Authors: Stephanie Thomas
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Dreamcatchers have breached the staging area. They swarm like flies on something dead, running in every direction with no clear purpose or plan. They open fire almost immediately, and a few Seers are caught by their gunfire and fall to the ground, some of them screaming, some of them dead.
“Holy crap,” Gabe whispers to himself, and I have only a moment to pull him back beside the doors leading into the large bay. The bullets ping off of th
e walls and my immediate reaction is to put my hands over my head.
“We have to move!” Elan reminds us. I am beginning to like this kid. He’s good to have around—I’m just glad he hasn’t been killed yet.
Just as we turn to start running somewhere, anywhere, we hear a clamor in the bay. Grenades are thrown and blast shrapnel around the large room, and some pieces catch in the flesh of Dreamcatcher and Seer alike. The two newer Seers with us get hit with shards of metal, and they both fall, screaming in pain. “Help me get them out of here!” I blurt at Gabe, Brandon, and Elan. We drag them out into the hallway, and when I turn around, I see that Rachelle is leading her team right into the middle of the battle. They start to push back the Dreamcatchers with their weapons and explosives.
“She’s got ’em.” Brandon forgets all about the hatred we hold for Rachelle, his words filled with hope that maybe she’s actually doing something right for once. Maybe she’ll save us all by this display of bravado.
But like all things having to do with Rachelle, this is not the case.
She runs up on top of an ATV outfitted with large wheels grooved with deep tread. Instead of actually using the ATV for its intended purpose, she decides to make a display of her charge on the Dreamcatchers, and she hangs off the side shooting her gun up in the air and toward nothing in particular. “You’ll never win!” she yells, and if we weren’t in some crazy situation, I’d probably die of laughter right now at how stupid she looks. It reminds me of old holomovies with bad guys who get way too full of themselves and end up tripping all over their own pride.
That’s exactly what Rachelle does.
Clear in the middle of the bay, she continues to yell just as the doors leading to the outside are blasted inward with a force that sends Rachelle off the ATV and the rest of us tumbling to the floor. I scramble to get back on my feet, and when I’m standing again, I look back to find out what happened, only to find that one of their ships has breached the Institution. The ship’s hull doors open, revealing a force of Dreamcatchers inside, all dressed in black, machine guns held close to their chests. One of them hangs out just enough so that he can train his sights on Rachelle.
In just two shots, she falls and her screaming about how the Dreamcatchers will never win eerily echoes through the bay.
“Holy…” Brandon starts to say when Rachelle finally lands on the ground, still and bleeding. A Dreamcatcher walks over to her and points his gun at her head, and just like that, Rachelle is gone, and my stomach ties into knots.
“They killed her,” I hear Brandon whisper, shocked.
“They will kill us, too, if we don’t get out of here!” Elan reminds us all as he ties a tourniquet around his wrist to bandage it.
In organized line formations, the Dreamcatchers disembark from the ship and press forward, shooting down anything that gets in their way. From behind me, Elan says with much more urgency than before, “We have to move.
Now
.”
And we do. The four of us race for the lift, but it’s Gabe that points out that is probably not a good idea. “Let’s take the stairs instead. We could get stuck in the lift and we’d have nowhere to go.” He takes my hand and pulls me toward the stairs. He’s trembling, and though he might be trying to make it seem like he’s just guiding me to safety, the way he holds my fingers tells me that he’s just as scared as I am, even if neither of us dares to let it show.
He pushes the door open with such force that it slams into the wall and rebounds, nearly hitting Elan in his face. The boy is quick, though, and he puts both of his palms out to stop it. That’s when his eyes begin to glow, and he nearly collapses. Brandon catches him at the last moment, and we wait in the stairwell until Elan’s Vision passes. It doesn’t take long.
Elan’s eyes dim and he comes back around, looking to each of us. “We will be betrayed.”
“By whom? What did you see?” Brandon sets Elan back onto his feet as he asks the question.
“We don’t have time to analyze his Vision now. We have to get to cover before they get to us.” Gabe begins his trek up the stairs. “Let’s go to the Meeting Room, maybe we can find the Keeper there and warn the others.”
