WE ARE BACK IN THE VOID, AND THIS TIME IT’S already light when we get here. We are all standing in various places in the glaring whiteness, facing different directions. Except for one person: BethAnn. She is lying sprawled on the ground like a broken doll, blood flowing freely from wounds in her chest, arm, and leg.
My hand is still clenched around Ant’s wrist from when I tugged him off the sandy ground into the blackness of the Wall. I drop his arm and ask, “Are you okay?” We both stare down at his leg, which is as good as new.
“I’m fine,” he says. And then, obviously not fine, he slumps down onto the ground into a cross-legged position. He doubles over, leaning forward at the waist, and wraps his arms over his head. George is right behind us, and with a smooth, feline movement, she slips down beside him, patting his back and rubbing his bony arm. “I’ll take care of Ant,” she says, “you get BethAnn.”
I stand and move toward the bleeding girl, but before I can get to her, something strange begins to happen. She starts fading. All of the color is draining out of her. And then she’s gone. Vanished. The floor is a blank space. No blood. No sign that anyone had ever been lying there.
“What . . . what just happened?” Cata is beside me, her eyes wide and wild with fear. Sinclair joins us, and Remi comes running over from farther away. He focuses on the spot we’re all staring at and then glances around the group. “Where’s the blond girl?”
“She disappeared.”
“I . . .” Cata sounds like she’s choking. She clears her throat and tries again. “I saw that. I mean, what happened back there? In the nightmare?”
“She got shot,” I say. And as I remember what happened, I’m flooded with horror, grief, disbelief . . . they’re all scrambled up together. I reach for my tattoo, massaging it with my fingertips, but it’s already too late to fight the wave of emotion. I feel the muscles in my neck go slack, and the next thing I know I’m lying on my back with five faces staring worriedly down at me.
“Dude,” George says. “What was that?”
I push myself up into a sitting position and press my hand to the back of my throbbing head. My words come out in a slur, as if my brain and tongue aren’t connected. “I’m all right. I have this . . . fainting thing. Low blood sugar.” I’ve told that lie so many times I half believe it myself. I put my head between my knees until the wooziness passes.
I rub my eyes and focus on the concerned faces looking at me. “BethAnn saw Ant get shot,” I summarize. “When I went back for him, she threw herself between us and the military guys so I could get him to safety.”
“She sacrificed herself for you and the kid?” Sinclair asks.
I see the scene like it is happening all over again. The way she threw out her arms, as if to shield us. To offer herself up. “She said something about Ant being the same age as her sister . . . and that she couldn’t ‘let that happen again.’” I think back to when we were hiding in the shack and BethAnn said something about an accident being her fault. I bet it had to do with her sister. “So yeah, I think she was trying to save Ant.”
There is a moment of silence while everyone digests this information.
“I don’t get it,” Cata says finally. “Ant got shot, but now he’s fine. Beth got shot, and she disappeared. Why?”
“This place must be governed by some sort of ground rules,” George says.
“Like what?” Sinclair asks. “I mean, besides the obvious back-and-forth between the Void and the nightmares . . .”
George nods. “Nightmares,” she says thoughtfully. “That last one was yours, right?” she asks Remi.
He pales and nods. There is no fight left in him, it seems. Or else he’s just taking time to recharge.
“Have you had that dream before?” she asks.
“More or less,” Remi says quietly. “Sometimes my family is in it. Sometimes I die with them.” He chokes on the last words, and presses his forehead as if he can shove his emotions back inside.
“What about the dream before that?” Cata asks. “The cave one?”
I speak up. “That was mine . . . I think. I had vague recollections of being there before, and the monsters kind of reminded me of my dad. Plus, I heard his voice.” I’m trying to be flippant about it, but am still horrified by the memory of my father’s eyes staring out of the thing’s head as BethAnn smashed it with the stalactite.
“Your dad is blue and hairless?” Sinclair asks with a twitch of his lips.
“No,” I say, deciding that I don’t like his movie-star snobby looks. “All of the monsters had his eyes. It was like he was looking out at me through them.”
“That’s disgusting,” Cata says, and then her eyes widen. “That’s why you stopped me from killing that first monster!”
“Oh, man! So we killed your dad in your dream. Multiple times. That sounds pretty Oedipal,” says Sinclair.
I scowl. “It’s usually him trying to kill me,” I say without thinking and just as quickly shut up. George is watching me curiously, and I don’t feel like spilling my life story in front of her.
Why do I care what she thinks?
Because she’s just the kind of girl you always go for, I respond. Artsy, ballsy, supersmart. Now is not the time for crushes.
Sinclair sees George looking at me, and can’t stand sharing the spotlight. “What’s up with the costume change?” he asks, leaning in to nudge George teasingly. “I’m totally digging the safari-chic dress. Is this like Adventure Barbie, or something? An outfit for every dream?”
George glares.
“Okay . . . not Adventure Barbie. Slightly Goth band-chick Barbie. With attitude.” He dodges as she nudges him back, not at all teasingly. “What? That’s a compliment!”
