Chapter 4 Hazel #3
‘Nice try at a subject change.’ She continues flicking pages. ‘This is nonsense; there’s no way I’m going to be able to communicate across time and space using this kind of poorly evidenced waffle.’
‘That “kind of poorly evidenced waffle” is what brought you here, Hazel Brandt.’ Hazel looks at the screens of unintelligible code, which is now spiralling in on itself.
‘It might also be encouraging to know that Lilith and Huxley were both proud and accomplished lucid dreamers, though, as non-Travellers, they did not have your access to the dreamscape. They were, like me, always envious of Travellers’ unique direct experience of the fourth dimension. ’
Hazel huffs a laugh to cover her unease at CHARL1E expressing feelings. ‘So far, let me assure you, you’re not missing out on much.’
‘Time will tell, Hazel Brandt.’
She closes the book and clutches it to her aching chest, an instinct that brings her comfort.
The fumes of Old Street tube station giving way to the vanillin scent of her favourite bookshop; a novel in a brown paper bag, receipt tucked in the front page; the feel of paper under a fingertip; a bookmark embroidered by Mum—
‘Wait, CHARL1E.’ She hesitates, heart monitor bleeping, but she must know. ‘If my arrival destroyed the Arch, how will I get home?’
‘That is not a salient concern.’
‘What do you mean? Of course it’s a salient concern, it’s the most important thing!’
‘That is a matter of perspective. However, I can appreciate that it may be the most important thing to you in this moment.’
‘Don’t screw with me, CHARL1E, not about this. Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Unable to comply; I possess no protocol on nonspecific goings-on.’
Hazel clings to the book so hard her knuckles turn waxy. ‘How can I get home?’
There’s a pause long enough for Hazel to complete one calm breathing cycle. It doesn’t work. Her hands feel like pincushions and her lungs are flooding with adrenaline.
On the screens, CHARL1E’s code flickers. ‘Warning: Information requested may result in accelerated temporal relocation. Caution is advised if you wish to proceed.’
‘Temporal relocation to where?’
‘Warning: information requested may result in accelerated temporal relocation. Caution is advised if you wish to proceed.’
‘I wish to proceed!’
CHARL1E’s code goes haywire. ‘Secondary warning system implemented: Travellers are advised not to access information regarding the return trip mechanism.’
Hazel’s pretty certain no warning system has been triggered, CHARL1E’s just hiding things.
Her instinct is to throw the book at his screens and shout that he should just send her home now, but she watches his code spinning and flickering and wonders if he’s in a bit of a bind.
Maybe that frenetic motion indicates an experience akin to anxiety just as high as hers.
One of them needs to be the bigger person.
She relaxes her grip on the book. ‘Let me rethink the question. How about this: CHARL1E, can I still get home?’
The code regains its vertical fall, as if CHARL1E is sighing with relief. ‘Affirmative. Your homeward mechanism is not dependent on the Arch.’
She plays with a dog-eared corner of the book. ‘I guess that’ll have to do for now.’
‘To a similar end, it is recommended that you do not wander about Station C without my permission, as this may also result in accelerated temporal relocation.’
‘Noted,’ Hazel mutters, though she refrains from explicitly agreeing.
On the floor with the heart monitor, Teaspoon’s tail twitches, setting off tail-waving between Robin and Shiny.
‘The Tinys’ latest scans indicate a rise in your stress levels,’ CHARL1E says. ‘This will result in suboptimal healing if allowed to continue. They recommend you rest. Will you comply?’
Letting herself sink into her chest pain and exhaustion, Hazel replies, ‘Yes, that I will comply with.’
‘Until tomorrow then, Hazel Brandt.’ One by one, CHARL1E’s screens fade from existence, as seamlessly as they appeared. The icosahedron falls dark, and the workshop becomes all the gloomier.
Hazel tugs the blanket around herself and levers out of the chair, as Shiny takes Lucid Dreaming and Teaspoon lifts the heart monitor again.
Robin leads them back into the curved corridor.
Hazel and the three Tinys pass pinboards covered in thick layers of handwritten notices, empty vending machines with the glass removed, and many closed doors, all made from any manner of scrap just like the wall tiles.
