“Great. Thanks for the check-in. Anything else I should know?”
Myrddin and Roy exchanged glances. “Guess I’ll tell her,” Roy said, sighing. “You’re going to have to spend the night here. And most of tomorrow. Just to be safe.”
Alex groaned and sat back down on the bench. “Are you kidding me? All night?”
Myrddin and Roy were heading to the door. The old man looked over his shoulder. “If you need anything, the wall will help. But be very specific. I’m still working the kinks out. Thank you again, Alex.”
They left Alex alone with her thoughts. Even though she tried to fight it, her mind inevitably turned to the meteor and what she had seen within it. Nope, Alex thought. No nightmares tonight.
Alex focused on what she wanted: company. She closed her eyes and imagined Jollies’ smiling face. When she opened them, the wall next to her had built a holoprojector and Jollies’ comm frequency was ready to be dialed. After a quick ring, Jollies picked up. “Hello?”
Alex sighed in relief. “Thank God. It’s me, Alex.”
“What are you calling me from? What happened to your comm?”
“It’s a long story, but I’m in quarantine.”
Jollies popped up on the holoscreen. She was brushing her teeth. “Long story? Good. I’m all ears,” she giggled.
They talked for a long time, then Alex went to sleep.
Chapter Two
Alex awoke in the middle of the night. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, and her heart was pounding fast enough to crack her rib cage. Sweat poured from her brow. Worst of all, she wasn’t sure if she was herself.
Her fear had been growing since the night after she destroyed the meteor that had come rocketing through the sky a few weeks ago. The first night after the mission, Alex’d had a nightmare, a rarity for her. Even as a child, she’d rarely had nightmares. That had changed recently.
The nightmares were never understandable. They were not like dreams. She didn’t find herself repeating her experience of the meteor, nor did her mind take past experiences and layer them on top of that one horrifying episode.
Instead, Alex dreamed of a color that permeated her mind like some kind of gas, staining the inside of her skull, leaking out of her skin, and submerging her eyes until they were a deep, awful green. Alex felt the color crawling up her body like living slime, covering her from head to toe, and then stretching out toward her friends, toward the end of the universe.
It was this dream, recurring nearly every night, that Alex awoke from. She rubbed her eyes, trying to remind herself that she had a body. That she was not some abstract interplay of light and darkness. That she had weight to her. By the time she was comfortable again, she felt stupid. It was obvious she wasn’t a color.
As she pulled back the blankets supplied by the magical hole in the wall, she wondered why she had started having these dreams. Obviously, she’d been shaken up by what had happened on the meteor. Anyone would have been. The whole thing had seemed like a bad acid trip, or at least what she’d heard that was like.
Yet Alex felt it was something more than the disturbing nature of her experience. She felt that if she were just dreaming about that, then it would have been more focused, not this vague feeling of dread about becoming green.
The Nest needs to hire a therapist. You rarely heard about that or saw it in war or science fiction movies, except for Troi on the Enterprise, Alex mused as she leaned back on the pillow mattress she’d built atop the glass bench.
As she tried to shake the last bit of sleep from her head, she imagined herself in a coffee shop, reading a book that would take some of the edge off her nightmare. She turned to the magical hole in the wall and took the steaming coffee that appeared alongside a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams by Carl Jung.
Alex had heard the name before, although psychology had never been an interest of hers. But if it was going to help her better understand her dreams, it was worth a try.
The next few hours dragged by as Alex powered through the first chapters of the book, sipping coffee. She had no idea what time it was but also didn’t want to check. Obsessing about how much longer quarantine was going to last sounded like about as fun as finishing Jung’s book.
She could see why she didn’t like to read psychology. It was filled with terms and concepts she’d never encountered. The book read like a foreign language. Further, it made her tired, and sleeping was the last thing Alex wanted to do.
That didn’t matter, though, because she drifted off to sleep in her third hour of reading. She woke up screaming from the same recurring dream. Waking up this time was much more violent since Alex had thrown herself off the bench and was tangled up in her blankets.
By the time she got untangled, she was panting and trying to catch her breath. She tossed the blankets back onto the bench and turned to find Jim staring at her through the glass. She smiled sheepishly, attempting to play it off as if she were doing something perfectly normal.
Jim had a picnic basket, a bottle of pop, and his adorable smile. He was also dressed very nicely in a collared shirt and paisley tie with tan chinos. He knocked politely. “Mind if I come in? We still have a date to finish.”
Alex walked up to the glass and tapped on it. “I’m quarantined if you hadn’t noticed. I don’t think you’re even allowed to be in the same building as me.”
Jim held a piece of paper up to the glass that read Free
