by Dima Zales
“It tracks.” Pom’s ears wiggle. “But what about the others?”
I recreate the bird attack crime scene. “Valerian could’ve made Gemma think Leal was her enemy, and then had her summon the birds to kill him. For that matter, he could’ve made the birds see something tasty where Leal was standing, thus causing that attack.” I create Leal and turn him into a bowl of grain.
Pom turns black. “Illusionists have too much power.”
“Yeah. Yeah, they do.” I recreate Gemma’s torn body. “Here again, Valerian could’ve made someone strong—probably Eduardo—see an enemy attacking, so Eduardo ripped the ‘enemy’ in half. Or he could’ve shown Eduardo the illusion of Gemma provoking him, until he snapped and killed her. He could’ve even used his powers to drive that werewolf insane at JFK, to make sure the Enforcers were away.”
Pom bobs his head, his eyes bigger than usual.
I’m on a roll now. It’s coming together so clearly. “Finally, Valerian could’ve shown Eduardo something that drove him to choke Albina to death.” I create a bedroom with Albina lying in bed, then swap her for Ryan the elf. “Alternatively, the choking might’ve been part of sex play, but Valerian could’ve made Eduardo think that Albina was asking him to squeeze harder. He could’ve used illusion to hide any sign she was choking.”
Pom’s ears droop. He looks sick. “What about Eduardo? Could you make someone give themselves an injection using illusions?”
“Sure,” I say. “Valerian could’ve made himself invisible, then waltzed in and swapped the syringe with steroids for the one with the REM drug.” I recreate the scene. A translucent Valerian watches as Eduardo accidentally kills himself. “For all we know, Valerian was still there, invisible to us when we found the body.”
Pom’s fur trembles.
I turn the translucent Valerian more opaque and study his perfect features. Can someone with such a gorgeous face be a killer?
What am I thinking? Of course he can. Besides, who says Valerian even looks this way? He might look like a leper with missing teeth and—
“You think they’ll stay the execution when you tell them all this?” Pom asks.
I make Valerian disappear. “Well… this theory has a major flaw: I have no clue why he would kill all these Councilors. Motive is a pretty important part of crime investigations. Without that, plus some kind of proof, the Council won’t listen to me. At the end of the day, this is just a wild theory.”
“I still think you should talk to someone,” Pom says. “Maybe Kit will think of a motive. How about we go into the tower and see if someone from the Council is sleeping?”
I shake my head glumly. “I’d need my powers to enter other people’s dreams.”
“You haven’t recovered yet? I thought that’s how you create stuff like this.” He waves a paw around us.
“Just changing my surroundings doesn’t mean I have my powers back. Even humans can learn to do something like this, à la lucid dreaming. To really know if I’ve recovered, I need to try to enter someone’s dream.”
“Let’s do that, then.” He torpedoes toward the tower of sleepers, and I hurry to catch up.
“Felix and Ariel aren’t here,” he says when we get to the nooks.
I take a quick glance at where a few of the Councilors would be if they were sleeping, but they aren’t there. “Maybe it’s daytime in New York.”
“Then why is Bernard sleeping?” Pom points at the mustachioed man’s room.
“He’s been keeping odd hours.” I make my way over to the clouds representing more dreams in the poor guy’s trauma loop. “I guess I could use him to see if my powers are back. That’ll give us a clue as to how long it’s been in the waking world.”
Pom gives me a baffled look. “You’re going to finish Valerian’s job? Even though we think he’s the killer?”
“I don’t have to finish the job. I could guide Bernard through the rest of his trauma loop but not do what Valerian actually hired me for. Then again, I think I should finish it.”
Pom’s ears twitch quizzically.
“If I finish, when Felix goes to sleep, I could ask him to send word to Valerian that the job is complete, so he remits the funds as promised. Killer or not, Valerian’s got lots of money.”
Pom turns an indeterminate mix of colors. “I guess.”
