16. DreamInterrupted #2
No, not now. Not again.
My magic can’t do this to me now. I stop for a moment, my senses heightening. It feels foreign, not like my magic, but more like an intruder busting down the door to my soul, ready to steal what’s locked in my memories.
This is it. My fears have come to fruition, any moment he will push me aside, and I’ll be ripped out of DreamNet and hauled into a van.
My body betrays me, arching into him as if he’s gravity itself, and for a moment, just one stolen moment, there’s no Corporation, no nightly Kast, no rebellion. It’s just my dream of him, of a man I cannot have.
I close the last inch between us, gripping him tighter.
Our mouths collide in another kiss that’s nothing like gentle.
I almost hope I can taste his secrets, then I would know.
I shouldn’t want to, but I have to know if he’s here to collect me.
It’s consuming, electric, and sharp like the dagger tattoo on his neck.
That dagger tattoo...I’ve seen that before.
The giant ball of sun flickers static white around us. My pulse pounds, my body screaming with confusion, desire knotted tight with danger.
Just as I call my courage to the surface to tell him to go ahead and take me back to his lab, the dream fractures.
A haunting echo-scream detonates across the landscape, filling my ears once again with pain. Kael winces and covers his ears, a look of confusion in his obsidian eyes.
Eli’s scream.
It rips through me, through Kael, through the dream world. The sky ignites in neon violet, instead of its usual lilac. Ocean waves bend like folded paper and shatter as if the earth itself is convulsing.
“Eli!” I choke out, spinning around and standing on my own two feet. “No!” I begin to look for some sign that DreamNet is collapsing so I can brace myself for the drop.
Kael’s expression shifts, the heat in his eyes cooling to something indecipherable and razor-sharp. He looks around as the dreamscape buckles.
“Something’s wrong. It must be TheKast! We need to go, Lyra. Trust me!”
Why should I trust him? How does he know it’s TheKast? I set my alarm. I have time. That makes no sense.
A burning sensation engulfs my wrist. I look down to find my DreamBand overloading. A white-hot burst of energy frying its circuits and my skin.
I reach up to my neck, only to find in my panic this morning, I forgot to wear Ash’s necklace. Pain sears as I try to tear it off my wrist, but I can’t because I’m falling. The drop out of DreamNet begins.
My consciousness spirals downward through layers of collapsing dream code—letters and numbers passing through me like tiny lasers.
I blink several times to try to see through the code as my arms scrape the air for purchase.
Fragments of my memories begin to warp into haunted images, my brother’s laughter, Kael’s blank face, all spiraling away from me. Suffocation takes hold.
The sky cracks with a thunderous roar. I’m falling further away from the beach but in the distance I can see a thin line of red, slice across the dreamscape above me like someone slashed open DreamNet with a hot knife.
Kael is still there on the beach, the ground under his feet splinters into jagged code, fragments peeling upward as if gravity forgot how to work. He takes off in a sprint toward me.
Then comes the noise again. An echoing, bone-rattling sound like a hundred screams layered over each other, deep and droning. It vibrates through my skull until I clutch my head, giving up on stopping my fall.
My body freezes midair, but I can’t move, can’t use my limbs.
Across the blurry digitized beach, a boy staggers into view, tall, wide-eyed, his body jerking with sparks of purple light.
Eli. He’s not really here, I know that, but his power is bleeding through everything like spilled ink, staining it black and bruised purple.
“Eli! Stop it!” I scream, trying to run to him, but my voice doesn’t come out, and my body doesn’t move. The DreamNet itself begins to fold in on me. The ocean completely collapses into strings of red code, and the sand unravels, floating and scattering into pixels.
Eli screams louder, fighting it. The sound isn’t human anymore. It’s a deafening and digitized, layers of distorted frequencies ripping through the DreamNet like a storm.
Somewhere beyond this collapsing world, alarms are blaring. Drones are deploying. The Corporation’s grid is lighting up like the Fourth of July. I’m positive Kael’s there, ready to erase us.
“The update...” Kael appears above me. He reaches for me, his long arm extending to reel me back, but I’m being pulled into the endless colorless void that was once the sunset. “It was a virus! Lyra, try to come to me! Hurry!”
I feel it before I see it, a hot, white surge of energy tearing through the dreamscape like lightning. I feel a sense of buzzing throughout my limbs like grabbing a live circuit.
My body out there, in the real world, must be convulsing, but here, it just feels like my entire consciousness is being shocked. Maybe they’ve used tasers on me.
“Lyra!” Eli screams, voice cracking into broken code.
“I’m here!” I push forward, now able to move. I can feel my heart in my throat, but my power fills me, lashing out uncontrollably. Bolts of energy cross the collapsing dream in sync with my panic, spiking into wild, violent colors of amber and gold.
I reach for Eli instead of Kael, my fingers brushing his, but the virus swallows us whole. A blinding blast detonates through the dreamscape: the sun, the beach, the waves, everything. Gone.
And then I’m falling again, but this time it’s too fast. I’ll never break my fall. My body spirals like I’m being thrown off a building. My head lulls to the side, dizzy as I spin out of control.
I can see Kael, reaching for me, panicking. He’s helpless to do anything but watch. I whip toward him, desperate. “Help me!”
My last thought before the darkness takes me is that my body is gone. I can’t feel it, can’t feel anything, can’t speak, can’t see. They’ve killed me. The CIC must have come in to erase us as we lay in our beds during TheKast.
I expect my next few moments to be fleeting.
It will probably just go away, and I’ll eternally sleep.
Instead, I wake up, my eyes fluttering to ground myself after spinning endlessly.
Ash’s voice runs through my head “DreamNet runs on their neural servers, Lyra. If they want to keep you under, they will.”
Adrenaline floods my veins, burning hot but I don’t feel it throughout my body.
Instead I feel nothing, an absence of sound, light, and temperature around me.
There’s a constant hum like servers in a data room.
I fully open my eyes, expecting to either confirm I’m dead or wake to a digital prison inside the CIC HQ. It’s neither.
I’m just enveloped in darkness.