Dreamweaver Read online

  Damn.

  I went to find Tommy, to show him the texts.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “That’s not good.”

  Shaking my head in frustration—not to mention annoyance at Devon’s melodrama—I brought up my contact list and scrolled down to Miriam Seyer’s name. Devon wouldn’t have given me instructions like that unless it was pretty important, and I clearly wasn’t going to get an explanation until we did what he wanted. So we might as well get started.

  All in all it took Tommy and me more than an hour to delete all relevant data from our devices. The stuff on our phones and computers was easy enough to deal with, but our internet provider still had copies of all our emails, so we had to go online and deal with that as well, rooting through every corner of their system where copies might be hiding, double-deleting the trash. Then Tommy checked the online forums where I’d once talked to other changelings, and did what he could to remove my past postings. Meanwhile I tried not to obsess about how pointless all this was. We’d both watched enough police procedurals to know that if anyone really wanted to find our stuff, copies were still out there somewhere. Neither Tommy nor I had the tech expertise required to make our internet history disappear from all servers for good. I hoped to God that the superficial cleansing we were able to manage would address whatever Devon was concerned about.

  When we were finally finished I picked up my phone again to text him, but it took me a moment to figure out how to communicate what we’d just done without—well, without telling him what we’d just done.

  Finished with chores, I typed at last.

  The answer came so quickly it must have been typed on his phone already, waiting for him to hit the send button. Got the car for the day. Grab lunch? Maybe the place we met, Red Robin off 28?

  I stared at the message, not knowing how to respond.

  “What?” Tommy asked. “What is it?”

  In answer I handed him the phone. He squinted at it. “I thought you guys met at IHOP?”

  “We did meet at IHOP.”

  Tommy whistled softly under his breath as he handed the phone back to me. “That’s pretty paranoid, Jess.”

  It was. And the paranoia was coming from a guy who was notoriously well grounded, so I had to assume he had a good reason for it. Did he really think someone might be spying on our conversation right now? Or was he just trying to be as thorough in this as he was with everything else?

  Or what if it wasn’t Devon at all? Someone else could have gotten hold of his phone. But I had no way to find out if that was true without showing up.

  I stared at the phone for a minute, then typed. Sure. Same time as last?

  Y. 1 pm. Meet u there.

  Slowly I put down the phone. Devon and I had met at noon, not at one. So that was another lie, offered up for the consumption of unseen observers. I was feeling more and more uneasy about the situation.

  “You gonna be okay?” Tommy asked. After a pause he added, “Am I gonna be okay?”

  I don’t know, I thought. Who did Devon think was spying on us? Local people? Gifted aliens? Ghosts? The fact that this was happening so soon after the reaper’s visit to my mom was deeply disturbing. Were the two events connected? “I’m sure Devon will explain everything,” I said. “And once we know what’s going on, I’m sure we’ll be able to deal with it.”

  It was another lie. And Tommy knew it was a lie. But the words were comforting, so we both let them stand.

  I watched the IHOP from a distance before approaching, but didn’t see any overt signs of trouble, so I finally headed inside and sat at the same table where Devon, Rita and I had held our first conversation. I remembered how he had walked into the restaurant that day, tall and attractive and oh so confident. I’d relied upon that confidence during our first trip to Terra Prime, drawing strength from him in the midst of all the alien craziness. The fact that he wasn’t the kind of guy who panicked easily made his recent texts seem ten times more ominous.

  I ordered lemonade and played with the straw while I waited for him. Déjà vu. He arrived soon after and looked around the restaurant before approaching me, like Rita had done when she’d first arrived. Checking to see where the exits were. A knot formed in my gut.

  “Hey.” He slid into the booth opposite me.

  “Hey.”

  The IHOP was full, but it was a lunch crowd, and everyone was busy with conversations of their own. Devon looked around the room again, searching for . . . what? Men in black suits and dark glasses guarding the doorways? Someone pointing a parabolic microphone at us? He was making me very nervous. It didn’t help that we hadn’t talked much lately. Devon’s dad had decided that I was responsible for his son’s delusions about alien worlds, not to mention his sudden illness in Berkeley Springs, and had been doing everything possible to keep us apart. Since we lived far enough from each other that a car was required for a visit, it was hard to get around that.

  Would the reapers go after Devon as well? The sudden thought was unnerving.

  “Do you still have the fetter lamp?” he asked me.

  We’d given the lamp to his father for a brief time to study. Our hope was that once he confirmed its technology wasn’t from Earth—our Earth—he’d be open to believing the rest of our story. But we’d underestimated the power of his denial, and once it was clear the artifact wasn’t going to convince him that our story was real, I had decided to hold on to it. “Yeah,” I told Devon. “But it’s out of power now.”

  “Thank God.” The tension in his shoulders eased a tiny bit. “Thank God.”

  It seemed an odd reaction. “You want to tell me what all this is about?”

  “You remember Chen?” he asked, lowering his voice to a near-whisper.

  I shook my head.

  “The changeling in Taiwan,” he prompted.

