by Therin Knite
Club Valkyrie is one of them.
Regina Williams is still alive, and Brennian is going to kill her inside her latest favorite club. It makes sense when I consider the facts. The Director is obsessed with order and neatness and poetic punishment. Victor Manson craved the appearance of perpetual invulnerability. He died in the most vulnerable situation conceivable: alone, in his own backyard, in his underwear. The ultimate disgrace.
For Regina, her biggest weakness is also her biggest strength—the source of her pride and power, her admirers. By humiliating her in front of them, by getting rid of them, Brennian can reduce her to nothing. Destroy her then kill her. Because she “screwed up,” and now she must be stamped out. Totally. Utterly. Completely.
He considers her a pest. Pests are dirty. Whitford Brennian hates dirt.
I walk from the corner across from Larry’s to the place where the Pennimore Street sidewalk ends and the highway begins its trek across the infinite darkness. It’s at least ten miles to the other side. There’s no way I can run that far in time to prevent Brennian from killing his prey. I don’t have the stamina. I lack it because I never had to go through the full physical training regimen during my IBI Academy days. Brennian let me skip it.
My muscles coil tight. My fists clench hard. My teeth grind together so violently my jaw cracks. The dull ache in my shoulder reminds me that in the real world I’m recovering from the second worst injury of my life (trumped only by Brennian’s dragon attack). I’m helpless.
So why am I here?
Wind gusts through Pennimore Street, streaming over the edge of the world and off into the vast nothingness beyond it. I’ve learned from that mistake, said Brennian. Clearly, to him, his mistake wasn’t that he altered the dream. It was that he made it incorrectly in the first place. If the dream collapsed when he broke the laws of physics, then the logical solution for someone constructing a complex echo would be to write the laws of physics out of it entirely. He’s made the dream more fluid this time, easier to change.
But then, wouldn’t that also make it easier for another maker to influence his dream content?
Is this a challenge?
A test?
No. It was an oversight.
Brennian’s instructions were clear. I’m supposed to be sedated, prevented from discovering a way to communicate with my comrades, prevented from interfering in his cleanup. He didn’t know I would end up crossing into his dream again. In fact, by the tone of his voice, he didn’t know I could. Sedation isn’t the same as sleep, so why would an echo maker be able to access his dream powers while sedated?
Things to ask Dynara later.
“But how do I get over there to stop him?” Superpowers of mysterious origin mean nothing if I can’t use them to my advantage.
Another formidable gale shrieks through the neighborhood, blowing fence doors open and tree leaves over the edge, where they float down. And down. And down. Until they’re nothing but orange and yellow specks in the void.
“Oh.” The answer comes to me along with the feeling I should hit my head repeatedly with a metal bat. What an obvious conclusion. In a dream with far stricter rules, I was able to make my work boots appear. If I have enough juice to do that, then what can I do in a world without the laws of reality?
My eyes rove over my dream self. My damp, wrinkled designer clothes sag, weighing down my weary body. The unwieldy sling restricts the movement of my injured arm. Before I can fight the evil king, I need to look the part of the valiant knight.
I close my eyes and recall the Manson death scene. Not the dragon sequence but myself standing before the place where the chatty lawyer took his last burning breath. I’m surrounded by thirty-odd agents, and Jin is ambling toward me with his prized donut in hand. He surveys my appearance—firecracker-headed Adem Adamend in his stiff, spotless navy field uniform, gun strapped to his right leg, left arm free to maneuver all it wants. That’s who I need to be.
And then I am.
One eye cracks open to sneak a peek, as if seeing less of a failure will dampen the fact of what it is. This is not a failure though. I’m dressed in my IBI uniform, and my sling has vanished. The gun even came along for the ride. I brush it with my finger, the cold metal feeling as it should, tangible, deadly, flawless. You’re the one percent of the one percent.
