Awoken (The Lucidites Book 1) (23 page)

“Is that all.” I bite on the words.

“I’m only trying to help,” he lashes back.

“Thanks,” I say. I knock at the third door and am unsurprised when it goes unanswered.

The idea of working with George has been intimidating. I’m uncertain if he still resents me for the torture he experienced before I wore the frequency adjuster. I know he means to help me now and there’s times I see tenderness under the hard exterior he projects. But I’ve also rubbed too close against his armor before and been reproached for it. I’m simultaneously attracted and repelled by him, which creates knots in my stomach every time we’re alone. When he looks at me, I feel his probe pushing underneath the surface of my skin, searching for the part of me I hold most dear. It’s taken many meditative sessions to be able to face him without flinching. Now I’m supposed to unshield my feelings while running around the Institute and allowing him to decode other people’s emotions for me? None of this is natural or real. It’s a strange dream.

I stride forward, eyes fixed on the next door. The fluorescent lights cast it in a plain glow.

I knock and in no time the door slides back. Before the figure says a word I jerk my finger to my mouth and say, “Shhhh…I’m conducting an experiment.”

Narrow eyes slice me in half. A part of me immediately regrets this, but as the brooding eyes stare at me with half contempt and half amusement I lack the motivation to abandon my plan.

“Okay, all right,” George says on the other end of the radio. “I’ve got something new. It’s dark. Scared. Mad.” There’s a pause while I hang out, staring at the terrifying figure in front of me. He’s growing impatient.

“Hold on a second.” George’s usual cool voice sounds flustered in my ear. “I’m getting more. There’s guilt in this person, a shame, but they don’t feel they deserve to bear this wound. They didn’t do it.” His words come slow at first like he’s reading them from a blurry screen. “They’re tired of blaming themselves for what went wrong. Remorse. He’s sorry she’s dead. Such suffering. He’s always suffering. It isn’t fair.”

George falls silent. I stand petrified. The emerald eyes in front of me seem to sense my treachery.

“Whatever does this experiment have to do with me?” Ren barks, half past the verge of angry.

I’ve willingly walked into the belly of the whale and now I’m unable to evict myself from it. Terror threads around my spine making me stand up tall. It’s only when I hear breath move into my nostrils that I realize I haven’t inhaled in a while.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“R
oya!” George’s voice makes me jump. “You’re standing in front of Ren, aren’t you?”

I take two steps back, looking lost, as Ren shoots darts at me. I’m uncertain if he knows what I’ve just done, but he looks all too displeased with me, more so than usual. He slams his fist on the button beside his door and it slides shut.

“Roya!?” George’s voice is accusatory. I know I’ve already been tried and convicted at this point. “Roya?”

“Yes,” I finally reply.

“Are you standing in front of Ren?”

I continue to step backwards through the hall, not daring to turn my back on the door in front of me. I’m terrified by what I’ve just learned, less so by the wrath which is about to come down on me.

George’s voice echoes loudly over the radio again. “Roya? Was that Ren?”

I charge off in a new direction. “Well, at least we know this whole thing works.”

George looks different when I approach him minutes later. His soft eyes have turned cold and narrow. His mouth is pinched, and I don’t like the way he wears this contorted expression of anger. “That’s a pretty rotten way to force me to disclose Ren’s emotions, don’t you think?” George throws his earpiece on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That truly wasn’t my intention. I didn’t know that was his office.”

“You tricked me! Did you pretend to knock at doors? Biding your time and playing games with me until you set the stage?” Flames drip from his accusations.

“How dare you?” I revolt quietly.

“Did you do this all because you wanted to know something I refused to tell you?!” It’s the first time I’ve heard George yell. The words sound unnatural and ugly as they spew out of his mouth.

My fingernails pierce into my hands as I grip my fists. “Honestly, I forgot I’d asked you to tell me about him. I really wasn’t trying to get the information out of you.”

He stands staring at me, trying to read me. Trying to assess my emotions. His attempts are like tiny needles piercing my skin. I fight the urge to resist and for the first time truly allow it, stripping off the many protective layers I wear. Exposing myself.

There’s a long pause as George’s eyes rake over me. He draws in a long breath through his thin lips and says, “Roya, I only mean to help you.”

