Secret Legacy (25 page)

“And what she has to be is alone?” Maddie demanded.

“No,” Sarah stared at the brooding, crimson-soaked
clouds. They were twisting between her and her twin, tumbling downward into the ocean. “I have to be free. I have to follow my instincts, knowing that you’ll still be here when I’m done. I’m not running away this time. I’m trying to come back completely. No more nightmares.”

“Open the door,”
Trinity’s voice whispered from the haze,
“and see what we’ve become
. . .
”

“What happens if the darkness traps you and I’m not there?” Long-ago pain roughened Maddie’s voice. “Just like when we were teenagers, and I lost you for ten years.”

“The darkness already has me.” Sarah accepted the bone-deep truth of what she was saying. “It’s always been a part of me. But I have a chance to break its hold now. I’m going to beat Ruebens’s programming. Use what I’ve learned against the center. Find Trinity and the truth about our legacy. Don’t ask me to hide from what has to come next. I’m finally ready to face it.”

She could feel Richard’s trust flowing to her. Maddie could, too. Her twin could feel the courage Sarah had found in her connection with Richard and the acceptance of so much more than her need for him.

“I love you, Maddie,” Sarah said into the dream. “I want you and Jarred and Richard in my life too much to let the madness win again. Please help me do this.”

Maddie’s amethyst energy began to retract, swirling back to her, allowing the bloated crimson and black cloud to spread.

“Come back to me,” Maddie said, repeating Richard’s parting words in the lab. “Do whatever you have to, Sarah. I’ll be right behind you. Just please, come back to your family.”

Then her mind was letting go, and Sarah was falling, her consciousness merging with the menacing clouds she’d called into the matrix. The nightmare’s currents swarmed. They battered Sarah with Trinity’s brittle cries and the wolf’s deep laugh as she raced deeper into the dream.

“Help me
. . .
”
Trinity said from below.

“Help me . . .” The words tumbled from Sarah’s mouth as she surrendered her mind to the nightmare’s mania.

She could do this. She could accept the fear and keep dreaming. The people she trusted to protect her wouldn’t abandon her to the darkness. Her family would—

“We’ll be there,”
Richard promised.
“Focus on finding Trinity’s door. I’ll make sure your team finds you.”

Richard.

Maddie.

The Watchers.

Her family was coming for her.

Breathing was nearly impossible, Sarah was spiraling so fast. Her sight had dimmed to the point of being useless. Crimson and black were oozing everywhere. Outside her—consuming the water and racing ahead. Inside her—drilling deeper, searching for every weak, lonely place that the nightmare could still feed on. Until Sarah thought she’d go insane with it.

“Make the colors guide you,”
Richard said. Her Watcher. Her heart.
“What are they telling you? Where is the maze you couldn’t solve before? Find it. Make the dream take you past it, to the door that was on the other side.”

“Help me
. . .
”
Trinity begged.

“Hurry
. . .
”
the wolf’s command said in the child’s voice.

Sarah breathed in the sound of them, the colors swirling deeper, faster. She focused, pictured the door. Needed the door. She needed Trinity. She needed to know where the madness of her legacy had started and where it would end.

Suddenly, the tunnel emerged around her, absent of water, absent of light. Except for Trinity’s crimson aura, which was barely visible and racing ahead. Sarah ran, her hands trailing along the walls, feeling for the door’s scarred surface. But there was nothing around the next turn, while the child’s screams poured over her, coming from every direction, sending Sarah to her knees, her hands covering her ears.

“It’s your programming’s pain,”
Richard said.
“It’s meant to stop you. But you’ve been here before. You know there’s more beyond the tunnel. Find Trinity. Focus on her.”

“She’s in danger.” Sarah could sense the black cloud’s menace. It was the wolf’s energy, she realized. It was consuming more and more of Trinity, who was the crimson. “I can’t let him hurt her.”

Sarah opened her eyes, feeling what she couldn’t see—letting her inner voices drive the dream. Light flickered dimly ahead, casting everything in gray, tempting Sarah to run again. To never stop. Except . . .

“The dream wants me to keep moving.” She could feel it. “It wants me crazy exhausted so I’ll quit before I find the truth. Just like last time.”

“But you’re not quitting.”
Richard’s confidence washed through her like oxygen filling her starving lungs.

“No.” She wanted his beautiful forest back. She wanted both of them safe there, free of Dream Weaver’s hold. “I’m not giving up,” she yelled into the empty tunnel. “I won’t give up until I find the truth.”

It was time to end this.

Searching inside instead of moving deeper into the maze of tunnels, she retraced her steps in the last nightmare. She remembered the rushing water, sucking her down winding corridors that led to nowhere. But why a tunnel? What fear, what memory, was Ruebens manipulating to create a maze she couldn’t escape?

“Think,” she yelled into the dream as Trinity’s pain taunted her to find a door she’d never reach.

She could remember another existence filled with emptiness. Failure. A no-win, endless reality where she had only shadows and loneliness for company. She’d been here before.

“What happens if the darkness traps you and I’m not there?”
Maddie had asked her.
“Just like when we were teenagers, and I lost you for ten years.”

“Oh, my God.”

Sarah had been trapped in the same sea for ten years, knowing only the self-loathing and guilt and madness. She hadn’t saved her father. She hadn’t deserved to come back from her coma. It was the same overwhelming failure she’d felt in the last nightmare, when she hadn’t made it through the door to Trinity.

Sarah braced herself on her hands and knees. Ruebens had re-created her coma. Her nightmare ocean, this endless maze of corridors—it was the bastard’s way of trapping her in the same hopelessness that Richard had
first rescued her from at the center. Her programming had been designed to suck Sarah back, to strand her in the darkest place her mind had ever known.

