Nightmare

leave within the next few seconds. Kendi shifted uncomfortably on his chair.

'I named him after the very first slave I ever owned,' Betta said. 'Now there was a hard worker.'

'The name?' Ara said, barely civil.

'Drew, of course,' Betta said. 'Jeren Drew.'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We can’t all be Silent, nor should we want to be.

— Daniel Vik

Kendi swallowed. It took all his concentration to hold onto the Dream. His drug dose had to be almost completely gone by now, but he didn’t want to leave. He felt light-headed and flimsy, as if he might vanish at any moment.

'Jeren is Cole?' he said incredulously. 'He’s Dorna’s brother?'

'He must have lied about his age,' Mother Ara said. 'Jeren said he was barely twenty, but Cole Keller is twenty-four. My god.'

They were in Mother Ara’s pleasure garden again, and Kendi was glad of it. Betta Drew’s sitting room was a nasty place, and Betta herself, a slave owner to the core, had made Kendi’s skin crawl.

'All life-I just remembered,' he said. 'Jeren sometimes calls Dorna ‘Sis.’ We all thought he was joking with her by pretending to call her ‘Sister Dorna’ when she wasn’t actually a Sister yet.'

And that one woman said Jeren was hung like a donkey, he thought, just like Jeren told me he was. I thought he was kidding.

'It was a joke, all right,' Mother Ara muttered, and for a moment Kendi thought she was replying to his unspoken words. 'He’s been playing with us from the beginning-pretending to learn meditation, then pretending that he had only just made it into the Dream. I-' Mother Ara paled and put a hand to her mouth.

'What’s the matter, Mother?' Kendi asked.

'Oh my god,' Mother Ara said in a voice so choked Kendi could barely understand her. 'The night after I freed the lot of you, I peeked in on you while you were sleeping to see how you were doing. Jeren was sleeping so soundly that I actually checked his breathing. Later I found out this was when Iris Temm was …being killed. He was killing her right in front of me, and I didn’t do a thing.'

'You didn’t know,' Kendi pointed out.

'I should have known,' Mother Ara said softly. 'I’m a Mother, almost a Mother Adept. I should have spotted the fact that he wasn’t asleep. I didn’t even look through his possessions. He must have had a dermospray on him. I should have known.'

'You wanted to give us privacy,' Kendi told her, shaken by her agitation. 'You had no reason to think it was …one of us.'

Mother Ara didn’t look convinced, but she said, 'We have to move. Kendi, you leave the Dream and call Inspector Gray. I’m going to backtrack along Jeren’s owners and see if-oh, hell. This means I’m going to have to leave and come back, and it’ll be my third dose today. Well, there’s nothing for it.'

Kendi found his hands were shaking and he was getting dizzy. 'Look, I’ll get out and call the Guardians, then come back in and help you. We need to talk about this.'

'You don’t have to-' Mother Ara paused. 'Well, all right. Another person might make this easier, and you already know what’s going on. I’ll meet you back here in half an hour.' And she vanished. Kendi shut his eyes. Another wave of dizziness washed over him, making it hard to concentrate. His body drifted like a feather on the wind.

If it be in my best interest, he thought, and in the best interest of all life everywhere, let me leave the Dream.

He opened his eyes on Mother Ara’s guest room, a small space with a simple bed and night stand. It was dark outside. The meditation spear was firmly under his knee, and he carefully came down off it as another wave of dizziness hit him. Mother Ara had warned him that letting his drugs wear off and yank him out of the Dream would leave him debilitated, possibly for days, but the dizziness was his only symptom. He must have just made it.

Ben poked his head into the room. 'I thought I heard someone moving around in here. How did everything go?'

'I have to go back in again.' Kendi reached for the dermospray that sat on the night stand with shaking hands. 'Listen Ben-you need to call Inspector Gray, and quick. He needs to find Jeren.'

'Jeren?' Ben said, surprised. He leaned against the doorjamb. 'Why?'

Kendi sat on the bed and quickly explained. Ben’s expression went from puzzled to skeptical to amazed. Kendi abruptly wished that he could draw Ben down beside him, have Ben put an arm around Kendi’s shoulders. Ben looked comforting and solid after the slippery, shifting Dream, and Kendi wanted something to hold onto. Ben was also sensible and reliable, someone who could be counted on to do the right thing instead of taking stupid risks like Kendi.

'I never did like Jeren,' Ben muttered. He was still leaning against the jamb. 'I guess I’ll get the Guardians.'

'Thanks, Ben. You’re great' Kendi pressed the dermospray against his arm, pressed the release, and reached for his spear.

Ben watched Kendi slip back into his trance and hated it. Once again he was waiting on the sidelines while someone else acted. Ben was always waiting, waiting for his Silence, waiting for his mother, and now waiting for his-waiting for Kendi. Sure, once in a while he got to do something interesting like call the Guardians, but it was always minor. Even when Dorna had shown up at the party, Ben had hung back while Kendi acted. He hated it. Maybe it was time to make some kind of change, take a risk, do something.

Like call the Guardians, he prompted himself.

Ben tapped the section of wall that became a vid-screen. 'Eliza, call Inspector Linus Gray from the Guardians.'

'Apology,' said the computer. 'The connection cannot be made.'

Ben raised red eyebrows. 'What? Eliza, try again.'

'Apology. The connection cannot be made.'

'Eliza, why not?'

'Unknown.'

Puzzled, Ben left the guest room and trotted into Mom’s study. She had a separate phone account through the screen there. A square sheet of wood sat in place of one of the windows, the one Dorna-Violet, whoever-had broken two nights ago. Ben, reliable and solid as always, had cleared out the glass and boarded up the window himself. He tapped the wall and ordered it to call Inspector Gray.

'Apology,' it said. 'The connection cannot be made.'

A bit of nervousness crept over Ben’s skin like mouse claws. Something was obviously wrong. Maybe it was just a local glitch and he should run to the neighbors. Except a cold feeling told him the glitch wasn’t a stuttering chip in the system. He was turning to leave the room when a glitter of metal caught his eye on the floor near Mom’s desk. Ben crossed the room to scoop it up.

It was a silver charm bracelet. Ben stared at it in the light of the overhead fixture. He had never seen it before. Granted, he didn’t make it habit of rooting through his mother’s belongings, but he was sure he’d remember something like this. Mom didn’t go for ostentation, and there was nothing unassuming about the bracelet. It clanked and jingled in his hand. The silver charms included a heart, a tiny rose, six little plaques that spelled out I–L-O-V- E-U, and a kitten, among others. A terrible feeling descended on Ben, magnifying his earlier nervousness. With shaky fingers he counted the charms.