Besides, it didn’t really matter. For all of Carter’s faults, I trusted that he meant me no harm. Let him hide his mind away if he wanted to—I didn’t need to see the truth of it anyway. Some things were far too terrifying for me to witness firsthand.
Before anyone had the chance to ask any other stupid questions—and I could guess they would be stupid without even hearing them—Yun appeared.
She wore a long black dress, one that made her look delicate and sweet. Her hair had those soft curls in it, and the black reflected the purple in the sky. She didn’t seem overly bothered by our presence, just mildly confused. “What are you doing here?”
“You dream about us often, don’t you?” Carter asked, his voice soft and coaxing.
“Yeah, but not like this.”
“Then like what?” Ingram asked.
Her cheeks flushed, and she glanced away.
Which made me wish we had the time to question her about that. I’d love to have known just what went on in her head when she dreamed about us. Sure, I directed a few thoughts in that way, but as I had told them before, I had no way to actuallyseethe results. I’d wanted to remain distanced, since that would allow her the most refreshing and natural sleep.
Often a light touch did more for a person than a sledgehammer.
She opened her mouth as though to speak when a tearing sound echoed in her mind, one that reminded me of what a large dungeon opened, the ripping apart of two realms.
She twisted, terror on her features. It was the type that suggested a person knew exactly what was happening. Fear of the unknown was bad but fear of the known was always worse.
A shadow appeared as though grown from her nightmare.
“So, is it real?” Carter asked from behind me.
The figure stepped forward, but his face remained bathed in shadows, obscured.
“I don’t know,” I answered, searching the energy.
Where did it come from? I closed my eyes, trying to follow it.
First, I crossed off the initial option—just a nightmare. If it were nothing more than Yun’s own mind crafting it, there would be no other energy. I had already suspected this wasn’tthe case, given my difficulty in accessing her mind during these nightmares, but I now knew for sure.
Another energy coursed in her mind, stronger than before, as if it had formed into an actual creature.
So, not just a nightmare.
That left me with two options—one bad, the other worse.
I didn’t bother to watch the figure, leaving that to the others. It was more important for us to find the answer than anything else. Only once I understood it could I fix it.
“It’s not just a nightmare,” I said.
“So it’s real?” Carter verified.
“I don’t know. It could be just left over energy, like the corrupted left a tiny piece of themselves in her mind. It could be activated by the nearness to The Pitt opening, but it might not be an actual connection.” I followed the flow of energy, searching for where it had taken hold. If I could remove that, rip it out, then she wouldn’t suffer from this anymore.
“He’s real,” Yun said, her voice gentle and terrified.
I forced my eyes open to find her staring at him. He was still little more than a shadow to me, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see all the details. Minds were interesting things, never easy to nail down or follow clear rules. They changed, shifted, never remaining the same for long.
“You don’t know that,” I told her, hating the defeat in her voice.
I’d never heard that from her before. Anger? Fear? Desperation? Sure, but never defeat. It took me back to the idea that she’d been willing to die before to escape, and how easy it would be for her to end up in that same darkness again.
“She’s right,” the figure said. His voice was dark, twisted, echoing so much I couldn’t say whether it was familiar or not. He took slow steps forward, but I knew better than to listen.Even figments of the imagination could spout lies, could twist the truth.
No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t find the pocket inside her brain that held this sliver. Instead, her brain felt as though corruption soaked through the walls, like it filled every crevice, every space, every molecule within her, and pulsed each time that figure spoke.
