6

by James Phelan

  ‘You’re quite right to be concerned, Eva,’ the Professor said. ‘We agree that we must be cautious. Cody and his parents have been welcomed here but they are all being very closely watched and their access to certain things and certain information is currently restricted. We will be very careful until we can be sure that we completely trust them.’

  Eva sighed. ‘That’s good to know, thank you.’

  ‘So, with that matter dealt with,’ the Professor said, leaning forward on his elbows, ‘I believe you had quite the dream last night. We’ve just watched the replay and it’s quite intriguing. One particular image especially.’

  ‘Intriguing?’ Eva said.

  ‘This,’ Jedi said, bringing up an image, ‘is the Dendera Zodiac. In 1799, a French artist called Denon found, and drew, a copy of the circular zodiac, which was discovered in a temple ceiling in Dendera in Egypt.’

  ‘How does this help us?’ Eva asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ the Professor said.

  ‘In 1820,’ Jedi went on, flicking through digital images, ‘the ceiling was taken apart and transported to France. It ended up in the Louvre, where it’s still on display today. Experts examined it and calculated that it dates back to 50 BCE, going on the placement of the five planets in the design, a pattern that occurs only once every thousand years.’

  ‘OK,’ Eva said. ‘I remember dreaming about something like this, but I was definitely not in the Louvre in my dream. And what I saw was a bit different to that.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Jedi said. ‘The Dendera Zodiac is a map of the stars, showing the twelve constellations of the zodiac. These were used in the ancient Egyptian calendar, which was based on lunar cycles of about thirty days, and so on.’

  Pictures of the zodiac as Eva knew it flickered up on the screen.

  ‘And this is vital news to us because …’ Eva’s eyes were starting to glass over.

  ‘Because,’ Lora said, jumping in, ‘as you said, what you dreamed about last night was not the Dendera Zodiac.’

  Jedi changed pictures. Now the screen showed another kind of zodiac.

  ‘This is much older, about a thousand years or so,’ the Professor said, ‘say around 1300–1200 BCE.’

  ‘During the reign of Ramses the Great,’ Lora clarified, to stress the relevance.

  ‘Notice anything significant about it?’ Jedi said.

  Eva stood and studied it closely, not sure at first, then stepped back to see it better.

  This one has twelve signs. But what’s that in the middle? A thirteenth sign?

  26

  SAM

  ‘What about you?’ Sam asked. ‘What’s your story?’

  ‘My story probably sounds like a sad one, but it has a happy ending,’ Arianna said.

  Sam was silent and let her continue in her own time.

  Her steely eyes flickered vacantly at the landscape rushing by out the window.

  ‘The sad part is right at the start,’ she said, ‘I never knew my real parents. I was in an orphanage. I was told later that they had been killed—an accident, on the road.’

  ‘Oh, man. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s been a long time. I was just a baby, so it’s all I’ve ever really known.’

  Sam was silent.

  ‘It’s OK … I was in state care and got lucky, very lucky—so many are not—I was almost immediately adopted.’

  ‘This is in Moscow?’ Sam asked.

  ‘St Petersburg,’ she said, twitching at the sound of the train blasting its horn as it shot through a crossing. ‘At least at first. I grew up there, then we were in Moscow for some time, then a few years in Germany, where I went to an international school and received special gymnastics training.’

  ‘Sounds like your adoptive parents were very supportive,’ Sam said.

  Arianna nodded.

  ‘They are the best kind of people. Then, when I was about twelve, some government agents from Moscow turned up, along with the local German authorities, and explained that the paperwork had been incorrect, that my parents hadn’t been killed after all.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a lie. Of course we didn’t know it then. It’s what the Hypnos do—take Dreamers from their families and put them into orphanages so that they can be brainwashed. But a mistake was made—I was never meant to be adopted. They showed up, and they took me to this place in Siberia. There was nothing my parents could do. I was taken to the science facility we are going to now. That’s where they put the chip in my head to steal the dreams.’