“The Meeting room is sixteen floors up, Gabe,” I point out to him, but I know it won’t make a difference. We are running up those stairs, even if I don’t want to. My gear weighs down on me and I feel exhausted just thinking about it.
“Well, we better start hauling ass then, shouldn’t we?” Gabe takes the stairs as if they moved on their own and all he had to do was stand still. As we rise, floor by floor, it gets quieter, and the mayhem down at the staging area fades out. Do the people up here even know what is going on downstairs?
The internal alarms start to sound, immediately answering my question. They do now.
When we reach the sixteenth floor, the four of us can hardly breathe. Gabe pushes on the bar to open the door, but something pulls at me from the inside, urging me to stop him. “Wait.”
Gabe pauses. “What?”
“Something’s not right.” I can feel it. It’s that feeling we get when the Dreamcatchers are close, plus something more that screams at me not to go in there.
“How do you know?”
“Are you having a Vision too?” Elan asks, holding his head from ache.
“No, it’s not a Vision. It’s just a feeling…”
“Well, if we start to do everything based on feelings in our guts, we won’t get anywhere. They’ll find the stairs soon enough. We have to go somewhere.” Ignoring me, Gabe pushes open the door to the sixteenth floor and steps in. It’s pitch black and too quiet. “What the hell is going on?”
“I told you,” I angrily mutter and walk by him, purposefully knocking Gabe in the shoulder.
“Watch out.” Gabe’s voice hovers in the air, detached from his body, which I can no longer see.
“We have to stick together.” I rein in my leadership position once more. Jutting my arms out in front of me, I feel around for the others, blindly grasping into the air. I hear a click in the darkness, and the halogen light on Elan’s machine gun turns on. One by one, the rest of us remember to turn our lights on, too.
I gesture down the hall toward the Meeting Room. “Maybe they are taking cover in there? I don’t know of another room where they could all go to hide and be safe.” The Meeting Room is as good as any, with its catwalks for the Watchmen and its size, allowing most, if not all, of the Seers to be in one place at one time. “Let’s go look.”
Gabe, Brandon, and Elan follow as we move down the hall. I can’t help but notice that sometimes there seems to be a foggy nature to the dark space in front of us, but it’s hard to tell in the dark. It’s probably just the shadows from the four of our bouncing lights, the only luminosity present. When we get to the Meeting Room doors, they are closed, but not locked. I barely step in front of them and the doors slide open, leading into the strangely quiet area. My boots catch on something in front of me, and I nearly trip and fall onto the ground, but I manage to regain my balance before taking the tumble.
Gabe points his light down to my feet. There’s a hand there, open, palm up. The light slides back, illuminating the arm, and eventually the side of the body to which the hand belongs. But as he continues to pull his light back, he reveals much more than just one body strewn on the ground.
There are piles of them, all naked, vulnerable…dead.
I notice the foggy quality of the air and put a hand to my helmet. “They’ve been gassed. Keep your helmets on.”
It’s just like how my Vision showed it. Dead bodies stacked in piles…the black fog…how wasn’t I able to stop this when I clearly Saw it before it happened? My stomach churns. I need to vomit, but I can’t without taking my helmet off. And if I take my helmet off, I’ll most likely end up in a pile with the rest of the Seers here.
“They’re all dead?” Brandon nudges another body with the toe of his boot.
“That’s like…so many of the Seers.” Elan whispers, as if afraid to wake them up from their eternal sleep. “They must have sought shelter here from the fighting.”
“Or maybe they were called back. We…we should keep moving.” Please don’t vomit. Please don’t vomit. My stomach lurches again. “Now.”
Gabe knows something is wrong with me. He looks in my direction, and though I can’t see his face through the tint of his visor, I can feel his eyes on me. He’s concerned, even if just moments before, he had no intention to heed my warning.
“But where do we go?” Elan puts a hand to his stomach. “I don’t feel so well.”
There’s another ripple of pain, and this time, we all cry out and buckle. “It’s getting worse.” Gabe clutches the nearby wall, his light falling by his side as he lets go of his weapon. I don’t like not being able to see him.
