The Dream Travelers Boxed Set #2: Includes 2 Complete Series (9 Books) PLUS Bonus Material

by Sarah Noffke

  “You really know how to inspire a person to want to work with you,” Aiden says. “What is it that you’d have me do?”

  “I need you to create a device to find the location of what you probably call a wormhole and then the device needs to open it,” I say, all in a rush of matter-of-fact words.

  “Oh, is that all?” Aiden says, bursting out with a giant laugh. He pulls his glasses off and rubs his eyes, which are filling with tears from his dumb reaction.

  “Well, no. There will probably be more, but let’s start with this for now,” I say.

  “So you want me to help you find a wormhole?” he says, leaning against his workstation and crossing his feet in front of him. He’s acting cocky with his skepticism and it’s going to get him killed.

  “Door, portal, passage, whatever you want to call it. It’s important that you don’t get stuck on semantics here.”

  “Right,” Aiden says. “Because that’s the obvious hurdle in all this.”

  “Look, I can’t help it that you’re a loser who has very little imagination. Your immediate cynicism on this is not only unappreciated, but it’s hurting my feelings during this really vulnerable time in my life,” I say, pulling off the perfect amount of pity in my voice and arranging my face into something that looks pathetic.

  The scientist takes a minute to study me. Then he shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  My face then lights up with a victorious half smile. People are really too easily manipulated. “You are sorry and a fool,” I say.

  Aiden, realizing that I’m playing him now, shakes his head at me again, but this time with his lips pursed and an expression that says, “This man can’t be helped.”

  “Okay,” he says, clearing his throat. “Let’s say you find this wormhole, how do you know where it leads to? It could put you on another planet or in Mesopotamia.”

  I shake my head. “No, for as much as you know about science you’re a fucking idiot. You have spent too much time at Comic Con. Wormholes don’t really connect with other time periods. They can’t because time is linear. Wormholes, if you actually knew what you were talking about, connect the three worlds because they are all connected. There’s doors between these dimensions, let’s call them.”

  He shakes his head before I’m done speaking. “No, that isn’t right.”

  “Look, spacewaster, I’m going to need you to forget everything you know about science because it’s wrong,” I say.

  “But I have a PhD—”

  “Shut the fuck up. You learned from a bunch of humans how this world works,” I say, cutting him off.

  “Einstein actually,” he says, proudly.

  “A human nonetheless. I’m about to teach you something if you will shut your dumb mouth,” I say.

  “You’re going to teach me about science?” he says on the edge of a laugh.

  “Yes,” I say with a sigh.

  “And you didn’t learn this from humans?” he says.

  I shake my head.

  “Aliens then?” he says.

  “You’re a fucking moron,” I say.

  “Wait, are you telling me that you’ve had conversations with God?” he says.

  “No, that’s how a hippie would describe it. I’ve seen the fabric of this universe. Of our world,” I say.

  “But how?” he says.

  “I turned off the fucking television, unlike most buffoons on this earth. I listened.” I throw my arm out wide. “What none of the fuckers on this planet get is that all the information is locked inside the conscious mind. It’s a bank and we all have an account there if we aren’t brain dead. Hell, even if we are. The information is infinite, which is why most know so little. But spend time studying the vault and the answers to anything can be found.”

  “Then why are you even talking to me? Why are you coming to me for answers, which is how it appears,” he says, and I want to slap the smug look off his face.

  “Call it a shortcut. Finding information in the universal mind isn’t always fast or easy,” I say. And it’s true. I can search for the how, but Aiden will know it without me digging on my own and I strangely know that.

  “Okay, so tell me about science,” he says.

  “You know as a Dream Traveler that there’s this world,” I say, pointing to the ground, meaning the physical realm.

  “Right,” he says, already shaking his head. “And then there’s the dream travel realm. The dreamscape.”

  “Good job, monkey face,” I say. “There’s rules for each realm. Here we’re entitled to the physical and consciousness. In the dreamscape we only have our consciousness.”

  “Are you saying there’s wormholes between the physical realm and the dreamscape?” he says.

  “Yes, probably. Most likely. There’s all sorts of remnants of relativity,” I say.

  “Did you just say the term relativity?” he says, boasting his big attitude.

  “Shut the fuck up. I had to learn about science for this. I’m already angry about it and looking for someone to unleash my hostility on. Anyway, we don’t need to find wormholes in the physical realm because they would just lead to the dreamscape, which I can already get to,” I say.

  “Wait, how do you know they’d lead to the dreamscape?” he says, looking honestly curious now.

  I sigh heavily. Stomp over to the whiteboard sitting against a wall and pick up a marker. The smell of the ink tinges my nose when I snap the lid off it. I draw a single horizontal line.

  “This is time,” I say.

  “Yes, it’s linear,” he says.

  “The reason I know that there aren’t portals to different time periods is because of how it’s set up. Wormholes aren’t what you think they are,” I say.

  “You mean they aren’t doors into another place that’s possibly light years away but can be accessed through a single portal?” he says.