“It’s true. You have different clothes,” Cata says, giving George the up-and-down. “How did you do that?”
“Who knows?” George says, glancing down and shrugging. She looks back up, scanning the group. “But to get back to the subject, the basic rules here are becoming obvious, aren’t they? Like Sinclair put it, we’ve been traveling between two alternating places: the Void and the nightmares.”
“So, Void, nightmares. There are two places inside this . . . place,” Cata says, unsatisfied with her choice of words.
“At least, those are the only ones we’ve seen so far,” Sinclair says. “Maybe there are more. Who knows?”
“But from what’s happened so far, we know what happens in the nightmares doesn’t carry over into the Void. Whether we get messed up, bloody, dirty, injured, whatever, like we did in the cave and the desert back there, we arrive back in the Void untouched.”
“Up to a point,” I add. “Judging on what happened to BethAnn, if you actually get killed in the nightmare, it’s game over.”
“This isn’t a game,” said Remi, narrowing his eyes at me.
“It’s a figure of speech,” I explain.
“So where is she?” Cata asks with a haunted look. “Did her body go back to that place in Africa?”
“Matangwe,” Remi fills in. He says it like the word tastes bad in his mouth.
“There’s no way to know unless we go back there,” Sinclair offers. “And I, for one, hope I never see that place again.”
“Maybe she escaped,” I say. “Maybe she went back to the real world.”
“That’s an interesting thought,” George says, tipping her head as she thinks it through. “Maybe you can only escape if you die in the nightmare. If you do, your life’s your own again.”
“Or maybe not,” Sinclair says darkly. “Maybe if you die here you die in real life.”
“Which is what?” I ask. “What is real life? I still have no clue how I got here. Or where this is. We’ve already established the fact we are all suffering from memory loss. Remi’s the last one to remember anything, and that was . . . when?”
“February fifth,” Remi responds.
“So this could be February sixth, or it could be months or even years later. We have no clue. We’re all from different places. How did we end up here, together . . . wherever this is?” I run my fingers through my hair and prop my forehead back on my knees, willing my strength to return. Everyone is silent, thinking.
“What if our real bodies are out there somewhere?” I venture, gesturing toward the sky before realizing that there isn’t any sky. Just the blank whiteness. “And it’s just our consciousness in here, not our real bodies. But we’re able to project them into the Void and the nightmares.”
George leans down and pinches my bicep. “Does that feel real?” she asks.
“Ow!” I say. “Yes. Point made. Totally real.”
“That reminds me of The Matrix,” Remi says.
“How do you know about The Matrix?” Sinclair nudges him. “I didn’t see any DVD players back in those shacks.”
“Oh my God!” Cata says, wheeling around and staring in at him in reproach.
“What?” Sinclair asks, confused.
“Shacks,” Cata says.
“Sorry,” Sinclair says, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I don’t know the politically correct term for that style of architecture. I’m just saying I’d be surprised if he had access to movies in such a . . . secluded place.”
Cata pursed her lips, considering Sinclair’s excuse.
Sinclair pats Remi on the arm. “Dude, I’m sorry. No offense,” he says, pouring on the charm.
“We had a library,” Remi replies, frowning at Sinclair. “Set up by an international aid society. It had a video player and someone donated a lot of movies. It was one of my favorites.”
“Okay . . .” Cata says, “Keanu chose when to teleport or whatever into the Matrix. But we have no control over where we go. Whenever the door appears and the knocking starts, we’re at its mercy. And once we’re in the nightmare, we’re stuck there until the black wall appears.”
“How about this?” Sinclair says, making his voice low and spooky. “We’re stuck in a postapocalyptic Matrix-like game where we’re just moved between this artificial holding area and our nightmares. It’s like we’ve fallen asleep, but we keep getting sent into dream after dream after dream. Hey, let’s call it . . .” And, with a horror-movie flair, he growls, “Dreamfall!”
“Please,” I moan, rolling my eyes. “That sounds like a James Bond film.”
“No . . . I like it,” George says, impervious to Sinclair’s sarcasm. “The Real World and the Dreamfall. It might be tipping the scales of ridiculousness, but there’s a grain of truth in it. Keep going, Sinclair.”
“Okay, so we’re under the complete control of the Dreamfall’s sadistic gamers, who get their kicks yanking us from one world to the other whenever they want.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. Sinclair gives me a satisfied smile. He can tell he’s getting under my skin, and he seems to be enjoying it.
“We’re not completely at the Dreamfall’s mercy,” George says. “Ant has already started figuring out how it works.”
She nudges Ant with her elbow. He looks up from where his head is buried in the arm nest he’s made. “Twenty,” he says.
Remi rolls his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
George looks at Ant and waits for him to explain. When it’s clear he won’t, she says, “Okay. When we were in Africa, Ant told me that both times we were in the Void, we stayed for around twenty minutes.”
“How do you know?” Remi asks. “You’re not wearing a watch, and I don’t see any clocks around.” He gestures around the emptiness to prove his point.
