“Something like that.” Iwinked.
Oh my God, I’m totallyflirting.
Weirdest dateever.
“What is that thing?” I askedhim.
He shook the device a little, pointing it at a tree. “It’s a thermal imaging scanner. Technically it would’ve fried with the EMP, but then we went back to the awake world and were rescanned, so it should work,right?”
I shrugged. It still confused me how we could lose a gun or weapon in the dream world and wake up with that weapon near us in the real world. “You’re the smart one, not me. How’s it different from regular heatscanners?”
I’d worked with a heat scanner before. Good for telling you if ghouls were coming up behind you, but it could also be a human, so it ended up just beeping all night and freaking you out for noreason.
Damien nodded. “It should be able to scan only temperatures above a hundred and two, and tell me if there are any ghouls in a two-mile radius. It won’t alert me for humans, animals, or any of that. It also scans the height of the person to differentiate between grunt orsentry.”
My eyes widened. “That’s brilliant. When can I getone?”
He chuckled. “When I can get it working. This is the first time I’ve ever used it. Jeremy had to tweak my design, ofcourse.”
“Of course.” I really had no idea how their business partnership worked, but Damien seemed like the idea man and Jeremy helped with the science application ofeverything.
The thing in his hand beeped, and suddenly a red bull’s-eye flashed on the screen. At the outer edge of the bull’s-eye were dozens of tiny green dots and a couple blueones.
I swallowed hard. “What arethose?”
Damien covered the screen, hiding it from me as if I were a child. “CallDawn.”
My heart jackknifed in my chest. “Are thoseghouls?”
I looked down at my mangled leg and my limp necrotic arm. I was total ghoul meat if they came upon usnow.
“Call Dawn,” he repeated and then stood, gun at theready.
Oh God. I shook my head, hoping to clear some of theanesthesia.
‘Dawn, do you know where I am?’I sent out, unsure if our mental link even worked this far apart, when I couldn’t seeher.
Nothing happened.‘Dawn, I’m hurt and I need help. Can you find Kit?’Sometimes I spoke in her rough way so she could better understand what I wassaying.
‘Dawn is too far. Roger can help Kit,’an unknown voice said into myhead.
Oh God. Who said that? What if it’s asentry?
‘Roger?’
‘Roger, friend of humans. Friend of Kit’came hisreply.
Okay… they didn’t have names that I knew of. I’d named Dawn, but were they now taking human names? That wasinteresting.
Suddenly a gigantic green Galadria came up over the tree line at the same time a pack of ghouls stepped out across thelake.
I scrambled to sit up, wincing at the pain it caused my leg and arm. During Earth surgery, it was best to stay still in the Dream Wars so as not to injure yourself further, but that wasn’t an option rightnow.
‘Please hurry. Ghouls coming,’I said frantically to the green beast, making his way across the sky tous.
Unfortunately, when a Galadria landed from a high place in the sky, it did this beautiful and elegant yet super-long, zigzaglanding.
‘Roger will hurry,’he said and suddenly dropped five feet, like a plane that had lost an engine. Then he went back into his graceful zigzag before dropping another five feet. It was terrifying to watch, but I couldn’t look away. It was like he just stopped flying, collapsed his wings and then opened themagain.
