Fearsome Dreamer (6 page)

And then, one night,
she
was there.

The girl who looked like a ghost.

She had been watching him, that much he knew; that way that you just
knew
in dreams. She'd been skirting around the edges of him, watching his dreams unfold, and god knew what she'd seen. She'd squatted in corners, her thin arms draped over her grey legs, watching.

Finally, in a dream one night, she had started to talk to him.

She knew things.

She knew things no one could possibly know about him.

That was the first reason he believed her.

The second reason he believed her was when she took him to the Castle.

She led him like a child, taking him by the hand and pulling him through, stepping from here to there. And then he saw it.

It was a place, she had assured him. Maybe not a place in the sense that he thought of places, but real enough. Just real in a different way.

It was a huge, echoing stone building, that shifted when you tried to look at it, really look. It was filled with rooms. Thousands of rooms, millions of rooms, rooms within rooms, twisting, turning, choking or wide as a boulevard, rooms that led you to black places, tiny cramped places where the things no one ever wanted to find or remember or think about were hidden.

Rooms that led you to a banquet hall with blood on the flagstone floor and dishes of greased chicken and rotting fruit on the tables. Upturned glasses of wine dripping onto the cloth.

Rooms made of infinity mirrors that showed you yourself, endlessly repeated, again and again and overlapping and stretching all the way for ever until your mind cracked with trying to understand it.

Rooms draped in velvet, with that desk in the corner that you remembered hiding under as a child, that desk with the hidden drawers that could only be opened with a tiny key, that desk that seemed to contain secret worlds. Rooms he'd never seen before, fairytale places and strange. But there were also all the rooms he'd ever been into in his life; bedrooms and dining rooms and parlours and gambling rooms and bathrooms and half-remembered rooms and rooms where bad things had happened that he'd managed to forget and ones in which nothing much had happened at all.

This was the Castle.

It showed you the past, and the now, and the what might be. It showed them all together in the same place until it was hard to know when you were. It showed you other worlds, other times, other and other, until you started to lose all sense of yourself in time and place, and years could pass out there while you stood in a room, frozen and alone.

All this Frith knew, when the Ghost Girl led him to the Castle. She didn't have to explain any of it. He knew. And he also knew, not one tiny piece of him doubting, that there was something loose in it.

Something awful.

Something to end all worlds.

The only thing that could stop this thing, the Ghost Girl told him, was the Talented.

He needed to help her. He needed to find every Talented he could, recruit them, make them loyal. He needed to make an army of people who could fight this, before It came and it was all too late.

He said yes.

Frith was the first Castle agent to be recruited. But when he got a message calling him to a meeting in Life, and his avatar walked into that simulated boardroom, he realised just how busy the Ghost Girl had been. How many others, he was silently relieved to note, had been as affected by the dream as he had. How many others like him that she had managed to persuade to her cause, by worming into their minds and showing them a nightmare.

And that, one day, unless they could stop it, that nightmare was going to become real.

Several days after his argument with Jospen and Cho, White sat in his room, surrounded by the detritus of his life. Clothes spilled over everything, mostly rejected. They would draw too much attention. He had a small bag packed at his feet.

In it was a battery-powered toothbrush, an ancient thing that had cost him a lot of credit and taken quite a while to find. There was also a skinsuit, which he would wear under his normal clothes – it was hard to get used to the bizarrely changeable weather in Angle Tar, and he had grown up in regulated environments. The skinsuit would cool him down if he overheated, and warm him up when it was cold. He couldn't imagine how Angle Tarain coped. In the winter, when the air was full of knives and snow fell often, their solution appeared to be to wear more and more layers of clothes until they were bundled up into balls, which hardly seemed practical if you moved about outside as much as they did.

He had also packed innocuous trousers and jackets, shirts and a style of soft boot that they tended to favour there. There was a body gel, very much in World fashion at the moment, that would help keep him clean until he could find a more permanent solution to the problem of hygiene. There was a little money that he had managed to pick up on visits there, at first because he'd found a piece or two on the ground and had been curious as to what it was; and later, after reading up about money in Life, for more practical reasons.

He took a steady breath, trying to swallow the uneasy lump in his throat.

Jospen was right. What would he do in Angle Tar? How would he survive? Would he be able to find somewhere to live, some way to earn more money? There was no plan, there was no nothing. It was impossible to plan. He didn't know what people without technology did with their lives. In World, everything was answered for you. Everything was assigned to you. No effort required. In Angle Tar, it seemed that you found your own way or died. At least most people had a family who started them off. He would have no one. He would be all alone, drowning in a culture that still thrilled and terrified him in equal measure with how alien it could be.

