend the old man.
A plan was forming in Maisie’s mind. It was made of anger, and so it was sharp-edged, like a knife. She couldn’t kill Graeme because then she wouldn’t know how many people she might have transported and what had happened to them.
The first thing to do was convince Graeme to take her back. If Steve’s crazy statistics were right about the rarity of her talent, Graeme would at least hear her out. And then she had only to get him Darkside, where she was dominant, and shake the answers out of him.
What was a human being doing in that package?
Had there been others?
Wait. Something was off with her plan. Shaking Graeme wasn’t enough. She remembered Steve’s insistence that Graeme himself was nothing. Steve wanted the person behind Graeme, and Maisie knew that if she wanted to learn everything she’d been a party to, she’d have to do the same. Which meant she’d have to go back to the evil dream and discover its true nature.
The thought made her go icy with fear.
“Mr. Blackman?” Steve asked the old man. “Are you Raymond Blackman?”
The old man was openly crying now. “Will carry…”
“What’s your name?” Steve asked again.
“William Kerry,” the old man said.
Steve straightened, his gaze trained on her. “You said the place where the package was supposed to be delivered was bad.”
She nodded, but had to add, “I didn’t know the package contained a person. I didn’t know a person could be…”
Squashed down like that.
“You have to take me there,” Steve said. “We have to know what they’re doing.”
She shook her head.
“You
will
,” he commanded her.
The other Chimera lady sneaked a scathing glance at her, saying in one twitch of her eyes that Maisie was a spineless fuckup.
Part of that was true, or had been once. Maisie thought she’d changed, but she was really just the same messed-up problem kid who’d lost her mom. But she wasn’t refusing Steve because she was scared, though she was actually ready to piss herself at the moment.
Yeah, she’d go back to the evil dream. She had to.
Steve gestured to the old guy. “He’s weak. He’s innocent. You will tell me who’s behind this.”
Innocent. While she’d been stupid and selfish. Opportunistic.
“I won’t do it,” she said.
“Why?” Steve demanded, not so cool and collected now. “Look at him!”
She didn’t need to. The sight of the old man was forever burned into her brain. It was the way Steve was looking at her that seared now.
Maisie mashed her lips together to keep from answering. But the answer was there, ready on her tongue.
’Cause then it’ll eat you instead.