by Sarah Noffke
I clear my throat. “Yeah, well, she’s—”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Reynold,” Adelaide says with that grace, the family one. She extends her hand to my pops and curtsies slightly.
“Granddad,” he says, the smile in his voice again. “You call me granddad. And we hug in this family.” And then the old man has his arms around hers so fast, pulling her tiny frame against his as he hugs her. He’s all arms and legs. All unyielding spirit.
Adelaide lets out a muffled laugh and the whole exchange is too much for me. I turn and walk into the house, preparing myself to stare at the wall for the next several hours as un-pleasantries happen. That’s what I’m expecting from this reunion. A preponderance of un-pleasantries.
Over-spiced beef stew is strong in the air when I enter the house. Pops can’t cook. It’s not like I’m comparing him to my mum. Compared to a blind man with no sense of taste, he can’t cook.
“You’re Ren’s pops?” Adelaide says as she enters the house. She has a confused expression on her face like she’s still struggling with disbelief and bewilderment.
“I am,” Pops says, that familiar disappointment already in his voice. “And you called him by his first name?” my pops says to Adelaide.
“Yeah,” she says a little sheepishly. “He told me to.”
“It’s my name. That’s what everyone calls me. Well, to my face,” I say.
“But she’s your daughter,” my pops says, wrinkles connected to his sudden stress surfacing on his face.
“Don’t call her that,” I say and grimace. “And before a week ago she was a stranger.” I grimace again.
“Has he always been like this?” Adelaide says, stepping up close to my pops. Both of them are glaring at me like I’m a gorilla on the other side of the glass at a zoo.
“Always,” my pops says, nodding. “But deep down inside, on a good day, Ren can be incredibly loving.”
“That’s completely false,” I say but get the sense they’re pretending not to hear me.
“You know, Ren was the best thing Mary and I ever did,” my pops says, his eyes now glowing with pride. Both he and Adelaide are regarding me with different levels of interests.
“Oh, for the love of God. Why did I bring you here? You two are going to cohort against me now,” I say.
“Why did you bring me here? That doesn’t seem in line with your usual actions,” Adelaide says, her proximity too close to my pops as though being near him is automatically natural.
I roll my eyes and then throw my hand in my pops’ direction. “I did it for him. He likes people and family.”
“Is there more family?” Adelaide says, turning to my pops.
He lets out a long sigh and presses his hand to the back of his head. “There is, but—”
“My sister is insane,” I say, cutting him off, relieving him of saying what I know he doesn’t want to admit. “She’s a permanent resident of a mental hospital. So be warned, crazy runs in the family.”
“I kind of knew that since we met,” she says, sticking out her tongue at me.
“She has daughters though. They’re American. Maybe you can be pen pals,” I say.
“I’m not looking for a family reunion. And honestly I don’t really get along with girls. Or Americans,” Adelaide says.
“Because they’re wasteful?” I say.
“Because they think they’re better than everyone else,” she says.
“No arguments there,” I say.
“So you recently found Ren, I’m guessing,” my pops says to Adelaide.
“Yeah, he wasn’t happy about it,” she says.
“He will come around,” Pops says.
“I won’t,” I say.
“Having a child is a wonderful experience, Ren,” he says.
“For those with a soul,” I say.
He turns to Adelaide and winks. “Give him time and he will fall in love with you. I’m already endeared to you like a kindred spirit. Must be those eyes you inherited from my Mary.”
Adelaide gets an all wrong happy look on her face.
“She has my powers,” I say, cutting into their sappy-ass moment.
My pops drops his head a little, his eyes closing for a beat. When he looks at me, there’s the stress I knew would be caused by my admission.
“Yeah, not the little angel that you were thinking. When you hugged her she probably stole all your current thoughts out of your brain,” I say.
“I didn’t,” she says, and then hesitates. “At least I tried to ignore them.”
“I need to have a disclaimer plastered across your forehead,” I say.
“You don’t have one,” she says to me.
“I don’t touch people…anymore,” I add a second later.
“Having powers like Ren’s must have been very confusing for you. Is your mum a Middling?” Pops asks.
She nods.
“So you had no way of knowing what was happening to you, did you?” he says to her. Always the intuitive one, my pops.
“Right,” Adelaide says.
“Well, that must have been difficult. Ren has always known who he was and I fostered his skills, helping him to develop and control them,” he says.
“Which is exactly why I’ve taken the little monster in, and also another reason I brought her to you. Since you’re retired and bored to hell I figured you’d take on some of her training when I’m earning a bloody living to support her,” I say.
“Ren…” my pops says with that tone he thinks works on me. No tone works on me, I’m only compliant when I care to be.
