Sanya-ketsu was right at the edge of my range, but Mass Grave didn’t hurt her. I scoured her life point with Moldering Bones, but I couldn’t kill it. She was too powerful. I switched to a focused Dead Man’s Hand instead.
The second that fist of Miasma closed around her sparkling prismatic life point, Sanya’s defenses kicked in. And they didn’t just defend her, they attacked me back.
I gasped and sat up in class, wiping drool off the side of my mouth.
Mr. Meighan stood at the whiteboard, writing out dissection instructions. The rest of the class was taking notes.
Next to me, Blaise snorted. “Morning, Grody. Have a fun sleepy-sleepy?”
He slapped my notebook off the lab table, and one of his buddies leaned across the aisle to fist-bump him. Behind us, Hannah and Isobel giggled.
“Eat a dick, Blaise,” I growled.
“What’d you say, Grody? I can’t hear you over this stench. It smells like pitstain trailer trash in here.”
I shot to my feet, throwing an elbow that snapped Blaise’s head back. Blood gushed from his nose, and he tipped over backward on his stool. Then suddenly all the jerkwads who flocked around Blaise came at me like buzzards descending on a piece of roadkill.
They never had a chance. I intercepted them with bone-crushing kicks and skull-rattling elbows. Blaise jumped back into the fight, but even with his YMCA taekwondo, he couldn’t touch me. Real terror sank into their faces when they realized I wasn’t the skinny loser they used to push around anymore. I was stronger and faster and infinitely more vicious than their soft, cushy first world lives had prepared them to deal with. It was like a junkyard pit bull tearing a herd of dachshund puppies to shreds.
But there was something wrong with this picture. In spite of all the crashing and banging and yelps, Mr. Meighan never looked back from the whiteboard. Hannah and Isobel and all the other students kept taking notes.
It was all fake. Some long-lost bully revenge fantasy from when I was still on Earth.
This was Sanya’s defense, trapping her enemies in their own dreams. She wasn’t a fighter, she was a brain. All Dream Spirit, no physical strength.
Like when I had to get out of a Lost Mirror Dream from Sushi, I fought my way up through the layers of illusion.
I poured Miasma into Dead Man’s Hand, wringing Sanya’s multicolored, sparkling life point in my fist for all I was worth.
Suddenly I was in the back seat of my crappy Oldsmobile with Kest smiling up at me. Her huge eyes were almost completely black, with tiny pinpricks of opalescent white shining like stars in the glow from the radio clock. Black lace rolled across her bare skin in mesmerizing patterns I couldn’t look away from. She pushed sweaty hair off my face, her nails gently raking across my skin. I leaned into her hand. She was so beautiful, so perfect—
So perfect I wouldn’t be dumb enough to make our first time in the cramped, dirty backseat of this scrapheap like some kind of douchebag.
Sanya-ketsu wasn’t even paying attention to the details anymore, maybe because she thought I wouldn’t be that focused on the details right then, either. But these were some pretty big details to screw up. Kest’s wrong arm was metal, her teeth were too perfect, too straight and too white, and she didn’t smell like her usual mixture of welding and girl. She didn’t smell like anything.
I pulled myself out of that dream and sent a second Dead Man’s Hand to wrap around the first—something I didn’t even know I could do—adding another layer of pressure to the Sown Dream cultivator’s life point.
Sanya was right at the edge of my range, about to walk out of it. If I was going to kill her, it had to be now. I poured on the Miasma, emptying a whole spiral in a second.
But the last dream was her knockout punch.
Gramps, Mom, Dad, and I sat around a real table, not a drop leaf attached to the wall, eating a homecooked dinner with vegetables and meat instead of freezer burritos. The dining room was in a house, not a trailer. The floor was covered in tile instead of peeling linoleum, the whole place didn’t groan or shake whenever you took a step, and the front door was solid enough that a methhead couldn’t break in and kill anybody or steal anything. My dad had a real job, and his phone didn’t go off at all hours of the night, and he and Mom didn’t freak out every time a cop car rolled by. Gramps spent his time relaxing and being an old man, not worrying about how he was going to feed himself and a teenager on a fixed income or stewing over what would happen to me if he died and left me alone.
Dead Man’s Hand shattered like turquoise glass.
I woke up for real this time on the stone staircase, still half tangled with Valthorpe’s body. My cheek was bleeding from almost having bitten through it when the crossbow bolt fried me. The bullet tear in my ear and the graze across my forearm were still scarring over. The Dragon script tattoo burned as it fought to repair all the damage.
I shoved myself away from Valthorpe and got up, wincing a little at the flare-up of a thousand minor bruises and scratches too small to take note of individually.
Technol corpses littered the staircase and floor. Fresh Miasma rose from their bodies, mixing with the ancient Death Spirit that filled the temple. I started Swallowing the Universe and sent out a blast of Dead Reckoning as far as I could reach.
Nothing.
“How ’bout ya?” Warcry was at the bottom of the staircase, backed into a corner to avoid touching the bodies with his boots.
“Still alive,” I said. “You?”
“Right