I approach the sleeping Bernard. “I’ll deal with his remaining dreams in the trauma loop first, then decide.”
“Good luck,” Pom says, bouncing up and down.
I give him a wave, make myself invisible, and touch Bernard’s scarred forehead.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’m in. My powers are back—and I almost wish they weren’t.
A dirty, beaten-up man is chained to a radiator in an abandoned warehouse.
I recognize him instantly. It’s the wiry, balding middle-aged defendant from Bernard’s courtroom dream, the one pronounced not guilty of murdering Bernard’s boy. When his smell reaches me, I gag. What the hell? He stinks so bad my only option is to disable my olfactory sense. He also looks much thinner than at the trial, his shifty eyes filled with insanity and desperation.
His face stony, Bernard approaches, wood saw in hand.
“I’m sorry,” the chained guy croaks. “Please let me out. I didn’t mean to kill him. Things got out of control. I was abused when I was—”
“You want out? Here.” Bernard drops the saw and kicks it within the prisoner’s reach.
The guy frantically saws at the chain but only destroys the tool in the process. He hurls the toothless saw back at Bernard with a guttural cry—and misses.
“You can’t cut metal with a wood saw,” Bernard says coldly. “You know what you really need to do. You’re just not ready yet.”
Oh, no. I kind of knew where this was going, but still. Mega yuck.
A few days pass in a blink, and Bernard returns with a new saw identical to the last. This time, the insanity in the prisoner’s eyes is even clearer. He doesn’t even plead with Bernard, just sits there, gaze glued to the saw in his tormentor’s hands. Without a word, Bernard drops the saw to the floor and kicks it over. The guy grabs it and reluctantly places the sharp edge above his wrist.
I shift my gaze to Bernard’s face, and when the nauseating sounds begin, I disable my hearing. From Bernard’s expression, you’d think it was his wrist being sawed in half. He’s muttering something, and though I’m not great at reading lips, I think he’s saying, “I’m a monster. I’ve become worse than the very evil I was trying to—”
Suddenly, his eyes widen to the size of plates.
I follow his gaze.
His right arm a gory mess, the prisoner leaps at Bernard with an animalistic snarl, shouting something.
I reenable my hearing.
The guttural roar is something I’d expect from a wounded bear, not a man.
Clutching the saw in his remaining hand, the man slices at Bernard’s face. The teeth of the saw bite into his forehead, and Bernard screams in pain.
I shudder. So this is how he got that scar.
Bernard shoves his attacker away. The malnourished man tips backward but instantly begins crawling back toward Bernard, growling like a demon.
Hand trembling, Bernard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gun.
Bang.
The growling stops, but the guy still crawls forward.
Bang.
The crawling stops as well.
Bernard keeps shooting until his gun is empty. Then he falls onto his hands and knees and vomits.
The dream shifts at this point. Bernard is staring at the empty walls of his apartment.
I swallow down the bitter tang of the previous dream. Okay, so his trauma loop is over. That’s a good thing. Now that it’s handled, I could in theory perform my job.
This dream is a memory, though, and I’m curious to let it play out.
The phone rings, and he lets voicemail pick up.
It’s the ex-wife. “Your daughter’s
birthday is today. She misses you. Call her.”
A shiver ripples through Bernard. “Why?” he whispers raggedly. “Why would she want to talk to a monster?”
The next dream is also a memory but takes place years later. Bernard watches his daughter from afar, his eyes filled with regret.
The next dream is later still. Bernard is sitting in a large conference hall surrounded by other humans. I recognize the keynote speaker.
It’s Valerian.
In this memory, Valerian looks exactly as he appeared to me. Does that mean this is what he really looks like?