“So you’ll train her when I’m busy, which means I won’t have to worry about her defacing parts of London. And as a bonus, then you won’t have to sit around here all day staring at the bloody walls. Haven’t I thought of everything?” I say smugly.
“I’d love it if you trained me instead of Ren,” Adelaide says.
“Not instead,” I say sharply. “My pops is good, but he only has one skill and it isn’t one we share. You still need my unique knowledge to make it out in the world. Or there’s always the option of offing yourself. That one is still on the table, you know.”
At this my pops actually laughs. “Oh, Ren, you and your jokes. They always sneak up on me and produce a laugh.”
I thread my arms together. “Not joking.”
He dismisses me with a wave of his hand and then turns to Adelaide. “I’m happy to help. But firstly, are you hungry?”
And although my reasons had been solid, I still knew that introducing these two was only going to create more problems for me. Adelaide is going to sew herself into my life until she is a permanent part of the patchwork.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“So you really think that teleporting is a skill that people can learn?” I say to Trey from my kickstand place against the wall to the training studio.
“Yes, but not every Dream Traveler could learn to teleport so easily, or maybe at all. Your powers as a Dream Traveler make it possible for you to hook in to potentially any skill,” he says, sitting on a chair in the corner, his elbows on his knees. “Really I think that your skills make it easier for you acquire powers. However, I firmly believe that any Dream Traveler with enough practice can obtain any gift.”
“So why aren’t you reading minds or controlling them?” I say.
“Who says I’m not?” Trey says, no smile on his face. “I got you to work for me.”
“I did it out of guilt,” I say.
“Control is a funny thing.”
“You’re a funny thing,” I say.
Trey pauses, then his face shifts. “Everything is energy, Ren.”
“Don’t patronize me like I’m one of your bloody residents. I already know the ‘everything is energy’ speech. I fucking wrote it,” I say.
“Well, then you know that our skills are just us accessing different energies. When you touch someone you feel the energy of
their thoughts. When you control people you’re accessing the energy that produces their desires and actions,” Trey says.
“This is all very boring. You should leave the lectures to me. I’m theatrical when I teach,” I say.
“Yes, your students have mentioned that,” he says, a disapproving look on his face. “They also say some of your teaching tactics are a bit radical.”
For decades I’ve been teaching the employees of the Institute, training them on the dreamscape and its assorted powers. It was an extra duty I took on to ensure those who went through orientation got a proper education. Well, and also it was a way to entertain myself by berating halfwits.
“Well, under the right circumstances I think you’re powerful enough to teleport,” Trey says. “And if you’re going to work level five cases regularly then it’s a good idea to have an arsenal.”
“I will be working level fives,” I say.
“That’s yet to be determined. You’re getting this current case,” Trey says.
“Teleporting. Teach me your hocus-pocus,” I say, circling my hand at him.
Trey nods and then says, “The whole process works similarly to the one you use for creating illusions. You’re pulling from already present energy to manifest something that doesn’t really exist. In some ways you’ll find that illusions are harder because you’re creating that which isn’t real. With teleporting you’re only pulling your already existing energy to a new location using the fabric of consciousness.”
I pull out my pocketknife from my trouser pocket and immediately go to work cleaning under my nails, which I keep all the exact same length. One centimeter. Not too short. Not too long.
“You really do love to hear yourself talk,” I say, my eyes on my hand.
“Focusing on location is important, but you’re already comfortable with being precise with that due to dream traveling. The thing that makes the process of teleporting unique is belief. Remember how you reacted the first time you saw me teleport?” Trey says. “You didn’t believe it was real. You were in disbelief that I actually teleported.”
“To my credit, I thought you were trying to kill me,” I say, my mind flashing back to the long ago memory. Trey had intersected my path in an alleyway. Materialized out of the fucking air. Thinking he was an illusion, I ran straight into him. One of my palms is still scarred from the fall that resulted from that collison.
“The point is that you couldn’t fathom the possibility that teleporting was real and doable. That’s the hurdle for most people. Belief,” he says, tapping his head. “It’s the major prevention to a successful teleportation. You first learn the science and then you believe you can.”
“And then I chant some ancient babble and poof, I teleport?”
He shrugs. “Or you don’t and you sever your body from your consciousness. Or mangle your physical body. Or you disappear altogether. Never to be see again, stuck forever in the cosmos.”
I nod, having expected something like this to be unveiled casually. “And now you’ve finally disclosed why everyone in this bloody Institute isn’t popping around, teleporting their asses off.”
“Yes, it’s quite dangerous.”
“It sounds as though,” I say.
