“Sushi,” Kest said, her voice going deadly calm, “I need you to focus. Can you take us to my twin?”
Another wild nod.
“Follow Sushi!” the fish girl said, yanking the door open.
In one of those insane dream logic situations, instead of the carport and lawn, the door opened into the main hall of my high school. Lockers lined the walls, sneakers squeaked on red-brown terrazzo floors, time-dulled skylights let in grayish squares of sun, and people hung out talking and laughing or frantically doing their homework before class.
The scene change didn’t bother Sushi. She ran out of the trailer and into the hall. Nobody freaked out that a fish-girl had just stepped into the middle of a rural Missouri high school before the first bell.
Kest only hesitated a second before tearing off after Sushi.
Warcry glared at the mix of farm kids and town kids and jocks and artists. “What’s this, then, one of the meat roach internment camps? Where’s the Ylef trash guarding the place?”
I shook my head. “This is Earth. Where I used to live. We only had the one race.”
“Grady comes this way!” Sushi yelled, her voice echoing in the school hallway. She wheeled her arm at me. “Save Rali!”
Warcry gave the school and students the hairy eyeball, then let out a disgusted grunt.
“You heard her, grav. Let’s go get the big man.” He jogged out into the hallway after Kest and Sushi, his boots thumping on the tile floor.
“But...” I looked at Gramps.
Out in the hallway, black-clad ninjas rounded the bank of lockers, sprinting through the crowd toward my friends.
“Incoming!” Warcry warned, getting into a fighting stance. Red Burning Hatred Spirit flamed down his head and shoulders, covering his fists in fire.
“Machete,” Kest said. Her homemade blade appeared in her hand from the storage ring.
I knew they needed me, that somewhere Rali needed me. Whatever was going on, Sushi was really worried about him.
But Gramps was right there. If I left him now, I might never get to talk to him again.
“Balls,” I whispered under my breath.
“What kind of talk is that?” Gramps snapped at me. Apparently, his hearing was a lot better in dreams than it’d been in real life. “You best straighten up and knock that off right now. I didn’t raise no damn heathen.”
“Sorry. I just...” I looked from my friends to my grandpa. It felt like someone was ripping me in half. “I don’t want to go.”
Gramps’s disapproving frown faded into something tired and sad.
“That ain’t how dreams work, Grady,” he said. “I’ve had enough of ’em to know.”
I edged toward the door as I stared out at Kest and Warcry trying to fight off the ninjas. There were way too many for them to take alone. My friends were going to get overrun without my help.
But I could feel that this was my only chance to come clean.
“Gramps, I need to tell you some stuff,” I blurted out in a rush. “The last couple months, I—I’ve been doing a worse job than Dad. I screwed up. I—”
“It’s okay, buddy boy,” Gramps said in an understanding tone that just about killed me. “We’ll catch up later.”
I swallowed hard.
Gramps reached up and gave me a weak noogie. I knocked his gnarled hand off because that was how the business went, not because I actually wanted him to stop. He grinned his toothless old man grin.
“Be good,” he said.
I couldn’t answer him, so I just nodded.
Then I left him behind and ran out the door to help my friends.
Nightmares & Wake-Up Calls
AS SOON AS SUSHI SAW me step onto hallway tile, she nodded, then bolted straight at the ninjas. They took swings at her, but their nunchucks and bo staffs sliced through her like a ghost.
Warcry and Kest weren’t having the same luck. The black-clad attackers came at them from all sides. Kest shot out her chain weight and swung her machete and Warcry’s prosthetic pinged over and over again like a metal baseball bat, but there were too many ninjas. They were getting overrun.
A tall douchebag stepped into my path. “Hey, Grody—”
“I don’t have time for your crap today, Blaise.” I side kicked him into the lockers and kept going.
A trio of ninjas met me with nunchucks whirling. I summoned Death Metal instinctively and threw my arm up just before the wood cracked my skull. The first guy’s nunchucks thunked off my shield, but another one kneecapped me.
My leg folded, and I went down awkwardly, protecting my head with my shields and trying not to land on what I was pretty sure was a crushed patella.
Before the ninjas could get in another shot, I sent Three Corpse Sickness exploding off me.
Usually, my Corpses looked like humanoid blobs of Miasma with no clear features, but in the dream, they were exact copies of me, just blue-green and translucent, as if I’d had forever to perfect them and they were finally operating at top-level power.
The ninjas backpedaled, dropping into defensive stances. Each of my Corpses readied a different Spirit attack, and I felt the Miasma being drawn from my Spirit sea. The first Corpse wielded my dual shields and ran at the ninja in the center. The second hit the guy on my right with Rigor Mortis, freezing him in place. My third Corpse ripped the last ninja’s life point out with Dead Man’s Hand.
Blue-white Spirit flashed and metal screamed. Just ahead of me, a whole bank of lockers ripped off the wall, tumbled across the tile, and crushed the remaining ninjas into a ball of metal-and-meat paste.
Kest lowered her real and cinnabar arms, letting the Metal Spirit she’d just used drop with them.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Kest shrugged. “It’s just a dream. Watch.”
She raised her hand again and balled her fingers into a fist. Suddenly all the metal benches and pipes in the walls were ripped out. With an ear-piercing scream like a mechanical T. rex being chewed up in the universe’s biggest blender, the scrap slammed into the ball of lockers
