by James Phelan
‘I have friends here who can help out with that,’ Sam said. He went up on deck with her and waved along the jetty at the others. ‘I think you’ll find with their help, this boat’s going to run like she never has before.’
20
EVA’S NIGHTMARE
I’m walking down a city street. It’s a weekend, I’m sure, and I’m going shopping. I’m alone, but due to meet my family—my aunt. I look for her at the food court in the mall. She’s not here yet. I sit and wait. I check my phone. A missed call from Aunt Julia.
I call her back.
A voice answers.
Metallic. Menacing.
Solaris.
‘If you want to see your aunt again,’ the voice says, ‘come outside.’
The line goes dead. I walk through the masses of people, frantic, scared. I’m aware of my surroundings and things aren’t what they seem—the people, the shops—none of it’s real.
‘I’m in a dream,’ I say. ‘Just a dream.’ I try to slow my breathing.
Be in control.
Outside, it’s not the car park that I’d walked through just before.
It’s a barren endless desert. I turn to head back but there’s nothing but sand dunes behind me.
No—there’s a figure, in the distance, distorted by a heat haze. I run to the person.
I clamber up the last sand dune and see the figure, now laid prone on the baking ground.
Looking around, this is still the only sign of life as far as I can see. I watch the figure on the sand. The person is lying still and has been for a long time judging by the sand coating them. I approach slowly as I get closer. I bend down and turn the person over. They are wearing the face mask of Solaris, but the outfit doesn’t match—it’s a Stealth Suit. I pull the mask off.
Professor?
EVA
Eva stayed in the shower until she felt free of the memories of her nightmare. Once dressed, she sat on the edge of her bed, waiting. The room on the freighter was small, but like the rest of the ship it was recently refurbished and comfortable.
Tap, tap, tap.
Eva opened the round porthole and poked her head out.
Lora’s head was sticking out her window.
‘Talk about deja vu!’ she laughed. ‘You OK?’ she asked when she saw Eva’s face.
‘Yeah,’ Eva said. ‘Just had a bad sleep. Nightmares.’
‘Anything you think will be happening soon?’ Lora said, concerned.
‘No, it was a pretty out-there dream about—’
There was the sound of the key at Eva’s door.
‘Someone’s here!’ she called, then pulled back into her room and sat down on the edge of her bed, playing the role of captive as a guard entered.
‘Follow me,’ he barked.
Eva followed the guy out into the hall. They stopped outside Lora’s room and he unlocked her door, giving her the same order.
‘So,’ Lora said, as they trudged along between a couple of guards. ‘I guess we’re finally going to be doing something.’
‘This here,’ Mac said, pointing to a large back-lit blueprint on a table in his private office, ‘is the facility in Vancouver where we pioneered the genetics research. The US army like to do their secret research on foreign soil.’
They were alone in the room, just Eva and Lora along with Mac and Julia, which meant that they could talk freely.
‘The site has been closed for years,’ Julia said, ‘but it’s still of use in this race.’
‘Why?’ Lora said. ‘How? I mean, what’s there that could possibly help us now?’
‘A supercomputer was at the complex when the lab was shut down. It was considered obsolete and left behind,’ Mac said.
‘OK, so what does it do?’ Eva asked.
‘It’s not what it does, it’s what it holds,’ he replied. ‘Which is everything to do with our Dreamer gene research.’
‘And they just left it there?’ Lora said. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’
‘It was considered a shut-down program,’ Mac replied, ‘and keeping all this under lock and key at the site was an initial measure of security that was eventually forgotten about. And I believe there is information stored within it that might help us find the last 13 Dreamers ahead of time, and perhaps even better navigate their dreams to find the Dream Gate first.’
Eva and Lora exchanged wary looks.
‘I know how this sounds,’ Julia said, ‘but I worked alongside Mac there when I was just starting out as a biochemist. The Enterprise gave me the chance to advance, nurturing my career and taking me on as an Agent once the facility closed down.’