“Pick your weapon back up. Let’s move. They are getting closer—it’s why we feel sick. It’s why we hurt.” They are killing more of us. Each time they do, I feel it—we all feel it—and the pains are getting worse. The pain starts down in my toes and radiates through my legs. Then it balls up in my stomach, exploding into my chest, and eventually simmering in my brain until it dissipates and another pain starts in its place.
“Or are we poisoned too?” Brandon poses a good question, but I have no time to think about it. I brush by them and start in a new direction, toward the stairs. The alarm sounds again and before we can get to the well, all of the doors in the building’s infrastructure bolt shut. I push the door, but it goes nowhere. I push again, and again, and again, until Brandon stops me. “Bea, we’re stuck here.”
“I know that! Don’t you think I know that?” I kick the door. It hurts my toes.
“Shhh. They could still be up here.” Gabe holds his light up so that it’s shining on my face. “Let’s go check the other rooms to see if they are closed up too. Maybe it’s just the rooms that lead to the outside that are locked.”
“Good point.” Elan points his gun and light down the hall. “What about the Recreation Room?”
“Okay, let’s give it a shot.” Inside my boot, I flex my hurting toes before setting forth to lead the way. As we move, I think back on the dangerous red light that shoots up from out of the Institution.
The day is winding down, and it feels like forever since we were first set out into the City. “We need to rest.” I look back at the others, who walk with an exhausted air about them. If I could see their faces, I’m sure they’d have circles under their eyes, and their skin would look gaunt and pale. When we get into the Recreation Room, it is quiet and no one else is in there. We quickly fortify the door by pushing the sofas and tables in front of it. I move to the intercom system, and Gabe hustles over to the holovision to see if it is still picking up any transmissions.
I punch in the number for the Keeper’s office. It’s an easy number to remember: One.
The intercom buzzes over and over again but no one picks up, not even an assistant. “Do you think the Keeper was in the Meeting Room, too?” I don’t want to ask them if they think she’s dead or not. I don’t know who is listening, and I don’t want the Dreamcatchers to think they’ve won.
“Who knows? There were hundreds of bodies in there.” Elan starts to take off his helmet, but he stops just as quickly. “Do you think this whole floor is poisoned?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out the hard way. Why don’t you keep your helmet on?” I level a look at him that Elan will never see. Pushing the “one” button on the intercom, I try the Keeper again.
“Do you really think that was the Beacon?” Brandon asks, settling on the floor in front of a wall. He leans back and puts his legs out in front of him, and his posture reminds me of a baby who doesn’t quite know how to sit on its own yet.
“Did you see how it just tore through those ships?” Elan shakes his head. “Amazing.”
“Yeah, that was something else. Just…sliced through them, like…” Brandon’s brain struggles to find a good comparison. If you stare into his eyes, you can probably see all the cogs turning, straining to think of something. “A knife through melty cheese.”
Gabe stops by my side. “Did you reach her yet?”
“No, no one is answering.” I look up at him, or where I think his eyes are. “I’m worried. Where could she be? Why isn’t anyone answering? Are we the only Seers left?”
He puts a hand on my forearm, and although I can’t actually feel his skin on mine, it’s still comforting. “Calm down, Bea. We’ll figure things out.”
“Did you see all of those people?” The words catch in my throat. “I Saw it in one of my Visions. I saw them all there…dead. Why couldn’t I stop it? It’s just like with the boy on the bridge…what good are these Visions if we can’t actually stop them?”
“I don’t know, Bea. I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Well, we have to figure it out before more people die and there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t want to be helpless anymore, Gabe. I want to be able to…to
do
something about it.” I’m just as tired as the rest of them. I can feel the exhaustion deep down in my bones. “We need to rest.”
“We do.” Gabe drops the subject. “How about we take turns? You three go ahead and sleep first, then Elan will take watch, then Brandon, then Bea.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Elan’s words are caught mid-yawn, and “plan” sounds more like “yam.”
“All right. But keep your weapons in hand. Who knows what will happen in the morning?” I hug my machine gun as if it were a teddy bear. It’s the only thing that can protect me now.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I don’t expect to see Echo in my dreams tonight. When I’m taken away into unconsciousness, I appear in his arms and he’s running away from the City. I bang on his shoulder and frown, “Put me down!”
