by Amy Plum
“You’re here now,” I say. “You’re safe.”
He pauses, thinking, then shakes his head. “No, I can’t leave them there. I can see it . . . the Void. You’re fading and it’s getting clearer. I think . . .” He sighs and lifts his hand to his heart. “I have to go back.”
What? I think, my thoughts racing. Is he hallucinating, or going back into the coma, or . . . dying?
“Listen, Fergus.” I barely knowing what I’m doing, but feel like I have to tell him what happened. “There was an accident during the test, and now the doctors think you’re all in a coma. They’re figuring out how to wake you up. But until they do, you have to be careful. One of you . . .”
His focus seems to fade. Can he hear me? I lean in and whisper into his ear. But before I can finish telling him everything I want to say, Fergus’s eyes fly up to the ceiling and he flatlines.
I look frantically toward the door. No Zhu. I rip open Fergus’s gown, pick up the defibrillator paddles, and place them above and below the heart on the left and right, like we learned in class.
And then I stop.
What am I doing? I’m a premed student, not a doctor.
This boy is dying, a voice says from inside me.
If this doesn’t work and he dies, it could be blamed on me. If I do nothing, I’m blameless.
A life is in the balance.
This could cost me my degree . . . my entry to med school . . . my career.
If you stand by and let him die, you will never forgive yourself.
This could mean ending up back in Detroit.
Better to be safe than sorry.
And then the voice inside me becomes that of my dad’s. My dad, who was always proud of me, no matter what. I hear pride and amusement blend in his low baritone voice. When have you ever taken the safe way?
That is the push I need. “Come on, Fergus,” I say, and standing back, making sure my body isn’t touching his, I press the defibrillator’s shock button.
The charge convulses Fergus’s body, arching it off the bed and back down. I wait, watching his monitor, palms sweaty with nerves as I watch the line continue to travel straight across the screen. No change.
I wipe my hands on my jeans, reapply the paddles, breathe out slowly, and give him a second charge. The brain-numbing steady high note of the flatline continues unchanged.
I breathe out one more time, reminding myself to keep my hands steady before realizing that I am actually completely calm. The fact that I am doing something . . . am able to actually act instead of being a powerless bystander, has sent me into that zone I’ve experienced before when faced with accidents. No matter how gory the compound fracture or the amount of blood pouring from a wound, if I am able to take action, I reach a sort of levelheadedness.
Which is why I am able to follow through, even when my peripheral vision catches Zhu rushing through the door, and I hear her scream, “Jaime! What the hell are you doing? Stop right now!”
I apply the third charge, and as I lift the paddles from his chest, Fergus’s heart starts beating again. Zhu races over and looks down at Fergus, then up at the monitor. She registers the flatline followed by the up-and-down zigzag of his current heartbeat, and turns slowly to face me.
That’s it, I think. I’m out of here. She’s going to have my head.
“Jaime,” Zhu says, her face drawn in wonder, “you just saved that boy’s life.”
CHAPTER 29
CATA
ANT SITS CRUMPLED IN A HEAP ON THE UNFORGIVING blank floor of the Void. Her torn shirt and blood-spattered shorts have once again transformed and look brand-new. Her hands are tucked safely in the fingerless gloves, and her hat is back, earflaps pulled down to her chin.
She kneels next to Fergus’s motionless body. He lies on his back. The ringmaster’s uniform has disappeared, and he’s wearing his regular clothes, but there’s a hole sliced through the chest of his blood-soaked T-shirt, and a pool of red has formed on the ground next to him.
Remi and Sinclair walk over from where they appeared, and the four of us crouch around Fergus’s body, watching in horror as it starts to fade.
“No! You can’t die!” sobs Ant. She throws herself across his body, arms around his neck and head on his shoulder, gluing herself to him. Like she wants to disappear along with him.
As it happened with BethAnn, the color seems to seep out of Fergus. His edges blur, and he seems on the verge of vanishing when all of a sudden, his body convulses. Ant drops her hold on him and backs away.