  I remembered that during our first IHOP meeting, Devon had talked about a changeling in Taiwan, but I’d been hit with so much new information that day that it was hard to remember all the details. Was Chen the one who had been stung to death by bees? Or the one who had surfed in a hurricane? So many changelings had died that week, in strange and terrible ways, it was hard to keep them straight. “Just pretend I don’t remember anything and take it from there,” I told him.

  So he reminded me about the changeling in Taiwan whose father had been a geneticist. It was through Chen that we’d learned changelings lacked genetic markers which normal human beings were supposed to have. Now, of course, we knew the reason for that. We’d all been born on another world, one where people looked human and acted human most of the time, but differed in ways that scientists could detect. And Chen’s father was a scientist. He’d taken Chen’s DNA to a lab, where he and his fellow scientists said they were going to study the matter further. Chen had promised to cut off all contact with us if things started getting dicey.

  Then he had cut off all contact with us.

  “My father kept tabs on their efforts,” Devon said, “as much as was possible, given how secretive the whole operation was. He’s got international connections who were feeding him information.” He paused. “Key word there is, were.”

  I felt a cold knot forming in my stomach. “They stopped?”

  His face was grim as he nodded.

  “Shit. That’s not good.”

  “Dad worked for the government once, and he still has some friends in high places. One of them passed on a warning to him. He didn’t tell me exactly what they said, but he told me it would be good if details of our Terra Prime story weren’t part of the public record. And if any unusual artifacts we had weren’t easy to find. Those were his exact words.”

  “I thought he didn’t believe our story.”

  Following our return to Terra Colonna we’d convinced police investigators that we’d been drugged by fictitious kidnappers, so that our memories were effectively useless.
It had proven a successful tactic for bringing the victim testimony portion of the kidnapping investigation to an early close. But the plan had backfired later when we tried to come clean with Devon’s dad. We’d been drugged. We’d imagined things that weren’t there. Wherever the fetter lamp came from, it wasn’t from an alien world. End of story.

  Devon shrugged. There was weariness in the motion. His relationship with his father had been strained since that phony confession, I knew. I ached to comfort him.

  “I don’t know what he believes anymore,” he said. “But his suggestion makes sense. If we’re going to pretend that what happened to us was a mundane crime, we should get rid of anything that would cause people to question that.”

  “Well, like I said, the lamp doesn’t work anymore.”

  “But it’s still got the sigil of the Weaver’s Guild on it. Who’s to say where else that might show up? We’re all on the government’s radar thanks to Chen. We can’t afford to have anything around that would raise more questions. Destroy the thing, Jesse. Crush it to dust and scatter it on the wind.”

  His intensity unnerved me. “I will, I promise.”

  “And anything else that links us to Terra Prime. Or to other changelings. Or . . . any of it.” He sighed. “If they really put their minds to it, we can’t keep them from finding our data. Not without wiping dozens of servers clean. But my dad’s right, let’s at least make things less obvious. Maybe after a cursory survey they’ll decide we’re not worth the time and energy needed to dig deeper. After all, we’re just kids, right?”

  I reached out and took his hand. “The Gate we travelled through is buried under hundreds of tons of earth,” I reminded him. “And asking us questions is pointless because of our supposed memory loss. We’ll be fine.”

  “That’s our trail, but what about all the others? Every changeling on Terra Colonna was brought here through a Gate. Each of them was exchanged for a baby born on this world, so hospital records had to be altered. You said that your own footprint matched the one on your birth certificate. Was that kind of thing managed perfectly every time? What about security cameras? Did the Greys in charge of baby exchanges never make a mistake?” He shook his head. “There’s evidence of the truth out there, Jesse, it’s waiting to be found, and someday someone will follow the right trail, and find out about the Gates. How do you think the Guilds will respond to that?”

  I hadn’t even thought about the Guilds. For a moment I couldn’t speak.

  “You see the problem,” he said.

  The Guilds of Terra Prime considered genocide an acceptable strategy for safeguarding their interests, I knew. And what greater Guild interest was there than preventing a world like ours from finding out about the Gates? The last thing they wanted was for people from Terra Colonna to cross into their world without sanction, armed with hi-tech weapons and bad attitude. If our government started nosing around the places where Gates were hidden, the Guilds’ response to that might get ugly. They’d destroyed worlds for less.

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  “Nothing. We can’t do anything. Just get rid of all the obvious evidence and pray they never find what they’re looking for. What else is possible?”

  Our food arrived then, temporarily halting our conversation. The waitress attempted to make small talk with us but realized pretty quickly that we weren’t in the mood, so she left. The brief interruption at least dispersed some of the negative tension. It was hard to think about genocide when someone was smiling and talking about the beautiful summer weather.

  When she was gone we talked about other things. Safer things. I told him how my mom appeared to have accepted the truth of our Terra Prime story, probably because of something the Fleshcrafter had done to her. He said I was lucky. He said he would give anything to have his father believe us, the way Mom did.

  I might have been dating him by now, if not for his dad. We certainly would have been closer than we were, confiding in each other on a daily basis rather than sneaking in a few moments during clandestine lunch dates. I always felt an ache of regret when I talked to him, about what might have been.

  We called for the check at 12:55, and were well on our way home before anyone waiting for us at Red Robin would realize we weren’t showing up.