“What?” Echo doesn’t pause, though. He keeps right on running, stumbling at times. I realize that he’s bleeding through a jumpsuit, not the white robe he wore when I was awake, and blood soaks into the material by his thigh. It has to be a deep wound to have bled through the layers of fabric, but yet he seems to somehow manage the weight of his own bod
y as he runs, as well as the weight of me.
I am also bleeding. My leg is broken. I know it hurts, but in my dream, I can’t feel the pain at all. It must be why he’s carrying me, though. I wouldn’t just let him pick me up and run off.
Or would I?
“Where are you taking me?”
“I told you, Beatrice. We need to leave this place. We’ve saved each other.”
“I saw you kill a Citizen. You didn’t say anything to me. You didn’t even look like you recognized me.
“Did you want me to get you in trouble?” Echo looks down at me when he says this, pausing in his running. “I had to ignore you, Beatrice. And I’m glad you ignored me in return, lest we both be executed.”
The thought of standing beside Echo on the gallows makes me sick to my stomach. “True. But you still killed an innocent girl.”
“And you’ve not killed any Dreamcatchers, Beatrice?” Echo starts to run again, fleeing the scene as quickly as he can. Ships buzz by us overhead, fleeing the City, but I don’t know where they are flying off to.
I don’t have anything to say to that. I did kill Dreamcatchers and he was right. How dare I question him when I’ve been doing the very same thing? “But you…you used her…”
“I had to heal myself.”
“But don’t you see how that is wrong? She was trying to run…and you came down on her like some sort of predator.” My trust in Echo begins to fade. How did I ever trust him in the first place? How did I bring myself to get so close to my enemy?
Echo stops running again and sets me down on a stone post that marks off an ancient road that leads away from the City. “I didn’t want to do it, Beatrice. And I didn’t want to have to do it in front of you. But if I wanted to live, I had to do it before I bled to death.”
Despite him being so near to me, I feel nothing. Nothing that I’m supposed to feel when I’m so close to a Dreamcatcher. Then again, I hardly ever feel anything when he comes into my dreams like this. It’s just not the same as when he was standing there in my real life. When he was something tangible and real.
When he was Echo.
“Did you want to see me hurt?”he asks.
“No.”
“Do you want to see either of us hurt?”
“No,” I reply.
“Then we have to keep moving.” Echo picks me up again. “I don’t want to lose you, Beatrice. Not after I just saved you. This whole City will come crumbling down, but at least I know that I’ve rescued you.”
I have no idea what has happened, or where Gabe is, or where we are going. But I do know one thing I feel is for certain, “I don’t want to lose you either, Echo.”
…
“Attention: All Dreamcatchers are to be shot and killed on sight. I repeat, all Dreamcatchers are to be shot and killed on sight. The Institution is on lockdown. There is no way in and no way out. Those of you who are still alive need to fight to eradicate the enemy threat on each floor. Protect the Beacon.”
The intercom switches off. The Keeper is gone once more, hidden somewhere deep inside the Institution, probably for her own protection.
I really want to pull my helmet off to breathe in fresh air again. The hall is still dark, but at least now the sunlight struggles to stream through the Recreation Room’s window blinds and we can see again.
“We have our orders,” I remind them all. “We have to leave this room and take care of the Dreamcatchers on this floor. Our time here is over.” Below us, we hear a fresh burst of gunshots, which breaks the creepy silence of the sixteenth floor. The war has moved from the City to the Institution, where we’ve all been trapped against our wills, Dreamcatchers and Seers. “It’s started.”
“It started a long time ago.” Elan slaps a magazine into place, locking and loading his weapon.
“You know what I mean.” I roll my eyes at the boy, and though he might be getting on my nerves with his pompous attitude, he’s still reliable.
“Listen,” Gabe begins, waving us to gather around him. “Once we leave here, it’s not going to be easy. We can’t go back into hiding…we need to be on the hunt.”
“This is a depressing pep talk.” I’m smiling at Gabe, but he can’t see it anyway.