“By the end of next year, Bale Inc. will take virtual reality to the next level,” the gorgeous illusionist says passionately, channeling Tony Robbins. “Further down the line, the world you see around you”—he clicks his remote control, and a space view of Earth appears on the screen behind him—“will be one of the many possible places people can inhabit. My hope is that most will thrive in these limitless illusory worlds that we will create for them, worlds undistinguishable from vanilla reality. It will be the biggest…”
I stop listening because something dawns on me.
What Valerian is trying to do. And why.
He wants to bring illusory worlds to billions of Earth humans. More than that, he wants his name—his and his company’s—to be the name everyone associates with these worlds. He wants his name to be synonymous with illusions.
It’s a mind-boggling ambition.
There’s a relationship between Cognizant powers and the human belief in said powers. That’s how Lilith, a vampire who declared herself a goddess of blood on a world she subjugated, became nearly unstoppable. By making his company synonymous with illusions, Valerian might become the most powerful illusionist on Earth, if not throughout the Cogniverse, all without declaring himself a god—something that would get him executed by the local Cognizant.
This must be why he hires me for shady jobs such as what I might be about to do: He needs to keep his nose clean as far as the Earth Councils are concerned.
Bernard’s dream shifts to a time some nine months later. He’s sitting in a meeting room with a bunch of people. Valerian is there too, looking at Bernard expectantly with those hypnotic blue eyes.
“The VR motion sickness is the most urgent issue to resolve before we go live,” Valerian says. “Has your team made any progress on that?”
Bernard glances at his notepad. “We’ve been slaving at it for months, but we don’t have much. We don’t even know if the problem is caused by sensory conflict or postural instability. You’re against removing body visualization…”
I ignore the rest of Bernard’s speech. It’s time to decide if I want to finish the job Valerian hired me for. Given this dream, it would take almost no effort to do so, as the dream happens to be about the very issue in question. Valerian is working on producing VR products that don’t make people nauseated, a major hurdle facing the industry at the moment, so he’s hired me to secretly provide Bernard with an inspiration—a solution to come “in a dream.” The task is trivial, of course, since Gomorrah is light years ahead of Earth when it comes to all technology, but especially anything to do with virtual reality.
Fine. Given how easy this is, I’m just going to do it.
I leave my body and jump into Valerian’s, then stride up to the drawing board. “What if we tried this?” I proceed to present a comprehensive solution, from hardware to software tricks.
Bernard’s eyes light up greedily as I draw an algorithm that’s particularly ahead of its time. I can’t help but grin; the most difficult part of this job was actually memorizing all this.
When I’m done, I exit Valerian’s body and wake Bernard with a jolt of my power. If I allow him to dream more, he could forget what he’s just learned.
Pom is waiting eagerly in Bernard’s nook in the tower of sleepers.
“That’s it,” I tell him when I reappear. “I’ve gone Inception on his ass.”
Pom claps his tiny paws together. “So he’ll make a technological discovery when he wakes up?”
“And he’ll be positive he came up with it on his own. Valerian, of course, will profit.” I leave the nook behind me to fly alongside Pom. “I wonder how often my kind has been responsible for big discoveries that are really just information from another world? Maybe this is how Earth’s Dmitri Mendeleev came up with the periodic table in his dream. Niels Bohr is also said to have come up with the structure of the atom in his dream, and even Albert Einstein—”
I stop short because I notice something that can’t be.
A sleeper who shouldn’t be sleeping, yet is.
I look at Pom. “You see him too, right?” I point at the nook in question.
Pom turns a hodgepodge of colors. “I see. But isn’t that—”
“Exactly.” I whoosh toward the room.
“But how?” He flies after me.
“I think he was doing his best to stay awake until I’m executed, but he must’ve accidentally fallen asleep.” I loom over the sleeper, still having trouble believing my eyes.
“Do you think it means—”
“Oh yeah.” My voice crackles with excitement. “This must be the murderer.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
We both examine the deceptively kind, grandfatherly face in front of us—a face belonging to someone who’s supposedly dead.
A face belonging to Dr. Hekima.