Ever so slowly, the color begins to return. Fergus solidifies before our eyes. The steady up-and-down movement of his chest is our proof that he is not dying. He is not gone. We wait, speechless, unsure of what to expect.
As we watch, the blood dries and then disappears. The T-shirt seems to repair itself, the edges slit by the knife pulling together and reknitting. Sinclair leans over and pulls up the hem of the shirt, exposing Fergus’s chest. His skin is smooth—no stab wound in sight.
Fergus’s eyes flutter open and he glances around at all of us. It takes him a moment to realize where he is, and then he gives Ant a weak smile. “Hey,” he breathes, “you’ve got a pretty powerful throwing arm.”
“It wasn’t me. I-I-I didn’t mean . . .” she stammers, but he shakes his head.
“I know. It was the evil clowns from your dream, which, I have to say, beat all of the rest of our nightmares by miles for sheer freak factor.” He slowly, haltingly props himself up on one elbow and looks around our group. “Where’s George?” he asks.
Ant squeezes her eyes shut and taps three times on the floor. She takes a deep breath and then, staring at the ground, says, “George wasn’t real.”
“What do you mean she wasn’t real?” I ask as a flush of horror sweeps up my spine.
“George . . . Georgina . . .” Ant looks around at us, measuring our reactions before continuing. “She was kind of this fictional companion I’ve had since I was young.” She hesitates before continuing in a tone that sounds almost shy. She’s forcing herself to talk . . . like a normal person. “George was the girl I always wished I could be: cool, brave, able to talk without sounding like a walking dictionary.”
“Are you telling us that George was your . . . imaginary friend?” Sinclair sounds like he’s about to burst into laughter. But, after a cautionary look from me, he contains himself and crosses his arms, creasing his face with an expression of concern.
“I never thought she was real,” Ant responds. “But when she appeared here in the Dreamfall, well, it was so nice to have her actually be able to take care of me that I didn’t say anything.”
“None of us would have believed you anyway,” I reassure her.
“So everything she said . . . everything she did . . .” Fergus begins, with a look straddling embarrassment and loss.
“. . . came from my head,” Ant mumbles, looking down.
I lean over to put an arm around the kid who I can’t help but still think of as a boy. Like it even matters. Fergus sits up and presses a hand to his forehead.
We are all silent, the others surely doing what I am: trying to remember everything that had happened with George since we got here. Trying to reconcile the fact that she and Ant were the same person.
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” Remi says finally. “There are supposed to be seven of us.”
Fergus stares at him, confused.
I explain. “In the last Void, when you weren’t here, we were discussing what you said about us all having sleep disorders. And we remembered about being asked to participate in this clinical trial to cure our insomnia. Something that included electroconvulsive therapy.”
“Which explains our memory loss,” adds Sinclair.
A look of amazement and then comprehension comes over Fergus’s face. “Oh my God, I was just there!” he exclaims.
“Where?” Remi asks.
“In the lab where the trial is taking place . . . the room where all our bodies are ly
ing.”
“What?” “What do you mean?” “How could . . .” We all speak at once.
“In the circus, after I got stabbed and went unconscious, I woke for a moment somewhere else. It was this clinical-looking place, and I was lying down, attached to all of these monitors. Cata, you were on a bed to my right. The one to my left was empty. There were other beds, all grouped around a computer we’re hooked up to—blinking lights, heartbeat monitors, the works.
“And there was this person there, leaning over me . . . I couldn’t really see who it was. They said that something went wrong with the experiment, and that the outside world thinks we’re in a coma. Doctors are trying to find a way to get us out. They also said . . .” Fergus pauses and looks around at the group. “. . . that BethAnn died.”
We stare at each other in shock. “Well, that answers the question about what happens if we die here,” Sinclair says.
Remi speaks back up. “But what about the seven?”
“The seven what?” Fergus asks.