“It might be…but we have to be honest with ourselves here. We might not see each other again, Bea. Not alive, at least. We don’t know how many Dreamcatchers are out there…”
My smile fades. “Stop talking like this.”
“Someone has to.” Brandon turns his head toward me. “He’s right, Bea. I think we’ve learned by now that one minute we can be alive, and the next minute…gone. Just…gone.” Like Mae. And Connie.
“I know, but we don’t have to keep harping on it.” I point at the door. “Gear up and meet there. We’re leaving.”
Gabe doesn’t let me go, though. He leans forward and his helmet clinks against mine. Brandon and Elan leave us alone, giving us space and privacy by walking to the far side of the room and turning their backs.
“What are you doing?” The nervousness I feel leaks into my words, causing them to tremble. I can’t look weak in front of him. I’m his leader right now…I’m supposed to be strong for him. I’m supposed to be strong for Team A…all four of us.
“I don’t want to leave here without saying good-bye to you.”
“I don’t want you to say good-bye.”
Gabe squeezes my arm with his hand. I imagine that his eyes are closed when he is speaking, unable to look at me as we say our farewells for what could be the very last time. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Bea, and you told me to trust you…so, I’m trusting you now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Trust me, too.” Gabe reaches out and unlatches my helmet. Reflexively, I reach up to push it down.
“What are you doing?” I blurt at him, frantically trying to latch the helmet back down again. “Are you crazy?”
“I’m saying good-bye to you. Hold your breath.” He unlatches his own helmet and pulls it off. With a nod, he signals for me to do the same.
I suck in a deep breath and pull my helmet off as well. It’s the first time I’ve seen Gabe’s face in a whole day, and it tugs at my heart that it might be the last time I ever see it again. Especially if I have to go by my Visions, which so far…have all come true.
He leans forward and kisses me deeply, so much so that if I weren’t holding my breath already, he would have stolen it away. When I close my eyes and kiss him back, I see him yelling for me, stretching out to me, begging me to come back and get him. I wrap my arms around his neck to hold him as close as our jumpsuits will let us.
I won’t let you go, Gabe. I’m not going to let go of you.
He breaks the kiss first, just as he started it. Neither of us draws in a breath. He helps me replace my helmet and latch it airtight again, and I help him do the same. When we are back in our protective barriers, I already feel so cut off from him, a premonition of something to come.
“This isn’t good-bye,” I assure him.
“It isn’t…but at least we said it, just in case.” He taps the pendant that hangs outside of my jumpsuit. “You’re wearing my necklace.”
“Of course I am. I’ve never taken it off.”
“Are you two done yet?” Brandon turns back around. “Something is coming down the hall.”
Just like that, we are thrown back into the mayhem. For a moment, I forgot we were in the middle of a war—that is, until the gunshots echo from somewhere above us.
It’s our turn to eliminate the Dreamcatchers from the sixteenth floor. I march in front of what is left of my team. “Remember to keep your line of fire clear. We can’t be effective if we are in each other’s way. And you can’t blame anyone but yourself if you get shot by your own people.” Beacon fire. The kind that will destroy you instantaneously. I pause and wait for the shots overhead to stop. “We have to move. We are going back to the Meeting Room. We’ll wait for them there.”
“With all the bodies?” Brandon sounds like he’s not pleased. “Why?”
“Because we are going to show them we aren’t afraid, that’s why.” I look at Gabe, my lips pressed together in a line. “Let’s go.”
I open the door by hitting the release button with the nose of my gun, pointing it first to the left. Nothing is there. “Clear.” The other three move up and cover me as I turn and check the other side. The hall is long and dark, but I can’t see anyone. “Clear.” When I give the go ahead, the three of them come out into the hall. Brandon and Elan keep their sights aimed to the left, while Gabe and I stand with our back against their backs, guns aimed in the opposite direction. We have all sides covered, reducing the chances of a Dreamcatcher sneak attack.
“As we move down the hall, I want you to open each door and check the rooms. We don’t move forward until they are all cleared.” This will be tedious—there are at least a dozen rooms before we get to the Meeting Room. I’d rather it be tedious and clear, though, than sloppy and dangerous. The last thing we need is to have our backs turned and the Dreamcatchers sneaking up behind us.