  On the top shelf of my bedroom closet were several boxed war games. The three on top of the pile were Tommy’s. The one on the bottom wasn’t.

  I shut the blinds, pulled out the bottom box, and set it on the desk. It was well worn, with faded pictures of armed robots and hostile aliens all over it. I removed the cover and set it aside, followed by the loose pieces inside the box. Cards and dice and tiny models of robots, all well used. Last came the board itself, a heavy cardboard piece folded into quarters. It didn’t unfold by itself, thanks to the paper-thin strip of putty I’d stuck inside it, but a fingernail inserted between the layers was enough to pry it open.

  Inside were several papers. The first was a large sheet folded into eighths; I smoothed it open, revealing the map of Terra Prime that Sebastian had given us back when he brought us to Shadowcrest. The United Colonies of New Britannia were east of the Mississippi and The Badlands far west, with French-named provinces in between. I stared at it for a minute, considering, then opened the desk drawer and took out a red pen. B+ I wrote in the upper left corner, slanting the handwriting so it wouldn’t look like my own. Good start, but needs more detail. Next to a city in what would normally be Oklahoma, I wrote, Why French? Then I circled the area labeled “Badlands” and drew an arrow pointing north. Badlands should be here, I wrote.

  There. Class project. No one would think twice about it.

  Next came three round trip transfer tickets I’d bought before leaving Terra Prime, in case I ever needed to go back there. They had my Terra Prime passport code on them and a few other alphanumeric sequences I didn’t recognize, but nothing that screamed “alien artifact.” They looked like fancy raffle tickets. I folded them up and put them in my back pocket.

  Then came the smoking gun.

  Before leaving Terra Prime I’d gotten a list of Gates from the Fleshcrafters, along with the contact info needed to access them. I’d figured that if I ever wanted to go back to Terra Prime I shouldn’t have to sell my soul to Alia Morgana to do so. My fingers trembled slightly as I touched the names and phone numbers of the Greys who controlled the Gates, sensing the power coiled within that data. If the wrong people got hold of this list they would be able to identify Terra Prime agents and locate the Gates they guarded. Maybe they would even visit one under the cover of legitimate business. And the fate of my world would be sealed.

  I took out a small sketchbook and began to draw, quickly penciling in designs with fractal waves that cascaded in rhythmic sequences, like in a Hokusai print. Each curving crest broke up again and again as it descended, in seemingly random array. Only it wasn’t random. Encoded in those waves were the phone numbers I needed, information I couldn’t afford to lose.

  The last item in the secret stash was my Terra Prime passport. It was made out to Jennifer Dolan, but the picture in it was unmistakably of me. After what Devon had told me, I was no longer comfortable leaving it in our apartment, so I decided to keep it on my person until a better hiding place presented itself. I put it in my pocket also, closed up the game box, returned that to the closet, and then retrieved the fetter lamp from behind my bed. A mere glass marble now, drained of its magic.

  In the kitchen I set fire to the contact list, dropping it into the sink to let it burn itself out. When the last glowing edges died I tore the resulting fragments of charred paper into tiny bits, then lit them again. And again. In the end, all that remained was a pile of black ash, which I crushed to dust between my fingertips, mixed in with some leftovers, and sent down the garbage disposal. Then I put a bowl of water in the microwave, and turned the small glass marble over in my hand as I waited for the liquid to boil, tracin
g the Weaver’s mark with my finger. I remembered how we had depended upon the tiny lamp to light our way through an alien and terrifying world. I remembered the other fetters I had seen there, the plates of metal with the life-essence of young children bound to them, including the essence of a Dreamwalker. I remembered the mysterious tower I had seen through his eyes, whose form changed every time I looked at it, whose every window revealed a different view. The girl who invaded my dreams had fled to that tower. The reaper who attacked me knew about it. There were ancient secrets bound to that place, and perhaps the information I needed to survive might be found there. But was the tower real, or just a shared illusion? How do you search for a place without knowing the answer to that?

  When the water finally boiled I took the bowl out of the microwave and dropped the fetter lamp into it. The glass ball fractured without breaking apart, turning into a jewel-like sphere riddled with glittering fault lines. Easy to smash. Easy to flush down the toilet.

  Would that the memories it conjured could be flushed away so easily.

  3

  LURAY

  VIRGINIA PRIME

  ALIA MORGANA

  IN DEFERENCE TO THE SHADOWS, the Council of Guilds always met at night. So when the reigning Shadowlord didn’t show up for a scheduled meeting, it was more than a little annoying.

  Morgana looked around the large chamber, noting how many of her allies were present. More and more members of her Consortium were rising in rank and no longer needed to wield power through back channels; several now ruled their Guilds openly. It had been an unexpected benefit of their conspiracy. Once they had agreed they were willing to share sensitive information to undermine the Shadows, using that information for personal gain was a natural next step. Morgana had leveraged that advantage to take control of her own Guild, and now others were doing the same. Among the thirteen Major Guild representatives seated around the Council table, Morgana and her allies controlled five votes directly, and they had measurable influence over others. It wasn’t a rock-solid majority yet, but soon it would be.