“That’s one of the reasons I’ve never taught this to anyone before. No one has ever had the right talents and level of power,” Trey says.
“So either your crush on me has gone too deep or you want me dead,” I say.
“The decision to make your first attempt to teleport is yours now that you know the risk. If you’re still interested in proceeding then I’ll share the process, which is surprisingly easy. But you have to be sure you want to do this, since it is incredibly dangerous,” Trey says.
“I’m not a fucking pansy. Tell me how to do this awesome party trick,” I say.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As I intended, I teleport behind the center column in the atrium of the Galleria mall in Dallas, Texas. Even after practicing a hundred times, the experience of teleporting makes me feel like my skeleton is being ripped through the pores of my body. It’s way worse than using a GAD-C, which I no longer really need. Hell, I don’t have to walk to the bloody post box if I don’t want to. I can just pop wherever I want on the globe. However, Trey has asked that I limit teleporting since apparently materializing out of the polluted air is somewhat uncommon. I’m only to use teleporting when traveling to secure locations or when I’m in desperate need. I deem this situation as such, since I’m here to intervene in something that although we don’t know much about, we suspect is of great threat.
Worse than feeling like my bones have been reduced to dust and then reassembled is visiting a bloody mall. I fucking hate malls. Hundreds of repulsive people milling about with their dumb faces and their sick obsession with scoring a buyer’s high. They fill up their shopping bags with rubbish they don’t need all while emptying their already pathetically low bank accounts.
The toxic fumes wafting from the food court assault my nostrils at first landing. Trey better double my salary after dealing with this shit. I withdraw the brain cell–frying gadget from my pocket. If this thing works then it might have even been worth the torture I endured listening to Aiden’s nasally-ass babble.
The screen registers each individual in my thirty-foot proximity when I switch it on, which unfortunately is more bloody dots than I care to count. There are so many dots that they overlap. Worse than that is that only one red dot sits on the screen. Mine.
Roya’s description of the person being abducted was pretty worthless. Sixty years old. Gray. Male. The only detail I got her to see was a football helmet which in the state of Texas does me no bloody good. Shit related to football is plastered everywhere. It’s like books were banned in this city and head-crushing sports assigned as a mandatory obsession.
A black dot moves on the screen and reveals a single red dot at my two o’clock. I whip my head in that direction, but there’s a sea of people in front of a shiny store front, some passing by, a few pausing to browse. I turn my attention back to the device. Another red dot appears. Then another. There’s four now. Two at my back. I swing around to find more hordes of people. But my photographic memory is excellent at snapping a picture and sifting through it until something meets the criteria of what I’m looking for. And that’s when I see him. A man, sixty-something. Gray receding hair. But the thing that grabs my attention is what he’s wearing. His back, which is to me, is covered in a huge emblem of a Cowboys football helmet. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and wind pants. Two articles of clothing that should be outlawed.
The man stands stock-still, the moving crowd parting to make their way around him. His hands hang loose by his side. His shoulders slack. This position is reminiscent of a person under hypnosis, but he’s still standing. He’s the abductee, which means… I flick my eyes to the screen. The closest red dot has moved in. It’s right in front of him. Something else on the screen catches my attention. The first red dot is moving. Roya’s vision only centered on Person G, who is to be abducted by Blocker. There should only be three Dream Travelers. This other one on the screen could just be a random Dream Traveler, but we only make up less than ten percent of the population. So to find a random one here is odd. Then that strange red dot moves in my direction. I can’t worry about this. I have to intervene and identify the blocker.
I switch my gaze to the man, Person G. He’s still in place but now beside him is a woman. She’s excessively blonde, her hair obviously the result of too many chemicals. And if that isn’t distracting enough she’s wearing a corseted red dress; the length is conservative but the slit up the side is the opposite of modest. And her heels make it so she’s eye to eye with the man beside her. She leans in and whispers something in his ear. He lifts his hand like it’s weighted by lead, slow and deliberate. Then she wraps her hand around his fingers, and I’m overwhelmed by the idea that it’s not a deal that’s been made, but rather a partnership.
No, I think but that’s the only resistance I’m allowed. My feet remain planted. My muscles somehow paralyzed, although I remain upright. Again my vision starts to morph, like it’s made of cotton candy being spun on a cone. I fight the assault on my mind and too briefly the image of the pair snaps into focus. The woman, Blocker, turns back, her hand still pressed into the wrinkled man’s. Her eyes connect with mine and she winks one large dark eye at me. And then as the corners of my vision turn into singed pieces of parchment, burning in on itself, the woman’s eyes snap to something just behind me. I whip around and there standing before me is a figure. A blur of a figure, like I’m seeing it in a funhouse mirror.