5

by James Phelan

  And yet it had been a good dream, too.

  Japan. Issey.

  As his senses slowly emerged from sleepiness, more memories came flooding back.

  The last 13. I am one of them. This race will finish at the Dream Gate …

  “Sam? Are you OK?” a voice said.

  “Yeah.” Sam sat up on the back seat of the battered old car. Arianna was twisted around in the passenger seat, smiling at him.

  “You were dreaming, a nightmare I think,” Arianna said kindly. “But I didn’t want to wake you …”

  “Ah, yeah. Sorry,” Sam said, sitting up straighter and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Well, it is a good time to wake,” Arianna said, pointing out the windshield. “We’re here.”

  Sam noticed the driver’s seat was empty—Boris was gone. But then Sam saw him outside crossing the road.

  “We’re at the airport,” Arianna said. “You slept most of the way. Boris has gone to check that all is clear.”

  Sam nodded, watching the big Russian weaving casually through the busy commuter traffic. “Was I, ah, talking, you know, in my sleep?” he said. He wondered how much he may have said out loud, and if any of it had been coherent.

  “You spoke a little, at the end,” Arianna said in her heavy Russian accent. “Mostly you keep saying, ‘No, no, no.’”

  “Kept.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing, I’m sorry.” Sam wound his window down and let the cool morning air blow in. It stung at his face, the temperature easily in the negatives, with plenty of snow outside, and it woke him better than a dozen coffees. “I was having a nightmare,” he admitted to Arianna. “I was having this dream, and it became really weird.”

  “How?”

  “Well, Solaris was there, so that was the same. But this one had some kind of—monsters, I guess—in it.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Yeah. Like huge beasts, but nothing that I could recognize. They belonged to him.”

  “I had a nightmare too,” Arianna said quietly.

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?” Sam said, and then the realization hit him. “Wait—you dreamed as well?”

  “Yep,” Arianna said, smiling widely. “For the first time in so long. And I can remember it!”

  “That’s amazing!” Sam said.

  “It was so amazing!” Arianna said, sounding excited to have gotten back her ability to dream. “It feels so unusual, but wonderful all at once. The nightmare, although, not so much …”

  Sam nodded. “The Academy told me the Dreamscape is full of nightmares right now, more than ever. It’s because of the race.”

  The car door opened and Boris got in, handing them both paper bags. The bag felt warm and when Sam opened it and looked inside, he was very happy to see a bread roll stuffed with coleslaw and pastrami. He realized then just how hungry he was.

  “All is clear out there,” Boris said.

  Sam nodded his thanks and said through a mouthful to Arianna, “So that means that when you shut down the Hypnos’ lab in Siberia …”

  “That it deactivated the chip they implanted in Dreamers like me,” Arianna said. “Just imagine all the people across the country who are now dreaming, who had no idea that we were moving against the Hypnos.”

  Boris chuckled and said something in Russian. Sam looked to Arianna.

  “He said they will know now,” Arianna translated. “They will be thankful for what we’ve done. Here, use this,” she handed Sam a new earpiece translator, identical to the first.

  “What happened in there?” Sam asked, as he inserted it into his ear. “I mean, afterwards, to the guards at the lab?”

  “The police found them this morning,” Boris said, smiling. “I tipped them off.”

  “What about Hans?” Sam asked. “Think he will go to jail?”

  “No, not yet,” Arianna said as Boris took off into the traffic to take them around to the airport’s departure area. “We left him at the facility, but still he managed to escape.”

  “Big surprise …” Sam said, staring out his window.

  Hans is probably halfway around the world by now, already planning his next move against us.

  “We will continue to hunt this Hans,” Boris said, “along with anyone still working for him or the Hypnos. After what we did at the Tunguska facility, he might find those who were willing to help him are now not so easily bought.”

