The Fray Theory: Resonance (20 page)

In spite of the pain, Romer runs as
fast as he can towards St. Paul’s Hospital, having no idea what to do once he
gets there.

Should he try to sneak in through
one of the back entries?
No
. There will be cameras for sure. But it’s
not like he can just waltz into the emergency ward and demand to see Neve, either.

He’d have to say he’s a relative.
But considering he and Neve look as much alike as wheat and coal, it will
likely be a pretty unconvincing argument.

Unless he tells them that they’re
married?

But then again, what if they’re
not even taking her to the hospital?

From further up the street, he
hears the sudden squeal of skidding tires, followed by a THUMP, and then a blaring
screech akin to nails on a chalkboard.

And then he’s running even faster.

It’s got to be her
.

σ

Roughly
ten blocks up from where Romer was first alerted to the turbulence, he’s faced
with yet another crowd of onlookers.

This time, he weaves through them with
far more vigor, ignoring people’s protests.

And then he finds himself gawking at
a sunken ambulance blocking traffic across multiple lanes.

Its axels are badly deformed. One
of its tires has rolled to further up the street, and the other three are
nowhere to be seen. And from where he stands, there is a long trail of
scratches dug deep into the asphalt.

Romer closes in on the vehicle and
starts to circle it for a better vantage point.

The rear doors are wide open. Two
of the three paramedics are sitting on the edge of the landing, hunched over.
And the third is flying off the handle about what incompetent morons they are.

Romer can’t help but snicker. It sounds
like Neve gave them quite a scare.

Relieved, he quietly slips away,
distancing himself from the scene.

He finds a quiet corner and pulls
out his phone with hopes of getting back in touch with Neve. And just then, he realizes
he forgot to take out his battery after popping it in to call Dylan’s dad.

Is that how those men tracked he
and Neve over to Galen’s? Is this entire thing his fault?

He shakes off the guilt and mulls
over his options.

Neve might have turned her phone
back on, but in light of his epiphany, Romer can’t bring himself to risk
calling her.

He pulls out his phone’s battery
and tries to think of how else to reach her.

What would
she
do next? With
her phone off, she won’t be able to reach out to anyone. And she isn’t too
likely to go home either, knowing about the men who broke into his workshop.

So what other options are there?

Come on
,
think
!
She’s a smart girl
.
Smart enough
to hide in a dryer
…

And with that, Romer remembers the
rendezvous plans he and Neve made when she called him earlier today, desperate
for help.

He may very well have foiled those
plans when he decided to step up and go to
her
. But in light of their
new circumstances, what if Neve
does
follow through and go to the
gallery with hopes of reuniting with him? What if instead of waiting for
midnight, she’s already made her way over?

Dylan
opens his eyes, or so he thinks. It’s much too dark for him to be able to tell.
The air around him is cool, but stale. The ground he’s lying on feels chilled
against his bare skin. His mind is foggy, and there is a heavy murkiness to his
blood.

This whole thing feels
like an encore of his brief captivity in that damned trunk. But unless his
senses are betraying him, he’s in a much larger box.

His gag is gone. And it
seems like his wrists and ankles are no longer bound.

That man
…

Dylan recalls the masked
man who stuck a needle in his neck. The stranger with eyes Dylan was certain he
recognized.

But who was he
?

Tears break in his eyes as
his fear rips him from within. Because if his hunch is right—if the man who
claimed him from that trunk is the same murderous monster who’s been plaguing
his dreams—then this right here, is where Dylan will die.

This dark and lonely abyss
is the last place he will ever be. And he will most likely leave it in pieces.

Unless he can escape
before it’s too late. And that means he can’t wait to regain his full strength.

He rises to his feet, but
still reeling from the drug in his system, staggers to his side and hits the
wall.

There is a soft rustling
sound.

He glides his arm along
the wall, listening to the swish and crackle of the papers pasted onto it.

And his wrist bumps
against a small, bulky object, which a quick feel reveals to be a
battery-powered light-switch. Its
cord
seems to be stapled to the wall, running up towards the ceiling.

It’s looking like his cage
is much more civilized that he’d initially thought.

He tightens his grip
around the switch and stares into the void, imagining all the horrors that
could be awaiting him. Horrors the likes of which he has not only seen, but
endured time and time again through his Proxies. Except, in
this
realm—
his
realm—there’s no waking up from death.