Ant holds his fingers to his wrist for a moment. “My resting pulse is eighty beats per minute. I just used it to count the minutes.”
“You’ve been counting the minutes the whole time we’ve been here?” asks Sinclair with amazement.
“I always count minutes,” responds Ant. And then, realizing that we’re all gaping at him, he quickly unfolds his arms and taps nervously on the ground four times.
“COULD YOU STOP DOING THAT?!” Remi yells, hands flying to his head like he’s going to tear out his hair. Here we go. The old Remi’s back.
“It’s obviously a nervous tic,” says Cata. “Just shut up about it. You’re the one who said he can’t help it.” Remi squeezes his temples in frustration.
“I need my notebook and pen,” Ant says in a small voice. “I have my hat and my gloves and . . . I have four. I need six. Six is the number. Four is not enough.” He taps four times again and looks frightened.
“If we want to get out of here, we shouldn’t be taking advice from an autistic obsessive-compulsive timekeeper,” Remi says, turning back around and staring at us like he’s trying to get us to join his side.
Man, does this place bring out the worst in people. Cata sucks her breath through her teeth, and George’s hands curl into fists.
“Like I said before, I’m not autistic,” Ant says, straightening his back and speaking forcefully for the first time. He looks Remi straight in the eyes. “I’m not autistic. I don’t have Asperger’s. I’m not obsessive-compulsive. I’m just . . . me.”
Remi looks at his feet, taken aback by Ant’s defense.
“Haven’t you ever heard of spectrums?” George continues, visibly controlling her rage. “Anyone with half a brain nowadays knows that everything falls on a spectrum. Sexual preference. Neurological normality. Who doesn’t have a bit of ADD or dyslexia or addictive personality? And if you don’t, I’ll bet you’ve got something else going on.”
“So if we’ve all got problems, what’s yours, band chick?” Sinclair quips.
George lifts her chin. “Right now my problem is that I’m surrounded by people who aren’t going anywhere except the next nightmare if they continue to waste their time dissing each other.”
I rub my tattoo as I feel frustration mounting.
Sinclair spots my gesture. “What’s up with your tattoo, anyway, Fergus? Why are you always rubbing it like it’s a freaking security blanket?” He grabs my arm and inspects my ink. “What’s DFF stand for?”
I rip my arm back from him and stick my face about an inch from his. “Right now it stands for ‘Don’t Fuck with Fergus,’” I growl.
“Holy crap, can we bring the man rage down a level?” Cata says, pushing us apart and stepping between us.
“She’s right, I’m sorry,” Sinclair says, putting his hands out as if to placate me. “I didn’t mean to piss you off. This place is just really getting to me.”
He looks sincere, and I feel my tension lessening a fraction. I glance at George. She’s looking at me like she expects me to make up and be friends with the asshat. I sigh.
“Yeah, me too. Sorry for jumping on you, but just give me space about the tattoo. It’s my own business.”
Sinclair nods, not quite looking apologetic, but I’ll take it.
George looks satisfied. “Ant, how much longer do we have until the next nightmare?”
“Five minutes,” Ant replies without hesitation, and then taps on the floor four times.
“DON’T . . .” Remi begins, but George stamps a brown croc Doc Marten and shoots him a look of pure hatred.
“I think I have an idea about another rule of the Dreamfall,” Cata cuts in. “You know how last time the door started knocking, Sinclair ran away from it? He was the last one to leave the Void.”
“That was just survival instinct,” Sinclair protests.
Cata holds up her hand. “Not judging. Just saying that in the nightmare you ended up really far away from all of us.”
Sinclair nods hesitantly as Cata continues. “This time, when we came back from the nightmare, Fergus had Ant by the arm, and they ended up here together.”
Everyone just stares at her. “Well, what if this time, before we’re sucked through the door, we all stand close to each other? We could even hold hands. Maybe we’ll end up in the nightmare together. It might be a safer way to face whatever comes next: as a group.”
George crosses her arms, thinking, and Remi looks intrigued, as if finally someone has some semblance of a plan. Even Sinclair seems swayed by Cata’s theory. “It wouldn’t hurt to try,” I say, “although I’m not holding his hand.” I nod toward Sinclair, who responds with a laugh.
“I’ll hold it,” Cata says, and with a whisper of a smile, she reaches out and takes Sinclair by the hand. I reflexively glance at George, in all of her totally hot fearlessness and determination, and position myself next to her.
“Two more minutes,” Ant says, rising to his feet. He takes George’s hand in one of his, and Remi takes his other. But before we even lock fingers, the first boom sounds. Faint blue lines begin to glow from close by.
By the second knock, the door is clearly outlined in fluorescent blue. The third knock is deafening. As the door swings open, with a groan that sounds like the universe is splitting in two, Ant drops George and Remi’s hands and tugs his hat farther down over his ears.
“No!” Cata yells, but it’s too late. Our circle is broken as we are swooped up into the air and sucked through the door like dying stars into a black hole.