  “But at least we have these,” Sam said, looking at the Gears in the case. “Which means there’re only five left to find. Five, and then we have to find a way to get the other Gears from Solaris. Unless we have all thirteen Gears there’s no way to assemble the Bakhu machine.” Sam paused, feeling overwhelmed as he thought about the seemingly insurmountable challenge ahead.

  One step at a time, Sam. Just think about right now … the very next step.

  “So now we’re going back to the Academy? I mean, you’re coming with me, right?” Sam asked Arianna.

  “Your plane leaves very soon,” Boris answered, idling the car’s engine at the drop-off point at the Departures terminal. A plane roared overhead. “In a few hours you will be back in London.”

  “Arianna?” Sam said.

  “I should stay here, help Boris and the Nyx. But yes, Sam, I will join you. I understand my path now is to help win the race.”

  They all got out, Sam tightly holding onto the box containing the Gears. He went to shake Boris’ hand but the big bear of a man pulled him in for a rib-crushing hug instead.

  “See you again, someday—soon, Sam.”

  “Thanks, Boris, for everything.”

  Arianna said goodbye to her friend, getting a bear hug of her own, and then she and Sam walked out of the icy wind and into the warm terminal.

  Once inside, Sam saw two people running toward him.

  Lora and Eva?

  “Hey, guys. Hi!” Sam exclaimed, before he was almost knocked to the ground as Eva flung herself onto him.

  “Where’ve you been? We’ve been worried to death!” Eva said, pulling back and punching him in the arm.

  “Ow! Hey, it wasn’t by choice, I assure you,” Sam said. “But I’m glad to see you missed me,” he grinned. He quickly introduced them to Arianna, who greeted them with firm handshakes and a warm smile. “But what are you doing here?” he continued.

  “We were on the way back to the Academy too,” Eva said. “Heard you had reappeared in Russia so we took a detour to meet you.”

  “Been on vacation?” Sam joked.

  “I was on a mission of my own, actually,” Eva said, punching his shoulder again, “with Dr. Dark and your old friend Ahmed Kader.”

  “What?” Sam stopped in his tracks. “But, but he—”

  “Come on, you two,” Lora interrupted. “We can catch up on everything on the plane. We’re going to miss our flight if we don’t hustle.”

  05

  ALEX

  “What if I run really fast?” Alex said. “You really think this wristband will blow my hand off?” He looked at the metal wristband, its little red blinking lights a constant reminder that he was a captive.

  “You might make it down the hall and to the elevator,” Shiva replied. “But most definitely, yes, it has enough explosive force to take your hand off and make a real mess of the rest of you.”

  Alex let out a sigh. “And if we try to get it off …”

  “It has an anti-tamper mechanism that will start the timer, and if it’s not reset in five minutes, boom!”

  “Great, just great.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “How’d you figure?”

  “At least we’re in a nice apartment,” Shiva said.

  “Yeah, I guess …” Alex looked around. They were sitting on beanbags chairs in front of a TV screen that nearly took up the whole living room wall. But there was no Internet or phone, and the windows were thick, locked tight and blacked out—so there was no use using the lights to signal for help to neighbouring buildings. They w
ere in a luxury prison, sixty floors up. Alex could just make out the skyline of midtown Manhattan if he squinted through a tiny gap in the window. Cut off from the outside world with nothing but each other and just enough food to survive. No guards to watch over them, just the wristbands packed with explosives.

  How can we be in the middle of the city with no neighbours? What is this building? Have we really been here a whole week? Man …

  “You really don’t think Phoebe or Jack will find us?”

  “No, I think they would have found us by now if they were going to.”

  “I know, I know,” Alex said. “Sorry, man. I know we’ve been over this a hundred times. And speaking of things we’ve talked about before, what do you think Stella and Matrix are going to do with us?”

  “My guess,” Shiva replied, “is that they need you for something.”

  “Me?”

  “Maybe. It did look like you might be one of the last 13.”

  “And then again, maybe not,” Alex sighed. “Nothing’s happened since the Professor and the Director told me that my dreaming patterns altered around the Gears. Nothing, zip.”

