Chapter 19 #2
“You sure Thoth isn’t here?” I said as I took in Cameron’s pallor. Someone had propped the bed up so she was nearly sitting. Almost, I could believe she was sleeping.
He’s gone, Pluck fizzed as Lev shrugged. But he left a web to snare us. It will not.
Good, I mused, then started when Lev pushed a chair forward for me.
“Thank you for this,” Lev said, expression grim. “I’ll keep watch in the hall. I’m not supposed to come in, and if they see me gone they might investigate.”
“This wasn’t your fault, Lev,” I said, but he shook his head as he left, jaw clenched in frustration as he shut the door with a soft click.
Truly it wasn’t, and I set the empty bottle and trio of sticks aside before going to pull the vertical blinds.
Much better, I thought in the golden haze as I scooted the chair closer and gingerly sat, my knees touching the hard frame of the bed.
Pluck fizzed and bubbled, his thoughts coming so fast that I couldn’t parse out anything but a rising worry.
Cold seeped upward from my ankle as he slipped deeper into my thoughts until even my chest cramped and my arms became icy.
I took a deliberate breath, feeling odd as I exhaled a cold mist.
And yet for as cold as I was, I wasn’t shivering. Even the chill of dark matter had lost its bite.
I can sense her, Pluck fizzed, his thoughts in mine seeming almost warm. If we can get through the web he left to snare us, we can pull her consciousness free of it.
My eyes closed, and I took Cameron’s hand. It was hot, and I strengthened my grip, relishing it. Then let’s do this.
Indecision colored his confidence, spilling into me until I banished it for both of us.
Slowly the smaller sounds of the room gained a new importance: the hum of equipment, Lev’s foot scraping in the hall, the TV in a distant room playing.
Until faintly, almost not there, came an echoing ring of the universe at odds with the constant chiming tinnitus in my ears.
Is that Cameron? I mused, and Pluck’s light presence in mine brightened in affirmation.
Relief spilled through me. It was a double blessing as the slow rise and fall of her presence gave me something to follow deeper into her thoughts, but more importantly, if the roar of the universe still echoed in her mind, Thoth hadn’t taken away her ability to make fields.
More confidently now, I let myself dissolve into the muzzy nothing that filled Cameron’s mind.
Slowly a glittering network of twined threads took precedence, Pluck’s bright humor and sour acceptance making it obvious what was Cameron’s mind and what was his.
Sparking nodes of thought blazed within her, but there were far too few.
I had to wake Cameron up. Not just for me but for her.
Somewhere, hardly recognizable, I felt my hand tighten on Cameron’s.
Cameron sleeps beyond the snare, he fizzed. She’s trapped in the same dreamscape as before. Are you ready? I can take you through Thoth’s trap.
I didn’t see any trap, but that was the point. Pluck could. Yes.
Then take a breath.
He didn’t mean literally, but I still found myself doing just that as my thoughts shrank down to a tiny point, and I followed Pluck’s presence, letting Cameron’s mind grow closer, larger, until a glowing mass of threads took shape between it and us.
A second hum became obvious, vibrating through me, the soft rise and fall coming in ever-larger waves until it was a roar.
This, I realized, was Thoth’s snare, and I had no idea how to get past it.
I looked for the way out, realizing I was trapped.
Panic spiraled through me until Pluck wrapped his presence around mine, muffling the chaos, his thoughts growing more solid as the pulse of energy swelled and ebbed. It was telling me I was no longer real, and I believed it. How could I be?
Of course you’re real, Pluck thought, clearly having caught my musings.
You are as solid as the chair you’re still sitting in, but you are also just as much the spaces between your mass as your mass itself.
Concentrate on the spaces. Like you, the sound of the universe isn’t solid, it’s many parts moving in concert, just as light energy is.
You must pull yourself into the spaces your mass possesses to slip through. That’s all this is.
Spaces, I mused, listening for the emptiness amid the clutter of noise. They were there, and the more I concentrated on them, the bigger the gaps grew until the rising echo all but vanished.
You have it, Pluck thought. Go. Take us both through.
It wasn’t so much moving my awareness as it was falling inward. Vertigo spiraled through me, through us. My mind seemed to hiccup, and with a crack that was more felt than heard, something broke. And with that, everything seemed to implode, taking me with it.
