CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE DREAM
The jailer is also a prisoner, and he is jealous of the prisoner’s dreams.
It was cold, and the red cracks in the Dream fabric around Sejal offered only a dim light. He could feel the minds in this place-over thirty of them-and they were hungry. Now, however, he knew it wasn’t a physical hunger, but a spiritual one, a desperate, horrible feeling of loneliness and separation. He could see outside the darkness to the well-light plain beyond. The plain was safe and pain-free and filled with other minds. This was what the children longed for, reached toward. The fact that they could see but not touch it only made the feeling worse.
The wailing was quieter in the dark place. Perhaps it was because the children’s rage and pain were directed outward. Their minds flowed around Sejal, cold shadows in a black hole. Icy fingers touched his face and neck. Sejal recoiled, but the fingers didn’t draw away. More touches-hands, fingers, lips, and tongues that flickered over him. Sejal forced himself to remain stock-still, like a man confronting a strange dog that might decide to tear out his throat.
A few steps away, Katsu was dancing. She moved like a young tree waving in an angry wind. She moved toward him, pivoting and swaying, clearly well-practiced. As she approached, the minds around Sejal calmed. He felt from them something akin to admiration, even solace. They liked her. But before she could speak, one of the minds broke away. It flashed toward the boundary of the Dream and the dark place. Snarling gleefully, two more tensed themselves to follow. The ground rumbled.
“No!” Katsu cried, and without thinking, Sejal’s mind snapped out. He reached for escapee just as he had reached for Say. Here in the Dream, however, the action took a physical manifestation. A golden thread snaked from Sejal’s outstretched hand. The other end wrapped itself around the fleeing shadow. The shadow stiffened and halted less than a fingerlength from the boundary.
Katsu sighed with relief, though she continued to sway to music that only she could hear. “This is why I need you. There are so many. If I stop long enough to chase down the ones that break away, the others-”
The shadow yanked on Sejal’s thread. He the sudden pain drove him to his knees. Blind fury and all- consuming hunger flooded Sejal’s mind. He was flashing on the shadow, feeling what it felt. The thread flickered and weakened. The shadow yanked again and Sejal gasped in pain and confusion. No one had ever been able to fight him before. He touched people as he pleased, made them do what he wanted.
But, a part of him realized, these weren’t normal people. They were like him. Their DNA had been given to them by the same father and shaped by the same retrovirus.
Hands landed on his head, warm and friendly. Katsu. Sejal drew strength from her, braced himself, and pulled back on the thread. The gold thread thickened. Screaming in hostility, the shadow was dragged back from the boundary. Katsu left Sejal and danced toward it. The loneliness from the other shadows lessened a bit at the sight of her graceful movements. She caressed the bound shadow and it calmed.
Another one used the distraction to leap away, but Sejal had felt its tension and another thread whipped outward to catch it. It fought, clawing and snarling, until Katsu was able to calm it down like she had the first. The others swarmed about uncertainly.
“How many can you hold?” Katsu asked.
“I don’t know,” Sejal replied through gritted teeth. “I could take a dozen regular people without working up a sweat, but this is something else. How many are there?”
Katsu glanced into the blackness. The red cracks formed glowing, distorted ladders in every direction, and the weird light made her face take on a spectral aspect.
“Thirty-seven,” she said.
Something shifted, and the darkness rippled slightly.
“Thirty-six,” Katsu amended. “Father and mother must have-”
A crashing howl broke over them. Betrayal and anger and the constant overwhelming hunger smashed at Sejal as the twisted children screamed in unified fury. Five shadows rushed away. Sejal lashed out with more threads. He caught one, two, three. But the other two broke free of the darkness and raced across the plain. The ground cracked and crumbled beneath their feet. The sky darkened as they swallowed the minds that made up the Dream plain. Katsu dashed after them, quick as a fox. She caught one by the heel, and the second stopped to see what had happened. Katsu caught that one as well. Her touch, as always, brought them some kind of comfort and she was able to bring them back. They followed her, twisting clouds of darkness and gray mist. It came to Sejal that the children had no personal physical picture of themselves, which was why they remained amorphous in the Dream.
As Katsu and her two captives re-entered the dark place, there was another delicate shudder. One of the minds Sejal had bound disappeared. Prasad and his mother had put another child into cryo-sleep. Thirty-five left. The red lattices glowed with suspicion. The children knew something was wrong, but they didn’t know what it was. Sejal hoped Mom and Prasad would be able to finish the job before they figured it out. The children he held in the threads were quieter, but they were whispering to the others around them, and Sejal couldn’t make out their words. He glanced uneasily at Katsu, who shook her head.
“I can’t quite hear them, either,” she said.
The blackness shifted, and a familiar cry rang overhead. Sejal looked up sharply and saw the falcon. In desperation she had pierced the black place. Instantly, one of the children lashed out and caught her. The falcon shrieked in pain.
“No!” Sejal yelled. “Let her go!”
Another thread snapped out and wrapped around the grasping child. It released the falcon, who dove down to land at Sejal’s feet. The child drew away, hissing softly. Sejal reached down to stroke the falcon’s feathers. She made soft meeping sounds.
“Who is this?” Katsu demanded.
“It’s part of…of a friend of mine,” Sejal told her. “He’s in trouble, but you needed me more so I came here instead.”
Another shudder. Another child disappeared.
“Listen,” Sejal said, “Kendi must be desperate if his falcon came in here to look for me. He…I really want to help him. Can you hold them back for just a few minutes?”
Katsu looked at him for a long time. Then she backed away and started to dance. It was a faster dance, one with a clear rhythm. Her feet struck the dark ground, and she twisted between the red slashes cut into the Dream fabric around them. The movements were lovely and hypnotic. Sejal stared, then noticed the children had calmed considerably. He also noticed the sweat appearing on Katsu’s face. This dance was clearly costing her a lot of effort. He had better move quickly.
He released his captives. The threads vanished, but the children didn’t seem to notice. They were watching Katsu. Sejal put the falcon on his shoulder and wove between the red lattices toward the boundary. The moment he was clear of the dark place, the falcon exploded from his shoulder and fled across the plain.
Sejal ran after her. He hadn’t gone fifty meters before he saw the stone block. It was about twice Sejal’s height and six or seven meters on a side with no openings. The falcon circled over it, crying in its high, shrill voice. Sejal put out a hand. The moment he touched the block’s icy solidity, he felt Kendi. His empathy switched on, and Sejal was caught in a wash of terror and…guilt? The falcon shrieked again.
“Kendi!” Sejal shouted. “Kendi! It’s Sejal.”
No response. Sejal’s empathy switched off. What was going on? Could one Silent imprison another? He had never heard of such a thing, but that didn’t mean much. For all his power, Sejal was still new to the Dream.
A sense of urgency tightened his chest. Katsu was holding the children back all by herself, and she must be