Robin opens a hodgepodge metal door, revealing a ramshackle but tidy bedroom.
The glow of LED ceiling strips glances off the patches of corrugated iron, melted rubber, and worn plastic that make up the walls, which are oddly angled, with a lopsided, curved ceiling that makes the room feel like a tall tube.
A single wrought-iron bed runs lengthways along one wall.
Hazel sinks onto it and the mattress squeaks. ‘I’m in for a great night’s sleep.’
Robin shuts all four of them in, and Hazel notices the door’s bottom half is a fringed curtain, presumably so the Tinys can dart in and out at will.
So much for any hopes of privacy. Sure enough, tired of carrying the heart monitor around and without regard for her permission, Teaspoon takes off her blanket and starts tearing the sticky pads off her chest. Hazel bears with the procedure, flinching as the glue tugs her skin, leaving behind red welts.
She cringes, embarrassed at being naked, and her anxiety threatens to overflow.
What does she normally do when she feels this panicky?
She senses she’s had practice putting off feelings like this, as if her anxiety is just a bunch of programmers’ notes: The code keeps running, ignoring the brown anxious comments among the operational cyan, magenta, and yellow.
It’s OK, she doesn’t need to panic. Hazel can best robots any day of the week: Her instincts have got this, she can worry later.
What she needs to do is find a place the Tinys and CHARL1E can’t follow her, but where might that be in all this weirdness?
Even now, CHARL1E could be in the room with her.
Tinys aside, he might still have eyes and ears in here.
Wincing as Teaspoon tears more patches from her chest, she looks over the furniture, door, and walls, searching for cameras, microphones, or speakers.
There’s a tilting flatpack wardrobe and beside it a school desk with a flip-up lid.
Above the desk is a shelf holding scrap metal sculptures of musicians playing drums, a rubber band guitar, and wooden spoons.
There’s a dressing table with a hairbrush and an unbranded container labelled ‘moisturiser’—which Hazel suspects upon opening will be the colour, smell, and consistency of old butter.
The room’s not obviously monitored. Even the bedside table only hosts a cracked banker’s lamp, a beaker of water, and an analogue alarm clock.
Once Teaspoon’s finished, it plucks up the heart monitor and speeds it away through the fringe under the door.
Hazel wraps her body in the blanket again as Shiny, taking its turn to pester her, drags her to the desk and flips up its lid, pulling out a notebook and pencil stub and leaving them pointedly on top of Lucid Dreaming.
‘Yeah, like I’m going to study now,’ Hazel croaks.
Shiny stares at her, unreadable, then zooms after Teaspoon.
Aware of Robin still observing her, Hazel investigates the wardrobe, which contains well-darned thermals and dungarees in roughly her size, alongside a collection of granny-worthy bras and pants.
No obvious signs of bugging—but that could just mean the surveillance is really good.
Still, when she runs her hands over the furniture, there’s not a speck of dust anywhere and her fingers come away smelling of disinfectant.
Despite its decrepit appearance, the room is well-kept.
She opens the second door—this one without a fringe, solid to the floor—and finds it leads to a bathroom.
Hazel stares at her reflection in the mirror.
There are two cuts on her left cheek and a bruise on her right temple, while her eyes are bloodshot.
She turns to Robin. ‘Out you get.’
The Tiny doesn’t move, just stares at her with blank eyes.
‘I mean it, you have to go. I need the toilet, and a shower.’
Its tail sways, then it trundles back to the bedroom, shutting the door behind itself. Hazel pounces on the lock. She holds the bolt for a moment, afraid Robin might somehow be able to unlock it from the outside, but no, this seems to be her one piece of control.
She opens the sink cabinet and finds someone has scratched phrases in the plastic.
Salt an atlas. Pull up if I pull up. Nonsense.
More helpfully, the cabinet contains basic toiletries: a bar of soap, a bamboo toothbrush, and toothpaste tablets so pepperminty Hazel’s nose smarts.
She feels better for brushing her teeth and drops the blanket on the floor to shower.
