Annoyed, Cecily brought her gloved hand up, placing an outstretched finger to her lips. “Quiet, Antonia, there are people here now.” The glove stretched past her elbow in the opera style and it was made of white silk that shimmered like moonlight when Cecily moved her arm.
“But we’re not finished,” Antonia said, paying little attention to the volume of her voice despite her companion’s warning. “It would simply be in bad taste for someone to interrupt us now, and we have nothing to present to visitors should they demand it. No cake, no scones. We don’t even have tea. Why, they surely would believe us to be barbarians if they found us here in such a lacking state of preparedness.”
Cecily dabbed at her coif of blond hair self-consciously as Antonia continued.
“None of which alters the fact that we are neither stuck here nor have we been here so long that you need behave as if we are never to leave,” Antonia chastised.
“But the people...?” Cecily began.
“There are people,” Algernon confirmed, turning away from the rude parting in the wall. “Foreigners, too, by the look of them.”
“Foreigners?” Cecily’s and Antonia’s horrified response came in shocked unison.
A fourth figure appeared from the same room where Antonia had strode a minute or so previously, entering via the stairwell on silent tread. It was Hugh Danner, with his collar-length tresses of curling brown hair and a white shirt on the cuffs of which were two shining gold cuff links. “What is all the commotion?” he asked. His voice was honey rich, his tone nonjudgmental.
“Oh, Hugh, it’s terrible,” Cecily said while Antonia rolled her eyes at the performance. “There are foreigners here, just outside. Two of them. I told you that metal thing meant something. Oh, whatever should we do?”
A smile formed on the thin lips of the man, but it was a cunning smile, like the smile of a reptile. “Why, we should introduce ourselves,” Hugh announced. “Without delay.”
* * *
T
HE
CLATTER
OF
HEELS
on tiling, the swish of leather against her muscles as she ran. It was faultless, it felt so real.
Brigid Baptiste continued to run, driving herself to the staircase that would let her ascend that final floor to the roof. She had ridden the elevator up as far as she could, one story from the top of the dagger blade of a building. The elevators worked, even after she’d driven a ton and a half of sports car into the side of the building. They shouldn’t, Brigid knew. The impact should have messed up the whole structure, and at the very least emergency protocols should have kicked in and shut down the system until it could be checked. But it was dream logic, dream physics; sometimes stuff kept working even after it should have stopped. She was counting on that. That, and the strength of her memory.
Boom!
The heavy fire door slammed against the wall, the echo of wood against concrete resonating up and down the grim stairwell. There were windows running up one side of the stairwell wall, tall, narrow rectangles that swiveled open on a central spindle. One of them had been propped open and Brigid felt the wind in her hair as she ran past. Damn, but it was real.
“Remember, it’s a dream,” Brigid reminded herself as she reached for the door that waited at the top of the staircase. Outside, through the arrow-slit windows, Brigid could see the Deathbird waiting, moving through the air like a circling shark, hunting for her. There were more shapes in the distance, appearing over the line that marked out the sea. Where were they coming from? There was no land there, no island. The internal logic didn’t work, the simulation and the dream drug were working at cross-purposes, trying to keep things moving forward, responding to her actions.
Brigid shoved against the door, scampered onto the rooftop, the familiar sound of gravel under her boots as perfectly realized as everything else. The Deathbird spotted her, turning its guns on her even as she ran. Was dying in a dream an option? she wondered. Was that something she had known before she took this assignment?
Laser blasts burned the air, carving toward the roof in sizzling lines of heat. Bullets joined them, spitting from the Deathbird’s USMGs, kicking up loose gravel where they cut a path across the roof toward the fleeing woman in black. Brigid paid them no mind, focusing only on her destination. She ran, pelting across the rooftop to its edge where the building kneeled against the sea.
Jump! she told herself.
Another blast of laser light, another round of bullets. More Deathbirds swooping toward the building, their shadows stuttered as they crossed the ocean waves. Then Brigid was over the side of the building, arms spread out in a swan dive.
* * *
T
HE
TANNED
MAN
in the red dress had picked up one of the bags of sea salt from the desk and rested it comfortably in his palm as he tore it open. Then he brought the bag up to his face and inhaled, squeezing at the sides of the bag to jostle the contents. It wasn’t sea salt, Kane realized. It was glist, what remained after you’d evaporated the water content of the mutie sweat.
“Listen, buddy,” said redskin after he’d taken a hit of glist. “My name’s Red Mama O’Shumper—you heard of me?”