He swallows the painful
pill in his throat, raises his chin, and flicks the switch on.

A
blinding rectangle of light frames the ceiling.

Dylan squints, his eyes
stung by the bleach-white glare of LED lights. And his very first instinct is
that he’s inside an industrial storage unit.

At the far end of the
rectangular space, black sand bags are stacked up against the wall. But aside from
those—and give or take a few crates scattered along the periphery—the room is
more or less empty.

But in contrast to the
room itself, the walls are as burdened as can be. The rustling sheets of paper
that Dylan felt earlier belong to an enormous panorama: a rich collage
consisting of maps, charts, newspaper clippings, photographs, color-coded
notes, and much more.

The volume of information
is staggering. But even more astonishing is how with just one glance, Dylan can
tell just how intricately-connected everything is.

On the wall to his right,
a large map of Vancouver beckons his focus, and he turns to face it.

But it isn’t the map
itself that he finds fascinating.

Splayed over it, there are
three colorful networks of thread—red, black, and blue—vaguely resembling
spider webs.

The red network—the largest,
and by far the most elaborate of all three—is speaking to him in a way he can’t
quite articulate.

So much red. Pins and
thread. A beautiful web of connections so labyrinthine that it takes a moment
for Dylan to realize what it actually represents:

Him.

The network is a visual representation
of not only anchors like his apartment and Galen’s office, but of countless
other random locations that he has visited over the years.

Someone has been watching
him for a
very
long time. Not just
watching
, but tracking his
every move!

His thoughts come to a
screeching halt, and then all Dylan can think of are the mysterious shoeprints he
discovered in his apartment.

The urge to simultaneously
laugh and cry is rising up in him. He knew it. He just
knew
it wasn’t
all in his head! Alex was convinced it was just paranoia—that Dylan’s crippling
fear of his nightmares was slowly driving him mad. But after years of trying to
explain to Alex the nature of his nightmares and the severity of his pain,
Dylan finally stands witness to proof.

And it doesn’t even matter
if anyone believes him. Because now he knows the torment he has suffered his
whole life was not a sickness in him.

It was real.

He flings his focus onto
the other two networks. The smallest, and by far the least sparse network, is
the one in blue thread.

It takes Dylan little
time—taking note of Romer’s workshop and the British Columbia Penitentiary—to
realize who it belongs to.

Dylan cranes his neck
back. He has barely been in touch with Romer since he returned from New York.
So why on earth would the Reaper care to keep tabs on
Romer
’s
wherebouts?

At a total loss, Dylan
diverts his attention to the black network, and his gaze is immediately drawn
to the pin from which nearly all the threads stem:

Neve’s apartment
…

Dylan backs away from the
wall and looks at all three networks in unison. Neve’s and Romer’s barely
overlap. There
is
a spot in Gastown close to Romer’s workshop, but
that’s it.

And that makes Dylan’s red
network the common denominator amongst all three.

Dylan starts to feel sick
to his stomach, his short-lived bout of vindication, eradicated.

He stares at the way the
red network bleeds into the black and the blue. And he can’t shed the feeling
that he is the one responsible for putting Neve and Romer in the Reaper’s
crosshairs.

He starts to pace the
perimeter, scanning the wall for more clues. It’s beginning to seem that
practically everything knowable about them is
somewhere
on these walls—info
as broad as school transcripts, and as invasive as genetic profiling.

But why such an astounding
investment?

He comes to a section on
the wall that’s riddled with data, charts, research summaries, and complex mathematical
formulas.

He scans the sea of
letters, numbers, and symbols, failing to understand any of it. And then, from
within one of the summary paragraphs, the world ‘suicide’ leaps out at him.

His heart skips a beat,
and then he’s just reading, his eyes darting from left to right, all the way
down the paragraph at hand.

The rage swelling up
inside is making him shake.

His focus wanes, and then
he is staring at nothing, wondering how Alex could betray him like this.

Because how else
could—whoever the
FUCK
has put this room together—know about all the
things Dylan told Alex when he confided in him in therapy?

How
could
anyone
know about the degrading details of Dylan’s disturbing
nightmares unless Alex hadn’t divulged them!? Or know about Dylan’s guilt over
his mother’s death, the shame of feeling like a burden on
everyone
around him, and even about the numerous times he begged Alex to put him out of
his misery..?