Each pair of us takes a door, opens it, checks the rooms, and then moves forward after giving the all clear. I am careful not to let the heel of my boot sound on the ground. We need to be stealthy, just in case we can catch them off guard.
We make it to the Meeting Room without any incident. The sunlight streams into the windows that line the very top of each wall. The fog that we thought we saw the night before is gone, but all of the bodies are still there. Their faces are all stuck in haunted, pained expressions, mouths open like they were screaming before they just suddenly expired. I recognize some of them and quickly turn away.
“What happened?” Elan steps around a body, then looks up and around him, searching everything and everywhere with the barrel of his gun. “Where’d all the Watchmen go?”
Brandon nudges a body with his toe. “Here.” The corpse is that of a Watchman, dressed in black with blood coming down his arm. “He looks like he’s been shot, though. He didn’t die like the others.”
“He probably shot at the Dreamcatchers and they got him back.” Gabe shakes his head. “This isn’t right.”
I kneel down to get a better look at the Seers. All of their eyes have turned white, as if they were all blind. The girl I am looking at is young, and doesn’t yet have her raven’s wings tattooed over her eyes. I reach out and close her lids so she doesn’t have to blankly stare out at the world anymore. “They did something to the Seers.”
“They did?” Gabe kneels by my side and gets a closer glimpse at one of our fallen. “Their eyes…”
I push myself up off the ground and dust the knees of my jumpsuit off. “It’s like they stole our—”
“Power.”
A female voice finishes the sentence. We all turn and point our guns at the source: a small woman with flaxen hair and icy eyes. She wears white robes, just like the Dreamcatchers we saw when I first found Echo. “We didn’t steal it, though. We stopped it.”
She holds up a hand and a deafening, piercing sound blasts through our heads, and all four of us drop our weapons and put our hands where our ears would be. Of course, because of our helmets, we can’t get to our ears to protect them from the high-pitched screeching. As soon as we are disarmed, though, the Dreamcatcher drops her hand and the noise stops. “That’s better.”
“What do you want?” I ask her, but I can barely hear my voice over the ringing in my ears.
“Are you Seer Beatrice?” the Dreamcatcher asks.
“What’s it to you?” Gabe interjects when I open my mouth to respond. I decide to keep silent.
“She is the one with the clearest Visions, is she not?” She looks to me. She hardly looks threatening standing like this, but I know her power is in her hands. In just a touch, she can turn me into nothing, and add me to the bodies piled all around the Meeting Room. Or, she can fill my head with that noise, that crippling noise.
“Who are you?” Elan also doesn’t allow anyone to answer her question.
“Enigma. I am one of the Dreamcatcher leaders.”
“Why did you kill all of these Seers?” Elan keeps up his interrogation.
“Who said we killed them? We’ve come for our Citizens to take them home. We’ve come to destroy your corrupt Institution and the Keeper who runs it.”
“Home?” Brandon, Gabe, and Elan ask all at the same time.
When she mentions her home, I recall Echo in the meadow with the tree. I feel peaceful just thinking about it, and I wonder if Enigma can tell since she shoots me a look.
“Our home is called Aura. It is somewhere west, where you’ve never been because your Keeper does not let you go anywhere.” Enigma smiles with a tilt of her head. “It’s a shame, don’t you think? Don’t you ever wonder what is outside of this dim, dark City? Don’t you ever want to abandon it for a life of light and…dreams?”
“How can we want something we never knew existed?” Gabe rolls his eyes.
I want it. When I close my eyes at night and Echo finds me, he takes me there, and I never want to wake up. I want Gabe to know the feeling of freedom, of not being bound or barricaded by anything. But he’s probably never experienced a dream that has taken him out of the City. How do people dream about something they don’t even know about?
Elan puts us back on task with another question. “You killed all these Seers to steal the Citizens away. Why do you need them?”
Enigma’s smile disappears. She looks too serious in this moment, as if Elan has just asked a question that never, ever should have been asked. I regret him speaking up at all now. I should have ordered him to shut up. I should have handled the questions on my own.