  “Yes, they are that, but you think you can find one in 2017 and it will stick you in 1981,” I say, ticking two separate places on the line.

  “Right. That’s the common assumption. And that I can find a wormhole in the main hall of the Institute that will put me in outer space,” he says.

  “Where’d you thankfully die. But wormholes don’t really exist—”

  “Well, I know that, it’s just cool science fiction,” he says.

  “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say, wormholes don’t exist like you think they do.” I hold the pen up. “Everything is grounded in an archetype and wormholes do exist but they aren’t doors to things millions of miles apart or time periods decades apart. They are just doors and they open into the space next to them, which is how passages work, if you remember,” I say.

  “So that’s the reason they wouldn’t work with time, because it’s linear?” he says.

  “Good job, dumbass. Now before I said there are only three dimensions in this world we live in. There’s the physical realm,” I say, drawing a rectangle. Then I draw under it a matching rectangle. “This is the dreamscape.”

  “And you suppose there’s doors between those realms because they are touching, is that right?” Aiden says.

  “I presume, yes. But that’s not what I’m after. I want to find the door to the third realm, which I assume is located here,” I say, drawing a matching rectangle under the dreamscape realm.

  “And that is?” he says.

  “The place where there’s no physical bodies and no consciousness, only the subconscious,” I say.

  “You mean the Underworld?” he says.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Fuckity fuck,” I say, slamming my open palm on the conference room table.

  Trent stares back at me with a look of uncertainty. Not only does he never know how to respond to me, but he’s more on edge due to my recent loss. If fuckers like him don’t stop looking at me like I’m a fragile little puppy hopping aroun
d on three legs, then I’m going to hypnotize them all until their heads explode. I’ve had enough of everyone’s worthless sympathy. They aren’t even giving it because they want to help me. They want to help themselves. They want to feel better about themselves. In my situation they’d need someone to hold them up and they think they can do that for me. But they can’t because I don’t do pity. I’m fucking allergic to it.

  “I realize that we didn’t see this coming but—”

  “I did see this coming!” I yell, now slamming a closed fist on the table.

  Trent pulls back, looking shocked. “You did…?”

  “Yes, but then Dahlia had to poorly time her death and I got overly distracted,” I say, remembering connecting the pieces of the massive theft on the optometry offices.

  The whites of Trent’s eyes when they widen are a stark contrast to his dark skin. “Ren—”

  “Don’t Ren me,” I say. People don’t like how flippant I am about everything that’s happened. It makes them uncomfortable, but I’m so bloody tired of worrying about how other people are dealing with the way I’m processing my situation. Fuck them and their selfish hearts. They use them to feel all right, feeling scared and reluctant to actually experience life.

  “I connected that the retina scans taken at optometrist offices were going to be used to steal yet more information,” I say, remembering the epiphany but then getting pulled away before I could put an agent on the case.

  “How could you have possibly known that the retina scans would be used to gain top-level security to the Pentagon?” Trent says.

  I drop my chin and regard him behind a repulsed expression. “I’m Ren-Fucking-Lewis and it’s not my first day on this job, as it appears it is for you. For God’s sake, Trent, you’re going to have to get a whole lot better at this job and quick. I’m not always going to be here to think for you.”

  “Well, I guess I could see making the connection now, but… Wait, what did you just say?” he says, the last part of my statement finally sinking in. God, he’s so fucking slow.

  “I don’t repeat myself. You know that,” I say, and now drum my fingers on the conference table, trying to figure out the next ten moves.

  “Are you quitting? I mean, if you need some time off then it’s perfectly understandable after every—”

  “I’m not a fucking quitter,” I say.

  “Oh, then why are you saying you won’t always be around to help me?”

  He’s bloody confused and it’s kind of cute to watch his dumb brain try to piece together the fragments of a riddle I’m constantly swinging in front of his face. “Let’s just say that I’m relocating.”

  “Oh, well, but you’ll still be able to work for the Institute, right?” he says.

  “The commute would be a bitch, so no. I’m guessing that this will be one of my last cases,” I say, and enjoy the look of horror that springs to his face before he washes it away with something a little less pathetic.

  “But Ren,” he says.

  “Don’t worry your ugly little head about that now. I’m here to hold your hand for a bit longer. Right now we need to focus on these current case details.”

  He nods, trying to muster a new confidence. “Yeah, of course.”

  “So the security cameras were disabled when the breach happened at the Pentagon? Can we get agents to time travel to get a glimpse of the perpetrator?” I ask, running over the details I memorized from the case file.

  “Uhhh… Yeah, I tried that but it didn’t work,” he says.

  “Why?” I say with a growl. I’m certain I’m not going to like the answer.

  “The person appears to have been invisible,” he says.

  “What? Are you fucking kidding me? The thief has the skill of invisibility. Brilliant.” I throw my hands in the air. “Yes, now I officially quit! Fuck this job,” I say. Invisibility?! Really? I’ve seen it all, or at least I thought I had, but now to have an adversary who is invisible. That’s bloody absurd.