I never knew her at all, until now.
‘So I know a little about what went on there and I honestly think Mac might be onto something. He told me of his plan to trick Solaris and to retrieve the missing data so I decided to help him.’
‘You really think that this information could help us win the race?’ Eva asked.
Julia nodded. Mac was silent, reading their faces for a reaction.
Eva turned to Lora. ‘Then we should go and at least see what’s there. Lora?’
Lora looked resolved. ‘OK, let’s do it.’
21
SAM
The Scaramanga powered through the bright turquoise waters of the reefs and islands off the southern coast of Cuba.
‘This is amazing!’ Maria said, steering the boat through the water. ‘It’s never gone this fast!’
Sam gave her a thumbs up. On the rear deck, the two Guardians were wiping off grease and oil, having managed to remove the old diesel engine and replace it with a V8 turbo engine from a speedboat they’d bought with cash, all in less than two hours. The result was the wooden-hulled Scaramanga cutting through the water at a speed it had never been designed to cope with.
Hope it holds together.
‘Scans reveal that there’s no radio activity where we are headed,’ Tobias said to Sam. A laptop and satellite dish set up on the forward deck, where Xavier and Rapha were readying the dive gear.
‘Good,’ Sam said to Tobias. ‘And in my dream you weren’t all here. It was just Maria and me. So things have changed.’
‘As Solaris figured in your dream last night,’ Tobias agreed, ‘it’s good to change things up—what’s the benefit of seeing the future if you can’t alter things to be more in your favour, right? We must prepare ourselves.’
Tobias nodded towards Maria, who was still piloting the boat, constantly checking their location on a GPS navigation screen.
‘You need to talk to her about her dreams some more,’ Tobias said. He held up his phone and pointed it at her, showing Sam the screen. It was just like the glass walkway at the Academy’s Swiss campus, showing the outline of the body glowing with a spectrum of colours. Maria’s aura was a sparkling yellow with flashes of silver.
‘I’ll take over piloting the boat,’ Tobias said. ‘Talk to her, see if she can tell you anything more about where we need to go.’
In the living quarters below deck, they sat in a room that had bunk beds on one side and a little table, booth seats and galley kitchen on the other. Maria poured iced water from a cooler.
‘I need to know about your dream,’ Sam said. ‘About when you saw the Gear.’
Maria shook her head fiercely. ‘I don’t like talking about my dreams. I told you already, I will show you where this wheel is that I saw. I think I know now. That is enough.’
‘But this dream, was it a nightmare?’
Maria paused and tears formed in her eyes. She sat down on the seat opposite Sam, but just stared at him and said nothing for a long time. Finally, she sighed.
‘Yesterday, when the boat broke down,’ she said, ‘it took the whole night to find there was a problem with the fuel lines, about eight hours. Then I slept for maybe an hour. I thought it was the fumes from the engine room, but it was a nightmare like I’d never had. So clear, so real, but … how do you say in English … not real? Impossible but some
how true …’
‘Surreal?’ Sam offered.
‘Yes. Surreal.’
Maria sipped her water, and Sam could tell from that familiar distant look he’d seen on so many Dreamers’ faces that she had gone back there, into the Dreamscape, reliving what had happened.
‘I dreamed I was diving, at the place I had last been with my father, but this time with someone else. A boy. I don’t know who—he was wearing the diving gear and I couldn’t see his face clearly. But the current at the edge of the reef where the seabed drops away took me—it whipped me along and I could not stop, I was flashing by with the fish and turtles, and after a while I just went with it, relaxed.’ She paused and looked at Sam.
‘Go on,’ he encouraged.
‘So I thought, in my dream, that I might just float along with the current and somehow end up at the Barrier Reef or somewhere crazy like that—it felt like a fantasy. But after a while I realised that my air supply was running low, so I used my spear gun to shoot at a coral reef as I passed, then pulled myself in on that cord. I held on to the reef, reloaded the spear and then repeated the process, over and over, until I hauled myself to the other side and out of the fast-moving current. And there … there is where I found the wreck.’