I gasped, suddenly floundering in that brown, warm, gritty river of Cameron’s nightmare.
“Pluck?!” I called, choking on a mouthful as I treaded water. A log was to my right, sinking under me as I grasped for it and I, too, went under. Water roared with the echo of the universe, and then I found the surface.
“Got you!” Pluck sang out, and then a hand gripped my shoulder and dragged me to a floating car.
We were back, and I pulled myself up onto the roof, hacking and coughing out stardust disguised as dirty brown water.
“You mastered it,” Pluck said, and I looked up, more surprised at the pride in his voice than at seeing him as he had been before, in jeans and a lightweight shirt, dry this time right down to his soft shoes.
He must have appeared on the car, I thought, then jumped at the sudden hammering on the front window.
“Cameron!” She was there inside the car, the frantic woman armpit-deep in water as we floated and spun down the river. “Open the window. We can get you out! Thoth made a mistake. Let’s go!”
“Grady?” she shouted, voice muffled as she put a damp hand to the dash. “Oh, my God. You’ve got to go. Now! Before he knows you’re here. He’s going to break the vault!”
“He already did. Put the window down,” I insisted, and Pluck grabbed my arm as I leaned over the hood to see her better. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Not the vault at the records building,” she shouted, making me wonder how she knew. “The one here at the hospital!”
The one full of dross?
“Ah, Grady?” Pluck’s grip on my arm tightened. “We’ve got a bridge coming up. I think it’s our way out.”
I looked up, blanching. “Are you serious?” I blurted.
The floodwaters were smashing up against the bottom of the bridge with the force of a car hitting an overpass.
Angry water frothed and boiled, and I watched in horror as an entire tree crashed against it, spinning violently, roots over crown over roots, branches snapping, until it was sucked under.
The maelstrom would pull us down before we had a chance to climb onto the bridge, but seeing as we were headed right for it, I knew this was it.
“It’s a trap!” Cameron shouted from inside the car. “He will know if I escape. It will trigger him into blowing the vault. He won’t do it until you’re here. Just go!”
What? No! I thought, sensing Pluck’s sudden anger and…chagrin? The net around Cameron’s mind hadn’t been the real trap.
Damn it all to hell…I wasn’t sure who had thought it, and I straightened, scanning for another way out.
Frothing water and dangerous, slippery shores: I wouldn’t leave her a second time.
“Cameron, you need to get out. Now!” I demanded.
“The car is about to get sucked under a bridge, and if you die here, you die in that bed.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Cameron slammed her fist on the dash, her neck craned to see me on the roof. “Go before he knows you’re here. You have to catch Thoth. Once he’s contained, I will wake up.”
“Petra…” Pluck’s green eyes pinched in worry. “I misjudged him again. The bridge was triggered into existence when we got through his trap. He put it here to force us to take her out. She either comes with us and alerts Thoth to crack the hospital vault, or she stays here and dies.”
Cheese and crackers, I thought, cold as I looked at Cameron’s suddenly frightened face.
I was not leaving her here to die. “Cameron…” I started, gasping when the car hit something and spun into a sickening swirl.
I fell to my knees, holding on to the wet car in a panic until it freed itself and we lurched back into the current.
Pluck hadn’t moved, his balance perfect as he stared downstream.
“You see that bridge?” he said, and Cameron’s expression faltered.
“This car is going to hit it in forty seconds. When it does, we will have three seconds, tops, before the current pulls the car down and drags it under. It won’t resurface.
” His eyes met mine, the green of them giving away that he wasn’t human.
“The only way to hide that we were here is to let Cameron die.”
That was so not going to happen. “Cameron, get your ass out here!”
“But everyone will blame you for the vault—” she started.
“Open that damn window and get your ass out here!” I shouted. “If you don’t, I will stay and all three of us will die. Not just here, but for real!”
The woman looked tearfully up at me, her jaw clenched. “I order you—”
“I outrank you here!” I exclaimed. Shadow spit. The bridge was almost on us. “Open the fucking window or I’m going to bash it in!”
Finally Cameron turned to the window. Floodwater poured in as she lowered it, and the woman panicked. Arms flailing for me, she reached for help.
“I’ve got you!” I cried as her wet hand found mine and I gripped it, pulling her up and out onto the roof.
The small woman hung half in, half out for a moment, her feet struggling to find purchase until Pluck grabbed her shoulder and hauled her higher.
