The Point

by John Dixon

  The sight sickened her.

  All because of the stupid football game. What was the big deal? They’d all been cheering their heads off, hoping Army would win.

  Nobody deserves to suffer like this.

  Seamus strained against his bonds. The veins in his neck stood out in the pulsing light.

  Scarlett opened the door. “Seamus, are you all right?”

  He didn’t reply. How could he? He was lost to pain and terror.

  The robotic arm shifted. The spinning disk jackhammered his temples with pulses of blue light.

  Seamus’s eyes flew wide open. His mouth yawned as if to scream, but only a faint moan, long and soft and terrible, escaped, and she understood that in his private world of pain, Seamus was screaming louder than he—or anyone else—had ever screamed before.

  Something was wrong with the machine. It was killing him.

  She crouched beside the machine, found a switch, and flicked it.

  The groaning stopped, the blue lights died, and Seamus let out a bloodcurdling scream. He thrashed even harder against his restraints. She talked to him, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “The machine was broken.” She reached through the metal bars to touch his shoulder. “I stopped it. You’re going to—”

  Seamus turned his head to glare at her. “What have you done?”

  She nearly stumbled backward from the force of his anger. “It was killing you.”

  “You’re so stupid! You’ve ruined everything!”

  “But it wasn’t—” Scarlett stammered.

  Laughter sounded from behind her. She jumped at the sound of it, then turned with a sinking feeling in her chest.

  Hopkins and his TK crew filled the doorway.

  “Winter,” Hopkins said, drawing it out like a growling attack dog. “You are in sincerely deep doo-doo.”

  “She stopped the machine,” one of the others said, and laughed incredulously.

  Seamus wept, mumbling curses.

  Scarlett let her eyes close and pinched the bridge of her nose. Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. She’d tried so hard to stay out of trouble, tried so hard to do the right thing, to help him, but now…

  “Step out into the hall, Winter,” Hopkins said. “Kaiser, start the machine over again…from the beginning. Winter bought Seamus an extra—” He whistled. “—six hours of suffering.”

  Scarlett opened her eyes and put herself between Kaiser and the machine.

  Kaiser grinned and glanced toward Hopkins.

  “Don’t,” Scarlett said. “There’s something wrong with the machine. It was killing him.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the Chamber,” Hopkins said. “That’s the way it works. Why do you think Kyeong is so crazy?”

  “Just do it,” Seamus said, his voice thick with tears. “Just get it over with.”

  Kaiser started around Scarlett, but she sidestepped, blocking him. “Don’t. This is my fault, not his. Write me up and leave him be.”

  Hopkins laughed. “Write you up? We’re going to teach you a lesson. Remind you that you’re still a plebe even if you have a fancy room. Running around at night, interfering with punishment? Those are heavy offenses, Winter.” He grinned wolfishly. “You remember how we used to visit your cell at night?”

  Invisible hands shoved Scarlett. She staggered back. “Yeah, I remember,” she said, and a resigned weariness settled over her. “I’d been worried you’d catch me some night.”

  “You were right to be scared,” Hopkins said, and looked to his friends. “Beat her down.”

  Blows rained down. These weren’t the heavy pillow thuds they’d given her in the cell. These were crunching blasts, prizefighter hooks slamming into her ribs and gut and the side of her face. They pummeled her from all angles, smashing into her head and thumping into her body again and again, hundreds of hammer blows pounding, pounding, pounding…

  When a furious strike smashed into her ribs, she realized that it was an actual boot, not telekinetic force. She opened her eyes to see Hopkins grinning down.

  “Thought you could run from us,” Hopkins said. “How’d that work out for you, Winter?”

  Scarlett looked at him with no expression on her face. “I wasn’t running because I was afraid of you,” she said. “I was afraid of myself.”

  And then, with the force of their attacks raging like a tornado of fire within her, Scarlett finally let them have it.

  DALIA LEANED BACK IN THE chair across from Rhoads, watching the man straighten the papers atop his desk, knowing what that compulsive tidying meant.

  He was going to ask her again.

  Before he’d asked the first three times, he’d unnecessarily straightened his work space.

  “I hope you’re right, Dalia,” he said, not looking her in the eye. “For now, I’ll take your advice and be lenient with Scarlett.” He straightened the framed photo of his deceased parents.

  She stood, knowing that Rhoads wasn’t finished, and told him that that sounded great. She’d give Scarlett a talking to, straighten her out.

  Scarlett had really done a number on Hopkins and his toadies. Broken noses, cracked ribs, deeply bruised egos. So stupid of her to snap like that—and beyond stupid, helping Seamus—but hilarious, too, because it all backfired, earning Pretty Boy several extra hours in the Chamber.

  Rhoads frowned. His anxiety was delicious.

  “A moment longer, please,” he said, gesturing toward her chair.

  “Sure,” she said, and sat down again.

  “I hate to ask,” Rhoads said, forcing himself to meet her eyes now, “but I want you to do another recon mission.”

  She feigned concern. “But you said—”

  “I know,” Rhoads said, “and I remain worried. I still have nightmares about Appleton…”

  I know you do. In those nightmares, Appleton stumbled through dense fog, blood and pulp draining from the ruined mess within his eye sockets, crying out for Rhoads to help him.