Now, for my next trick—I’m seated on a bus in between two burly men who are heading to watch an unofficial wrestling match in the nearest park. The bus squeaks to a rickety stop in front of the building next to Club Valkyrie, and I hop off right as the streetlamps switch on for the night. The stop itself is a raggedy thing: a wooden bench dotted with stains I’d rather not know the origin of, a bent metal covering that wouldn’t be much protection in a real storm, a pathetic potted tree on the left side, and a warped sign labeled RED LINE STOP 14.
I’m there. A burst of air settles around me as I blink into existence, and I curl my toes and fingers to double check all the right parts arrived in all the right places. I just teleported. Some spring breaks around my mouth, and my lips expand into a smile so wide it hurts. But I can’t force it down—I have the power of teleportation! A delirious giggle escapes my throat. There’s nothing funny at all about this development, but I’ve struck a chord in my brain that won’t stop ringing.
“Adem?”
Reality smacks me in the face. (Well, not real reality.)
Dynara is about thirty feet away from me, a gun gripped in her right hand while her free one points a finger at me. I’ve caught the master of surprises by surprise for once, and her lips part and close several times without her saying anything. Finally: “What the hell are you doing here?”
Her presence has a natural reason. There’s an echo crime in progress, and Dynara Chamberlain is here to save the day. But what business does an echo maker in denial have in the dream of a killer?
“I brought myself here just by thinking about it.” Thinking about murdering that motherfucker Brennian to be precise.
“Where are you? In the real world.” She glances at the dream version of the club I’ve come to hate in the course of two days. It’s the same six stories with the same gaudy electric blue sign, and there’s little doubt the interior is a perfect replica as well. When the echo shifts to level three, no one inside the club will notice the difference until it’s far too late.
“In an abandoned airfield hangar,” I reply, “about to be shipped off to a mysterious bad guy by none other than Whitford Brennian.”
“Brennian?”
“This is his echo. It was him the whole time. He knew we’d figure it out eventually, once we caught his accomplice, Regina Williams, the good patron of Club Valkyrie and the lovely lady who took a hit out on me. So he’s making a break for it. He’s got his plane prepped and ready to go. This is his final detour before takeoff. Williams has outlived her usefulness, so he’s going to kill her.”
Dynara marches toward me, suppressed concern in her eyes. She tugs on my IBI jacket, testing the stability of the fabric in her fingers. She knows I made it myself. She’s impressed. “Well, this is quite the development. If I wasn’t so pissed off right now, I’d be laughing. There’s no one else I want to kick in the crotch more than that asshat Brennian.” Her swift finger pokes my injured shoulder, but I refuse to acknowledge the throb that slinks up my neck in response. “Now, did you say you were being shipped to a bad guy?”
“Someone unrelated to EDPA taught Brennian how to make echoes. I got the feeling he hasn’t known this guy long, but they’ve been acquainted long enough for this to be the result.” I gesture to the surrounding buildings. “Brennian kidnapped me so he could take me to this guy. You were right.” My smile is tight. “Apparently, I’m quite coveted by less-than-savory characters.”
Her face screws into a disgusted grimace. “Shit, this is bad. This was supposed to be an isolated incident. Like all the thousands of other standard echoes we see every year. Like all the hundreds of petty criminals and think-they’re-sma
rt drug lords using dreams for personal gain. But for someone, for anyone, outside EDPA to have this much knowledge about the making process is unheard of. Whoever this bad guy is, he’s dangerous. Where is Brennian taking you?”
“He’s an asshole, Dynara, but he’s not stupid. He refused to tell me, just in case I found a way to communicate it to someone else. Like to you inside his own echo, which, I imagine, was not something he considered but was covered by his refusal to share the knowledge anyway. He’s good at planning, as you’ve discovered.”
“All right. We’ll talk about the big bad behind Brennian later. Our priority is stopping him before he hurts anyone. The dream’s already in a pre-breach state. We don’t have long before the shift. We need to find him and subdue him here or wake him up in real life. Do you know exactly where you are now?”
“Yes. He didn’t anticipate me coming here, so he didn’t bother blindfolding me or anything.” I describe the location of the airfield, and Dynara recognizes it immediately.
