Neverwake

by Amy Plum

  Dedication

  To Max, Jenna, Ant, and everyone else who illuminates our lives and the world with their extraordinary minds

  Epigraph

  But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

  —J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Jaime

  Chapter 2: Cata

  Chapter 3: Ant

  Chapter 4: Jaime

  Chapter 5: Cata

  Chapter 6: Jaime

  Chapter 7: Ant

  Chapter 8: Cata

  Chapter 9: Jaime

  Chapter 10: Ant

  Chapter 11: Jaime

  Chapter 12: Cata

  Chapter 13: Ant

  Chapter 14: Jaime

  Chapter 15: Cata

  Chapter 16: Jaime

  Chapter 17: Ant

  Chapter 18: Cata

  Chapter 19: Jaime

  Chapter 20: Ant

  Chapter 21: Jaime

  Chapter 22: Cata

  Chapter 23: Ant

  Chapter 24: Jaime

  Chapter 25: Cata

  Chapter 26: Jaime

  Chapter 27: Ant

  Chapter 28: Jaime

  Chapter 29: Cata

  Chapter 30: Jaime

  Chapter 31: Ant

  Chapter 32: Cata

  Chapter 33: Jaime

  Epilogue: Jaime

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Amy Plum

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Jaime

  THE LAST EIGHT HOURS HAVE BEEN A LIVING nightmare.

  Early this morning, I witnessed seven teenagers simultaneously fall into a coma. Shortly after, one of them, a nineteen-year-old girl, died of a heart attack. Then, just moments ago, an eighteen-year-old boy almost died the same way . . . would have died if I hadn’t used a defibrillator on him. It was an insane move, one I’m not sure I would have made if I’d had time to think it through, especially considering I’d only ever practiced on a plastic dummy.

  Now here I am, standing in the darkened laboratory of the Pasithea sleep research facility, heart pounding like a speed-metal drum solo as I watch the six survivors on their hospital beds. They’re fanned out like spokes on a wheel around the blinking, beeping column they are linked to by a jungle of wires and tubes.

  There is a gap in the wheel now—one empty bed that held Beta subject three, BethAnn, before her body was carted away.

  Dr. Zhu and Dr. Vesper have reconnected the IV tube that Fergus, the boy I just saved, ripped out as he flailed on his bed. Vesper is mopping up the puddle of feeding solution that spilled onto the floor. The way he crouches as he swabs the liquid makes him look even more vulturelike than usual. “We should give him a beta-blocker,” he says.

  Zhu nods and, going to her phone, calls someone to deliver the drug. They’re acting so normal, while I’m trying to slow my pulse to a speed that won’t give me a stroke. But I know that underneath their studiedly calm demeanor they’re as scared as I am. I can read it in the sweat gleaming on Vesper’s brow and the tentative way Zhu hovers over her keyboard instead of her regular speed-typing. She glances up, catching my eye, and I quickly look back at my monitor.

  “You saved that boy’s life,” she had told me. But we both know that it could easily have gone wrong. Her shadowed expression suggests that she is torn between praising me and kicking me out: I might be too much of a loose cannon to keep in such a precarious situation.

  If she makes me leave, it will be the end of all my dreams. If she writes me up for what I did, I’ll never get into medical school. Forget about winning a scholarship. I can pretty much kiss that career good-bye.

  Then what would I have left? Would it be back to the streets of Detroit? Or would I be able to find an office job, like my mom did? My mom, who is way too smart to be answering the phone and getting someone’s coffee.

  I have to win back Zhu’s and Vesper’s confidence. My future depends on it.

  Their boss, Mr. Osterman, made it clear that he wanted me to stay. I’m the only witness—besides the doctors themselves—to the derailing of this cutting-edge insomnia treatment that not only threw the subjects into comas, but ended up killing one. I’m the only one who can stand up to say that it wasn’t the researchers’ fault. It was that freak earthquake, and they’ve done everything they can to keep the subjects stable while they try to find a solution. I’m a necessary evil. They can’t get rid of me now.