  “You want me to spy on Scarlett?” she asked.

  Rhoads cleared his throat, visibly uncomfortable, and nodded. “Given this recent incident,” he said, and trailed off. He straightened the picture again. “I never saw it coming. I made a similar error once before, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I can’t afford to let something similar happen again. I’m hoping you can take a look. I need to know if I can trust her.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  His relief was obvious and pitiful. “Thank you.”

  “But if I end up at The Farm…”

  Rhoads laughed nervously, shaking his head. “Don’t even joke like that.”

  She raised one brow. “I wasn’t joking. I’m willing to help, but this is a risky mission. If something…goes wrong…I hope that you’ll…give me a second chance. You wouldn’t—”

  He waved her off. “Dalia, you know that I will protect you.”

  Like you protected Appleton? From time to time, she visited the dreams of Appleton, who had been one of only two other somnopaths ever to attend The Point. Observing his dreams now was like walking on the dark side of the moon, everything dark and dusty, airless and lifeless, a bleak and cratered wasteland. She’d burrowed beneath that stark moonscape, drilling for the hidden subconscious, but all she’d found was a dry riverbed devoid even of fossilized memories. Appleton was gone.

  “If you’re not certain—” Rhoads said.

  “I’ll do it,” she interrupted. She stood once more and offered what she intended would look like a forced smile. A brave smile. “But you owe me one.”

  “Anything,” he said, “and please do be careful.”

  She paused at the door, showing him the brave smile again. “I’ll try to have something for you soon.”

  In reali
ty, she’d been watching Scarlett’s dreams for weeks, since Rhoads first had introduced them. Of course, she could never let Rhoads know that. He thought that she had a difficult time doing dream recon and worried that she would snap, as Appleton had, and end up drooling in a padded cell at The Farm.

  A ridiculous concern. Truth be told, Appleton was weak.

  She was strong.

  Far, far stronger than Rhoads would ever guess.

  Let him toss and turn tonight, worried that he’d asked too much of her.

  In truth, she had moved way beyond simply peeping into people’s dreams.

  Tomorrow, she would skip her shower and set her hairpins loosely and report back to him that it had been difficult, but yes, she’d managed to open a window onto Scarlett’s dreams. Then she’d give him something, a piece of the truth, probably, just enough to satisfy him yet certainly not enough to make him suspect the true power of her abilities. But yes, she would have to give him something. Despite Rhoads’s genuine concern for her well-being, he remained a results-oriented, goal-driven man. He would, she knew, offer her up without the slightest hesitation as a living sacrifice if that would guarantee the safety of The Point.

  What to tell him, though? Shadows and whispers, blurry impressions, enough to make him mull. She could guide his interpretations easily enough.

  Returning to her room, she closed and locked the door, sat on the bed, and folded her legs in a lotus position. She laid her forearms atop her thighs and let her palms open toward the ceiling. Then she concentrated on her breathing and sank into her mind.

  Inside, she strolled the cool stone hallway she’d created there, what she thought of as a pyramid passageway, although she knew that it had more in common with the European castles over which she had obsessed as a little girl than with the ancient architectural wonders of her father’s Egyptian bloodline. Whatever. It didn’t matter. She’d never seen either structure in real life. Besides, this was her place and her place alone, and she liked it like this, historical accuracy be damned.

  She drifted—drifted was more accurate than walked in this internal world where she felt only half corporeal—beneath the great stone archway and into the dusty dream archives, which she’d modeled after the cozy old stacks of her hometown library, where she’d spent so much of her youth, hiding from the cruelty of other children, who could see only her dark skin and strange last name, and escaping into the much happier worlds offered by books. Here she stored the fragments of dreams she visited each night. These dream snippets lacked the length and orderly narration of the library books of her childhood, but what they lacked in completeness and clarity they more than made up for in brilliance and emotion and the draw of the puzzle that even the simplest of them offered. These were intimate glimpses of her classmates and cadre, archived alongside the fears and hopes and confessions of those she’d left behind in her hometown, Wyalusing. Also stored here were scenes clipped from the dreams of people she’d met only in passing and, increasingly, people she’d never met at all. Over the last several months, she’d taken to ranging out into the world. She’d learned to drift through the dream ether until, like a hawk spying movement in the grass, she detected a vibrant dream. Then she would swoop straight into the heart of it.

  Here in the archives, she could revisit dreams. Unlike living dreams, dream snippets were as static as film clips, though you couldn’t enter film clips, couldn’t stand there and feel the grass of someone’s dream beneath your feet, couldn’t pause to study the sparkling glass in the hair of the dead men or smell the smoke or hear the crackling of the fire and the screaming of the woman and her child and Scarlett’s friend Savannah or know that Scarlett and Savannah were no longer close or that Scarlett worried over this sometimes, though nowhere nearly as frequently or fiercely as she worried over her brother, Dan.

