Lay Me Down (6 page)

***

The howling wind of the Scrape wore at Vince Blackman where he was crouched, huddling against both the storm and discovery. He’d lost his sight to the stinging, cutting shards of sand, and now he covered what was left of his eyes with an arm across his face. Sound, too, had become muted, the wail of the dust storm seemingly distant while it buffeted him from all sides. His nose and throat burned with each breath. Time had no meaning. He was beyond exhausted, but collapse meant death.

One of
them
, those creatures, was near. He’d discovered he could sense them after his sight had darkened. They were cold, so he was cold when they ventured close. He dared not move. Stillness was his only hope. He prayed the wind would hide him, because if the creatures found him, they would tear him apart.

He’d failed his father, whom Graeme had surely killed by now. The Chimera had promised to help, but they’d also promised to come back for Vince out in the Scrape, and they hadn’t succeeded so far.

The cold intensified, the creature coming closer.

Vince held his breath, he willed his heart to a slow thud, and he waited.

Please, God, let it pass me by.

CHAPTER FOUR

“William Kerry,” Steve said, “attended a Rêve seven days ago put on by an outfit called Silver Sunrise that caters to retirees.”

The report was brief, but he didn’t need much detail to paint the picture. He wanted just enough to make sure that Maisie understood what she’d been involved in, and what her holding out meant. Just about anyone else he could crack like a nut, but she was naturally strong, and at the moment too guarded.

Thus far, she’d only conceded enough to provide the real-life names and dreams of people like Graeme, in the middle of the chain. Not the one at the end, to whom the old man was to be delivered.

Steve cursed himself for not pressing her on it earlier. Instinct had urged him to get beyond Graeme, but he’d wanted to give Maisie time to settle into the idea of Chimera and to work out on her own whether or not she wanted to join. The delay was his mistake, not hers.

He’d had no idea someone was suffering, and neither had she.

Steve had reinitiated the Silver Sunrise Rêve—unsurprised that it hadn’t been used since William went missing. It was a flying dream with staggering landscapes to rush and dive over. A VR game could have simulated the same thing, but no game could provide, in body, the sense of power, youth, and visceral experience that a dream could.

In addition to Maisie, three other people hovered in the blue air: Jordan, her sister, who Steve hoped might convince her to talk; Malcolm Rook, Agora marshal and the man who’d recruited Jordan; and Harlen Fawkes, another marshal who’d been assigned as backup. All three Chimera had been searching the Scrape for Vince Blackman. His father’s fate was now less certain, considering what had happened to this old man. Had Graeme denied knowledge of Raymond because he was already dead? Steve hoped not.

At evenly spaced intervals throughout the sky, an Agora column speared even higher into space. The columns were in every dream, a security measure, though usually they weren’t apparent unless the dreamer looked for one. Agora columns were a promise of safety—or rather, they were supposed to be. They hadn’t worked for the old man.

“William Kerry came here to fly,” Steve said, “but he never woke up. Since he was already in a nursing home, his caretakers thought he had slipped into a coma due to physical causes.”

“See, right there,” Marshal Fawkes said. “
Every
absence has to be reported. Silver Sunrise was protecting its reputation and its revenue stream, not the people who buy their dreams. This guy just wanted to get out of his wheelchair for a night. His family paid a mint for him to do so. He ended up buried—” Fawkes shot Maisie a look “—under a tree.”

“There’s not much left of his path to track,” Rook said. “It’s been too long.”

Rook’s duties as a Chimera usually took him out of Rêve, following sadists who preyed on dreamers, but yes, William Kerry’s path would have been dispersed by the dreamwaters by now.

“I still don’t get what happened,” Jordan said. She was sitting close by Maisie in sisterly solidarity. When their mother had died suddenly in a car wreck, Jordan, five years older and already out on her own, had finished rearing her.

Maisie was looking off into the distance, face stony with resolution. Steve guessed the younger sister did understand what had happened to William Kerry.

“You want to explain it, Maisie?”

Her gaze shifted over to him, that trouble heavy in her gray eyes. He’d been staring at that trouble for the past couple of days, wondering what haunted her.

“He came here to fly, but someone pushed him out of the dream, which means they have another person like me working for them, by the way. From there, who knows where he went, but eventually he ended up compacted into a tiny ball and handed to me to deliver to the worst place ever. I ran, without making the drop.”

“But why did you bury it?” Fawkes asked.

Maisie shrugged. “I figured I was transporting a memory of some shady dealings, and I hoped that I might have something on Graeme and his people that might keep them from killing me after I severed my connection with them.”

“She didn’t know,” Jordan said. “What courier checks the packages they deliver? It’s none of their business.”

Big sis was echoing Maisie’s earlier defenses.

“I should’ve at least thought about it,” Maisie said.

And there was the little sister assuming her sister’s part. She took responsibility, but she was still holding back. Steve couldn’t fathom why. They needed to act immediately.

“Let me talk to her,” Jordan said. When he started to object, she added, “Alone.”

Fine. Jordan could try, but then it was Steve’s turn.

Maisie thought she’d seen bad? He’d show her bad. One way or another, she would tell him everything.

***

“So you still hate him,” Jordan said, sighing.

They’d stepped out of the Sunrise flying dream and into the null Agora. With the massive columns floating in grid-like intervals, the place seemed like a surreal temple on Olympus, and they were gods, powerful and quarrelling.

Maisie leaned against a pillar in the darkness, heartsick.

Both of them knew that direct discussion about what had happened to William Kerry was futile—Jordan, good big sister that she was, had tried reasoning with her a million times on a million subjects after Mom had died—so they were saved from fighting now.

