Delirium (11 page)

Rook grabbed Sera by the front of her shirt, as if she were part of him, and dragged her inside after him. The door clanged shut.

The man who’d let them in was bearded and gnarled, comfortable with his decades of wrinkles, and an old, stained gaming T-shirt stretched over his big belly. He regarded her with deep dislike and suspicion.

“She’s with me, asshole,” Rook said.

“She one of your old Chimera buddies?”

“I’m a chef,” Sera told him. He’d feel the truth in the waters. “I cook for a living.”

He grunted. “Can’t be too careful these days. Dream police are just as bad as nightmares. And you”—he rounded on Rook—“just because everyone lets you pass through their Rêves like a fart on the Scrape wind doesn’t mean you can bring anyone you want inside the market. She’s got to
buy
her way in on a dedicated waking world hookup, just like every other reveler.”

“Sera, here, is a prospective customer. I work for Vivienne Kennedy now. You can get your door cut from her.”

“Viv is very precise about her connections. She’s never had anyone in from the Scrape.
Ever.
Just because she trusts you not to bring in Chimera motherfuckers doesn’t mean I do.”

Rook lifted his chin. “You want to question Viv’s business practices, go ahead. She will fillet you like a fish.”

“I know fish,” Sera said, locking narrowed gazes with the man. She flashed a mean smile. “First Viv would have to scale him with a sharp knife. Then slice near the gills and slide the knife along the backbone, find the bloodline and scrape it out. Pick out the bones.”

Rook snorted.

The man just scowled deeper. “You psycho bitch.”

“
Chef
,
not Chimera,” Sera repeated. “And who are you?”

Rook glanced her way. “He’s the Middle Man.”

***

The shock of the fire had left Harlen’s parents pale, devastation and outrage clouding their eyes at irregular intervals. Jordan felt it keenly for them—sudden bad news, such an unexpected, vicious attack. They were handling it…better than Jordan expected. Where there’d been a sense of adventure and intrigue about sleuthing the Oneiros on the message boards before, now the task was quieter, their focus heated and grim.

“Okay.” Jordan held up a couple of headsets. “A little prep for going Darkside tonight. The thing is,” she said, “with everything going on, it’s best if everyone isn’t sleeping at once. If possible, we’d like someone to remain in the waking world at all times. So we’ll sleep in shifts.”

“We can do that,” Gary said.

“That’d be awesome. Thank you,” Jordan told him. “I’m going to show you how to work these headsets—it’s very easy. I’ve got an errand to run Darkside, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Gary slanted her a look. Very dad-like. “You’re going to the Revelations concert.”

Busted.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to go see what I can find out. Rook knows where I’m going but Harlen doesn’t, or he might have to report it since I’ll be sneaking into the Agora. I don’t want to get him in more trouble than he already is.”

“I appreciate it,” Eleanor said. She took a deep breath and added, “I appreciate everything you are all doing to help him.”

“We’re all in this together,” Jordan told her.

Gary gripped Eleanor’s hands. “We’re with you, too.”

“So…” Jordan collected her thoughts. “Once you go Darkside, you’ll find yourself in Maze City and Maisie will show you around. Just as a warning, the city might seem overwhelming and sometimes my sister doesn’t know how to take it slow. She’s a little on edge because someone close to her, one of our friends, has been MIA for days now. No word from him.”

Eleanor and Gary looked at each other. Not a single bat of an eye and yet some communication still passed between them.

“I’ll go Darkside first,” Gary said. “Eleanor will take the first shift here.”

“Oh, no need to decide right this minute,” Jordan said. “I figured you’d like some time alone together after…everything today.” She couldn’t meet their gazes for a moment. It was just too much. She cleared her throat. “So, basically, you just put on one of these and close your eyes.” She held up a headset. “Not as cool as a dreamjack, but it’ll do the trick. Rook had the system configured for me yesterday, so we know it works. At first, you’ll feel like you’re falling, a sensation of fluidity, and then you’ll find yourself in the city. When you want to wake, just try, and you’ll break free of the waters. It might give you a moment of worry, but after once or twice, you’ll get the hang of it, no problem. So…one of you goes, and when it’s time to trade off—you decide when—then the other can go.”

