“Wait, did you just hear me?”
Renee jumped. That time she was certain of what she heard.
“Blake?” she called out. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me! Where are you? As soon as the door closed, everything went dark.”
“I’m in your head,” she replied. “It’s the same over here. Kind of… hey what’s that?”
“What’s what?” Blake asked nervously. “Renee?”
“Hang on,” she said with an air of distraction.
A soft glow in the distance caught her eye. As she walked toward it, Renee noticed that it wasn’t one light, but a complicated network of glowing fibers that pulsed with a tangible energy. Small flashes of bright light raced, almost too fast to be seen, in all directions along the network.
“Oh my goodness,” she breathed in awe. “Blake, I think I found your brain.”
Chapter 16
“You what?”
Blake yanked the door open so fast that he tripped and fell face first onto the Caribbean beach, which had reappeared when he came through the portal. Renee shielded her eyes from the sudden and bright sunlight and shot an annoyed glare in his direction.
“What did you do that for?”
“Did you really think I’m going to let you mess around with my brain?” Blake asked, spitting gritty bits of sand out of his mouth.
“I wasn’t going to mess with anything,” Renee shot back. “It was really cool. What did you see in my head?”
“It was just really dark, but there was this sort of eerie glow.”
“That was it!” Renee said excitedly. “That was my brain! Did you get a good look at it?”
“What? No!” Blake gave her an odd look. “It was weird enough with the whole world disappearing. I wasn’t about to go exploring.”
“Well you just have to go back then,” Renee told him bluntly.
“No way,” he said, backing up as he put his hands out in front of him. “I am not doing that again.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was creepy!”
“For real?” Renee stared incredulously at Blake with her hands on her hips. “Your life is literally in the hands of some mad doctors who want us to fight to the death and you think going into my head alone is creepy because… because… what, it’s dark? How does that even make sense?”
“It just… does.”
Of course, when she put it like that, it did seem rather silly, but Blake wasn’t going to cave.
“Anyway, you don’t know for sure if that thing really was my brain. But even if it was, what would happen to me if you accidentally did something to damage it? For that matter, what would happen to you? You’d be stuck in a broken mind.”
“How can either of us get more broken than we already are?”
“Trust me, it could happen,” Blake replied with a slight shiver.
“Ugh!” Renee rolled her eyes. “Look, we could still communicate with one another, right?”
“Well… yeah,” he said with a shrug. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t it? Look, Blake, maybe we can talk through what we see in each other’s heads and learn something important. I mean… if there’s a chance we might be able to escape, don’t you want to take it?”
“I don’t know,” Blake answered honestly. He had known this issue was eventually going to come up again, but he had hoped that Renee would eventually realize that what she wanted was impossible.
“Please,” she pleaded. “I promise that I’ll come right back if it looks like we’re putting ourselves in danger.”
Admittedly, most of Renee’s ideas and observations had proven to be helpful to them so far, but this still made him nervous.
“I’m holding you to that,” Blake found himself saying with an exasperated sigh. He was beginning to question his own sanity.
“Thank you!” Renee threw her arms around him in a brief hug before making the door to her mind appear once again. “Let’s do this.”
As Blake pushed open the door, they were again plunged into darkness. The nearly complete sensory deprivation was almost too much for him to bear, but he took a deep breath and looked for the glow he had seen before.
“Are you there?” he called out into the void.
“I’m here,” Renee called back, walking toward the glowing matrix that had caught her attention before.
She watched in fascination as the pulses of light blinked by, rapidly relaying information from one part of Blake’s mind to another. She walked along the outer edge, looking at it from all angles. This time, however, she noticed something that she hadn’t seen previously. The center glowed brightest and all of the light pulses seemed to be coming from there.
“Are you seeing the same thing I am?” she asked Blake.
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing,” Blake replied, taking a step closer to the only source of light in the darkness. It reminded him of a giant, electric spider web.
Completely mesmerized, Renee reached out and absently ran her fingertips down the length of the strand closest to her.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Blake suddenly shouted.
“Huh?” Renee withdrew her hand quickly. “What happened?”
“I felt something,” Blake said with a shiver. “A chill just ran down my arm. It was like someone put their hand on my shoulder and dragged it down my arm.”
“Wait, really?” Renee said, a little too excitedly, in Blake’s opinion. “How about this?”
She reached out and touched another part of the web, watching as the light pulsed from her hand, to the brilliant center, and back.
“Hey!” Blake jumped again.
“Did that hurt?” she asked, pulling her hand back.
“Uh… Whatever you just did, you probably shouldn’t do it again,” Blake informed her in a ragged voice.
“Why? What happened?”
“Just… trust me, okay?” Blake’s voice was tinged with embarrassment.
“Oh. Oh! I’m sorry!”
Renee jumped back, absolutely mortified as she realized what Blake wasn’t saying. “I don’t know if this is just our brains,” she said, fixing her gaze on one darkened area. As she peered closer, she noticed that the strands connecting it to the center were broken, much like the broken filament on a burnt out light bulb.