Alex
betrayed
him. Day
after day, as Dylan poured out his heart and soul, Alex kept on insisting that
his nightmares are just fabrications of his own troubled mind. That his
premonitions are nothing more than coincidences.

And not
once
did he
mention the Fray Theory.

Why would he do this? Why
would he spend years soaking up Dylan’s words like a sponge, but offer no
insight in return? Why withhold the theories from his own godson, but readily
hand them over in a neat little package to a girl he’s
just
met!?

His face goes slack,
realizing he has no idea what happened to Neve after his arrest. For all he knows,
they could’ve taken her as well.

With a pang of anxiety
wringing his core, he looks to the network in black.

He skims over Neve’s anchors,
most of which are within walking distance of her studio apartment. But further
south—next to Mountain View Cemetery, a hand-written note is pinned onto the
map.

Dylan leans in and reads:

The Anvil’s frightened reaction to sinking into the mound
shows a lack of understanding of her condition.

Her Merging appears to be triggered and propagated by extreme
duress, which as of yet she is incapable of consciously controlling.

The Kinetic’s poorly-executed influence on the tombstones
is indicative of the same. If not for his determination, he would’ve likely
failed at uprooting the Anvil.

Anvil
.
Kinetic
.

Good
, Dylan nods to himself.
We’re finally
getting
somewhere
.

His gaze lands on the
report pinned directly next to the note he just read.

He flips up the pages one
by one, skimming over the unimaginably complex mathematical calculations he’d
never be able to understand in a million years. Over formulas not only packed
with highly advanced symbols, but some that are over a page long!

Formulas which seem to
account for—

Teleportation
!?

And just like that, the
broken links between his fragmented thoughts are mended, and for what feels
like the first time in his life, he can see clearly.

It’s all beginning to make
sense: Dylan’s relentless feeling of being shadowed. The mysterious prints he found
in his apartment. Even the means by which he was brought here—to a room with
every inch of its walls covered.

A room with no apparent
doors or windows.

But it can’t be possible,
can it? Teleportation is far too big a leap for mankind to even come close to,
no matter how elaborate these formulas may seem. But at the same time,
dismissing what’s right before him would mean denying what he’s felt deep in
his bones practically his entire life.

He reads on:

Teleportation (also known as Glitching), is
conceptually simple. Instead of walking from A to B, a Glitch takes a shortcut.

He Syncs with a Proxy in another dimension
who’s
already
at point B.

This temporary fusion makes him vanish, but
once the bond is broken, he reappears in his own dimension at point B, thus
completing the jump.

Jesus
… Dylan skims over the remainder of the text until
he arrives at a section titled: ANVIL.

Material Syncing (also known as Merging), is
the rarest form of Syncing known to man.

It is a temporary fusion with one’s Proxies,
resulting in an immediate increase in body density.

But this overlap can only occur with Proxies
who are at the exact same spatial coordinates as the Primary who initiated the
connection.

Since Merging occurs at a molecular level, it
initially confuses the electrical flow of the nervous system, causing numbness.
As things progress, the buildup of electricity leads to rapid firing of nerve
endings, causing the same prickly sensation as a limb falling asleep.

Once the Merge is complete, the rapid firing ceases,
and the temporary morph (a.k.a. Anvil) is linked—physically and
psychologically—to all dimensions in question.

Dylan exhales a trembling
breath and looks to the hand-written note about Neve and Romer.

The cemetery
. The mound would’ve been freshly-poured and soft.
If Neve is an Anvil, and if she was in Sync with enough of her Proxies, she
would’ve been dense enough—
heavy
enough—
Jesus Christ
.

He backs away from the
wall, fingers raking into his thick hair. Through cross-dimensional Syncing, the
laws of physics can be bent.

Even broken
.

Bewildered, he makes his
way around the room. And he sees and reads and marvels at what feels like
decades’ worth of research on the science of Syncing. Science that is further
reinforced with Neve, Romer, and himself acting as prime examples.

But why them? Why
only
them? They can’t be the only people in the world who are capable of Syncing.

What’s more, if Neve’s ability
is the rarest of them all, then how come most of the research in this room is concerned
with
him
? And if they’ve all been under surveillance for this long, how
come they are being apprehended
now
?