  ‘But you got out,’ Sam said.

  ‘I made a good show of pretending that I accepted their methods, played the part of being the good girl. So after a couple of months, once they knew the chip was working, they let me leave. I went straight to our family friends in Krasnoyarsk, where we’re headed now.’

  ‘Have the Hypnos ever tried to find you?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. My parents and I changed our names, I dyed my hair and changed my appearance in the last four years, and we never spend too long in the same area. That’s why you saw the wrong name in your dream. Nika Garin is the name I’m using at the moment, but my real name is Arianna—Arianna Barinova.’ She smiled shyly.

  ‘Wow, so you’ve really had a life on the run, in a way?’ Sam asked.

  She nodded. ‘I don’t think the chips can track locations, at least not the one I was given back then, so I wanted to disappear, get the Hypnos out of my life as much as possible.’

  ‘I can totally understand that, I would too. But it’s great you were able to be with your parents again, and that they appreciate gymnastics.’

  Arianna smiled. ‘They’re Russian, gymnastics is in our blood, ha! But yes, they’re great—they support any dream that I want to follow … dream … that’s funny …’ she trailed off.

  ‘Let’s try and get some rest,’ Sam said. ‘What’s ahead is going to be intense.’

  ‘Intense?’ Arianna asked.

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Ah. And so far this day has not been crazy enough for you?’

  Sam smiled. ‘So far it’s like any other Wednesday for me. But yeah, I’m thinking it’s going to get much more crazy.’

  ‘Good,’ Arianna said. ‘I like a little crazy, especially when it comes to finally taking on the Hypnos.’

  Neither Sam nor Arianna could sleep, so they bought food from the diner car and played with an old deck of cards for dried fruit and nuts. The refuelling stop had been and gone. Sam tried to use a payphone to call the Academy but, frustratingly, it was out of service. Sam’s attempts to borrow a phone to make an international call were greeted with stony silences and a distinct lack of offered phones.

  I guess I’ll just have to be ‘missing’ for a few hours longer.

  Sam tried not to think about how worried everyone at the Academy would be.

  I am supposed to be saving the world, after all. What would they do if I did end up being … gone? Who’s the back-up Sam?

  ‘Can you tell me more about your time at this place?’ Sam asked, flaking out at cards again and cursing his lack of concentration.

  It took Arianna a while to answer. ‘It’s where they take us,’ she said. ‘All the known Dreamers.’

  ‘What? In the whole of Russia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long were you there for?’

  ‘Months.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They conducted tests. They set it up like a school, but we realised that we were all there for our dreams. They tried controlling how much we slept and used different kinds of drugs to see what effects they had. When I saw that those who were obedient but of no use were let go, I made sure that I flunked out as soon as possible.’

  ‘And the Dreamer chip thing?’

  She turned around in her seat, holding her ponytail of red hair out of the way. Near the top of her spine at the back of her head, was a tiny white vertical scar.

  ‘That’s it?’ Sam said.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes,’ she replied, sitting back. ‘I’ve heard stories that the Nyx used to try to remove them, but it never worked out. It’s practically inside the spinal column.’

  ‘Wow, that’s horrible,’ Sam said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t mean that you’re horrible!’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘And you guys have never tried to take on this facility in Siberia before?’

  ‘No.’ Arianna looked out at the landscape, which was now a grey-white scene of barren farmland and distant wilderness. ‘Apart from the natural defences, as a former high-security military site it is still guarded around the clock.’

  ‘And why do you think you can storm the compound now?’

  Arianna gave a sly grin. ‘Because we have discovered another way in,’ she replied. ‘And it’s how we’re going to shut it down once and for all.’

  27

  The town had a name, though Sam couldn’t pronounce it. It was more a collection of roadhouses and mechanics’ workshops along what was wide enough to be a four-lane highway but lacked any painted lane markings. They crunched their way across the snow to the meeting place—a truck-stop diner that, aside from the prices and signage, would have looked just as at home in North America.