“You think?” There was a hint of irritation in Blake’s voice.
“I think this might be our whole nervous system.”
“Then it’s probably not something you should be messing with!”
“Blake, listen, this is important,” she said, placing her hand on the darkened area. “What do you feel now?”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s what I thought,” Renee murmured. “Blake, I… I think you’re partially paralyzed.”
“What? Why do you think that?” he asked cautiously as his stomach suddenly sank.
“There’s a dark spot that looks like a burnt out connection. When I touched it, you felt nothing,” she explained, her voice tinged with sadness.
“I’m not surprised,” Blake said in a measured voice. He knew he had been near death when he was brought to the hospital. He knew that outside of his head, there was likely very little left of him that was unbroken. Yet hearing Renee tell him what he should have already suspected was more upsetting than he would have expected.
“I’m coming back over,” he informed her.
“Wait!” she pleaded. “Is there anything like that on my side? Are there any dark spots?”
Blake walked completely around the web. Light pulsed from the bright center outward and over every tendril. He saw nothing like what Renee had described, which came as a bit of a shock. Just from what he saw of her memories, the accident had been brutal. It would not have surprised him to discover that she suffered a terrible spinal injury, yet if he was looking at her mind correctly, she was whole. A small, dark part of his mind felt that this was somehow unfair, but he pushed t
hose feelings back, burying them as deep as he could.
“No,” he said at last. “You’re pretty much intact.”
With that, he reopened the door and stepped back into his mind, relieved when he was met by the bright, early morning sun.
Renee was kneeling in the sand, close to the remains of their fire from the previous night. As the world reappeared, she looked at her now empty hands and then up at Blake with a sad, yet hopeful expression.
“I thought maybe I could reconnect the nerves,” she said in a small voice.
“I don’t think our physical bodies work quite like the worlds we create in here,” Blake said, sitting down on the beach next to her. “Not that it matters much anyway.”
“It does matter,” she said. Though her voice was quiet, there was a fierce intent behind her words. “I’m not giving up, Blake. We’re not dead and I refuse to live the rest of my life in a hell of someone else’s creation!”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t want to either and that’s why we’ve got to keep working together to make sure that we keep the ball in our court as much as possible.”
Though he truly believed what he said, Blake couldn’t deny that Renee’s desperation to escape their current situation was contagious. But at the same time, he couldn’t deny the very real fact that life inside his head was far less dangerous than life in the real world ever was. True, he was now eighteen years old. If they managed to escape, no court in the country could force him to live with his stepfather. But was he truly safe? Was there anywhere he could go where Randy couldn’t find him? It had been difficult enough to hide from the monster when he was whole. The thought of facing him while confined to a wheelchair was beyond terrifying.
“But it never stays in our court for very long,” Renee countered with a meaningful glance at the ship that had appeared on the horizon. “Look at that,” she said, nudging Blake. “We’ve only been here a few days. Why do I get the feeling that’s not a random cruise ship?”
“Because you’re being obnoxiously pessimistic,” Blake chided as he got up and pulled Renee to her feet as well. “And because we’ve been sitting here on this beach becoming complacent for way too long. Come on. They’re far enough that they won’t be a threat for a couple of days and we still have a whole island to explore.”
“All right, but there better be a cannon somewhere on this island,” she grumbled.
“And damage the ship that we’re going to steal?” Blake asked with mock surprise.
“We already have a ship,” Renee reminded him.
“What kind of a pirate are you?” he asked with a laugh. “If their ship is better, we steal their ship. What we need is a look out. Some place higher up where we can watch and then ambush them. Once it’s safe, we’ll plunder the ship for booty.”
“It’s always about booty with you boys, isn’t it?” Renee teased, rolling her eyes as she trudged along behind Blake. Though she kept her tone light, she couldn’t shake her disappointment in the fact that they weren’t any closer to finding a way to escape. She had hoped that they might have, at the very least, found a clue as to what prevented them from waking up, but they were no closer now than before.
Admittedly, Renee found it somewhat ironic, and more than a little hypocritical, that she was trying to escape from a place that had technically been her secret fantasy for most of her life. If she ignored the fact that she was in constant danger, this was a world where she had the ultimate power to do pretty much anything she ever wanted. Sure, she had to make some compromises for Blake’s sake, but she was sure that eventually, she would be able to convince him to give a magical world a chance. Who knows? Maybe she might even find the old west interesting as well. But it didn’t matter how much she rationalized the potential they had in this world, the need to escape was ever present.
“Hold up.”
They had climbed pretty far into the jungle-like interior of the island when Blake held his arm out to stop Renee from going any farther. “Did you do that?” he asked, pointing to the door that materialized in the side of a massive mango tree.
“No,” Renee said, pulling out her spyglass and pointing it back toward the shore. The boat was still pretty far off in the horizon. “We’re not in any danger.”