  “Well, they won’t take that chance.”

  “Right,” Alex said. “And what about you?”

  Shiva shrugged.

  “I mean, Stella wouldn’t hurt you, right? With your skills, you’re an asset to them,” Alex said. “And Matrix wouldn’t—”

  “Yes, he would,” Shiva said.

  Alex frowned, not knowing what to say.

  “Don’t worry about it, I’m not. You can’t stop crazy people from doing stupid things. No doubt they’ve been over all that work that we did and have done some tinkering of their own.”

  “They’ve had days to get it all right,” Alex sighed, exasperated.

  “Exactly. So if Matrix can take over from where we finished, well … they’ll have no use for me.”

  “If they get it working,” Alex said.

  Shiva nodded.

  Alex swallowed hard. “How much longer do you think it’ll take them to get it online?”

  “Soon, possibly in the next day or two,” Shiva replied right away, as though he’d calculated it long ago. “The work we were doing was just testing the power supply. They’ll have completed that and moved to the next stage.”

  “Making them operational?”

  Shiva nodded.

  Alex said, “And then they can tap into the Dreamscape, find Sam and the last 13, and this could all be over …”

  Shiva nodded.

  Alex stood. “We gotta think up a new way out of this mess.”

  “Seriously, the red wire?” Alex said.

  They were looking inside his explosive wristband. The face of it had been painstakingly removed, one tiny screw at a time. Shiva had sharpened the end of the metal arm of his glasses, forming a screwdriver. Alex held an empty drinking glass overhead as an improvised magnifier so that Shiva could carefully reroute the anti-tamper wire with a longer piece that they’d removed from the TV console. Now they saw the small detonator and putty-like explosives that packed every bit of space inside the wristband. There were two wires, one red and one blue, which led from a small battery to the detonator.

  Alex looked at the two wires. A simple choice lay before them—cut one or the other.

  Cut the right wire, disable the device.

  Cut the wrong one … boom.

  A snip of a wire—device deactivated.

  Or … the timer will start.

  “What,” Shiva said, “you think I should cut the blue wire?”

  “I think that’s what I’ve seen done before.”

  “You’ve seen this done before?” Shiva said. “And you’re just telling me that now?”

  “Well, yeah, kind of,” Alex said, keeping his arm completely steady under the bright lamplight. He didn’t dare risk moving it while Shiva was working. “In a movie,” he added quietly.

  “A movie?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hmm. Which movie?”

  “Can’t remember. Does it matter?”

  “Maybe. If it was a good movie, maybe I’d trust it. Did they succeed?”

  “I think so. Or—or maybe not.”

  “Cool, well, thanks for sharing, that was a big help.”

  “No problem.” Alex swallowed hard. “Hey, tell me again why we can’t cut the wristband?”

  “Well,” Shiva replied, “for one thing, it’s made of a titanium alloy, similar to what they use to make tank armour, so we’d need a serious diamond-cutting disc on an angle grinder and the bomb would go off before we got to a hardware store. Not to mention I might cut off your hand in the process.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “And, both wires seem to run through the wristband,” Shiva added, “so if we cut or break the band, that would sever both wires and trigger the mechanism.”

  “Oh, right,” Alex said. “And thus trigger the anti-tamper … trigger.”

  “Yeah, so let’s not do that.”

  “Agreed.” Alex blinked away at some sweat that was running into his eyes, focusing on the scene before him—his wrist, the bomb, and the nail clippers in Shiva’s hands.

  “OK. OK … let’s do the wire,” Shiva said.

  “The blue one, right?” Alex asked.

  “Right.”

  “I mean—wait, no, you said red before,” Alex said.

  “And then you said blue,” Shiva corrected.

  “Yeah—no, wait—did I?”

  “You said something about a movie and that they cut either the red or the blue wire and it did or didn’t go off,” Shiva said. “But hey, if you think red, great, me too, totally, so let’s cut the red wire.”

