I nodded, going over inventory one last time before feeling confident enough to head to this client’s house. His file was vague on why he needed protection. Most high-profile cases had a nightly warrior or two whom they went into the Dream Wars with, but it wasn’t usually with an expensive special ops team like mine. That was a bit of overkill for nightly guarding. Especially for Damien Striker, who had military training and an endless supply of weapons. And though most people couldn’t afford us for longer than a week, he’d booked us “indefinitely.” I’d never seen that on a contract before. At a hundred grand a week, it was certainly going to cost him. The average Joe only needed a single warrior to guard them, but hiring an entire team meant something was up. With three teams already dead, something told me nothing about this would beeasy.
Walking over to the mirror, I splashed some water over my face. Master Aki taught me this ritual. The water symbolized a cleansing. Whatever trials of the day, or the week, or the year, they were washed away with the water. Tonight was a new night. A new sleep. A new dream. A newwar.
“I’m in control. I project peace. I give protection. I harness strength,” I told the blue-haired girl in the mirror. My eyes fell onto the smattering of freckles across my nose and faintly on my cheeks, reminding me of my late father. He told me growing up that they were angelkisses.
My team was used to my ritual by now. They didn’t say a word, just sat in quiet reverence as if witnessing a person in deep prayer. Which they were. My mind was my temple, and I needed to keep it pure beforesleep.
The guy’s file kept running through my mind.Three teams dead. He hasn’t slept in four days, and he’sinjured.
Morewater.
“I’m in control. I project peace. I give protection. I harness strength,” I saidagain.
The Dream Wars were mybitch.
I gotthis.
After drying my face, I applied some of my signature red lipstick and ran a brush through my indigo hair. This was about as professional as Igot.
I turned around. “We got this!” I told my team, just as Brisk laid on the hornoutside.
Ronnie was strapping up her medical kit when she stood and took in my armor. I was wearing my full Kevlar zip-up bodysuit, with wire meshing around the abdomen to keep my guts in. My lucky grenade was hanging off the edge of my knee-high black boots. It was an unusually warm summer in LA, so the full-body suit was going to be warm but necessary. Even with half the population dead, global warming didn’t seem to be slowingdown.
“Going in heavy,” Ronnie observed. I didn’t always do the full suit, but my gut was telling me tonight was going to be rough. My gut had never let medown.
“I’ve got a feeling.” I shrugged. I didn’t want anything to mess up my Zen, so I didn’t say anymore.
Ronnie just nodded and added another gun to her armorbelt.
“I got a new flamethrower I’m dying to try out,” Nox admitted as he grabbed his duffel, and then opened the large metal roll-up door to the garage of the building that we owned downtown. I was a city girl through and through; the suburbs made mesleepy.
I strode over and clapped Nox on the back. “I pray you never have to use it.” I was in my zone now. My positivity zone, that Master Aki taught me to allow nothing to enter. Tonight we would be projected to a peaceful place within the Dream Wars, far away from the front lines, and we would have a good night’s sleep. That was my mantra. Nothing before sleep could disturbthis.
Nox justchuckled.
As I watched my team pack up and head over to the jeep, I couldn’t help but reminisce about younger times. For the past six years I’d slept next to these fools, since we were fourteen and new cadets at the academy. Only Maxine had joined us recently, two years ago when she was eighteen. I’d been with Nox, Ronnie, and Brisk since we were young. Hands interlocked, holding on for dear life, we’d fall asleep together each night. Even when my father died and I had to fly home to Boston for his funeral, they came. They didn’t want me to have to sleepalone.
As we all piled into the black jeep, I plugged in our client’s coordinates. He lived in some fancy mansion in Bel Air. I liked our downtown loft just fine. We’d bought an old sewing factory, and constructed it so we all had our own separate apartments—so it didn’t matter if one of us had a lover over—and also a training center. The most important room in the building was the room we co-slept in, sporting four king-size beds. At the end of the day, we all slept together. Considering we each made an even cut of twenty grand a week, we could afford to live in Bel Air if we wanted to, but it didn’t suit any of us. Except maybeMaxine.
We drove to the address in relative silence. Only when we passed the infamous crater made by the now long-gone ghoul ship, off the 101 highway, did we begin to rustle in our seats. Looking down at the deep depression in the earth, I had a visceral response. Every muscle in my body clenched as rage flooded through me. Staring at the black scorch marks where the military had attempted to level it, I was taken back to mychildhood.
The mammoth titanium-looking ships had arrived on August 22nd, 2020. The ships had no windows, no lights, and when the doors opened, no beings inside. None we could see anyway. We assumed they were empty communication vessels or something, but that night the whole of humanity’s collective consciousness was hijacked. We were projected into the Dream Wars, some type of alternate reality, as the ghouls controlled the landscape and took us out one by one. They started with the animals, the easier game, but eventually made it to the disabled and elderly. Now only the fittest, smartest, richest humans survived the night. It was a literal survival of the fittest, most well connected or the most hardcore. I once saw a fourteen-year-old Latina from a local gang take out a ghoul with a metal icepick.
Maxine raised her middle finger to the ghoul ship indentation, and shouted obscenities out the window. I simply closed my eyes, focused on my breathing and chanted mymantra.
After about twenty minutes, we approached the residence and Ronnie went into medicmode.
“How’s the knee, Nox?” She peered at our pyro warrior, who had a lighter in his hand and was twirling it between his fingers. That man was never without fire.Ever.
He slapped his leg just above the knee and smiled. “Like brandnew.”
Nox had been badly injured a couple months ago, but he seemed to be recoveringfine.
“Maxine, how are you feeling?” Ronnie checked in. Maxine suffered from bouts of extreme anxiety and PTSD. She’d seen her parents murdered right in front of her, so I didn’t blame her one bit. Some jobs just made her jumpier than others. If I saw signs of it, then I usually put her to the back of theline.
She looked calmly at Ronnie. “Full of rage and ready tokill.”
I grinned. Coming from a gorgeous redhead with the sex drive of a teenage boy, that line always made mesmile.