“That we can see,” Blake noted. “We might be better off straying on the side of caution.” He reached out to grab the handle.
“Blake, don’t!” Renee lunged and pulled him back before he could open the door. “That’s not our door.”
“What do you… oh!”
Behind Renee, another door appeared.
“I didn’t do that one either,” she said in a shaky whisper.
“Is it ours?” Blake asked with just as much tremble in his voice as Renee.
“Well, I’m legitimately scared and another door isn’t appearing, so yeah, I think that’s ours.”
As Renee spoke, the handle on the door in front of them turned slowly. Before she knew what was happening, Blake pushed her through the door into her own head and slammed it shut. Whirling back around, he froze as he came face to face with the last person he ever expected to see again.
“Hey Blake, long time no see,” the man said casually, giving Blake’s pirate costume a derisive onceover. Blake clenched his fists and took a deep, cleansing breath to calm his heart, which had begun to hammer so hard that he could hear his blood pumping in his ears.
“What the hell are you doing here, Randy?”
Chapter 17
The first thing Renee noticed after the door slammed shut was that she was alone. Well, not entirely alone. The parrot, who had been riding on her shoulder as they explored the island, had managed to come through with her. She knew that this was not the parrot from her world because that one was still down on the beach, picking grubs from the sand. As odd as that was, she was more concerned with why Blake hadn’t followed her through. The door remained and she was about to go back through when she suddenly heard Blake’s voice, as well as the voice of another man she wasn’t familiar with.
“What the hell are you doing here, Randy?”
Renee’s blood ran cold. Randy was the name of Blake’s stepfather.
Renee ran back to the door, but before she could open it, the parrot flew from her shoulder and perched itself on the doorknob. Every time she tried to reach for the handle, the bird pecked at her hand.
“Ow! What are you doing? Get out of my way!”
But the parrot did not allow her to pass. Instead, it flew at Renee, circling her as it gently herded her away from the door and into the forest.
“Where are we going?” Renee asked, feeling somewhat foolish for talking to the bird and feeling incredibly anxious the farther from the door they got. She needed to go back and help Blake. Somehow, she could still hear what was going on in his head.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked the bird. “You’re acting as some kind of link between us.”
Though the parrot didn’t answer, Renee gasped when she saw it wink one eerily familiar blue-gray eye before diving beneath a thick growth of vines. It was difficult to get through, but Renee managed to slide on her stomach and followed the peculiar bird.
“Oh my gosh!” Renee gasped. Hidden within the center of the forest was a glowing matrix exactly like the one she had seen in Blake’s head. “This is my mind, isn’t it?”
The parrot swooped up and over the matrix, diving down into the brilliant center. When she emerged again, she held in her beak an object the size of a large marble that glowed with a vaguely sinister electric violet light. For reasons that she couldn’t possibly explain, the object repulsed and frightened Renee. She backed away, unsure of what it was, or why the bird was showing her something so awful that had come from inside her own head.
But just when she couldn’t bear the sight of the object any longer, the parrot tipped its head back and swallowed the light.
“No!” Renee cried out and shielded her eyes as the bird exploded in a blinding flash of
color and lightning. For a moment, the world shimmered and time seemed to twist in on itself as Renee was bombarded by what felt like all of the knowledge in the world being fed into her brain at once. As she stood paralyzed, the cloud from the explosion that took the parrot shifted and began to transform once again into the shape of a bird. When the smoke and debris cleared, a beautiful red and gold phoenix with big, almost human, blue eyes stood blazing in front of her.
Suddenly, Renee knew exactly what she needed to do.
Randy Lawson sneered at Blake. “You dare talk to me in that tone, boy? Are you so stupid that you forgot who I am?”
Blake pulled himself up straight and looked Randy in the eye, something he never would have done in the real world without being fearful of getting a beating. But spending two years trying to survive his own subconscious gave Blake plenty of time to think about what he could have done differently had he not been damaged emotionally as much as he had been physically. What scared him now was not Randy’s presence, but the strength of his own need to extract revenge on the man who had made his life a living hell.
“I’ve forgotten nothing, Randy,” he spat. “How can I forget when I have so much to remember you by?” as he spoke, Blake tore off his shirt, exposing the countless scars that marred his arms, chest and back. “Still wondering why I never called you dad?”
“You know every damned thing I ever had to do to both you and your mother was your own fault, you worthless piece of trash. You’re going to wish I had finished you off the last time I saw you.”
Randy lunged at Blake with a closed fist, but Blake was expecting the attack. He dodged to the left, ducking under the low hanging branches of the mango tree, and laughed when he heard the sickening crack of Randy’s hand connecting with the tree’s trunk. He hoped that the bastard broke his hand.
“Learned a few tricks, did ya?” Randy taunted, trying and failing to keep the pain out of his voice. Just as Blake had expected, Randy wasn’t so tough when it came to getting the same as he dished out. Funny how bullies were all the same, no matter what age.
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