Kane shook his head once, back and forth. It felt kind of disorienting from where he’d been knocked out. “No. O’Shumper. What is that? Is that Irish? You don’t look Irish.”
“Ireland, Iceland, Atlantis? What the fuck does it matter with the way things are?” O’Shumper growled.
In a funny way, Kane could see his point. The world had been in a state of flux since the nuclear exchange back at the start of the twenty-first century, and even now the territories seemed to change size and shape quicker than those old African republics of yesteryear.
Smacking the bag of glist back on the desk, O’Shumper angrily slapped the Sin Eater beside it, making the strange insect girls flutter with the breeze. He was a dream addict, Kane realized, most likely in recovery but still running a pesthole like this. Sometimes addicts got too messed up by their time in
traum wirklichkeit,
found it hard to cling on to normality anymore. Their brains got kind of hardwired with the dreams, and their subconscious tried to take over.
“Just execute this mother,” the girl in the doorway drawled.
Chapter 6
Arms outstretched, Brigid leaped from the edge of daggerlike glass building, the Deathbird’s lasers searing red lines across its silvery facade.
The ocean was the edge of the map, she realized. Like in days of yore, when people had believed the Earth was flat and that the line of the horizon indicated the edge of the world. But there really was an edge to this world, a preconstructed dream environment, its structures bound by the processing power of the aging computer system that ran it.
As another thick red beam cut the air inches from Brigid’s scalp, she remembered the car she had driven, picturing it in her mind. The recall was perfect, thanks to her eidetic memory; she could see every sleek line, every highlight, every detail on the dashboard.
And remembering something inside a dream made it real. Can’t read a book in a dream without the story playing out before you, can’t look at a photo without the photo expanding as far as you need to see. She remembered the car and suddenly it was there, forming around her as another laser beam slashed the air, breaking windows across the building’s face.
Brigid’s foot was on the accelerator, flooring it as the car materialized, as the Deathbird fired, as the windows shattered, as the ocean roared, as the sirens wailed, as the—
“W
ASTE
OF
TIME
talking to him,” the dark-skinned girl with the impressive chest emotionlessly added as she peered at Kane’s naked and bound form from the open office door. “Besides, damn fool tried to shoot me.”
O’Shumper fixed his gaze on Kane, the diamond chip in his tooth twinkling in the light as he spoke. “That true? Did you shoot sweet Miss Schnitzler here?”
“I shot
at
her,” Kane allowed. “If I’d wanted to shoot her, I would have and we wouldn’t be having this shit-bore excuse for a conversation.”
“Oh, is that right?” Red Mama O’Shumper asked, leaning close to Kane and breathing that sickly sweet residue of glist in his face. “You know what? You’ve got ten seconds to tell me what in the name of the barons you were doing and who the hell you’re working for.”
“Cerberus,” Kane said. “You haven’t heard of them.”
“Cerberus...? Cerberus...?” O’Shumper muttered, rolling the word around in his mind. As he did so, leaning back against his overloaded desk, a cry came from the door.
“Red Mama? We have a— What you call it?— I think we have a—a situation building out here.” It was a man speaking, and Kane saw the figure peering past the girl—Deren of the shotgun.
“What kind of situation?” O’Shumper asked, a sharp edge of irritation to his voice.
“Engine A’s going nuts,” Deren explained. “I don’t—”
“Alana?” O’Shumper said, looking at the dark-skinned girl. “You go check this thing over.”
Alana Schnitzler lingered in the doorway for a moment, gazing over Kane where he sat naked in the chair. “Sure.”
“You should go with her,” Kane suggested as the girl withdrew from the doorway. “The situation’s going to get very rapidly worse and you’re going to want to be there to see it.”
“What?” O’Shumper growled. “What are you talking about?”
“That thing that’s going on,” Kane told him gently, “that’s my partner. She’s about to, uh, put an end to your dreams. You’ll want to see it happening. You won’t get the chance again.”
“That so?” O’Shumper snarled, leaning close to Kane as he reached for something on his desk. “’Cause you’ll never see it.”
Quickly, O’Shumper took the bag of glist clutched in his fingers and tossed the contents over his outstretched palm, raised it up and blew. Kane reared back as he realized what had just happened, but it was already too late—he had received a faceful of glist. The damage had already been done.
“Sweet dreams,
effendi,
” O’Shumper taunted as he wiped the remaining glist from his hands and left the room.