  Or can they? Maybe their boss was overreacting and they’ll be fine without my testimony. Or maybe they won’t even listen to him. I will have to be careful either way.

  My eyes flit across the seven windows on my screen, and I focus on the one labeled “subject two”: Fergus. I think back to the moment he opened his eyes. He looked directly at me and asked a question that confirmed my wildest theory about what was really going on—a theory I hadn’t dared believe. “Did BethAnn make it?”

  Those four words proved beyond a doubt that the seven teenagers are somehow connected, even though they appear to be comatose. How else could Fergus know something had happened to BethAnn—a girl he most likely had never met? In her last breath, she had spoken about being shot by soldiers in Africa. When I finally dared mention it to Vesper, he said it was the delirious rambling of a dying girl’s subconscious. That it didn’t mean a thing.

  But subject five, Remi, had lived through a genocide in Africa. His family had been killed by soldiers.

  Fergus knew BethAnn was in danger. BethAnn knew about Remi’s past. The subjects must somehow have access to one another’s thoughts. Perhaps even be in a place where they are able to communicate. It sounds crazy. Impossible. But there’s no other explanation.

  When I told Fergus that BethAnn had died, he said, “It’s the dreams. They’re killing us.”

  According to the feedback monitors, their brain waves are so low that dreaming shouldn’t be possible. But I began to think . . . and now I’m sure . . . that the monitors are wrong.

  I wonder if they were damaged by the earthquake. Or maybe the subjects are experiencing a state of awareness that doesn’t show up on regular brain-wave monitoring. A state that the makers of brain-wave monitors would never think of trying to measure. A shared consciousness in a subconscious state. Shared dreams.

  But before Fergus fell into cardiac arrest, I told him what had happened and that the doctors were working on how to wake them up. More important, I warned him to be careful. That I had discovered one of the other teenagers trapped in there with him was dangerous. A psychopath.

  I didn’t have a chance to tell him who. Or that subject four was linked to the recent deaths of three other teenagers, and that his psychiatrist suspected he was responsible. If my suspicions are true, and they’re all in there together, will Sinclair be capable of hurting the others? What kind of motivation would he need to kill them too?

  I don’t know much about psychopaths besides their trademark use of manipulation and lack of empathy. I don’t know what it would take to set one off on a murder spree. But I can’t imagine that being stuck inside shared nightmares would bring out the best in someone potentially dangerous and mentally unstable. I fear it could be enough to trigger even the most carefully hidden psychosis.

  Chapter 2

  Cata

  I OPEN MY EYES. I’M LYING ON MY SIDE ON THE ground staring at a row of rusted metal garbage bins. I try to move but am pinned in place by a heavy weight on my back. Craning my neck, I see brick w
alls stretching up five stories to touch a cement-gray sky. I’m in a long narrow street that dead-ends a few yards away.

  Everything is hazy and red, like I’m peering through blood-tinted sunglasses. I blink but my vision doesn’t clear. And then I smell smoke.

  The trash cans are on fire. Their lids all fly open, one after the other, clanging loudly while flames pour out, vomiting clouds of smoke. I strain from side to side, then raise my hands to feel ropes wrapped around my torso. I suddenly remember my plan to bring Fergus into the nightmare.

  In the Void, he had said something about his heart and then he lost consciousness. Afraid of what would happen if we left him behind, I had the others tie him to me with a rope just before the wind whipped us through the door into this place. The plan had worked—he made it through. But now he’s putting us both in danger.

  “Ant! Sinclair! Remi!” I yell, and hear voices coming from nearby.

  Ant’s small, worried face appears in my line of sight, flames billowing behind her head like a blazing halo. She looks like a saint wearing a chullo hat, flaps pulled securely beneath her ears.

  “Cut Fergus free!” I yell, choking on the smoke. “Quick!”

  Remi appears, crossbow slung across his back, and, pulling out his knife, begins sawing at the rope binding Fergus and me together. Ant draws her own knife from its sheath and kneels down to help.