  Scarlett fascinated her. Night after night, Dalia went to her dreams. Some nights, she observed. Other nights, she waited for a lull between dream sequences, dipped into the river of Scarlett’s subconscious, dredged out something iconic—the burning car; her brother jabbing her; the smell of apples, which for some reason meant friendship and laughter and hope—and used the flashbacks to cast Scarlett into dreams woven principally of memory.

  In this way, she had come to know Scarlett. She had watched scenes from her difficult childhood. She’d seen her ignored by her father, beaten yet loved by her brother, and smothered by her loving but pitiful mother. She’d seen the boys—so many of them—and her friends, and all the partying, and she’d known that if she and Scarlett had attended the same school, they wouldn’t have been friends, though Scarlett wouldn’t have teased her. Scarlett was wild and irresponsible, but she wasn’t mean.

  Dalia saw so much in her. So much potential but anxiety, too, and laziness and fear of failure. In Scarlett, confidence and shame were conjoined twins, sharing a single heart, and she experienced and delivered equal parts bitterness and sweetness. Sloth and ambition. Scarlett was struggling with who she had been, who she was, and who she would become. She missed her friends and her mother, partying and her motorcycle, climbing cliffs and diving off bridges and laughing. She worried that the good times were over for good. She didn’t belong here and couldn’t square herself with that reality. She didn’t trust the power she was developing. More than anything, she wanted to heal her relationship with her brother.

  Dalia could give Rhoads that much. The fight with Dan. Scarlett’s desire to bury the hatchet. Dalia would mention the blowtorch, too, so Rhoads would know that she wasn’t making stuff up. She was certain that Rhoads already knew about the blowtorch. After all, she’d seen it in his dreams before it had appeared in Scarlett’s.

  That would be enough for tomorrow. That and her general impression. You don’t have to worry about her, she’d say, and that much was true. Scarlett posed no danger to The Point.

  For now, she had unfinished business back in Wyalusing.

  She vanished from the archives, casting her consciousness out and away. She left The Point and returned to her hometown, zeroing in on the dreams of Brad Turpin. She smiled, recognizing at once the blurry edges and general murkiness. He was still on sleeping pills, then. Still trying to fight her visits, still scared out of his mind.

  She laughed. Well, he should have considered that a long time ago. It was too late now.

  She found him stumbling numbly through some stupid dream about the factory where he now worked, having gotten the job through his father, a longtime foreman, Brad two years out of high school and already wearing a white hat. No college, no real experience, just good looks and Daddy’s influence and a surprising penchant for kissing butt. It shamed her to know that she’d fallen for the tricks of such a simpering suck-up. The shame made her hate her former self even more than she already had.

  Cold purpose frosted over her as she stared at Brad in his khaki pants and shirt and tie and white hat. He was getting a gut, shifting into middle age at twenty. How could she ever have given herself to him?

  Because you thought he was sweet, she told herself. And handsome. And he was nice to you, the first boy in the whole town to be nice to you.

  Feeling ashamed and furious, she changed the dream.

  The factory disappeared. Gone were its steel and cement maze and caution tape and the constant droning of machinery.

  Brad huffed with fear as his new environment coalesced. He recognized it, of course. He knew its smell of hay and horse manure, the creak of old wooden floorboards beneath his feet and the soft sunlight sparkling with spinning dust motes, the cooing of doves high above in the rafters, the heat of the barn. He would never, ever forget this place no matter how much he drank or what kinds of pills he took, because she would drag his dreaming mind back every night to this place, the barn where he had taken her virginity exactly one day before he’d made her the laughingstock of their high school.

  No, he would neve
r forget it. Because she would never forget it. Never forget, never forgive.

  “Brad,” she said, entering the dream behind him.

  He jumped—and even that was a clumsy affair, given his drugged state—and turned, his handsome face white with terror. She noticed that his face was getting fat now, too. In five years, people no longer would think of him as handsome. In ten, he’d have a full set of jowls, and his hair would recede like a swamp in drought. By forty, he’d be fat and bald and unloved, and through it all she’d be here, bringing him back to this place.

  “I’m sorry,” Brad said, blubbering like a frightened toddler. “Dalia, I’m so, so sorry.”

  She was naked now. Naked and beautiful. She made herself extra beautiful. She wanted each nightly visit to be what Brad had said that he’d wanted her first time to be: special.

  Of course, at that time, she had no idea that special meant recorded on a GoPro, shared with friends, and uploaded to Pornhub with the caption Amateur Egyptian First Time Slut.

  “Look at me, Brad.”

  “No,” he said, crying and shaking his head. “I don’t want to.”

  She was disgusted to see the dark circle spreading across his pants. She hoped he’d wet the bed at home in Wyalusing, too.

  “I’m sor-r-r-y,” he sobbed, falling to his knees. “Don’t…please…I can’t take—”

  “Too late, Brad,” she said. “A friend is here to see you.”

  Brad fell to all fours, squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head back and forth, crying, “No, no, no!”

  She cued the laugh track—a chorus of raucous howls that she knew Brad recognized all too well. “Your friends are laughing at you, Brad. They’re all watching and all laughing at you. Your father is laughing at you.” And she added the laughter of his father, looping the big belly laugh Brad’s father had used when Brad was six and wet his pants on the roller coaster.