A Jump of Crazy Proportions
I
open my mind to Link. I don’t think about my family or Luka or Fray’s fragile condition. Even though I want to see my mom, convince her to do whatever she needs to do to bail Dad out of jail and move far away from Thornsdale, this has to come first. I need Link to teach me everything he knows, because maybe then I can help awaken more of The Gifting. And once they’re awakened, we can break them free. And once they’re free, we’ll have more people fighting on our side.
I lay in bed with my eyes closed, thinking about Link—his shaggy hair and the light spray of freckles across his nose, the fast way his fingers navigate a keyboard or twist his Rubik’s Cube, his lopsided grin, the mischievous twinkle in his eye whenever he calls me Xena and everything he told me the evening we lay under a plant in the greenhouse.
When I wake up, I’m surrounded by trees. Not the impossibly-tall redwoods that grow up from the ground outside my home in Thornsdale. But oak and ash and birch. This wooded area is so generic it could be anywhere.
A twig snaps behind me.
I turn around and Link is there, leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. “I found you.”
“That’s because I made myself easy to find.”
His grin grows wider. “Can’t give a guy a little credit, huh?”
A gnat buzzes by my ear. I swat it away, then remember that this is dream world. There doesn’t have to be gnats. Or ants or spiders or any other creepy crawly thing that makes people like Leela prefer the indoors. I look up at the canopy of leaves above, where birds chirp and a squirrel scampers across a tree limb. It’s the perfect environment. “So
Teach
, here I am. What’s first on the training agenda?”
“Whatever you want to be first. There’s dream hopping, dream linking, dream spying, dream searching, scouting—”
“Wait—dream
spying
?”
“It’s one of our most valuable assets. Dreams are incredibly revealing, you know. They tell you a lot about a person’s emotional state. Their fears, their weaknesses,” Link ticks each item off on his fingers, “their secrets.”
“How do you do it?”
“The only difference between dream hopping—which apparently, you’ve already done—and dream spying is that when you enter somebody’s dream, you don’t reveal yourself. You stay hidden and you observe.”
I tuck that morsel of information away for later. “Okay, so what’s scouting?”
“The lack of a modifier there was intentional, just so you know. Scouting isn’t actually done in a dream. It’s done after crossing through a doorway and it comes in handy when you want to scope out a specific location while remaining unseen by the physical eye.”
“Dream searching?”
“Ah, that’s how I awaken those with the gifting. At least it’s how I awaken the ones in medically induced stupors. It’s not easy. Anna’s mind was so mired in the medicine that was being pumped into her system, that it was almost impossible to access. I had to go very deep. When you finally find the person, you explain what’s going on. It’s the first step to freedom, since a lot of times, they aren’t even aware. Searching’s also useful when someone’s being hijacked.”
“
Hijacked
?”
“Controlled. Possessed. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“It happens enough.”
“What happens to the person who’s being hijacked?”
“They’re like an oblivious hostage. Stuck in dream world, with no idea that they’re actually stuck. Which isn’t good, because when they’re oblivious to what’s happening, they can’t fight the entity that’s hijacking them.”
Out of habit, I scratch the inside of my wrist. “Are they trapped in dream world forever?”
“Not likely. Usually, the entity uses the person they are hijacking to accomplish something specific and once it’s accomplished, the entity leaves. Except for some gaps in memory and the fear of Alzheimer’s, the person who was hijacked remains completely clueless. I have some suspicions, though, that some people in power are being hijacked indefinitely.”
A puzzle piece clicks into place—the government official who shot me in the neck with the needle, the one who dragged me out of Mr. Lotsam’s Current Events class and called me Little Rabbit. It’s a name I’ve only ever been called by one person. Was he possessed by Scarface? My mind spins around the thought. Who else might darkness be using to do their bidding? If I can find a way to search for them, awaken them, get them to fight their hijacker … then surely this will give our side the upper hand. Being a Linker is more than I ever hoped it could be. Maybe even more useful than being a Fighter.
“So what do you want to try first?”
“My grandmother,” I blurt.
“Huh?”
“I want to awaken her.” I couldn’t save her when I was younger, like she hoped I could when she wrote in her dream journal all those years ago, but maybe I can save her now. Maybe rescuing her is the first step to restoring my broken family.
