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But then the little boy, the four-year-old, fell into an REM state, and his dreams had blown away the others. It was as if the others’ dreams were on small TVs while the little boy’s dream was on an IMAX movie screen with surround sound.
Images of terrible menace.
Images of staggering beauty.
Things that were somehow both beautiful and terrifying.
None of it was logical. None of it made sense. But there was no looking away, no chance of hiding from the cascade of pictures, sounds, feelings. It was as if Orsay had tried to stand in front of a tornado.
The boy, Little Pete, had seen her. Dreamers often did, although they usually weren’t sure who she was or why she was there. They usually ignored her as just another nonsensical element of a random dream.
But Little Pete had stepped into his own dream and he had come to her. He had stared right at her.
“Be careful,” Little Pete said. “There’s a monster.”
And that was when Orsay had sensed a dark presence, looming up behind her. A presence that was like a black hole, eating the light of Little Pete’s dream.
There was a name for the dark thing. A word Orsay couldn’t make sense of. A word she had never heard. In the dream she had turned away from Little Pete to face the darkness, to ask it its name. To ask it what “gaiaphage” meant.
But Little Pete had smiled, just a little. He shook his head no, as if chiding a foolish child who’d been about to touch a hot stove.
And she had awakened, expelled from the dream like an unwelcomed guest at a party.
Now, months later, she still winced at the memory. But she also craved it. She had spent every night since wishing that she could touch Little Pete’s sleeping mind once more. She savored the fragments she could recall, tried to get that same rush but always failed.
She was almost out of food, down to MREs—meals ready to eat, the overly salted meals in a pouch that soldiers and some campers ate. She told herself that she was coming down from the forest at long last for food. Just for food.
Now Orsay watched from a safe distance, concealed by darkness, as a real-life monster, a boy with a thick, powerful tentacle in place of one arm, said good-bye to a boy who simply disappeared.
She waited as he lost the fight with sleep.
And then, ah yes, such strange visions.
Drake. That was his name. She could hear the echo of that sound in her head.
Drake Merwin.
Whip Hand.
For what felt like a very long time she wandered through dreams of pain and rage. She had to shield herself from the physical agony, memories of which kept flooding the boy’s dreams.
In Drake’s dream Orsay saw a different boy, a boy with piercing eyes, a boy who made things fly through the air.
And she saw a boy with fire coming from his hands.
Then she saw the girl, the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. And the angry, resentful visions took a turn to something worse still.
Far worse.
For weeks before the great disappearance Orsay had been tortured by dreams she couldn’t shut out, many of them the dreams of adults filled with disturbingly adult imagery.
But she had never entered a dream like this.
She was shaking. Feeling as if she couldn’t breathe.
She wanted to look away, spare herself from witnessing the sick boy’s vile nightmares. But it was the curse of her condition: She had no power to block the dreams out. It was like she was strapped into a chair, eyes pried open, forced to look at images that made her sick.
Only distance would protect her. Sobbing, Orsay crawled away, crawled toward the desert, indifferent to the stones that cut her knees and palms.