Gary took both headsets in hand. “It does sound easy. I think we can handle it, but what if something goes wrong? Can we wake one of you?”

She frowned. “None of the rest of us will be in our natural dreamscapes, so we won’t be able to wake, no.”

“Maybe I should go first,” Eleanor said to Gary. “You keep watch.”

“No one knows we’re here,” Jordan reminded them. “We’ve been very careful. I wouldn’t go to the concert if I had any doubts.”

Eleanor’s chin trembled—could’ve been in anger or sadness. “I believe you,” she said. “If the Oneiros knew where we were, where Harlen was, they’d have struck here instead.”

Jordan agreed. They’d killed Director Bright and burned down a house. They’d do anything to secure their vision of the future.

“Well, I think that’s it.” She looked into their stricken faces. They were trying so hard to hide their feelings. “Any questions?”

“We’re good,” Gary said. “Be careful at that concert, young lady.”

Jordan tried a smile. “I will be.”

She rose and headed back to the bedroom to lie down next to Rook. Harlen’s parents were going to take the pull-out sofa. Since one or both would be up part of the night, it seemed the best arrangement.

She dug through her duffel, finding a pair of clean sweats to sleep in. She dodged into the bathroom to brush her teeth really quickly and wash her face. When she finally climbed into bed next to Rook, she didn’t lie flat on her back but tucked herself into Rook’s side—he was so warm and he smelled good.

“Please be safe,” she whispered in his ear. No matter how tightly she held on to him, he was still far away.

She closed her eyes, her heart beating faster. “It’s only a concert,” she reminded herself. “I’ll be one of thousands.”

Nevertheless, she was still afraid. And growing more so with every second that passed.

CHAPTER SIX

Harlen had never proxied a woman before, and he hated that he would ride, of all people, Sera. Soft,
sweet
Sera—who’d just threatened to fillet the Middle Man like a fish. Harlen hadn’t wanted the proxy to work. He hadn’t wanted her to carry his weight. Hadn’t wanted her in the black market or scouting for nightmares. Even if she wanted to help him and was tough enough to handle it.

But the Oneiros had burned down his parents’ house.

And so here he was, doing something he would’ve never before considered. It made him wonder not what the world was coming to but what
he
was coming to. And what he was willing to do. If he didn’t draw the line here, with proxying the woman he loved, where in the proverbial sand would he draw it? Scrape sand blew all lines away.

He shuddered, his mind rebelling.
A symptom of the proxy—the primal fight between the dichotomy of selves:
him-not her.
As in the past, his senses were confused. She was short, for one; the ground was too damn close. But also, color was both reversed and hypersaturated. The fusion of their dreams was hot and bright. Part of that was his anger.

Burned down the house?
Ma and Pop might be feeling mostly thankful that everyone was okay and safe, a typical Ma-and-Pop response. But
no
. The Oneiros were going to pay.

He knew Sera was just as upset when he’d witnessed the husk of Ma’s burned-out kitchen before Sera replaced it with a vision of her second restaurant.
Nice try, sweetheart.
But the image was seared into his mind—where he’d grown up. Where his and Jess’s and Jake’s heights had been measured on the pantry wall when they were little kids.

He was ready to commit murder. No one touched his family.

Him-not her.
The crackle burning inside made it hard to hold on to Sera. She didn’t seem to fight the proxy at all, not that he could tell.
Him-not her.
The proxy was like acid eating at his nervous system. Was she in pain, too? He couldn’t tell. She made Indirect Surveillance seem easy, flipping the Middle Man the bird over her shoulder when he finally let her and Rook pass.