  Boris had traded his beaten-up taxi for a four-wheel drive that looked three times older than Sam. He was waiting inside, behind the frosted glass, giving a thumbs up and breaking into a grin at their appearance from the train.

  ‘What I would give to have my Stealth Suit back,’ Sam said, rubbing his hands together as they walked.

  ‘Your what?’ Arianna looked puzzled.

  ‘Stealth Suit,’ Sam said. ‘It’s made from a type of material that changes to whatever the wearer wants or needs. Right now, I’d have mine be a wrap-around feather quilt … man, I think I’d sleep standing up if that were the case. Is it always this cold here?’

  ‘No,’ Arianna said. ‘It should not be like this. The weather has gone upside down.’

  ‘Upside-down weather for an upside-down world,’ Sam muttered to himself. He opened the door for Arianna, and immediately the heat from inside the diner blew out and greeted them, along with the smells of breakfast which made Sam’s stomach grumble.

  They exchanged greetings and gave Boris an explanation of what had occurred at the Kremlin.

  ‘Can I use your phone to call my friends?’ Sam asked Boris finally.

  ‘It’s dead out here,’ Boris replied. ‘Only satellite phones work long distance here.’

  ‘There may be a payphone,’ Arianna said, looking around.

  ‘I’ll check,’ Sam said, and went for a walk. He found the payphone by the bathrooms, picked up the receiver and put it to his ear.

  Then he realised that the cord was cut.

  He replaced the receiver.

  The phone was broken, probably years ago, and had since turned into a planter box for mould and some bright yellow toadstools.

  ‘Great, do no phones work in Russia?’ he said and ambled back to the table. The diner was full of steam and the smell of bacon and onions cooking. ‘No luck again.’

  ‘Someone on the team will have a satellite phone at the farmhouse,’ Boris said.

  ‘The team?’

  ‘For our Hypnos assault,’ he replied. ‘They’re meeting us there in about twelve hours.’

  ‘How many people are in the team?’ Sam asked.

  ‘About fifty. All ready to take over the facility.’

  The waitress came over and asked for their order. Either her tone or local dialect confused Sam’s earpiece, so without a translation, Sam simply looked at the menu and pointed, and five minutes later he had a cup of coffee, a glass of apple juice, and three plates of food.

  ‘Oh, these are good,’ Sam said, heaving down his second plate of dumplings. ‘What do you call these?’

  ‘Pierogi.’

  ‘What’s the meat in them?’ Sam said, adding hot sauce from a basket of condiments on the table. ‘Lamb? Beef? Man, they’re delicious.’

  Arianna conferred with Boris, and they laughed and she said to Sam, ‘Boris calls such meat fillings in establishments like this … how do you say this—mystery meat?’

  Sam swallowed hard.

  A memory returned, swirled around the back of his mind.

  A diner. Not unlike this one.

  Sam smiled.

  Tobias and I were in a diner like this, before Denver.

  ‘What is it?’ Arianna said, eating a roll of cheese and bright purple borsch.

  ‘A memory, of a friend from back home,’ Sam said slowly.

  ‘Where’s your friend now?’ Boris asked.

  Sam’s smile faded. ‘I’m not sure … we got separated. He was in Texas when I was in Denver.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Arianna said. Again she spoke rapid-fire Russian with Boris, who then got out his backpack and passed a file over the table. ‘This is what we could find on Denver.’

  Sam opened the file—it was a stack of printouts from news websites.

  The first headline read:

  Nuclear Disaster Narrowly Averted

  at Denver International Airport

  The article that followed explained the incident as a radiation leak from a plane at the airport. But other articles were quick to poke holes in the official story, suggesting a cover-up of everything from a military training exercise gone wrong to pointing the finger at foreign extremists or a possible explosion at a nearby nuclear processing facility.

  ‘I can’t believe that I was there …’ Sam said.

