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I’m standing in front of my video game design class, naked as a mole rat.
Everyone stares at me, some giggling and some rolling their eyes. My left hand moves to cover my groin area, and as my right one goes to hide my breasts, I realize something is missing from my wrist.
The furry bracelet.
Pom.
In an eyeblink, I use my powers to clothe myself and make the audience disappear.
Ah, the good old ‘naked in public’ dream. If I had a gold coin for every time I’ve stumbled into one of these, I’d be richer than a dragon.
Speaking of dream invasion—no Nutcracker here. Does he need me unaware that I’m dreaming for his strike? Just in case, I turn myself metallic before teleporting to the tower of sleepers.
“Hi,” Pom says, appearing next to me as I examine the people whose dreams I could potentially sneak into.
“Hey, bud. Hope you weren’t awake during that fight with the giants.”
When he says he wasn’t, I update him on what’s happened so far.
“So what now?” he asks when I’m done.
“I want to check on Mom,” I say, spotting the gargoyle nurse I’ve been using for this purpose. “Want to join?”
He turns gray. “I don’t like seeing Lidia like that.”
He doesn’t like it? It’s my mom we’re talking about.
Biting back an unnecessarily sharp retort, I touch the nurse and nudge her into a dream memory about Mom.
In this one, she’s making sure there’s enough goop available for Mom’s feeding tube. Mom herself is lying there ashen and unmoving, for all intents and purposes a living corpse.
A hollow ache takes residence in my chest, and I let the nurse slip into her next dream while I teleport to my memory gallery. I know replaying a memory where Mom is fine doesn’t change the reality of her current situation, but it’s comforting nonetheless.
Once I’m calmer, I walk around the paintings depicting events from my life to see if there was any hint that I’d had a sister. I locate only the one that I already knew about, where I break a vase on which my twin and I had left our handprints.
I replay the memory.
Mom was sad, but it’s unclear if she knew why she was sad. Thanks to a black window in her mind, she doesn’t consciously recall killing Asha—or that Asha existed at all.
I strain to recall something—anything—else, but there’s nothing. My theory is that seeing Mom kill Asha in front of me was so traumatic that I blocked the whole thing out, along with the majority of my childhood. But shouldn’t there be at least a few stray memories?
Feeling heavier than before, I leave the memory gallery and reunite with Pom in the tower of sleepers, where I locate a few of my patients and provide some therapy sessions.
Making others feel better is a mood booster for me.
“You might want to create some exposure therapy for yourself,” Pom says as we fly into the lobby and hover below a mosaic depicting an archery-target-like mandala made out of multicolored glass. “Your adrenaline levels are through the roof.”
I grimace. “That would be tricky. The main source of my fear is going to a world with a nasty virus.”
Pom nods sagely. “Of all the ways to perish, that one would be the worst for you.”
“You can say that again.” I swoop down and land on my metallic feet with a thud.
“Won’t you be safe with the mask Itzel made?” Pom asks, following me down.
“No mask is perfect.”
He wiggles his ears. “So how about that therapy then? To calm you down?”
I roll my eyes. “What would that even entail?”
“You can have a dream where you lick doorknobs in a bathroom.”
Ugh. I suppress a shudder at that mental image. “No, thank you. And in any case, this is a deadly plague. I’m justified in my paranoia. Any other bright ideas?”
“We can talk about you and Valerian,” he says hopefully, his coat turning a light orange hue as his pupils transform into hearts.
“Nope,” I say and jolt myself awake.
Under the light of four moons, I see Valerian sitting there, vigilantly guarding my slumber.
For some reason, the sight makes me smile.
Closing my eyes, I drift into sleep again—this time without any dreams.
In the morning, we have a hearty breakfast—another Valerian-smuggled manna for me, leftovers from dinner for the rest of the crew—and continue on our journey.
“Maxwell and the others are just through there,” Valerian says as we approach a pink gate that, according to the map we memorized, leads to the world just before Necronia.
When we step through, we end up in an underground hub that looks just like the JFK one we started from.
Instead of a team, one person is waiting here for us. He’s wearing a surgical mask with a plastic face shield on top. He looks us over with sad eyes, his forehead creasing in worry.