  “You just said blue!”

  06

  SAM

  Lora, Eva, Sam and Arianna arrived at the London campus of the Academy in time for dinner. Sam waited outside the dining hall, Lora, Eva and Arianna standing next to him. The hum of hundreds of students could be heard through the closed wooden doors.

  “Can’t I just take something to my room?” Sam said to Lora.

  “You’ll have to face them sooner or later,” Lora said. “Better to get it over with. Go on in, I’ll come and get you soon.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Sam said.

  “What are you worried about?” Eva said, her hand on the door, slowly pushing it open. “These past weeks you’ve been gone, no one’s barely noticed you were missing. Trust me, there’s not going to be any crazy reception.”

  Sam looked at her doubtfully.

  They pushed the doors open.

  The noisy chatter of a few hundred students at dinner died down, first quieting to whispers, and then stopping altogether. Silence. Sam could feel the stare of every set of eyes in the room that were locked on him.

  What happened next reminded him of Issey’s crazy fans from his nightmare. In unison, the Academy students erupted into cheers. They clapped and whooped and screamed, some stamping their feet while others used the cutlery to add to the raucous noise. He ducked his head in embarrassment and followed Eva to the table where the others of the last 13 sat. He shook hands and received hugs from his friends. As the noise in the hall eventually died down, Sam felt, for the first time since he could remember, like he was home.

  Even as Sam was introducing Arianna to everyone, they could barely stop themselves from asking questions. Everyone at the table wanted to find out all about what happened to him in the US and Russia.

  “We heard it was a full nuclear blast,” Xavier said, smirking. “So, are you like a real radioactive superhero now?”

  Sam rolled his eyes.

  “Did a spider bite you?” Rapha asked, joking along. “Can you climb walls?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Sam said, secretly grateful for the lighthearted moment. “I did dream of wolves, though.”

  “Wolf Boy,” Xavier said, grinning. “Seriously, dude, how many lives do you have?”

  “Thirteen,” Sam said without missing a beat.
>
  “Wolf Boy is lame,” Gabriella laughed, joining in. “We should have a competition to think up Sam’s superhero name.”

  “Whatever,” Sam said. “And, thanks, you’re really helping with this ‘go back to normal life afterward’ idea that I had.”

  “It’s OK, Sam,” Zara said. “You have been missing. We all miss you.”

  “Some of us,” Xavier joked.

  Maria hit him in the arm. “Tell us what you’ve been doing,” she said. “And don’t leave out the good parts!”

  He answered as many questions as he could, but asked many too—wanting to know what the others had been up to in his absence.

  Sam had been uneasy about seeing Cody again and had tried not to pay him any attention during dinner. He noticed that everyone else at the table seemed to be happy enough to have him there. When Cody finally spoke up and added his side to Sam’s story about the complex in Denver, describing for Sam’s benefit how he and his parents ejected to safety, Sam just listened.

  He seems genuinely sorry for leading me there. I guess he was really taken in by Mac. And his parents must have told him it was the right thing to do. Most of us believe our parents, don’t we?

  “And now what will your parents do?” Sam asked Cody.

  “They, um, are working for the Enterprise again,” he answered quietly. “They want to help in any way they can. They know things that might be useful.” He paused before adding, “Sam, I’m really—”

  “Let’s not talk about it now,” Sam cut him off. There was a long awkward silence at the table—no one knew what to say next.

  “And any word on Alex?” Sam asked finally, changing the subject.

  Eva shook her head and said, “He went missing, about the same time as you, along with the Enterprise tech guy, Shiva. They were in New York, working on old Dreamer stuff, apparently.”

  “Oh …” Sam said.

  “They’ll be fine,” Xavier added. “My father’s sure of it. They’ll find them.”

  “Do they think Stella has anything to do with it?”

  “We believe so,” Eva said, “Stella and Matrix. The Director says it’s clear now they wanted those Tesla coils. They’ll probably have set them up somewhere hidden.”