  ‘Your escape pod was jettisoned from a facility there called the Ark,’ Arianna said.

  ‘I don’t remember an escape pod. I don’t remember how I got out … or what happened.’ Sam closed the file, not wanting to think about the fate of the others he’d known to be there, let alone all the civilians who may have been caught up in the mayhem.

  ‘You will remember,’ Arianna said. ‘This time tomorrow, your memory will double. In a week, it will be yours again—back to normal, I mean.’

  ‘Great, then I’ll just forget the little things.’

  ‘Little things?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said, ‘like forgetting to brush my teeth and feed the dog, stuff like that.’

  ‘You brush your dog’s teeth?’ Boris said.

  They laughed.

  ‘Actually, I think my mum did brush Scout’s teeth,’ Sam said, then he went quiet as he recalled his family.

  Where are they?

  His strained memories were interrupted when Boris brought out another file from his bag, this one with several maps and schematics.

  ‘This is from the explosion that happened at Tunguska in 1908,’ Arianna explained. ‘Reported to the public as an asteroid collision, but it is crucial to us in other ways.’

  ‘Why?’ Sam asked, flicking through the notes.

  ‘We believe the site was the location of Russia’s first attempt at building a Tesla-type dreaming tower.’

  ‘And that is …’

  ‘That is how they used to read dreams,’ Arianna said. ‘By tapping into a little-known frequency that transmits through the earth’s ionosphere.’

  ‘Right, right, of course, the Tesla frequency,’ Sam added. ‘Like the antenna used at the Eiffel Tower by the Dreamer Council,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Know it?’ Sam said. ‘I was at the Tower when the Council was attacked by that traitor Mac and his cronies. I went from the secret chambers underneath it all the way to the top, and off it, that day!’

  ‘You will have to tell me about it sometime,’ Arianna said.

  ‘I will,’ Sam replied. ‘But tell me about Tunguska.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly what happened, but somehow the explosion there wiped the facility off the map. The new one was built underground and they have devised a way to direct an electronic beam into the atmosphere, doing away with antennas.’


  ‘And they’re reading people’s dreams that way?’

  ‘Reading, stealing, take your pick.’

  ‘And that’s where they take Dreamers to implant them with these microchips.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So,’ Sam said. ‘How exactly are we going to break into this place?’

  Boris broke into a huge grin.

  28

  ALEX

  ‘City Hall?’ Alex said, looking up at the imposing building in downtown Manhattan, across the road from their subterranean hide-out where they’d been tinkering with the monolithic Tesla Coils. ‘You’re going to steal power from City Hall?’

  ‘It’s got masses of power going in,’ Shiva said. ‘And sky-high generating capacity.’

  ‘And how do you propose we get in,’ Alex asked, noting the cops milling about, ‘let alone tap into their power grid and siphon off a few megawatts?’

  ‘Well, we are from the power company, after all,’ Shiva said, changing their Stealth Suits to appear as government electricians. ‘And we’re not going in the front door. We’re going under.’

  Alex shook his head. ‘I just knew you were going to say that. But man, if we get caught—I’ve been in trouble with the law here before, they don’t fool around.’

  ‘Then we don’t get caught.’

  ‘They’ll think we’re terrorists,’ Alex persisted.

  ‘Relax,’ Shiva said. ‘We’re not going to get caught.’

  ‘I think that’ll do us,’ Shiva said, triple-checking the connection. ‘Yep, I’m sure of it. Come on, let’s go.’

  Alex followed Shiva, making their way through the electrical access tunnel that snaked under the road.

  ‘How do you know that it’ll be enough power for what we need to do?’ Alex asked, as Shiva gave him a hand out of the narrow tunnel full of dust and grime.

  ‘It’s heaps,’ Shiva said. ‘Just you wait and see.’

  They stood in the exchange room where several tunnels split off.

  ‘This one,’ Alex said, leading the way. Up ahead they could see a glow stick that Alex had left behind.