Angle Tar wasn't part of World. It wasn't connected to Life. It had closed its borders a hundred years ago, declaring it illegal for anyone to visit, but neither laws nor lack of transport could stop someone like him. That was what made him so dangerous.

If he wanted to, he could easily read up about Angle Tar in Life. He could look at topography, and climate. National dishes, key historical moments. Holographic renderings of a typical street scene. Every fact he could ever wish to know was there, and for most people, that was enough. But his childhood dream visits to Angle Tar left impressions that had scored burning marks across his heart and secret soul, impressions he could call up any time he was bored, upset or lonely. The dreams managed to sustain him for a while; but gradually, he found that they weren't enough any more.

And then White discovered that he could do a lot more than just dream.

He called it slipping, not knowing what else to call it. He called it that because when he had practised and practised and learned how to do it well, it had a particular feeling of slipping through a thin crack as if his skin were supple and greased. Sometimes it was harder than others, especially if he wanted to go to a place he had never been to before. Then he had to squeeze himself through the air, edging carefully through, one limb at a time, feeling like his lungs would burst with the pressure. Ever after it became easier and easier for him to slip, as he thought of it, to that same place, until it was almost like walking forwards and simply finding yourself there. In prison, they had called it Jumping. He'd never heard of anyone else who could do what he did, but his captors had seemed to know all about it.

The first time White had Jumped, he had been eleven years old. He wasn't even too sure how exactly it had happened. All he had done was think, for a while, about the Angle Tar of his dreams, and how to get there. He had thought very hard and very long about it – how it had started, what everything had looked like, the sounds he had heard. He had felt a tugging at his belly, inside the core of him. He had stood up, felt himself vibrate like a flicked wine glass, and pushed his way carefully through a crack in the air, a crack that he couldn't see but that he felt with every atom of his body.

A moment where everything was black, and endless.

And then, on the other side of the crack, he had stepped out to find himself several streets away, still in World, alone and very confused.

It took him only a second to understand what he had done. Though his mother had never mentioned such an ability, it seemed logical to him that if your mind could visit other places when you were asleep, your body would eventually be able to do it while you were awake. He supposed ending up where you actually wanted to go took a lot more practice.

He had walked home, using Life to navigate. Found his house and gone inside, where he was a little surprised to discover that no one had missed him. His father was working, and his brother and sister were still jacked into school, whereas he had already finished for the day. His mother, as usual, was asleep upstairs.

So the phenomenon passed unremarked, and when he managed to do it again a month or so later, he didn't talk about it, because he had learned a long time ago that the things he could do were the subject of not a few ugly, heated arguments in his family, linked to a knotted feeling inside him that made him sick. He didn't want to feel like that. His mother still insisted he practise dream-focusing techniques with her, but he never shared the progress he had made.

So was his free and secret time spent. He experimented alone, testing, pushing. It seemed, for now, that he could only focus a Jump to places he had already been to, either in real life or in his dreams. If he wanted, he could travel to school with a Jump – not that he had dared to do that more than once. But simply thinking ‘China' and trying to move did nothing.

It didn't matter though, because Angle Tar was what he wanted. It was hard to concentrate in lessons when he knew that night he might be in a place that fascinated and glittered like a jewel. He realised that most World people did not feel the same way as he did about that odd little nation, a country not important enough to make Life news unless one of its ambassadors had done something quaintly hilari-ous at a political function.

When White started to tentatively practise Jumping his entire self to Angle Tar and not just to visit it in his dreams, he bolted whenever he saw someone and hoped that they hadn't caught a glimpse of him. Angle Tarain didn't augment or body decorate – they all looked the same. White was too young to have done anything to his appearance when he had first started dream-visiting Angle Tar, but by the time he could comfortably Jump there, he had had his skin pigmented to a smooth, marble white and his dark hair was artificially extended to his hips. In World, his appearance was considered demure and rather boring. In Angle Tar, he stood out. He had exotic features, and World clothes were outrageous in comparison to theirs. He did his best with the most innocuous clothes he could find, and kept to the darker streets, huddling close to buildings in an effort not to be seen.

People spotted him, of course. After a while, he became used to watching city crowds from a side street. He had a great many odd looks tossed his way, but nothing compared to what he got if he wasn't in the capital city, where people were a little more used to oddness.

In between Jumping there, he learned and learned, with the rabid feverishness of someone who cared nothing for anything else in his life. In school, where before he'd been an object of vitriol, now he was a ghost, and it suited him fine.

When White turned eighteen, however, his game of a second life had become deadly serious, and his visits to Angle Tar were a secret no longer.

World knew.

The arrest was quick and brutal. Jospen was right – they had waited until White had declared adulthood and could be legally taken without reprisal by his family or anyone else. They knew exactly where he was. They knew where everyone was every minute of every day through implant tracking, and they had been watching him for a while, ever since they had found out what he could do.