The Middle Man and his Scrape-aiming Judas hole were interesting. It made sense that some Darksiders might enter the black market from the Scrape—occasionally breaches happened in the Agora—but Harlen hadn’t known that a person could knock on a door and negotiate—maybe force?—entrance. Most revelers had to use someone’s Rêve setup and descended directly into a black market dream. But a door in the wall?
Very
interesting.

Rook had been holding out on Chimera. Maybe that’s why he was still accepted inside the market. It also begged the question: what else was Rook keeping to himself?

Him, not her.
Harlen ignored the sensation and concentrated on where they were headed. If he could just
see
, just
understand
what was going on, maybe he could mount a defense. Make
them
burn. Stomp out their fantasies of the Sandman.

The Middle Man’s passage into the black market led to steep stairs, almost medieval in their plunge into darkness. It smelled earthy and dank and sour. Harlen marveled at how Sera’s sense of smell seemed to have a spectrum all its own, discerning subtle variations of funk. That alone almost drove him from her mind.

But Rook piqued Harlen’s interest, saying in a hushed tone to Sera, “This is the Underground. I avoid it at all costs. You’ll see why, but since you can’t cross black market Rêves like I can, we have to enter this way. You can’t bluff your way past everyone.”

“You mean about filleting that guy?” Sera returned. “Who said I was bluffing?”

The stairs led to a crowded parking lot of infinite space, with ugly concrete columns holding up the low, gray ceiling—a cheap hack of the Corinthian columns inside the Agora. Golden sand drizzled and misted from cracks in the pavement above, as if the structure might collapse at any moment. Illumination was conveniently patchy—hard to see who was who. Revelers gathered in small groups, their voices distorted into hisses and growls to obscure what they said.

Rook’s arm came around Sera
and leaned in close to her ear. “Don’t freak,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”

Naturally, Sera looked around for the people for whom she could do nothing.

“Do not freak,”
Rook repeated.

On the far side of the space—
oh dear God
—was a line of revelers, chained by the neck. Each looked absolutely miserable: thin, ill, confused, defeated. One was crying. They stood on a platform from which people standing below could see them and haggle over a price.

“Are you
kidding
me?” Sera angrily whispered back to Rook.

Harlen’s own rage was hard to handle. Slaves. It happened, he knew. If there were slaves in the waking world, there would be the same Darkside, but these poor people were living horrors bounded only by their masters’ imaginations.

Someone yelled a bid in a language Harlen didn’t know and couldn’t guess at over the din of the crowd.

“There is a
child
up there,” Sera said, her control slipping. Harlen could feel the schism between
him-not her
opening, and he scraped to hold on to the proxy. It seared his brain and screamed along his nerves. This Underground was not the place to separate from her. These revelers would kill them.

“If you don’t do something,” Sera said to Rook, “I swear I will.”

She was right. The child in question was a boy about ten, maybe. Young enough to be slightly effeminate but still rangy, with a stubborn chin.

“There is no child up there,” Rook whispered low, with urgency. “It’s an illusion. A perverted one, yes, but it’s an adult. I swear it.”

Harlen couldn’t sense if Rook was telling the truth in waters as murky as these.

“It’s a child.” Sera was a woman who trusted her own senses. “I see a child. I’m not leaving him to…to…”

Yeah, no one wanted to finish that sentence.

“Look harder,” Rook told her. “He’s actually taller than the man next to him. And see his thinning hair, his missing teeth?”

This whole place needed to be cleared out, Harlen thought. Shut down. Even if the child up there
was
a grown man, the illusion was sick. And whoever bought the kid was even sicker.

Sera blinked, and for a second, yes, there was a man. Tall. Balding on top, with thin, stringy hair wisping down from the sides of his head.

She blinked again. And then the man was standing there, inside the child. The auction was still extremely offensive, but at least—
and how strange
—Harlen could see through the illusion.