Jordan’s tried-and-true strategy was to talk about a less tense subject, circling the matter at hand, but not dead center. Men were an easy topic, a common starting point between them. The deeper stuff grew from there.

Relieved to be treading old ground, Maisie went with her lead. “Not
hate
exactly. He’s trying to do his best, but he doesn’t get me.”

For a while there, in her dark city, there’d been a synergy between them. She’d felt relaxed with him as they’d walked to the boundary. Confident. Strong. She felt the way she wanted to be, not this scared person she was right now.

“I’ve seen the way he watches you.”

“Yeah, he does that. He’s always watching me.” Maisie struggled to put into words what she’d felt from him in her dream. “I thought he might, you know, be interested, but I have no idea why. I’m not his kind of girl.”

“You mean smart, loyal, beautiful, talented, funny? Yeah, it’s a real turnoff.”

She was pretty sure he thought she was a self-serving coward, but she said, “He wears ties. My hair is pink.”

“Maybe pink is his favorite color.”

This conversation was just as uncomfortable as one about William Kerry, though she didn’t know why Steve’s having a low opinion of her mattered so much. He got on her nerves.

“The point is, I’m not going to give him what he wants. And I’m not joining Chimera. Those decisions are made.”

Jordan wasn’t going to be able to convince her otherwise, and they both knew it.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. It was her way of saying, “I love you.”

Because Maisie knew Jordan meant it and wasn’t trying to manipulate her into anything, Maisie opened up a little. “Super Agent Steve can’t go charging in and fix what I messed up,” she said. “He’ll just end up another casualty.
I
have to do it. I have to fix it on my own.”

So no one else would get hurt.

“Maybe he could consult.”

“Maybe he could back off and let me handle it.”

“Maybe he could increase your chances for success. There’s a second old man to think about, and you don’t have the training to help him.”

Raymond Blackman, Graeme’s hostage. He had probably already been taken into that bad dream, which meant there was no chance for his survival.

“It’s
evil,
Jordan. You haven’t seen evil.”

“I was dragged
by my hair
into and across the Scrape and had to fight a nightmare creature off both myself and Rook to get to safety.”

Maisie rolled her eyes. “Okay, so maybe you have. But I have to do this. I have to go back to Graeme, fake him out that I’m still in with him, and find out what he’s doing. I have to find out why I was delivering
a person
and make sure no one else does it in my place.”

“That’s your plan?” a male voice said behind them.

God. The man had no respect for privacy.

“How long have you been listening?” Maisie demanded.

“Everyone’s been listening,” Steve said. “You’re leaning up against a column. You clearly don’t know how to use them.”

Oh. Shit. Maisie’s mind raced. What exactly had she and Jordan said? And—
hey!—
why hadn’t Jordan warned her?

Maisie shot her an accusatory look.
Sneaky, sis.

Jordan shrugged, unapologetic. “It’d only work once anyway.”

Damn right it would. Maisie intended find out how the Agora columns functioned immediately.

“You plan to go back,” Steve said.

Since he’d been eavesdropping and had heard the gist of the plan, she saw no reason to answer him.

Had she fessed up to Jordan that she liked him? Had she revealed that she thought he might be sexy, if he wasn’t such a suit? Because that would be mortifying.

He can never know,
she vowed to herself.

“I’m not taking you with me,” she told him, which was the relevant point.

Jordan began to argue. “Maisie—”

Steve held up a hand to silence Jordan, but spoke to Maisie. “You’ll have to escape me believably.”

“Easy.”

He blinked at her for a second, and she thought he’d be angry, but he’d found his cool and that odd gleam had lit again in his eyes. “I have a reputation, you know.”

“I never heard of you.”
Simple truth, Steve-o.

The side of his mouth twitched upward. “Well, I do. So it’ll have to be good, or Graeme won’t buy it.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make it good.”

“
We’ll
make it good,” Steve corrected.

“Fine,” Maisie said. Just so long as after she ditched him, she was on her own. She didn’t want Steve in that evil dream. The thought made her panicky inside.

“I have to make some arrangements,” he said. “You might want to float for a while. You need to be strong. I’ll meet you in the waking world.”

Floating
was what Revelers called non-REM sleep. Too much time Darkside, and Revelers had low energy in the waking world. In extreme cases, people started to get sick, some even seemed to age prematurely.

It was the first time in two days he would be leaving her alone. They both knew she wasn’t going to run away again, not anymore. The old man kept her there. Jordan kept her there. The need to make things right kept her there. And weirdly, uncomfortably, Steve kept her there, too.

She’d disappointed him, and she still kind of wanted him to try to recruit her for Chimera, though she’d never join, so the feeling was stupid.

“I’ll be as fast as I can,” he said.

She could’ve really used one of his Chimera pitches right now. She’d messed up, but she was still worth something.

She watched as he dematerialized before her eyes and cursed herself for her juvenile feelings. Of course they wouldn’t want her anymore. And it was best that way, really. Made everything much more simple and straightforward. Chimera wasn’t for her—and now everyone knew it.

He’d disappeared, but his voice remained behind, at least for a moment. “By the way,” he said, a voice in the dark, “pink is rapidly becoming one of my favorite colors.”

Maisie’s heart stalled and she sneaked a glance at Jordan.

Her sister smiled. “I love being right. I swear it’s as good as sex.”

“Hey!” another male voice shouted. Had to be Rook defending his skills.

A painful spark of hope had lit in Maisie’s chest, and her heart skipped to make up for lost beats, but she made a face at her sister and said, “Shut up.”