The noise was coming from me; with a sudden, dreamlike certainty, I understood that it was an expression of my own thoughts—my confusion, analysis, and emotional responses. I was broadcasting like a radio tower.
I forced myself to be silent, which wasn’t easy. My “arms” wavered in front of me like the tails of kites, if kite tails had large hooks on their ends. The other shapes had long arms with hooks for hands, but they kept them around their middles.
The shapes were round and soft, and they floated by without paying me much notice. Only one, darker and more dense than the others, approached me. It trilled a greeting, and hearing its voice was like thinking its thoughts. I knew my vision had changed, but obviously my hearing had as well.
It was surprisingly easy to send a greeting in return; I only had to think it without trying to hold it back. The sound left me and became a thought in the other creature’s head.
I was dreaming, obviously. Only a dream—and a fucked-up one at that—would have this kind of absurd certainty.
The dark, dense creature opposite me thought a warning into me, letting me know that calling someone unreal or absurd was a serious insult. I sent back an apology.
It moved away from me, trilling a burst of notes that told me it was my host and I should stay close. I complied without hesitation. Having someone else’s words appear in my mind as though they were my own thoughts made for a damn compelling request. After a moment of trying out my new body, I floated in its trail.
I was getting used to my new perceptions. I sensed that my host was dark and dense because he was scarred. I realized, with the sudden certainty that you get in a dream, that he’d fought in a war. My host had hooked arms, too, but only six of them. I had nine. I felt a twinge of envy at that, but it felt like someone else’s emotion and I held it in.
I willed my arms to wrap around my midsection the way my host wrapped his, tucking them in place. It was probably bad manners to walk around with sharp blades at the ready, like walking through a shopping mall with a bowie knife in your hand. Other creatures like us floated by, trilling conversations about math that I couldn’t understand.
A sudden stabbing pain in my guts startled me. Was I sick? I slowed down. My host matched my new pace and played a short melody of sympathy. I knew immediately that this body was dying, and it was impossible to tell the difference between my host’s pity and self-pity.
What kind of screwed-up dream turned other people’s opinion of you into your own thoughts? I didn’t want to be here anymore. Maybe it would be better to wake up in the Hummer now.
We quickly reached a narrow opening in the ground. To my dream senses it was as impenetrable as any well or cave. My host told me to enter. Before I realized that it had been his thought, not mine, I was too close. Suction caught hold of me and dragged me inside, into the darkness.
Then I popped out like a kid at the bottom of a slide. I scuffed along the gritty stone floor and painfully managed to rise into the air again. My host popped out of the tube behind me with more grace. I felt clumsy and vulnerable, and that made me angry.
My host asked if I was well, and I snapped back that I was fine. It wasn’t offended. Maybe that’s what it meant for one of these creatures to go to war; it’d had other people’s dying thoughts in its head without dying itself.
It led me down a tunnel into a room as large as a tennis court. I stopped just inside the entrance at the top of a long slope. Indirect “light” shone through gaps in the wall, but the room was dim to my dream senses.
Then other creatures like me entered the room, although the dim light made them little more than silhouettes. They filed in from somewhere, casually falling into ranks like soldiers.
God, it was so much like the food bank in Washaway that I couldn’t breathe. My dream body wanted to broadcast my panic but held it in. I’d had dozens of nightmares about the pets—no,
One of the creatures moved toward me just the way the pets had, and I lost control.
The hooks around my torso untwined, and a loud trill whistled out of me. I knew I was beaming fear, fury, and the memory of what I’d done in Washaway directly into the minds of the creatures below me. I backed away from them, holding my “arms” out like a cobra’s hood to warn them away.
They fell into a panic, crowding toward the exits and trilling in fear.
My host came toward me and, over the blare of panic and confusion, unleashed a single blast of noise. It was almost above my range of hearing, and it turned my mind into a still, dark nothingness.
I awoke in the same alien body, feeling myself being pulled down the hall. I felt the gritty stone floor and suddenly knew that this wasn’t a dream—it wasn’t a vision. I was here, somehow, in this body and in this place. The liquid I’d found in that statue had transported me here, and …
My host loomed above me. It placed a single barb on the center of my body and at the same moment made a sound like a soothing, sustained note. It was telling me I had nothing to fear, unless I lashed out. I understood and was still.
Then it asked for the story at the source of my fear, and the tones it used were impossible to resist. I answered, and the sounds that came out of me told everything—every nuance—in a startlingly short time. It felt like opening up my mind.
My host kept putting questions into me, and I kept responding. I couldn’t hold back. These creatures didn’t seem to understand secrets, and they certainly didn’t understand shame.
It stole my entire life story within ten minutes, maybe less. I tried to make it stop, but it pressed its long spike a little harder against my flesh and urged me on. It couldn’t understand that it was
Then it promised to “fix” me.
It told me that I could keep my memory of the pets—of the