  Sinclair crouches next to my head. “Something’s wrong with my eyes,” he says, glancing down the alley. He cups his hand over his nose and mouth to filter the smoke.

  “Mine too,” I respond. “Is everything red?”

  “Yeah. It’s like I’m seeing through a gun sight.”

  “Same for me,” says Remi. He finishes slicing through one of the ropes, and scrambles to free us. I feel the weight of Fergus fall from my back, and turn to see him slump sideways onto the ground, thick black hair fanning across his face.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a haunting but familiar figure crouching in a doorway across from us. He flickers as I focus on him, his face changing from one of a boy my age to an amorphous blur with features that look like they were sketched in chalk then wiped away. The boy cradles his left arm with his right, blood flowing freely from a wound near his shoulder.

  “Oh my God, it’s him!” I hiss. Everyone turns to look.

  A blast of static scrapes my eardrums, and the boy changes into a manlike creature with a freakish rooster head. He’s wearing striped pajama bottoms, and his arms are bound in a straitjacket.

  A man’s voice reverberates through the alley, coming from midair above us. “Come out, Brett. We know you’re in there. We know you can hear us.”

  It’s followed by the voice of a woman. “Just open your eyes, honey. It’s going to be okay. Talk to us. Try to tell us what you see.”

  “May I speak frankly?” another voice says.

  “Why not?” The man’s voice is burdened with sadness. “It doesn’t even seem like he hears us anymore.”

  “As we have discussed with FFI, the brain cells that degenerate don’t ever come back. We can’t recover what is already gone. Gone. Gone.” The voice echoes robotically, and then stops.

  “Brett! His name is Brett!” exclaims Ant.

  She has thrown herself down by Fergus, and is cradling his head in her lap. She directs her gaze at me. “The static monster . . . I kept thinking he was saying red in the dreams, but he was saying Brett the whole time. He’s been trying to tell us his name!”

  “Holy shit,” exclaims Sinclair. “If those voices are talking to him, this must be his dream! What was it that you said, Cata? About there being something wrong with him?”

  “It was when Ant explained how we see each other in the Dreamfall,” I respond.

  Ant watches me, holding her gloved hand over her nose to filter the smoke.

  “Didn’t you say that we appear as we perceive ourselves, since we aren’t using our . . .”

  She comes to my rescue. “If everything in the Dreamfall is in our minds, then we don’t have typical use of our sensory organs: noses, ears, eyes. Everything we hear and smell and feel is fabricated by our thoughts. And the way we appear to one another is just a projection of how we perceive ourselves.”

  Ant looks self-conscious. I give her a smile. She seems to realize she’ll have to communicate in a more . . . normal way now that she no longer has George to translate for her.

  The rooster head flickers like an old TV, before changing into a skeleton draped in rotting flesh. The corpse writhes and convulses, like it’s having a seizure.

  “Fuck. Me,” groans Sinclair. “If that’s how he perceives himself, then he’s tripping. Or completely insane. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Watch out!” Remi yells. I turn to see something hurtling toward us from the street end of the alley. There is a pounding of hooves on pavement as a wall of horses races toward us.

  “Help me with Fergus!” I shout over the din, and we all scramble, dragging and pushing Fergus’s limp body until it’s hidden between two of the flaming garbage bins. There’s enough space for Ant and Remi to huddle beside him, but Sinclair and I stick out in the path of the oncoming animals.

  “Quick!” yells Sinclair, and drags me across the alley. As we throw ourselves against the wall between another pair of burning bins, I lean too far sideways and scream as the sizzling metal sears my shoulder. Sinclair pulls me toward him, cocooning me with his body as the herd gallops past.

  Echoing Brett’s last transformation, the horses are skeletons with decomposing flesh draped across their bones. As they toss their heads and bare their teeth, their blood-encrusted maws emit unearthly screams that shake the walls around us. Loose bricks and dust come tumbling from above as the horses run full speed into the wall at the end of the alley and disappear.