‘A shipwreck?’
‘Yes, a shipwreck,’ she said. ‘It is what my father went out to search for, when I had a nightmare about it before. I have seen this ship in my dreams many times lately, and again last night. I could see this wheel—your Gear.’
‘What’s the wreck?’
‘A Spanish ship. One of maybe twenty vessels lost to a hurricane from the 1502 Columbus expedition.’
‘And you saw that in your dream?’
Maria nodded.
‘Did you enter the wreck?’
‘Yes … I think so,’ Maria said. ‘My dream went by in little flashes, like a broken memory, or like watching a movie and skipping every few minutes. The last thing I remember was being inside an underwater cave, then I was inside an old timber ship. There was a room, I heard noises, like running—there were people there but I couldn’t see them. I felt afraid though, like people were after me. I kept running through the ship in the dark, and I came into a room of treasure. I held that wheel, that Gear, in my hand, before …’
Sam frowned, waiting for her to continue. ‘Before . . ?’
Maria just shook her head.
‘What happened in your nightmare, Maria?’
‘I was not alone in that room,’ she whispered.
Sam let that detail be for now as he asked, ‘And you dreamed where this location is? I mean, you can remember it?’
She nodded hesitantly.
‘Could you find it again?’
‘I think so. I could follow the edge of the reef and find the wreck.’ Maria looked at him. ‘We have to go there, don’t we? You really think that this is a true thing, my dream?’
‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘So do you believe me now?’
Maria looked out the porthole to the sea. ‘I have hope, so yes, I will believe, for now. For my father,’ she said. ‘He was, is, a brilliant diver. He can swim like a fish. He knows these waters, and every danger—including the sharks, and Scarface.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I think that he is alive,’ she said.
‘But …’ Sam pointed at her father’s underwater hand-held propeller drive, recovered from one of Maria’s earlier searches. Its yellow paint had been indented with the unmistakable pattern of teeth marks.
‘I know,’ Maria said. ‘But in my dream, he’s still alive. He helps me.’
‘How?’
‘I … I am getting chased, by a figure in the shadows.’
Sam thought of Solaris.
‘And,’ Maria said, ‘to get away I have to travel through a small, tight space. I’m scared of it—of what chases me, but also of this small way out. I feel such fear.’
She’s claustrophobic—frightened of being in small spaces.
‘My father tried to help me out,’ Maria said. ‘That’s when I woke up.’
‘ Tried to help you?’
‘There was not enough time … he was screaming too.’
Sam nodded, understanding. ‘And the Gear?’
‘I didn’t have it,’ Maria said. ‘He did. The figure in the shadows.’
22
ALEX
Getting past the security fences and the alarmed, password-coded doors was an easy process. With the Agents’ insider knowledge of the complex, they practically walked straight in. Alex watched in awe as one of the tech Agents used a small laptop computer to crack the PIN code in a matter of seconds.
I so gotta learn how to do that!
It was getting into the underground complex undetected, in case Stella and her crew were already inside, that was the hard part.
‘OK, this isn’t creepy at all,’ Alex said, walking with a torch to light the way under his feet. The downward-sloping corridor was long, dark and damp. Water sloshed under their feet, and was soon around their ankles. He looked back at the entrance door, which was ajar, and the sunlight peered through. Four Agents walked in front of Alex and Phoebe, with Rick, their commander, leading the way. He looked strong and capable, a determined look in his dark eyes. Alex eyed the fierce tattoo on his left arm as he strode into the complex. A couple of Agents cautiously followed behind. More Agents remained outside, keeping watch. Phoebe kept close to Alex.
‘The tunnel takes a few turns up ahead, then we start heading further down,’ Phoebe said, consulting the schematic on her hand-held screen.