“But he died,” Pom says, bewildered. “Nessie ate him.”
I shake my head. “Hekima’s an illusionist. He made me and Kain believe we’d seen his death in a way that conveniently left no body to be examined.”
Pom’s pupils morph into red hearts again. “So Valerian isn’t the killer after all?”
I grin at him. “No, but the way Hekima pulled off the crimes is probably the way I said Valerian would’ve. I almost figured it out—I just suspected the wrong illusionist.”
Pom’s ears flap back and forth. “But why did he kill all those people?”
That’s what I have to go in and find out. I point at the clouds swirling over Hekima’s head. “I bet his trauma loop has something to do with it.”
Dragging in a steadying breath, I touch the illusionist’s wrinkled forehead with unsteady fingers and jump into his dream.
“Please, Siti,” a younger version of Hekima says. “What you’re doing isn’t safe.”
He’s talking to a teen who looks just like him, frizzy hair, kind face, and all. Her name sounds vaguely familiar to me.
“I’m easing people’s pain, Daddy,” Siti says. “If you weren’t under the stupid Mandate, you’d do the same thing. You know you would.”
Hekima sighs. “I’m not saying what you’re doing isn’t kind. It is. It’s just that using your powers that way is forbidden by—”
Puck, now I recall where I heard her name. It was when I was researching the voting patterns. The case about the young woman who eased the pain of human hospice patients in their final days—her name was Siti.
“I make them think they’re somewhere beautiful,” Siti says, confirming my suspicions, “and sometimes I surround them with their loved ones. Is that so wrong?”
It all clicks into place. Siti was caught. There was a Council trial, and Eduardo, Tatum, Ryan, Gemma, Leal, Albina, and a bunch of others voted for the ultimate penalty—and the Council executed the poor girl.
When Hekima learned what had happened, he gained prominence in the Cognizant community by running the Orientation program Felix mentioned—all so that one day he’d be chosen to serve on the Council and be positioned to take his revenge.
And he’s not done yet. There are still people on the Council who voted to execute his daughter. With me out of the picture and everyone else thinking him dead, he’s free to finish what he started, one Councilor at a time.
Realizing I missed a shift from one dream to another, I start paying closer attention.
Hekima is standing over an unmarked grave, tears stream
ing down his face.
“I’m sorry, Siti,” he says thickly. “I should’ve forced you to stop. I should’ve dragged you to another world before you got caught. I should’ve—”
He stops talking and looks right at me.
Puck. What’s wrong with me? I forgot to make myself invisible again—and at the worst time ever.
I belatedly disappear, but it’s too late. Hekima saw me, I can tell by his expression. Looking at the spot where I stood, he smashes his fist into his own nose—and that must cause him to wake up.
I end up back in the tower of sleepers, Hekima gone from the bed.
“He knows that I know,” I tell Pom grimly.
He turns black and grabs my wrist with his little paws. “Wake up and do something.”
So I wake myself—and end up back on the dirty floor of my stinky dungeon cell.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Then again, all is not the same as when I first got locked in here. Having slept, I feel amazing. I must’ve gotten at least a few additional hours of rest. Leaping to my feet, I whip out my sanitizer and wipe down every part of me that touched the floor.
Wow, my mind is sharp as a diamond. No wonder I couldn’t solve the case earlier. After months of sleep deprivation, I was a shadow of myself. I resist the urge to smack my forehead. Why did it take me so long to kick vampire blood? Given my work with insomniacs, I know better than anyone that lack of sleep can lead to impaired thinking, memory problems, and eventually even death.
Here’s how bad my memory had become: I’d forgotten about my lockpicks. I still have them in my pocket from when I broke into Bernard’s apartment. My hand slaps my pocket—yep, still there. I dash over to the rusty padlock on the door of my cell.
Oh yeah, I can handle this. Hopefully.
The lock puts up a small fight but eventually yields. I slide open the bolt on my side and open the cell door. Now what?