“Your grandma is in Shady Wood.”
“So?”
“Shady Wood is in Oregon. We are in Detroit. There’s a limit to how far we can hop, remember?”
“I thought that was only for Fighters. I thought the limit only applied to the supernatural realm. This is dream world.”
“There’s always a limit. Same rules apply here. You can’t hop into someone’s dreams when they’re so far away.”
“I can.”
“Whoa there, cocky.”
“No, for real. The other day, you asked where I was. Well, I was in California. I hopped into my brother’s dream.”
There’s a long pause. A few birds, perhaps unhappy with the sudden silence, flutter away from a branch, up into the sky. Finally, Link crosses one of his ankles over the other. “You must have been constructing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just like you can construct a place, like this, you can construct people, too. You thought it was your brother, but it was just a construct of your brother. You made him appear in your dream because you were missing him.”
“It wasn’t a construct of Pete. It was Pete.”
“Show me, then.”
He might as well have thrown down the gauntlet and said
prove it
. He doesn’t believe me. But I know I’m right. The Pete from the other night was too real to be a construct of my own imagination. “I don’t know how to show you.”
Link’s cheeks pull in, like he’s sucking on the dilemma. “There’s a way to tell whether you’re constructing or hopping.”
“Okay.”
“When you hop into somebody else’s dream, you can’t control it. You’re a visitor. What happens is up to the person dreaming. Take right now, for example. This is your dream. You can do what you want. Create what you want. I can’t, since I’m a visitor. So if you want to know whether you’re hopping or constructing, you do a test.”
“Try to create something.”
“Exactly.”
A tree grows up from the ground beside us. Up, up, up into the air. A towering redwood in the midst of lesser things.
Link looks up at it.
“Now what?”
“Can I make a suggestion? Next time, make your test something a little quicker. Like a penny appearing in the palm of your hand.”
“Okay, fine. A penny. Now how do I prove to you that what happened the other night wasn’t my own construction?” In the past, whenever I’ve hopped, I’ve woken up in the place I’ve hopped to. I have no idea how to do it when I’m already inside my dream.
Link steps closer and threads his fingers with mine. His hand is smaller than Luka’s, his palm smoother. “Close your eyes,” he says. “Focus all your thoughts, all your attention, on the person whose dream we’re jumping into.”
Okay, so who will that person be? I’m not eager to visit Pete again, not after seeing his nightmare first hand. There’s no way I’m bringing Link to my mom or my dad. But what about Leela? My heart twists at the thought of seeing her.
With my mind made up, I squeeze my eyes tighter and focus on everything I know about my friend—her obsession with pink, the way she squeals in terror at the mere mention of spiders, the warmth of her brown eyes, the way she hardly pauses between words when she’s talking about something that excites her. Her hugs, her bubbly handwriting, her busy room—every inch of wall space covered with posters of her favorite musicians. The way she used to blush whenever Pete paid her any attention.
Leela, Leela, Leela. I want to see Leela.
I repeat her name over and over in my mind until my stomach drops—like I missed a step. The wind no longer rustles the leaves and the birds no longer chirp. I open my eyes. Link and I are standing inside my old high school. We’re in the upstairs hallway, right outside of Mr. Lotsam’s classroom. There are familiar faces—Bobbi and Chet and Serendipity. For a moment, I forget myself and wave at them. They walk right past, like I’m not there. But really, they’re the ones who aren’t there. They are figments of Leela’s dream. I spin in a circle, searching for my friend.
The hallway clears and there she is, walking and talking with … Vick Delaney? Yep, it’s him. Vick Delaney, former boy band singer turned heartthrob actor for some zombie show that won him more MTV people’s choice awards than anybody else has ever won in a single night.
Oh, Leela.
I hate to interrupt her moment with him, but I can’t help myself. I push through the crowd, pulling Link with me, and wrap my arms around her neck.
“Oh my gosh!” She hugs me back in one of her tight Leela hugs. “I can’t believe you’re here. Tess, this is Vick Delaney. Like,
the
Vick Delaney. Can you believe he transferred to Thornsdale?” She looks from me to him, a swoony-sort of expression on her face. “I’m his ambassador.”