  “What. The,” Sinclair begins, but even he is unable to find an expletive that rises to the level of horror we just witnessed. He lets go and holds me back to inspect me. “Are you okay?” His features are tight with fear.

  I can’t even speak. He rises cautiously, peers around to see if another monstrosity is about to come at us, then pulls me to my feet and presses me to his chest. I’m glad for the comfort, and bury my head in his shoulder, trying to catch my breath.

  After a second, I lean back and look at him. “Where do you think we are?”

  “Inside an insane person’s dream,” he replies. And then suddenly, his hands move up from my back to cradle my face as he leans in and kisses me.

  I jerk backward. “What the hell was that?” I ask, wiping the taste of salt and smoke from my lips.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted. You were giving off a kiss-me vibe,” he says with a sardonic twist of his mouth.

  I take another step back, careful not to sear myself again on the bin, but desperate for personal space. “That was not my kiss-me vibe. We almost got trampled by rotting horse cadavers! What is your deal?”

  He holds up his hands in innocence. “Misread you. Sorry. But you do taste good. Guess I’ll just take a rain check.”

  “You’ll be waiting a hell of a long time,” I say, but he acts like he doesn’t hear me.

  I glance across the alley to where Remi and Ant crouch next to Fergus’s body. Ant stares at me and Sinclair like she can’t believe her eyes. I don’t blame her. That kiss was so random. . . . So wrong . . . that I felt repulsed. I turn to Sinclair, but he’s back behind his usual jokey mask and is completely unreadable.

  Yanking up the hem of my T-shirt to shield my nose and mouth from the thickening smoke, I rush over to them. “You guys okay?” I ask. Ant and Remi nod.

  “We can’t stay here,” says Remi, peering out from behind the bin toward the street. “It’s too dangerous. We’re penned in. Nowhere to escape.”

  “There’s the door behind Brett,” Sinclair suggests.

  Across from us, Corpse Brett has transformed into an alien, with tentacles instead of arms waving around above his head. One of the
tentacles is severed, and blood gushes from the stump.

  “That’s what he looked like when George hit him with the pick in the graveyard,” Ant says. As we watch, he stares back with multiple hooded eyes, and steps closer to the door, slapping the doorknob ineffectually with an appendage.

  “We’re in his dream,” Sinclair says. “Maybe he wants us to follow him.”

  Remi looks unconvinced. “Why would he want to help us?”

  “He saved Fergus’s life back in the cathedral,” I respond.

  “Like you said, we can’t stay here,” adds Sinclair. “And whatever’s behind the door can’t be much worse than stampeding horse zombies. I say we go for it.”

  “How do we carry Fergus?” I gesture to the body sprawled on the ground.

  “What do you mean?” Sinclair asks. He seems to have completely forgotten about the unconscious boy lying at his feet, and is already moving toward Brett.

  “We can’t bring him with us,” says Remi.

  Sinclair isn’t even listening. He stops and turns, looking at me impatiently.

  “Well, we can’t just leave him here!” Ant exclaims.

  Remi looks between us, face twisted in disgust, fists planted firmly on his hips. “What you don’t seem to understand is that survival means strategy. George was the only one here who got it. And now she’s gone. Or at least she’s stuffed back into that oversized brain of yours,” he says, glaring at Ant.

  “Enlighten us,” I say. “Just what is this strategy of yours?”

  Now that he’s got my attention, Remi straightens. “We should have left Fergus back in the Void. He almost got us killed right now—crushed by those . . . animals.” He shivers at the memory. “If we take him with us, it will just slow us down.”

  Remi sees my horrified expression and picks up speed. “I’m not saying we leave him to get stuck in the nightmares again. We can come back for him once we find a safe place to wait for the Wall.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I look at Sinclair. “What’s wrong with both of you? We are not leaving him behind.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” Sinclair begins, holding his hands up in innocence, but Remi cuts him off.