I blink with surprise.
What had he read? What did he know? I didn’t mean for him to divulge Ren’s secrets. Did he know that?

“You’re scared of me?” he asks in disbelief. With a fugitive step forward he says, “If you could only read my emotions you’d know the same is true of me.”

I suck in a short breath and stare at him, bewildered. “What?”

“I can’t explain it,” he says. “You aren’t like most people I’ve read. Nothing about you is straightforward or easy.” His tone is gentler now.

“Why should that scare you?” I ask, tucking my chin into my chest.

“I’m used to understanding people,” he says. “It gives me security to know what I can expect. But you…” He trails off, a trace of a smile coiling across his face. “You, Roya, are an enigma.”

I avert my eyes. “I didn’t know that was Ren’s office,” I say, trying to steer the conversation another direction. “I wasn’t trying to betray you.”

“I know,” he states definitively. “But at the time, when I threw my own emotions into it, I wasn’t sure. And you had part of your wall up too. I couldn’t read you, not like right now.”

Goose bumps spread across my skin like I’ve stepped into a freezer. I grip my arms across my chest. The smile he wore a moment ago has vanished, replaced now with a persuasive expression. “Now, can’t you see the confusion we’d avoid if you’d trust me?”

I mean to nod, but remain frozen. He stares at me and for a moment I consider putting the bricks into place one at a time, until I’ve resurrected the barrier again. My heart hurts and the hesitation in this moment makes everything worse.

“I could try,” I finally say.

“That’s enough.” He gives an encouraging smile.

“Can we start over?” I ask, skirting his gaze.

“Yes.” George picks up the earpiece securing it in place. “And, Roya,” he says, begging for my full attention.

I waver, but comply, finally turning to stare into his quiet eyes. “What?”

“Thanks for taking down the wall. I know it wasn’t easy,” he says.

♦

Later that afternoon when Ren strides into the lecture hall, I sense he knows I’ve trespassed on his privacy. This is probably my guilt welling up to the surface because he never says anything to give me this indication. He’s just his usual offensive self.

“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Trey wants all of you to be here for this lesson. It could just be Roya since she’s the one who has to die at the hands of Zhuang. She’s the one who needs to know this information. You all could be off playing rugby on the beaches of Malibu right now, but no, someone has decided that wherever Roya is, that’s where all of you will be. Whatever Roya needs, all of you will get.” Ren pretends to gag.

“I despise team sports,” he says finally. Then he strides around the room until he’s lurking over my shoulder. The impulse to send my fist flying backward courses through me, but I resist.

“Dream layers,” he says in an exaggerated hush. “You’ve heard the term, right? But what does it really mean?”

Maybe he senses I’m having trouble restraining myself. Ren hops down the steps and stands center stage. “You all know by now that when you travel from one dream to the next each one represents a layer. Inevitably you’ve traveled dozens of layers in a dream going from one sweets shop to the next, right? Well, this is all fine and dandy when you’re playing with your friends in dreamland. However, when you’re tracking it’s more complicated.

“You see, if your friend decides to move into a new layer and you forget where he’s going then you have only one way to find him. What I’m speaking of is called dream tracking. We’ve used it for decades to find Zhuang with dodgy results. I don’t know why I’m even telling you about it now except for the repercussions. You should be aware of them because they can have assorted effects.”

Ren leers at me and then begins pacing back and forth. “When your dear friend, let’s call him Bobby, leaves on his travels, for a few brief seconds he will leave behind a ripple. This ripple looks exactly as its name implies, blurry like someone smudged the space. Stand in Bobby’s ripple before it dissolves and you might catch wind of his tracers—the small bits of consciousness he left behind right before traveling.”

Ren throws one finger into the air. “
If
you absorb the tracers in time then you can track someone, but it does take a certain bit of faith and a whole lot of talent. Your consciousness has to blindly jump into a rabbit hole and follow someone to an unknown location. When you don’t know where you’re going there are several dangers and usually they’re waiting for you.