They took him in the middle of the day, as easy as anything. He had skipped school and was intending to spend the afternoon in Angle Tar, when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind and asked in a quiet voice if he could spare a moment of his time. A moment turned out to be several weeks, in the end. It had been well over a month since they had let him go and he still couldn't sleep through the night, broken with the fear that he would wake up to find himself back in that bare, bleached room.

His heart sank over and over, a sickening roll in his chest. He wouldn't think about what he was doing, because it was too late for that. It was all too late. Too late when they had tortured and humiliated him, and made him feel like he was defective and disgusting. But even long before that, when his mother had first talked to him about what he could do, aged five. When his teachers had looked at him that way. When he had been born. He was like a virus, a small bacterium that World's immune system was trying to reject. They didn't want him here. So he would go.

The countryside was out of the question – they were far more suspicious and isolated than city people. He couldn't quite bring himself to choose a place with no people and too much space. He would go to Parisette, their capital city, from the first. He knew the street patterns fairly well by now.

He looked around his room one last time. There was nothing out of it that he would miss. Outside of Life, it was grey, just like everything else. He jacked in and sent messages to his mother, brother and sister, messages they might pick up almost instantly, which is why he had done it, to force himself to go now and not put it off again. The messages were short notes telling them that he loved them and not to worry.

His mother was upstairs, still lying in her bed. Supposedly she was meeting with a counsellor in Life right now. There was something faintly ridiculous about a Life addict having to meet in Life to be counselled about it.

The house was quiet.

He concentrated, steadying his breath. It had become easy to find the way to Parisette now, to a particular spot in an alley. It stank in there and was usually full of rats, but it was a safe place from which to emerge. He had used it so many times that he thought of it as his alley. He felt it in the air, pushing forwards slightly to make sure. Standing, he took up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Jacob.'

Startled, he looked back.

His bedroom door was standing open, and framed by the doorway was the thin, angular shape of his brother, Jospen.

‘What are you doing here?' said White. ‘You're supposed to be at work.'

‘Where exactly are you going?'

White struggled between the truth and a convincing lie, then gave up.

‘Where do you think?' he said.

‘You can't just leave. You can't just abandon everyone.'

White shifted the bag on his shoulder, defensive. ‘Look, I'm an adult now. I'm supposed to leave home now anyway, and find a job, and a house eventually, aren't I? It's better this way. You know it is. I'm sorry, okay? But you'll be glad when I'm gone. You will.'

‘What about Cho?' said Jospen, his voice edged with anger. Was it? Or fear? ‘What about Mama? Don't you have
any
loyalty?'

He was actually trembling. One arm disappeared behind his back, as if he was holding something he was trying to hide.

White felt the first trickle of fear.

‘Jospen,' he said. ‘What's going on? What are you doing?'

‘I can't.'

‘You can't what?'

Jospen brought his hand around and pointed something small and metallic at White's chest.

‘I can't just let you go. They won't just let you go, Jacob! Why are you being so stupid?'

‘What –' said White, before a tiny, white-hot flare on his shoulder caught his attention.

He turned his head to look.

There was something sticking out of his shoulder.

There was a little dart sticking out of his shoulder.

That wasn't supposed to be there.

He tried to bring his hand up to brush it off, but his arm, incredibly, weighed more than a building.

His hands were giant poles of meat, telescoping off for ever.

His legs were thin like razor cuts. Far too thin to hold up his body. Just how had he been walking around all this time?

He fell. He fell into the stars. The sky opened up beneath him, black and black and black.

Something banged against the side of his head.

And again.

And again. And then it melted away to a terrible, surging roar.

* * *

He opened his eyes.

He thought he opened his eyes.

Sound battered viciously at his ears.

‘Stop shouting,' he tried to say, but had no idea if the words had even left his mouth.

The noise wavered; faltered.

‘He's awake,' said a voice. ‘He shouldn't be awake.'

‘Well … the dart's empty. It's all in his bloodstream.'

White strained. Shapes blurred, focused.

Everything was all wrong. Everything was made of vertical lines.

He was lying on the floor.

‘He's awake?' said a tentative voice. Jospen's voice.

White sent frantic signals to his body.

MOVE he said to his legs.

‘Er … he's moving. Someone give him another shot, please.'

Oh no. Oh no no not again.

PANIC, ordered his mind.

He pushed everything he could feel outwards.

‘Stop him!'

‘I can't –'

‘Hold him down!'

Thighs came into his vision. He bucked. He was hauled up, leant backwards against a body who hooked their arms over his, while someone else tried to push his legs to the ground with their hands.