She holds a finger to her ear-com. “Lance, I need an emergency non-echo field team to report to that abandoned airfield outside the Industrial Sector as soon as humanly possible. Adem’s been taken hostage by our good friend, IBI Director Whitford Brennian. He’s our guy. Tell the team to be cautious. Adem is unconscious and won’t be able to escape any ensuing fray. He…” An oddball thought occurs to her. “Why are you unconscious, Adem? I’m guessing you didn’t decide to take a nice nap in the middle of your hostage situation.”
“He sedated me.”
“You’re…sedated? And you managed to cross?”
“Looks like it.”
Dynara gives me a look with ten thousand meanings, most of which evade detection. But one strikes me clear as day: suspicion. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“Well, I did. It’s not impossible, it seems.”
“No,” she mutters, “only unheard of.”
“Hey, don’t you dare turn on me or—”
The air rushes from my lungs, and my entire body is rendered motionless by the sensation of being compressed. A grating noise consumes my senses. It’s every negative sound I’ve ever heard blaring into my ears at once, and nausea tears through my stomach as the unnatural shriek burrows straight into my brain. Pop goes the world, and then we’re in another.
My body regains control of itself, and I suck in air, trying to fight down the bile rising in my throat. “Dynara, was that…?”
She stands rigid, eyes skimming the two hundred plus people who just appeared out of nowhere. Her attention drifts upward six stories, where it comes to rest on the looming form of the dragon we know so well. It’s perched on the edge of the Valkyrie rooftop, a lapdog longing for one specific command: kill everyone in sight.
“That was a level three breach.”
* * *
The flight of the dragon is spectacular. Everybody thinks so. A couple hundred morning clubbers and a few unlucky passersby watch in awe as the monster takes off from its resting place and soars into the sky. What an amazing holograph! they think. Club Valkyrie has really outdone itself. It circles the club three times, scouring the gathering crowd for its first delicious morsel of what is minutes from becoming the biggest day of death and destruction since the Old City Riots a decade ago. The dragon selects its victim: a teenage girl with violet dreadlocks.
Two mighty wings change direction, and the dragon plunges downward. The crowd hushes in anticipation of the beast’s next great trick. Dynara gears into action. She surges through the dumbstruck mass and floors the dreadlock girl, turning on her toes and aiming her gun straight for a reptilian eye. Her first bullet blows a hunk of bloody white out of the dragon’s head, and it reels back with a violent scream.
The people realize. The people panic. Several men in suits trample a woman in a white dress. Three older ladies scramble for the nearest parked car, pushing the rightful driver out of their way and stealing it without a second thought. A horde of frenzied fools cram themselves into every available nook and cranny, many of them fleeing into Club Valkyrie, where a far more dangerous monster awaits them.
Our injured reptilian foe makes another swing around the area before diving toward Dynara. Dreadlock girl is running for her life, and with no one to protect, Dynara starts pulling more dangerous stunts. She tugs a small metal cylinder from one of her numerous pockets and raps the end three times with her thumb. It activates. She slings it at the oncoming dragon and leaps out of its path, rolling underneath an abandoned vehicle.
It is a grenade. It explodes with a blinding flash of blue, and the dragon loses control of itself, crashing headlong into the middle of a street teeming with carefree bystanders not two minutes ago. The beast lifts its head and screeches, struggling to force itself back onto its feet. Correction, a VERA grenade. The blast wasn’t strong enough to knock out something so large but had enough power to render the dragon’s legs useless. Temporarily.
Dynara slips out from underneath the truck, gun at the ready. But the grenade didn’t catch the dragon’s spiked tail, and it lashes out at Dynara’s charging form. Somehow, she flips over the tail and lands safely on the other side without losing momentum. Five rounds nail the dragon in the back, but before she can maneuver around to its softer underbelly, it twists its head around and lets loose a massive stream of fire. Dynara is forced to dodge, and as she tries to recover, the tail clips her side, the gun bouncing away underneath the dragon’s moving legs.
