slumber.
His dreams were… as always… a barely lucid hodgepodge of scenes from recent events and conversations, snippets of television shows, and random elements swirling up from his subconscious. Kaneko was rarely able to make sense of his dreams, even when he awoke and wrote them in his dream diaries. A few times, some nugget of dream-delivered information had spurred him to recall a forgotten detail, enabling him to use it to help resolve a case. But those times were few and far between.
Now events from the day at the mall began to replay in his dreaming mind, though they were disarrayed, like an incident report whose pages had been shuffled into random order. But this time, as he knelt to check the status of the taller girl who had been tasered, Kaneko found that their positions were reversed. He was the one lying on the cold concrete, and she was kneeling over him instead.
'Frank Kaneko, do you know who I am?' the girl asked. She seemed to glow with a silver aura. She was beautiful, but he could tell she was fierce as well.
'You're the fugitive from the report.' As he answered her, the scenery shifted, and he was in an all-white room, strapped to a table in the center. A bright light shone on him from above.
She was now in different clothing, and the leather pants and dark red top showed off her figure. 'But you don't know my name? “
'No,' he replied. 'The report just told us to apprehend you and five others. It didn't specify who you were or what you had done. “
'Who issued the report? “
Frank struggled against his bonds, and saw that they weren't like any binding material he had ever seen before. Instead of rope or steel or canvas, these seemed to be composed of energy. 'Why am I being held? Why are you interrogating me? How are you interrogating me? 'This is a dream,' the girl said. 'Don't you know that? I'm not really here, and you aren't really tied up. I'm a figment of your subconscious mind, a part of your guilty conscience.' She leaned over toward him. He felt her soft breath on his face, and looked into her beautiful brown eyes. 'You do feel guilty about today, don't you? “
'Yes,' he agreed, then recalled his duty. 'No. Why should I? “
'You don't know what we did, or who we were, or why we were wanted. Doesn't that bother you? “
He nodded. 'A bit. But I had my orders. “
She suddenly snapped a riding crop against her leg. It cracked loudly on her leather pants. 'I was just following orders. Where has that phrase been heard before? “
Frank looked around at his environment, watching it change. He recognized the fences and the wood and tar-paper barracks and shacks that housed them all, saw hundreds of the Japanese men, women, and children who lived there. His grandparents had lived there, had met there. The internment camps. His grandmother was a Nisei, second-generation Japanese-American. His grandfather was classified as Kibei, a member of the American-born second generation who was schooled in Japan, and thus was more suspect.
After the war, when they had been released back into society, his grandparents had gotten married. They had passed down to all their children and grandchildren the stories and photos of the camps, sharing with them the feeling of helplessness as the government to which they had been loyal branded them as dangerous, confiscated their possessions, and forced them into confinement.
' Colorado River Relocation Center. This is where they met,' he told the girl, who was now in a military uniform. 'Why are we here? “
'You know the answer to that better than I do,' she said. 'Something about today reminded you of this place. “
Seeing that he was no longer bound to the table, he rose and approached the girl. 'What did you do? Why are they hunting you? “
'I tried to live my life,' she said. 'Certain people felt I shouldn't be allowed to live my life in freedom, so they began hunting me and my friends. “
'But you had to have done something' he said, though he wasn't at all sure that she had.
'We didn't do anything until they attacked us. And then, we only defended ourselves from harm.' Her eyes narrowed. 'You tried to harm us today. We defended ourselves. Wouldn't you have done the same for your family? Or would you have let them take you here… or someplace worse?' The walls of the camp barracks all turned white, and the sun grew brighter in the sky.
Something about the girl's statements made sense, and yet, it all seemed vague. 'The report we got about you came in from a special branch of intelligence,' Kaneko said. 'I don't know what section it came from, just that they had high-level clearance. It wasn't very specific about who you were or why you were wanted, but it did tell us not to shoot you. “
She laughed. 'Well, I guess there's something positive. So what happened afterward? “
'Some men came and debriefed us. They were with that high-level intelligence group. No one I recognized. No one I really wanted to see again. “
They were in a canyon then, in the desert. Someplace he had seen before in the Southwest, though he couldn't quite place it. A large spire of rock jutted off at an angle up the hill on a cliff. The girl stood on a nearby rock, her head framed by the night sky, a constellation of five stars serving as a crown. 'Show me those men,' she said.
He wasn't sure what she meant, but then the men appeared against the rock spire, their images projected a hundred feet tall, as if from some colossal movie projector. Though their lips moved, they were silent.
The girl studied each of them, as if memorizing their faces. When the images faded, she turned back toward Frank. 'Was that all of them?' she asked.
'Yes. How did you… “
'Did they say anything about anyone else other than the six of us?' She stared at him again, her cool brown eyes now darkened almost to black.
'Not that I can remember. “
'Did they mention anything about Boston, or Roswell? “
At the last word, Frank remembered where he had seen the desert before. His family had driven through New Mexico when he was ten. Although they hadn't taken any photos, the inspiring terrain had stuck in his mind.
'No, they didn't mention either one of those places,' he said. 'But I've been to Roswell before. “
Her eyes flashed. 'When? “
'When I was ten. We were going to California. Daddy got a flat tire in Roswell. We got to get ice cream while it was getting fixed.' He smiled at the memory.
The girl nodded. 'Okay. Let's get back to today. You're a federal agent. You're trained to notice unusual things. Was there anything else these men said to you that made you suspicious? “
He thought for a moment, and then another memory flashed. 'They were very clear that they wanted all the surveillance tapes of what happened from the mall. I don't expect they were happy that some of them got leaked out to the news. But I don't know why. If you're so dangerous, shouldn't they be alerting everyone? “
'That's a good question, Agent Kaneko. Maybe we're not the ones who are dangerous. Maybe it's the men who are hunting us.' She leaned in closer to him, and her eyes were fully black now, and wider. He could see an infinitude of tiny stars reflected on them… no, seemingly existing in them… with five stars shining infinitely brighter than all the others.
He blinked slowly, and, as he opened his eyes, he saw that the woman was gone. He was looking up at the ceiling, lying in his bed at home, the comforter thrown onto the floor. He could hear his wife breathing softly beside him as she slept.
The words of the dream girl came back to him. You tried to harm us today. We defended ourselves. Wouldn't you have done the same for your family? Something else gnawed at him. There was