“Furthermore, returning to your body is quite straightforward while dream traveling. However, when dream tracking it’s exponentially more difficult. You can’t pull out of it the same way you do when you dream travel on your own. A part of your consciousness can snag on a layer because you’re falling through them blindly. The deeper you follow a person through layers, the more potential for snags. When you pull yourself back to your body the unraveling can cause knots, tying your consciousness up, keeping it from rejoining your body. If you get stuck, there’s only one ending.” Silence. No doubt it greets Ren’s ears with satisfaction. He gives a sideways smile and then sharply hisses, “Death.”

I sit tense and unblinking for a several seconds before Ren continues. Sadly my rescue is in the form of a lengthy lecture filled with technicalities on how to spot ripples and absorb tracers.

“One last thing before I let you all out for recess.” Ren’s usual sharp voice sounds hoarse from talking. “Only a damn good Dream Traveler can follow tracers, much the same way only experienced trackers can follow an animal’s path through an overgrown forest.” With an unsympathetic smirk Ren jerks his head in my direction. “Sorry, missy, I’d advise on getting good at hiding, since my guess is you’ll make a poor seeker.”

♦

Later that evening, feeling distracted, I flip through one of the books Bob and Steve sent. Joseph lies across my bed reading through my dream journal as Shuman ordered. Although I keep trying to focus on the book, a part of me wants to ask Joseph why he lied about his family. We’re friends now and this could go one of two ways: he’d hate me forever or he’d be real with me. Twirling a piece of my straw-colored hair around my finger I sort through the pros and cons of airing this whole topic out. I’m unsure why I haven’t said anything yet, except for any time I try I see his father’s drunken eyes, full of disgust for Joseph. Maybe I’d lie about my family too if I were him.

“You know what’s weird?” Joseph says, pulling my attention back to the present moment.

“Yeah, your face.” I suppress a laugh.

“Look in the mirror, Stark.” Joseph aims a pillow at my head. “Good thing you’re kinda smart, ’cause you can’t rely on your looks.”

It doesn’t even faze Joseph when I reach out to deflect the pillow before it’s hardly left his hands.

“And you throw like a T. Rex.” I take a bookmark and flick it at him like a Chinese star. It bounces off his forehead and then falls into his lap.

He grins. “But seriously this time, you wanna know what’s weird about your dream journal?”

I shrug.

“Peacock-related images keep showin’ up in almost all of your dreams.”

I scrunch up my face trying to recall this from any recent dreams. There is only one that comes to mind. In it I’d been walking through a house trying to decide if I should live there. Suddenly I heard a child making a noise behind me. When I turned there wasn’t a child, but instead a radiant and brilliantly decorated peacock. He tilted his head to the side, and with a whoosh his feathers spread out around his body, taking over the entire open space of the living room. I remember being overwhelmed by his beauty, the silkiness of his feathers, how they formed such an intricate pattern as they rose up around his neck like a wall. His neck was the richest shade of blue I’d ever seen.

“There was just the one dream with the peacock in the house,” I say, shaking my head at him.

He rolls his eyes. “Stop being so literal all the time. Dream interpretation’s about seein’ patterns and analyzing images. Gosh, have you learned nothin’ from Shuman?”

“No, she’s always too busy telling me how I’m doing something wrong. Maybe if I batted my eyes at her like you then she’d be a bit nicer to me.”

Joseph ignores this and flips to a page in my journal. “Here you say ‘plastered across the side of a barn was a green circle with a brown middle and inside that, a blue circle with a black center.’ I’m no scientist, but that seems to resemble the design of a peacock feather, doesn’t it?”

“You’re right,” I say seriously, “you’re definitely no scientist.”

Joseph flips to another page in my journal. “Then in the next dream you say that ‘a man with a long blue neck’ kept following you around.” He reads from the journal in a high-pitched voice, “‘I didn’t feel threatened by him. Actually I forgot he was following me for the longest time, but each time I turned around he was always there.’”

I laugh. “All right, so what’s your point?”

Joseph shuts my journal. “My point is, I think the peacock is your spirit animal.”

“Oh, you have to be joking,” I laugh again. “Shuman gets rattlesnakes. Trent is pretty convinced his spirit animal is the almighty tiger. Even Whitney has that white dog she keeps seeing in her dreams. And you’re telling me my spirit animal is some flamboyant bird that’s about as useful in battle as a mink stole?”