Kane swayed back and forth in his seat, holding his breath. Refined and pure like this, glist could have a savage psychotropic effect on anyone who imbibed it, and while the preferred method of consumption was as a food supplement or mixed into a drink, breathing it in had just the same effect. Kane didn’t know how much had hit him before he thought to hold his breath, but he could already feel his heart speeding up, thumping against his chest. He figured he had maybe thirty seconds, a minute at the outside, before he was fully in the glist’s embrace.
Work fast, Kane told himself, a strict voice inside his head.
He pulled at the bonds that held his hands tied, felt them strain. He spent enough time in the Cerberus gym, as well as the proxy gym of his adventurous and often unbelievable life. He could do this.
One...
Two...
Three...
Snap!
The cord broke, unraveling in a second as Kane yanked his wrists free. He leaped out of the chair; they hadn’t bothered to restrain his legs, just tied his hands with a cord that looped across his chest.
Kane barely glanced at the desk as he snatched up his Sin Eater where the cross-dressing O’Shumper had left it unguarded. “Amateurs,” Kane sniffed, his eyes already on the open door, peering out to the main room, where the dream engines throbbed.
The glist was beginning to whir around his body now, he could feel its energy in his bloodstream. Without the connection of the dream engine, he wouldn’t enter the shared state of
traum wirklichkeit,
but he would start to lose touch with reality, begin to hallucinate. Thirty seconds. Maybe twenty left.
Kane stepped out of the office, his head throbbing. The dimness of the room beyond seemed to pulse before his eyes, the blue-and-green illumination shimmering as if seen through a kaleidoscope. He brought the Sin Eater up automatically, his left hand slipping beneath the butt to steady his aim. Alana, O’Shumper and the other, younger man were crowded around a computer terminal in the lit area behind the counter, with Alana working the keyboard.
“Someone’s overloading the system from inside,” Alana was saying.
“Which one is it?” O’Shumper demanded.
“Bay seven,” Alana read. “The redhead.”
“Ring-fence it, cut her out of the loop.”
“I...I can’t,” Alana stuttered. “She’s too deeply involved. She’s created an area beyond the
traum wirklichkeit
that’s leeching our processing power. I can’t...”
Kane strode past the dreamers, his head pounding as he selected his first target. The dreamers were shaking in place as Brigid interfered with the
traum wirklichkeit
program, their sleep restless now. For a moment the people at the computer terminal were unaware of Kane’s presence, this naked figure striding across the room with a blaster poised in his hands. Deren, the young man who had so badly failed with the shotgun, looked up first, something catching in the corner of his vision.
“What the—?”
Kane’s finger stroked the trigger, sending a 9 mm slug through the air to embed in the man’s forehead.
O’Shumper swore as he jumped back, blood and brains splattering across the bodice of his dress. “He’s loose,” he growled. “How did—?”
Kane stroked the trigger again, sending another 9 mm bullet on its death race across the room. It drilled through O’Shumper’s left cheek, exploding half his face in a mélange of muscle and bone.
Alana ducked down, snatching for the snub-nosed blaster she still had resting on the desk beside the computer rig. Kane shot again as the world began to blur all around him, his eyes following the bullet as it cut through the air and slammed into the girl’s knuckle, turning her index finger into bloody mist. She cried out, called Kane a name.
Kane continued to drive on even as the world began to blow out around him. The girls on the wall were real, the ones with the locust heads. They were waiting in the shadows, waiting to devour him. Their eyes flashed as he tried to look away, keep focus on the dream peddlers.
He heard O’Shumper’s voice from behind the distant counter. “Kill thim,” he lisped through his ruined cheek. “Blefore he...”
Whatever else he said was lost to the cacophonous boom of the .38, too loud in Kane’s ears now. He thought he saw the explosion of propellant, but it waited there like paint splashed on a wall. The glist was making it hard to see properly, to make sense of anything. Instinct was all he had left now, and still two targets to put out of commission.
Kane ran as though he was flying, concentrating hard on the feel of his bare feet on the floor, telling himself over and over that he was only running. Ahead, the illuminated strip that marked out the counter danced up and down like a broken vertical hold on an old-style television set. Something raced past Kane, a bullet maybe, but it felt as if it was waiting at his back, as if it was a creature moving around the back of his skull.
His hands worked the setting at the side of the Sin Eater, an act of muscle memory, something he had done countless times before. Around him, the room’s dimensions were becoming uncertain, liquid filling a jar.
