“Ten years of this,” Damien said, looking out at the city as the bombs went off. We’d been standing near each other in silence for much of the past hour. The Dream Wars tended to make you ruminate on things, usually negative, like the ghouls were trying to control our minds and make us more depressed. I personally didn’t have so much of that problem since I seemed to have an affinity for mental control. Yet, Maxine and Brisk struggled with it themost.
“They say in five to ten more years, humanity will go extinct,” Damien continued when I didn’treply.
Jesus, that was a sobering statistic. I didn’t even watch the news anymore; it just made me want to crawl in a hole and die, so I stuck to upbeat TV show reruns and old comedymovies.
“Well if your brother can figure out the cuff, then maybe that’ll change,” I saidbrightly.
He cast me a side glance, his piercing blue eyes catching me a little off guard. “It’s about the only thing I live for anymore. The idea that we can stop it.” He turned to look back over thelandscape.
His words made me sad, almost as if he’d given up. Four hours in the Dream Wars was a long time, and it was probably messing with his head. One hour more and I’d tell Tatum to wake us. I never spent more than six hours here if I could help it. I preferred four, but he’d been without sleep for too long. Long gone were the days of eight hours of sleep and a nap. That was only something you read about in history books. Even the elderly were given caffeine pills, and sparing use of stims to keep them from napping. But Damien had gone four days with no sleep. Five to six hours wasn’t going to do much to revivehim.
“I’m going to pee.” He started to walk off behind a large spinypod.
It still surprised me some nights when I felt the need to drink water here or pee or eat an energy bar. Scientists couldn’t explain it other than they thought it had to do with quantum entanglement. When the ghouls hijacked our consciousness and created a duplicate of our bodies, whatever happened to the one body happened to the other to a certain degree. And when we woke, there was just one of us, that other copy disappearing with the waking of consciousness. Then a new copy was made the next time we slept, with identical injures or haircuts or whatever we had changed from the night before. Like a dream that was real. When you were injured here, your body on Earth sustained the same injury, like a soul that was tethered to a body. But if you peed here, you didn’t pee the bed back on Earth. It was like a mixture of a vivid dream andreality.
A group of four Galadrias caught my eye, descending right in front of me. There was no pond for them to drink from, nor a cave for sleeping. They were solitary creatures and didn’t usually live in packs, so four adults flying together was unusual.They must be landing to speak with me.What if Dawn sent them to warn me aboutsomething?
I started walking out to meet them when I noticed their flight was erratic, jerky. They normally flew like a falling feather, light and graceful. This was not that. Maybe they were injured. It was too dark for me to make out, but they bled the green stuff, and I didn’t see any of it dripping offthem.
I was about thirty feet from them when I saw why they were flying soerratically.
No.
Fear flushed through my veins as my heart kick-started in mychest.
I spun, looking at our little camp, and screamed at the group. “Run!”
The sound of bullets behind me had me zigzagging, trying to reach the pod grove before being gunned down. My Kevlar suit was good, but not that good. An air assault with an automatic rifle would put me in a grave forsure.
This wasn’t possible. The sentries wereridingthe Galadrias. They’d put chains into their mouths and rode them like we rode horses, pulling the reins to control theflight.
This changeseverything.
Too far from the grove to make it for cover, I spun with my gun drawn and started popping off shots at the approaching sentries. I didn’t want them to spray bullets onto our group. The ghouls never even had guns when they’d first landed, using something similar to electric cattle prods but more high-tech, but they stole them from us. When we died, they looted our remains, taking anything they could use to hunt more of us. They didn’t have any cool mind control powers, or teleportation, but they were strong as hell, and fast, and there were more of them than there were of us. That was enough to take usout.
For every hundred or so grunts, I’d see a sentry, but to see four sentries riding Galadrias? They were getting smarter, learning what it would take to find us. I was trying not to hit the Galadrias, but I couldn’t get to the sentries without inflicting major damage on the winged beasts. The sentry descending closest to me was wearing the usual getup, indestructible armor complete with helmet and an automatic rifle with laser scope. The only weaknesses were at the neck, where there was a gap in the helmet and chest plate, or at the groin where the thigh plate of the armor met the cup that covered their package. The sentries were the most humanoid of the aliens—except for the fact that they stood over ten feet tall and their mouth consisted of six rows of teeth with an opening large enough to swallow a humanwhole.
I’d just made up my mind to start shooting the Galadrias when Damien burst out of nowhere and chucked a sticky bomb at the blue beast before me. The gooey ball flew from his canister gun and splattered onto the animal’s side, sticking to its skin. The moment it made contact with the heat of the beast, it ignited. An arm went around my waist and yanked me backward just as the blast rang out. Bits and pieces of Galadria meat rained down, and I fought the urge tosob.
I’d never in ten years seen a Galadriadie.
Damien had me tucked close to his body but I ripped myself away, popping up into a standing position. Sentries were my worst nightmare. They moved so fast you barely had time to think before acting or you would be dead. The big guy had jumped off the Galadria right before she blew and was now free-falling. The moment he touched the ground, he’d travel fast and have my head torn off my body. I needed to bequicker.
Nox came up on my left, and I saw his flaming arrow arc through the air and stick into the orangeGaladria.
Oh God.It was hard to see the gentle creatures be slaughtered like that, because I knew they’d been forced against their will, but I couldn’t focus on it. Master Aki’s voice floated through my head.Detach. Feel nothing. Justact.
A second before the sentry’s feet slammed into the ground, I ripped my lucky grenade from my boot and pulled the pin, chucking the grenade at him. He tried to get enough footing to run, but the grenade went off, sending him off flying into the air. His head separated from his body and I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about him, just the three others that were about toland.
I allowed myself a quick glance behind me to see over a hundred ghouls coming up behind us, and Santiago’s team on the far side of the pod orchard. Ronnie and Maxine were holding them off. I couldn’t see Brisk, but I had to trust that he wasokay.
The rest of the Galadrias were descending, one of them on fire from Nox’s arrow. I knew the logical thing to do would be to contact Tatum and just wake us up, but in order for me to make contact with her mind on Earth, I had to calm myself and go into a meditative state here in the Dream Wars. That didn’t seem like it was going to happen rightnow.
Where the hell isBrisk!
“I need to try the arm cuff! Cover me!” Damien shouted beside me, and then the sentry jumped off the flamingGaladria.
“What the fuck did he just say?” Noxasked.