Gasping, she lay on the roof, legs akimbo as she struggled to sit up.
Tearstained, she blinked at us both. “Everyone will blame you,” she said, even as she reached out to us to help her stand. “They won’t believe me when I say it was him. Dana will say you forced me to say it in return for getting me out.”
I pulled her to her feet, staggering as I took her weight. The car slowly spun, and I inched to the edge to balance it out. It was sinking fast now that the window was open. “We will deal with it after you wake up. Ready? Pluck says if you get on the bridge you’ll wake up.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she whispered, eyes riveted to the frothing water.
“Okay,” Pluck said, eyes on the bridge. “Brace yourself!”
I clenched my teeth, holding Cameron up, holding her close. I would not let her go. She would make it. I would not allow Thoth to use people against me. Never.
We hit with a bone-shaking thud. Cameron gasped as we were flung forward. My wet hands grasped for the cold stone, slipping.
“Climb!” Pluck shouted, and then I yelped when he boosted me up. My arms felt like noodles as I hooked one in the stone railing and reached down for Cameron, only to find Pluck standing alone on the sinking car.
“Cameron!” I panicked until I saw she was already on the bridge, face creased in effort and a hand out to help pull Pluck up.
Together we grasped his raised hands just as the car was pulled under the bridge, metal grinding and twisting in a frothing madness.
“Up, pull him up!” I groaned as we struggled to draw him from the current until, with a sodden scrape of wet clothes, he was on the bridge.
It might only be a nightmare in Cameron’s mind, but it felt real, and I was too exhausted to laugh, or cry, or anything as I stared at Pluck, his eyes wide as the water continued to beat on the bridge, rumbling like thunder under us.
“I can’t believe we made it. Are you okay?” I asked, and he jumped, startled when I touched him. He looked like a person, and I suddenly felt ashamed for ever seeing him as a dog. Uneasy, I turned to Cameron. But she was gone. “Where…”
Pluck smiled, the expression looking rare and beautiful. His eyes, I realized, were the same hazy green as moldavite. “She’s starting to wake. Let’s go. We slipped his snare.”
He touched my shoulder and I gasped when the scent of the universe hit me. A thunderous peal of noise pushed me tumbling through a net of spider silk. Like a rabbit hole in reverse, the universe flowed through me as if I wasn’t really there.
And then I jumped, startled when my eyes opened.
Shocked, I grasped the roll bar of Cameron’s bed.
I took a fast breath, but she didn’t move, quiet and still, and as dry as a bone in the desert.
The sun still shone on the blinds, but the harsh glow had faded to a warm haze.
It had been a dream, but it had been real, too.
We’d done it. I think, even if she didn’t look awake. “Cameron?”
“Oh, thank God,” Lev said, and I spun to see him just inside the door, his eyes wide in hope. “I was getting worried. Did you find her?”
“Y-Yeah,” I stammered. My leg was freezing. No surprise, seeing as Pluck was pressed against me. Shadow spit, my leg was almost inside him.
My lips parted as Cameron’s living dream flashed through me.
He had pushed me to safety first, even knowing if he had died there, he would have died here.
Gratefulness spilled from him to me, and relief that we were both okay.
Under it was a lingering worry, but before I could form a thought, he dissolved into nothing and hazed under the bed. Pluck?
I leaned down to look for him, recalling his worried smile and his wet hair plastered to his face. Dross dust sparkled everywhere, so much more than I’d ever seen before.
“Go,” Cameron rasped, and I jerked upright.
“Cameron!” Lev blurted, knocking me aside as he put a hand on her shoulder and the woman opened her eyes. “Look at me. Cameron?”
“She’s okay,” I said as he gently shook her and she pushed on his hand, trying to get him to stop. I rubbed my fingers together, remembering the cold feel of the threads and the echoing emptiness beyond.
Eyes open, Cameron fumbled for my hand, squeezing it until I looked at her. “Get out of here. Now. They can’t blame you if you aren’t here.”
“For what?” Lev asked.
I took a breath to answer, hesitating when something shivered up through me: a tangle of lines, a pressure, a pause in the constant hum of the universe. “Ah, Pluck?” I said, and then I reached for the wall when the floor shook.
I spun, staring at Lev and Cameron as multiple distant alarms began going off.
“For that,” I whispered.