“Seven test subjects. There were supposed to be seven of us in the trial,” Remi insists. “BethAnn, you, me, Ant, Cata, Sinclair, and George. So if George never existed, then who is the seventh subject? And why aren’t they here with us?”
“Maybe they pulled out of the trial at the last moment,” Sinclair ventures.
Fergus gets this horrified look on his face. “Oh my God. It can’t . . .”
“What?” I ask.
He takes a moment to think. “When I fell in the cathedral, when that static monster thing pulled me off the rope, I stayed in that nightmare.”
“How did you survive?” Remi asks.
“The monster. It actually shielded me from those killer statues until the time was up and we were able to go through the blue door directly into the circus nightmare. While he was protecting me, I thought about all of the times he had shown up. We thought he was trying to keep us from going into the Void. But I think he was actually trying to get into the Void himself.”
There is a silence as everyone processes Fergus’s words. “When I looked closely, when it wasn’t shifting from one creature to the next, I saw a guy about my age. I think he’s one of us,” he concludes. “He’s just been stuck going from nightmare to nightmare, not able to leave.”
“And we’ve been trying to kill him,” Ant says in a whisper. “We actually might have killed him. I saw him in the circus as we were leaving.”
“So did I,” I say. “He was crouching next to the Wall, not even trying to get through. He looked injured.”
“What’s wrong with him, then?” Remi asks. “Why do we all look like we do and he looks like a monster?”
Ant responds, “Our appearance to one another is obviously a projection of how we perceive ourselves, since our senses in the Dreamfall are processed by our minds without typical stimulation of our sensory organs.”
Remi just stares, unwilling to say he doesn’t understand.
“Where’s George when we need a translation?” Sinclair mumbles.
“Oh my God, Sinclair!” I scold.
“It’s okay,” Ant says, and tries again. “Our eyes, ears, hands, mouths, and noses are back in that lab. So our minds are fabricating what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell here. You see me as I see myself in my mind.”
“So that . . . person . . . sees himself as a monster?” Remi asks.
“There must be something wrong with him,” I respond, looking at Ant for her opinion. She stares at the floor until her notebook and pen appear, and begins scribbling something. No one seems to notice. By this point, we aren’t fazed by anything she does, I think with a rueful smile.
“Maybe his brain got fried by the experiment,” Sinclair offers, continuing my line of thought.
“Whatever the case,” Fergus says, “we have to try to save him.”
“Well, if this isn’t the last nightmare, like we were hoping, then we’ll have our chance to try,” Sinclair concludes.
“We worked out that we’ve been here almost six hours—the length of time we remembered the trial was supposed to last,” I explain to Fergus. “The hope was this was all just a part of the test and when it was over we’d wake up.”
“Not according to what I was told in the lab,” Fergus says. “It sounds like we’re stuck here. We’ll have to have to try to survive until the doctors find a way to get us out.”
“Or we find our own way out,” Ant says.
Everyone looks at her expectantly, like she might already have an answer, but she just shrugs.
“We might as well get ready,” I say, trying to hide the defeat in my voice. “Does everyone still have their weapons?”
Remi is wearing his knife, sheathed, as is Ant. I have mine. Sinclair must have left his behind in the tiger’s cage, where he slaughtered that poor animal. His eyes meet mine, and I can tell he knows what I’m thinking. “I saved our lives,” he whispers to me defensively.
“It was unnecessary,” I insist. He touches my arm, but I pull away. I’m not ready to forgive him.
“Listen, none of us have real fighting skills,” Fergus says. “I agree we need weapons to defend ourselves, but someone suggested more useful objects before: rope, flashlights . . . How about a lighter for fire? They could be equally useful for survival instead of focusing only on firepower.”
Remi frowns, obviously disagreeing. Sinclair just purses his lips and shrugs. Fergus stares at them, looking like he just remembered something, his brow knit in concentration.
“What?” Sinclair asks defensively.
“That person in the lab . . . They told me something strange.”