  “Yeah, it appears that’s their dream travel skill. That’s our best guess, that we’re dealing with a Dream Traveler.”

  “Or someone stole that Potter kid’s invisibility cloak,” I say.

  “I think it’s most likely that this is a skill, a unique one,” he says.

  I narrow my eyes at the dumbass wasting my time. “Thanks, genius. I wasn’t being serious about the cloak.”

  “Right,” he says, covering his long forehead with his hand.

  “So the invisible man used a retina scan he stole to gain access to a top-level area of the Pentagon. Then the fucker did what? I didn’t have a chance to read the entire file,” I say, remembering seeing it come through on my phone, but deciding to only scan the first page.

  “Well, you were a bit distracted. I wavered on if I should send it over to you on that day, but I didn’t want you to be mad that I left you out,” he says.

  “Funeral. You are referring to sending me the report while I was at Dahlia’s funeral,” I say, and run my hands through my spiky red hair, which makes my hand sticky from the gel. “You know, Trent, you’re going to have to be a real man and say things directly. Stop pussy-footing around the obvious. Dahlia died. I went to her funeral. She’s gone. Deal with it as I have. I know you lie on the floor of your room crying and listening to her music for most nights of your lame life, but you’re going to have to move on now. No more sugary-sweet ballads. No more crying yourself to sleep to the sound of her voice. You will survive. God, I hope you can fucking survive after this because I don’t have the time to find your replacement.”

  Trent doesn’t look as shocked as he should and it kind of pisses me off. Actually he looks curious. “How do you do that?”

  I yawn loudly. “Do what?”

  “Cut off the emotions,” he says.

  “I’m a man. I don’t cut off emotions. I quarantine them. I process when appropriate,” I say and then pause, considering whether to continue this lecture or not. He may not be ready. “Trent, at the end of the day, this is just fucking life. We live. We die. Shit happens. It’s really not as big a deal as everyone likes to make it. The worst thing in the world can happen and guess fucking what? It doesn’t really matter. The world goes on. You only think things will break you. That you’re vulnerable, but that’s a bloody choice. If you knew what I know then you wouldn’t look so pathetic. You wouldn’t act so pathetic.”

  “What do you know?” he says.

  “That we’re all bloody gods, capable of extraordinary powers. Life is limitless to those who believe this,” I say.

  “Well, that’s an incredibly hard reality to fully digest,” Trent says, but I can tell he wants to believe me.

  “That’s because you’re a failure. Those who can’t believe in their full greatness will never experience it. You have to believe it to see it, not see it to believe it,” I say.

  “Right, I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks,” he says, but this isn’t something he can easily digest. “So the perpetrator stole records on civilian and military individuals.”

  “Any correlation with the stolen data?” I say, having suspected that there would be a crime using the retina scans, but not knowing what it would be. It seemed obvious that it would be on a high-security place like the Pentagon, especially since that security is brand new as it’s a part of the current President’s legislation.

  “We’re looking into correlations, although a huge database was accessed and the files copied,” he says. Trent has no idea what’s going on here. And even worse, he doesn’t know what to do next. Thankfully for him I know exactly what to do. I turn for the exit.

  “Wait! Where are you going? What do you think is going on?” Trent says at my back.

  I pause and rotate around to face him. “I’m going to interrogate the one person who can identify our thief. The one who is potentially behind all this,” I say.

  “Who?” he says.

  “Oh, don’t you want to be s
urprised?” I say, and turn and stalk for the exit.

  ***

  Just as I did on the night of the election, I teleport into Douglas’s office. However, now the fuckhead does all his work from the White House Oval Office, thanks to me. As I suspected, the President of the United States is hunched behind a desk, his face screwed up from almost thinking. He’s staring at several papers, flipping through them madly.

  “Reading is tough for you, isn’t it?” I say and as I assumed, the knowledge of my sudden appearance makes him jump.

  “Oh dear lord!” he says, clutching his chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “I have that effect on people,” I say, pinning both my hands on the front of the President’s desk. “Please know, if I so desire it I can do far worse than give you a heart attack.”

  “I’ve been checking in every day. Reporting everything that comes across my desk,” he says, his voice frantic.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I say, and watch him visibly relax, his shoulders pulling down away from his ears.

  “Oh good, because I was worried. I don’t understand half of what comes across my desk, so the act of reporting it is difficult,” he says.

  “That’s because you have the IQ of a ferret and when I say that I feel I’ve actually insulted the little rodents,” I say.

  “I’ve always liked ferrets. They’re neat looking,” he says, and then to my horror he snorts with a dumb laugh. President of the fucking United States. Americans are all brain dead.

  With my hands still pinned on the desk I say, “Why did you push to have the retina scanners installed as the new security at the Pentagon?”

  He tucks his large chin back and regards me with a batty expression. “Honestly, I thought it sounded like a cool idea when I heard about it. Like right out of a science fiction movie.”

  I tap my fingers on the desk, impatience oozing from my every movement. “And where did you hear about this cool technology?” I say, a hint of condescension in my voice.