Ron and I are sitting on my bed. This is when I first told her about the camp.
Then, that image fades and now I’m in some sort of basement with unruly shelves lining the walls, an empty mattress on the floor and a laptop on a table next to it.
Carl is sitting at the table, looking at me.
“You stole something from me,” he says.
My heart pounding, I shake my head, backing away. I hit into a shelf.
“Where is my scanner?” he says.
“I didn’t take it,” I say, my voice small. “The police probably did.”
He narrows his eyes but then strokes his chin, as if he hadn’t considered that before.
I swallow hard. “H-how are you doing this? How are you in my dreams? Noah is dead.”
He frowns at me, his gaze hard. Then he gives the type of smile a know-it-all gives when someone asks a dumb question. He pats the laptop, which is closed. “Technology. You all think you’re so special with your dumb powers. Technology is the real gift. I can do things you can’t.”
Keep him talking. I just need to keep him talking. And maybe I can wake myself up before he tries to kill me.
“Like what?” I say.
Wake up. Wake up.
He smirks. “I can tell if you’re gifted or not.”
“We can all do that too. We can sense it.”
His smile falls. “Yeah, well, can you channel someone else’s gift?”
When I furrow my brows, he says, “Didn’t think so.” He snickers. “I can my brother’s powers with technology. That’s something you and your kind could never do.”
I shrug, trying to look nonchalant despite my heart pounding and my throat feeling more and more constricted. “Maybe someone somewhere has the ability to do that.”
Please, wake up.
“Yeah but you don’t,” he says.
“Okay, sure I don’t.”
“I saw you kill Iris. You just killed her with a touch. That’s your gift, isn’t it? I should upload yours too.”
I want to back away even more but I can’t, already pressed up against the shelf. “So what if I killed her? You killed your brother, didn’t you?”
He glares at me. “That was an accident! He wasn’t supposed to die.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t mean to kill Iris, so we’re equal.”
He scoffs. “Oh, please. I know you meant to kill her. I saw your dream last night. You love it.”
“That-that wasn’t me in the dream. That’s someone else. Besides you say you’re going to ‘upload’ my gift—whatever that means. And then what? Use it to kill people? How does that make you any different?”
“I’d only kill people who deserve it. Gifted scum like you!” He raises his arm, pointing at me. “Get over here!”
Against my will, my body flies towards him. He grabs me and then some sort of band materializes around my head. He sits down at the laptop and opens it.
I try to pry the band off of my head but I can feel something deep in my skull, tugging, attached to it.
Hunter, please wake me up. I’m panicking. Can’t you feel that?
“If I do this in the dream, it should come true right?” he mutters to himself as he taps away on the keyboard. “That’ll be the proof I need that it works.”
My head aches, like something is dancing around and stomping all over my brain.
I can reach him from here, and he’s wearing shorts too. I can just touch his leg and make this end.
I reach out, my finger just next to his leg. He’s so engrossed in the laptop that he doesn’t even notice. I just have to touch him.
Just touch him.
With a sigh, I drop my arm. No, I can’t. I just need to wake myself up.
My energy feels like it’s being sucked out of me rapidly. My vision starts to blur and double.
Carl claps, a huge smile on his face. “It’s working! Almost there…”
Ron said in her email that Noah’s life seemed to be connected to the laptop somehow. If I disconnect the cord, will I die in real life, or will I wake up?
My body is weak. I can barely lift my arm now.
I have to act now, while I still have the strength.
Whether I die or wake up, either is fine with me.
I yank out the cord.
Chapter 35
The next day, Ron sleeps in until noon and then goes to check on Giselle. She knocks on the door. No answer.
So, she opens it slowly.
Giselle is sitting up in bed looking at Remy’s letter. It looks like she had smoothed it out as much as she could, but it was still bending and curling with creases.
Without looking up, Giselle says, “When do you think he’ll come back?”
Ron enters the room fully, leaving the door open. She sits on the bed.
“I don’t know,” Ron says.
Giselle puts the letter on the end table. “I don’t want to be here when he comes back. I don’t want to be here a second longer, in fact.”
“What about the store and this house?
“That, and this—” she gestures to the room, “It’s all Iris’s.”
“Yeah but as her wife, it’s probably yours now, right?”
She buries her face in her hands. “It doesn’t feel right, Ron, to just… take all of her things. And how am I supposed to live here with her gone? The only reason I’ve been staying in this town is because of her.”
“I thought it’s because you were searching for the camp.”
She throws down her hands and slumps against the headboard with a sigh. “I was just keeping myself busy while Iris was minding the store. I mean, I do want to know where it is but I never honestly expected that I’d be the one to find it. And now that I know for sure my brother is there… I don’t know. I just don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore.”
“But you said you always suspected he was there.”
“It was a suspicion but I didn’t honestly believe that.” She waves a hand dismissively. “Anyway, I’m