“A place you escaped,”
Richard reminded her.
“A reality that can no longer control you.”

Sarah looked at the tunnel around her. Really looked, for the first time. It existed only in her mind. It represented a past she was done torturing herself with. She had a future to look forward to instead, where she and Maddie were free to explore their legacy with—

“Trinity . . .” she said into the dream. “Trinity is all that’s real here. The rest can’t touch me now.”

And as she released the last of her coma’s memories, the tunnel Ruebens had anchored them to disappeared and miles of harmless ocean stretched before her instead, empty, just like when she’d first reentered the ocean. A child’s heart-wrenching scream and the wolf’s soulless laugh jerked her around to see an intimidating door covered in crimson and black hanging in the gloom. It was the final barrier separating her from the truth.

The colors were melting into one another on its surface: black consuming crimson, Ruebens’s dream wolf consuming Trinity’s innocence. What remained was a grotesque stain, the tint of dried blood. This was the moment when she’d given up in the last nightmare. But this time light shone through from the other side, around the edges of the door’s scarred surface. It was Trinity’s light, she somehow knew, waiting just beyond Sarah’s reach. Or maybe she’d find the lost little girl who’d been waiting for Sarah in her rotting, abandoned bedroom, so sure, so angry, that Sarah would never come.

“I’m here!” She rushed forward, pounding on the door, searching for the latch. The razor-sharp steel sliced her fingers, but the lock wouldn’t give.

“Help me!”
a child screamed over a wolf’s growl.

“Your team’s almost there,”
Richard cautioned.
“Hold on.”

“But the wolf is with her.”

The new consciousness behind Ruebens’s wolf image was in Trinity’s mind. Consuming her. Sarah could feel it. She was so close to stopping it. She tugged harder, then pounded the door with her fists. She had to break through.

“Stay away from the door. Madeline’s bringing the team to you. You just have to—”

The door’s black aura surged around Sarah, drowning Richard’s voice, smothering her in Trinity’s terror. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear. But she wasn’t letting go.

“I’m finding you this time, Trinity. I won’t let the wolf have you.”

She clawed at the metal beneath her palms. Digging through the dark aura, ignoring the pain, she fought with every ounce of energy she had left. Until a streak of blinding brightness flashed through the cracks in the pitted surface, ripping at the steel beneath her fingers. Reaching for her from the other side of the nightmare. Then Sarah became the light and the cracks and the door itself.

She was the latch flying apart in her hands. She was a lifetime of fear and doubt and guilt and shame, exploding into tiny pieces, ripping at her own skin, peeling away everything but what she needed desperately to find beyond the door. Inside herself. Until there was
nothing left but Sarah kneeling, her hands covering her head, crying Trinity’s name the way she had in her childhood dreams.

The dreams that were finally a reality.

Richard’s consciousness was gone—his love and his gypsy intuition and his warrior’s logic that had guided her through the projection. Sarah’s link to her sister and the Watcher team was silent. She’d had to leave them all behind to get to this place where she could feel darkness closing in on the blinding brightness just beyond her closed eyes. Anger was still seething. Trinity’s cries were still searing her mind. Her ocean dream’s darkness was gloating, waiting for it’s chance to destroy them both.

“Open your eyes,” the wolf said, instead of Trinity, “and see what we’ve become . . .”

“Sarah?”
Richard called into their link.

She was gone.

His connection to the nightmare’s matrix was gone.

He braced his hands on each side of her body and leaned over her exam table until their faces were inches apart. She lay deathly still while her stats, pressure, pulse, and psychic echoes inched closer to the red zone.

“Talk to me, Sarah. Let me back in.”

He reached for the tray beside her bed, for the extraction protocol designed to suppress the brain’s dream center, but stopped. He couldn’t pull her back yet. He had to give her team a chance to find Trinity.

“Her psychic energy is being shielded from us somehow,” the tech closest to Richard said. “We’re no longer tracking her mind’s feedback from the dream. Her levels are off the charts, but she’s no longer streaming information.”

Jeff’s men were with Madeline now. Their reports were still coming through the group’s connection and the psychic audio transmission Richard had custom-designed to allow the lab to communicate within a projection. The dream had grown dark around them. They’d
been following Maddie’s lead, and she’d been secretly following Richard’s instructions to find the door and Sarah. Now they were all stranded in the matrix, and he had nothing. No way to get them moving again in the right direction. Not from the lab.

“Update coming in from the control room,” one of his techs reported from the lab’s corner workstation. “Two level-one legacy teams are under attack. Their principals are MIA.”

Two new Watcher teams with critical principals were in crisis?

Richard joined the seated man, warning signals firing through his mind, his intuition on overload. He kept searching for Sarah’s consciousness while another part of his mind analyzed the significance of a new security breach.

“Time of contact reported by each team?” he asked.

The tech pressed indicators on the wall projection in front of them, streaming reports from the compromised satellite locations to the lab.

“Both report first contact from unknown aggressors two minutes ago. Psychic links to their principals ended at the same time.”

The same moment that Richard had felt the mind beyond Sarah’s door suck her into whatever reality now had her.

A new report blipped to life on the lab’s transparent wall.

“Bursts of psychic energy detected at the center complex,” the tech said.

Richard pressed his fingers to the display, resizing
the readings and calling up new details, searching for the answers he needed.

“Same time stamp.” He pressed the receiver at his ear. “The center’s making its move,” he said to the lieutenant on call. “Inform the council. Lock down all legacies. All Watchers return to quarters and await further instructions. Escalate mission planning for both initiating center reconnaissance contact and repelling an attack.”