‘Further down?’ Rick said. ‘But the water is getting deeper and deeper already.’
‘It’ll be OK,’ Phoebe said, ‘once we clear the sealed doors to the complex proper.’
The troops up front stopped at each corner, carefully scouting their way ahead in case there were any surprises lurking in the doorways or adjacent corridors.
‘This is it,’ Phoebe whispered, her voice echoing in the space.
‘It’s a …’ Alex’s voice trailed off as he leaned forwards to look down into a cavernous hole that disappeared into the pitch black far below. The groundwater beneath their feet trickled over the edge like a gentle waterfall. ‘What is it?’
‘Lift shaft,’ Rick said. He took a couple of glowsticks from a zip pocket, cracked them to life and dropped them down the shaft.
Alex watched as they fell, taking several long seconds to hit the bottom with a sharp thud that echoed loudly back up the shaft. Alex winced at the clattering noise it made in the eerie complex.
‘Well, it’s not flooded,’ Rick said. ‘Must have landed on top of the lift, which is down there, probably the full fifteen storeys.’
Phoebe pointed to a cobweb-covered control panel on the wall. ‘Can you bring the lift up?’
Rick motioned to the tech Agent. He pulled out an electric screwdriver and had the lift’s control panel off in seconds.
‘It’s unlikely,’ the tech Agent said. ‘This is hooked into the emergency grid, so I can route the backup generators to here, but there’s no telling if they’ll kick over if they haven’t been maintained.’
‘Where are they?’ Phoebe asked.
The Agent shone his flashlight over the schematic diagram, flicking at the screen to see more details.
‘Back that way and a few access levels down,’ he said.
‘Take two Agents with you—try those generators,’ Phoebe said, looking at the schematic once again. The tech Agent and two others ran off the way they’d come.
Phoebe turned to Alex. ‘Do you feel any different?’
‘What? No,’ Alex replied, shining his torch around the lift shaft. There were metal ladders set into two opposite walls running down the shaft as far as Alex could see. ‘I feel completely normal.’
‘Nothing looks familiar? No deja vu?’ Phoebe prompted.
Alex shook his head. It was so quiet, only the sound of the falling water could be heard as they waited f
or the Agents to hook up the power. Alex looked around, trying harder to concentrate on his surroundings. He touched the open, slide-across metal gates that had once blocked the opening for this massive elevator. The closing latch was cut through, the two sections bright and sharp.
Someone’s beaten us here.
Alex said, ‘Ah, guys … look.’ He pointed to the severed lock on the lift gates, the shiny silver metal glinting through the rust and dirt, even more noticeable under the illumination of the torches. ‘Looks as if someone recently cut through the lock,’ he said.
‘I don’t like it,’ Phoebe replied. ‘We should move.’
‘Go back?’ Rick asked.
‘No. Down. There’s another way out,’ Phoebe replied, shining her torch over the ladders in the lift shaft, then checking the complex’s schematics. ‘I have a feeling this is going to get real interesting, real fast.’
23
SAM
‘Maria is convinced that her father is still alive,’ Sam said to Tobias as the two of them suited up to dive. Maria was explaining to Rapha and Xavier how to operate the boat.
‘Maybe he is,’ Tobias said, checking his air regulator. ‘I think it’s likely Maria’s father is a Dreamer—and a powerful one at that—who understood what her dream could mean. He may be just lost. And he may not be coming back, so we need to keep an eye on Maria in case she falls apart out there. I know she is concerned about his disappearance, but to find the Gear we don’t need her father—we need Maria. You need to remain focused on why we are here, Sam, and help Maria stay focused too.’
Sam nodded.
‘We’re ready,’ Maria said, walking over to them.
‘OK,’ Sam said to her. ‘I guess there’s no time to feed the sharks today?’
Maria looked at him, puzzled. ‘No, not today, I think.’
Sam smiled.
‘Are you ready?’ Maria asked, before pulling on her mask.