“What was it?” I ask.
Fergus looks back and forth from Remi to Sinclair, over to me and Ant, and then shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says, turning away and massaging his temples.
Ant walks a couple of steps away and sits in her meditation pose. As we watch, a crossbow appears on the ground in front of her, and then a short sword, a blanket, an industrial-sized flashlight, a coil of rope, and other objects that make it look like we’re going on a camping trip instead of the darkest corners of each other’s subconscious. She finishes with a set of five backpacks and, opening her eyes, looks up at us with an earnest expression, as if wondering if it was good enough.
“That’s amazing,” Fergus says, as we all stand and begin strapping weapons to us with the holsters and belts that Ant provided.
“I don’t even know how to use this,” Remi says, holding up the crossbow.
“From now on, this is all about survival,” I say. “About keeping ourselves—and each other—alive. After this, the Void will be practice time. We’ll need every minute we can get.”
Ant glances up at me, and her eyes are clouded with worry and guilt.
“What is it, Ant?” I ask.
Before she can answer, Fergus lets out a groan. He looks over at me, his face reddening as he raises a hand to his chest.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, rushing over to him. I put an arm around him and help him lower himself to sit on the ground. His face has turned beet red.
The others have gathered around us, and Sinclair squats in front of him, looking him in the eyes. “Are you okay, man?”
“My heart,” Fergus gasps. “Something . . . wrong . . .”
“Is this one of your narcolepsy attacks?” I ask.
“No.” Fergus chokes out the words, “Don’t know what’s wrong . . . my heart.”
“Someone . . . do something!” Ant yells as Fergus’s body goes limp.
Sinclair rolls him onto his back and presses his ear to his chest. “His heart’s still beating.”
Ant holds her fingers to Fergus’s wrist. “His pulse is fast, but not dangerously so.”
I place my palm in front of his mouth. “He’s still breathing.”
We crouch around him, staring in disbelief. And then, from all around us comes the first knock.
“Oh no. Not now!” cries Ant as the blue lights flic
ker on nearby. We scramble to our feet as the wooden door appears. As the second knock booms, it inches open with an ancient creak.
“Should we try to push Fergus away from the door so he won’t get swept through?” Remi calls as the wind starts howling around us.
“Doesn’t matter,” shouts Sinclair. “I was pretty far away that one time, and it sucked me in anyway. No one stays in the Void.”
“Who has the rope?” I yell. Ant rummages through her backpack and pulls out a coil of strong cord.
“Sinclair, pull Fergus up so that he’s sitting.” He looks at me, not understanding. “Just do it!” I yell, and as he props Fergus up, I slide down to sit behind him, my back to his.
“Tie us together,” I urge. Ant has understood and is already knotting the first loop around our torsos before encircling us again and again and then tucking the loose end under the top cord.
She flops down next to me and takes my hand, and Sinclair positions himself on my other side, with Remi completing the circle between them. I lean forward, balancing Fergus’s weight on my back, and, looking at the others, think of how not long ago the circle was bigger. Only hours ago, there were seven of us.
How long will our dwindling group survive? Can we hold out long enough for those outside the Dreamfall to rescue us? Or by the time they figure it out, will we all be dead?
The wind whips us around like we’re as light as a daisy chain, picks us up, and thrusts us through the door. And like that, we’re gone.
EPILOGUE
JAIME
I OPEN MY GMAIL AGAIN AND REREAD HAL’S chilling message.
Re: You’re not going to believe this
Hacked the shrink’s account, and found her file on Sinclair. Hope you’re sitting down.
There were notes on the three kids’ deaths . . . basically the same info as the police file. But shrink noted that the reason the police launched an investigation against Sinclair in the first place was because he behaved “erratically” when he was interviewed about the boy who got locked in the basement.
Apparently, the sick fucker laughed when the detective gave him the details of the boy’s death. That raised suspicions. He was cleared, though, when his parents confirmed their family was out of town when it happened.