I decide to go with it. There’s no reason why I have to ruin this moment for her, not when she thinks Vick Delaney will be her new classmate. Leela’s attention drops to my hand, which is still holding onto Link’s.
“Who are you?” she asks him.
But Link doesn’t say. He’s too busy gawking at me. “Try it,” he says. “Do the test.”
I close my eyes, only instead of imaging a redwood growing up from the ground, I imagine a penny appearing in my palm. Nothing happens.
“Are you faking?” Link asks.
“Why would I fake?”
“To impress me.”
I roll my eyes.
His go ever wider. It is officially the biggest kid-in-a-candy-store look I’ve ever seen. I’m convinced Luka would hate it. “Holy crap! You weren’t lying.”
Leela’s eyebrows squish together. “Lying about what?”
“Tess, this is
insane
. You just jumped to California.”
“Jumped to
California
?” Leela turns to me, her eyebrows still decidedly squished. “What is he talking about? Where’s Luka?”
Before I can answer, Link grabs my hand and starts pulling me away.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
But he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t explain. We sprint away from Leela until she fades away and I’m sitting up in bed, back at the hub.
What just happened? Why did Link do that? I stuff my arms into the sleeves of a hoodie, open my bedroom door, and run into the very boy I had planned to go looking for.
“That was insanity!” he says, grabbing my arms.
“Why did you do that? We just got there.” I wanted to talk to Leela. See how she was doing. Maybe have a couple minutes of normalcy back at Thornsdale High.
Link, however, is not concerned with what I want. He grabs my hand and pulls me down the hallway. I have no idea what’s gotten into him, or where we’re going. Especially when we head toward the adult dormitories. He stops in front of the second door on the left, throws it open, and turns on the light. Cap pushes himself up. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?” he roars.
“Tess just dream-hopped to California.”
More lights go on in the hallway. Doors open.
“Cap, I’m telling you. She just brought me with her to freaking California.”
“
What
?”
Only it’s not Cap’s voice responding to Link’s excited declaration. I yank my hand away from Link’s and turn around. But it’s too late. Luka already saw. “You’re visiting Link in your dreams?”
“Luka …”
He doesn’t wait for an explanation. Luka turns around and walks away.
Hiccup
“F
rom now on, I’ll be training you.” Cap’s unblinking stare makes me fidget. “We start today.”
A glob of Claire’s grilled cheese plunks onto her plate.
I glance at Luka, but he refuses to make eye contact. If he’s concerned or alarmed by Cap’s lunch-time announcement, I can’t tell. All day he’s ignored me. He won’t give me a chance to explain. Last night, Link and I were training. It’s not like I went looking for him in my dreams for the fun of it. It’s not like we share a beach of our own.
“When you’re finished eating, meet me in the training room. Claire and Jose, you’ll be training with Sticks in the mat room this afternoon.” Cap rolls away.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, Claire whips around, a blue vein throbbing in her neck. She glares at me like training alone with Cap was my idea. But I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of it. I wait for her to say something spiteful. I wait for her to goad me in some way. Or maybe flirt with Luka. She seems to realize this pushes my buttons more than anything. Instead, she snatches up her tray, dumps her food into the garbage, and stalks out of the cafeteria.
“Hey, I would have eaten that,” Rosie calls after her.
Jillian scoots what’s left of her lunch—strips of crust and a few stray peas—across the table to Rosie. “Private lessons with Cap now, huh?”
“I guess.” I can practically see the cogs spinning in her brain. If there was any question regarding the speculation surrounding Luka’s status as my Keeper before, there won’t be any now. Gabe, the hub’s only trained Keeper, is training him, while Cap, the hub’s most powerful fighter, is training me.
Luka stands so abruptly the legs of his chair scratch loudly against the cement floor. He sets his plate in front of Rosie, whose face lights up with delight. He’s barely touched any of his food. Without even glancing my way, he exits the room, too.
A pit forms inside my gut as I watch him go. I envision him finding Claire, being comforted by Claire, commiserating with Claire, and what’s left of my appetite vanishes. Looks like Rosie will eat her fill today. I leave my leftovers and head toward the training room, passing Anna and Fray’s empty table on the way. It was empty over breakfast, too. From what I’ve gathered, something is wrong with Fray’s heart and Anna’s caring for him until Dr. Carlyle can return later this evening.