Kane closed one eye, narrowed the other, holding the Sin Eater out before him. Things were standing in the shadows; people. Only, they were without human faces, had bent-back limbs, metal parts, wooden.
Noises were loud but muffled, the sounds of shouting and the thrum of the dream engines and the boom of a discharging pistol.
“He’th loothing it,” O’Shumper shouted. “Look at thim, thucker c’n barethy sthand.”
Kane saw the silhouette wavering in the flickering light of the counter, the light that kept edging up his vision like a rocket taking off. The girl’s braids, bunched high on her head.
“Deren’s dead,” she said. “Oh, hell, he’s dead. He ain’t moving.”
“Doethn’t matter,” O’Shumper screamed at her. “Kill thim. Kill... No, therget that. Giff me the blasht—”
Kane squeezed the trigger when the afro appeared over the countertop, sending a continuous burst of bullets at the target. Red Mama O’Shumper screamed, dropped back with a thump that sounded like a slab of meat hitting a butcher’s board.
The other one was still behind there, he knew—the girl. Couldn’t take risks now, not when he was like this, wired on glist, out of his mind. Something was beeping behind the counter, the computer display was flashing a warning as Brigid overloaded the dream structures. It was a distraction, one they’d planned before she came here, one that was timed to perfection. Brigid’s eidetic memory could bewilder the dream program and create chaos for the other customers. Paying customers. Customers that O’Shumper and his team would do anything for to keep sweet. It was Kane’s ace up the sleeve, just in case he needed it once he was inside the building. Of course, banging out of his mind on glist hadn’t been a part of the plan.
Alana Schnitzler was scared now, scared enough to do something stupid. Her boss was dead, her colleague was dead, the dream engines were heightened to chaos mode and there was a naked man stalking her across a locked room in a locked building in the crime quarter of a shantytown. She was scared enough to peep out from behind the counter and try to take a shot.
She didn’t make it. Kane blasted without remorse, sending another burst of fire at the counter. Alana crashed back, burbling something through the blood that filled her mouth, and then died.
Kane sensed it was over. As the lights of the dream engines flickered and failed, Kane fell to his knees, flinching his wrist tendons in a futile effort to send his Sin Eater back to a wrist holster he no longer wore. Around him, the world seemed to spin like a wheel.
“This chaos is killing me,” Kane muttered as he sagged to the floor. He was entirely in another world now. Thanks to the glist, he had entered an unstructured, unguided
traum wirklichkeit,
where what was real and what was false were no longer delineated.
What happened next he wouldn’t know until much later.
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
TRAUM
WIRKLICHKEIT
,
the sky was flickering from night to day as Brigid slammed her foot on the accelerator of a vehicle that shouldn’t exist. The Deathbirds were flickering, too, appearing in multiple places at once, blinking across the sky like a poorly tuned signal.
Beneath her, the ocean pixelated, righted itself, pixelated again, while the sound of the waves looped, running in reverse. The docks were behind her, visible in the rearview mirror of the Turbo 190, melting as if seen through a heat haze.
The ocean was the edge of the environment, she knew now; the dream structures stretched no farther. She had introduced an impossible element to the dream: the Turbo 190, driving across the ocean surface as if it was a road. The program didn’t know what to do, as it had been designed to respond to a vast but limited range of possibilities, which meant that reintroducing something it registered as destroyed, manifesting the automobile in a place it categorically could not be, sent the dream engine into a frenzy. In trying to respond, it was overcompensating. A highway appeared for a moment, forming beneath the Turbo’s tires, materializing in pieces like the slots of a child’s model-train set.
The view in the rearview turned to mush, the fictitious Australasian city caving in on itself in a ruin of pixelated data. She could hear the turning rotors of the Deathbirds but they no longer existed in vision, only their echo remaining as a glitch in the dream engine.
The car kept threatening to decompose, but Brigid held it in place with memory, recalling its lines each time they became immaterial, demanding that the dream engine fill them in to satisfy her belief that they were there.
The other dreamers must be catching hell for this right now, Brigid guessed.
The
traum wirklichkeit
was an open environment that encompassed more than one dreamer once they had plugged into the feed. Dreamers might interact without even knowing it, shaping one another’s dream experiences with their actions. But Brigid’s action, overwhelming the processing units, would send shock waves right across the dream. The trauma could even be enough to wake them.
Which reminded her...