The water batters her body, veering between freezing and scalding in a way that would be irritating if she wasn’t so tired.
Bruises protesting, she runs the soap under her arms and over her face, her skin tightening under its touch.
It isn’t very good soap—though she can’t remember what good soap does feel like.
She’s disconnected from the space she used to inhabit, yet at the same time, she can’t fully connect to the one she’s in.
Even if her mind is messy, she emerges from the shower invigorated and pink as a lobster, dries with the patchworked towel, and dons a pair of darned tartan pyjamas she finds hanging on the back of the door. They’re a men’s XL, and she has to roll up the sleeves and trouser cuffs.
Outside, Robin waits. It must have just been sitting there, staring at the door, the whole time she was washing.
She should do more—familiarise herself with her room, try to get away from Robin, even open that lucid dreaming book—but her head is swimming and her chest aches, so she falls onto her bed, without the energy to even get under the covers.
Robin fusses about in the wardrobe, withdrawing another duvet and hauling it over.
It tucks Hazel in, then places its steel fingers on her wrist, because apparently some life signs can only be gleaned by touch.
‘You’re a bit presumptuous, aren’t you? I’m getting really fed up with all your prodding and poking, even if I am grateful for the duvet.
’ Robin, seemingly satisfied with its data-gathering, withdraws its hand.
‘You really do look like a robin redbreast with that rusty jacket. Dr Robin Tiny. Odd little thing. So weird you weren’t programmed to speak. ’
Robin jacks its legs up so it’s on a height with Hazel, and fixes her with its lenses.
‘Are you going to watch me like that all night?’
It doesn’t move.
‘Fantastic. I’m going to sleep brilliantly then, aren’t I?’
Somewhere in the dome’s guts, an air conditioning or atmospheric control unit kicks into life, and a breeze sweeps Hazel’s face.
She snuggles into the duvet, wondering whether it’s CHARL1E that monitors the atmosphere.
He probably controls everything, from the air she breathes to the water she showers in.
It’s a far from comforting thought, mingling with the guilt she feels about the accident her arrival caused to give her alarming thoughts that keep jolting her from the brink of sleep.
Still, perhaps because of the effort required for her body to heal, she does drift off.
At first, she enters the deep sleep of utter exhaustion, but presently a dream forms. She’s in a womblike space, filled with a fleshy glow and a current that lifts her hair backwards.
It’s too gentle to tell whether she’s swept along by it like flotsam, or planted in it like a rock on a riverbed.
Whispering leaves and the scent of mulch riddle the air.
For a while, she thinks she’s alone, gazing silently into the flow, but slowly she becomes aware of someone breathing next to her.
Not that it matters—she can’t move her head, open her mouth, or say anything.
She just rests in the current with the other breathing person.
She remembers all this only on waking, her conscious mind managing just one thought while sleeping: Could this be the dreamscape?
When she does stir, Hazel gasps as if she’s been drowning, a memory bursting over her in the moment between waking and sleep: squealing metal, her muscles tensing against an oncoming impact, and an explosion of pain—
Robin reels back, missing her by a hairsbreadth as she bolts upright in bed. Was that scream she gave out loud, or only in her head? Surely the latter, or ever-observant Robin would have woken her.
The clock on the bedside table says it’s two minutes past seven, and she feels rested as if it’s morning. ‘You watched me all night, didn’t you?’
Robin stares at her, tail swaying—communicating.
‘Sure, tell CHARL1E and the others I’m awake, why not?
It’s not like I mind being monitored twenty-four-seven.
’ She sits up, clutching her bruised ribs where her heart’s still racing from the dream, and slings her legs off the bedside.
The room is gloomy, the LEDs turned low.
Over on the desk, Lucid Dreaming’s thick spine glares at her from under the notebook.
Internally, in a place Hazel can’t remember or touch, her dreams, waking thoughts, and lost memories collide, forming one unassailable instinct of belief.
It’s time to start doing some feather-pillow science.
Perhaps it’s because she’s become a true believer with a selfless urge to help the world—or, more likely, because she’s realising the dreamscape’s the one place CHARL1E and the Tinys can’t follow her.