A retreat is in order. She bounds over the nearest vehicle to avoid another onslaught of flame and circles back toward me. I’m standing exposed on the sidewalk, watching events unfold like I’m sitting in a movie theater worlds away from it all. If only. Last time that thing set its sights on me, it ran me through in so many places I died several times in a row. Brennian killed me. With no remorse. Because he was inconvenienced by my presence. And he figured I would be revived by paramedics.
Dynara almost topples me as she uses my torso to come to a quick stop. My shoulder complains, but I clench my teeth and bear it because I will not show the man behind that bastard dragon any weakness. “Adem, I need you to do something for me.”
“You need me for something? Really?”
She elbows me in the gut. “Cut the crap. Destroy the dragon.”
“Um, what?”
“You’re a class five controller. You can change whatever you want by thinking about it.” Her hand pats my dream-conjured uniform in appreciation. “So change the dragon.”
Said dragon has taken to the air again with a mighty beat of its wings. As it gains speed, its form blurs into a nightmare black monstrosity, the sort of thing that hides in the corner of your eye and rips your throat out the moment you dare try to find it. It cuts a wide arc through the air and shoots toward us, faster and faster as it falls. It’s going to crash right into us. Forget fire. We’ll be crushed.
I make to avoid the collision, but Dynara grabs my arm and holds me in place. “Make the dragon disappear,” she orders.
“How?”
“The same way you made the shoes appear. And the uniform. Will it to happen.”
The dragon is mere feet from us, nostrils smoking.
“Change the fucking dragon, Adem!”
It’s so close I can admire individual scales, lustrous black reflecting the blue glare from the Club Valkyrie sign. Almost like…
The dragon explodes into a swarm of butterflies. They blow past us, a couple landing on my face and chest. They’re black and blue, beautiful, harmless things. The bulk of them scatter into the heavy winds, and poorly hidden bystanders begin to emerge from their cover to watch the spectacle recede. Someone starts to clap, and the muffled fever catches on before igniting into a shower of senseless cheers.
“Dynara,” I murmur.
“Yes?”
“Did I just turn a dragon into butterflies?”
“Yes.” She pats my injured shoulder gently, chuckling. “Yes, you did.”
* * *
/> Club Valkyrie is a hell of ice, and everyone is dead. The moment Dynara and I step across the threshold of the main entrance, my breath turns to fog in the frigid air. No frost coats the walls or the floor or the ceiling, but the club has become an ice garden nonetheless. All the patrons are the statues, socialites garbed in every gaudy color of the rainbow frozen mid-gesture.
An elderly woman in a sunshine yellow day suit sits in a chair near one entryway to the dance floor. Her hand remains motionless in the air, pointing to something inside the room. Whatever she saw, she saw it too late, and her parted lips and wide eyes are caught in the instant before the release of a blood-curdling scream. Three feet away, a troupe of belly dancers attempted to flee from the performers’ stage erected next to the doorway, and several of them tripped over one another without any semblance of the grace they must have been displaying only seconds before. The young woman leading the pack was flash-frozen during a desperate lunge for the exit; her iced body hit the floor hard. One of her arms broke off.
Nausea twists my gut, but I manage to follow Dynara onto the dance floor, where a good seventy-five more rich patrons were enjoying a fancy midmorning party before the members of the lower classes filtered in for the day. It’s a crime scene, I repeat to myself. Bodies at crime scenes never bother me, but there’s something about this that sickens me to the core. Did they freeze instantly? Die instantly? Or did they suffocate, aware until the moments their chilled brains ran out of oxygen?
Did the man who fell down the stairs feel pain as his head shattered into a hundred pieces, a large chunk of his solidified brain coming to rest at the feet of a girl clad in scarlet? Did the model-like woman in a pink, see-through gown pose like a statue from the annals of antiquity on purpose, knowing what was coming? Or is the graceful stance she died in a testament to her natural perfection? The way her tilted head makes the light dance across her cheeks. The way her arms casually brush her hips and waist. Effortless.