Night's Deep Hush: Reveler Series 4 (3 page)

Jordan fought the hold he had on her, wrenched out of his grasp, and pushed him away. “Don’t you touch me!”

He staggered back, held his arms in the air, then looking a little peaked, he bent over, hands to knees. “You weren’t watching where you were going.”

He probably had instructions to take her alive. Chimera and Lambert would want Maisie’s waking world location—she who could do things Darkside that none of them could even dream of. If Maze City was an outrageous show of talent already, what would Maisie be able to do in the years to come? There was no way Jordan would lead him to her sister. “Don’t do me any favors.”

Vince’s face screwed up as if she were crazy. He was going gray, wheezing. His lips were turning kinda blue. Maybe Chimera should’ve given him an extra day in the hospital before sending him after her. Served them right. Him, too.

“Jordan. God, I’m…not…” He was gasping now, going down on his knees.

Passersby slowed, but Jordan waved them on. “He just needs a little space to catch his breath.” They kept walking, and Jordan surveyed the street around her.

But there was no sign of Chimera.

Vince collapsed the rest of the way onto the pavement, his stubbly cheek connecting with a pink piece of petrified and well-stomped chewing gum. His eyelids were still partially open, the whites showing.

“I’ve already called an ambulance,” she said to another interested stranger. “He’s going to be okay.”

And he would be, eventually. This was simple reveler exhaustion. He’d been in the dreamwaters for at least five full days. The body doesn’t like it, weakens, as if it’d been weightless in space for too long.

’Night ’night.
And she hadn’t even needed to drown him. Took all of ten seconds.

When he was out cold, she left him. She checked for traffic at the curb—no deadly busses now—and crossed, leaving Vince behind her. She found a cloud of pedestrians a couple blocks over, moved with them, stayed in the middle of the sidewalk. She turned onto Forty-Ninth Street where the traffic moved in fits and starts, yellow cabs cutting each other off.

Keep moving. Don’t look back. Lose yourself. Run.

She had no money, knew no one, and had no place to go.

But someone had Malcolm, and she had to figure out a way to get him back.

CHAPTER TWO

A scream cut through the darkness like a ray of light.

Jordan!
Rook parted his eyelids and swung his gritty gaze in the direction of the sound. The mouth from which the scream came was visible—feminine lips curled back, teeth bared—the rest of the screamer slowly appearing around the sound. The woman was suspended midair and writhing in agony. Didn’t seem like Jordan. All around her, three-dimensional scenes of her life played out in a rush, but time seemed to be running backward. She was getting younger. The life didn’t match his idea of what Jordan’s had been like, the loss of her mom, no images of her sister, Maisie.

Not Jordan. Not her scream.
Where was she? Was she screaming, too?

He fought to move but was restrained.

“There,” Chuck said, though Rook couldn’t see him clearly in the sharp contrast between darkness and light. “Where it can’t be mistaken for a hallucination.”

Oh. It was a voluntary memory transfer—voluntary, though very painful. The lifescan had stopped on what seemed like an ordinary day in the woman’s life. Like all memories, the scene was first person, so he had no idea what the woman had looked like back then, but she had to have been a teenager at the time. She was running through a high school hallway—lockers lined the walls—toward a roar that came from what appeared to be the gym.

Rook tried to move again, but he was unable to stretch any limb.

“Load the memory,” Chuck said.

Rook looked over again. Black mist was rising to compromise and replace the memory of the high school event. The setting mottled as the memory loaded, not unlike flames bleeding through a photograph, then changed to a very different vantage point, connected only by a similar roar of a crowd. This roar had the higher pitch of excited young women, girls even, who were held back by security in bright-yellow T-shirts. The reveler in question was now being led backstage, cinderblock walls on either side. She passed a long table filled with food and booze off to the right and finally came to a door. Beyond it, a sweaty young guy stood, barely twenty if that, in a T-shirt and tight red jeans. And too much jewelry.

He looked the visitor up and down and said, “Hey, babe.”

Oh God. A celebrity sex memory.

The woman in agony was probably being paid big bucks to carry the memory into the Agora, where all the legal commercial dreams were located. There it would be taken up by someone else and then someone else until it got to its intended recipient, the trail obscured by secondary and tertiary memories like the high school scene. The money might finance her next five Rêve fixes, but there’d always be a fracture in her mind.

Rook was in the black market. Had to be.

The complex of illegal Rêves was
not
the bastion of light and security that the Agora was. There were no Chimera to police it, only the Darkside version of neighborhood thugs to bribe for a promise of safety.
Please will you get me out if I scream?
The Market was a collection of jacked systems banded together for frequency and coherence, a shantytown of cast-off dreams and experimental mindfucks geared to entertain even the most jaded. All the laws were broken here. Some systems were barely viable, leaving their revelers short a couple IQ points, while a few others had the slick trimmings of something the Agora might offer but still with the safeties off. What happened in an unregulated Rêve occurred at each reveler’s own risk.

Rook strained against his bonds again, but they wouldn’t budge. He tried to force himself to wake up—a mental lift—but all he accomplished was a severe case of vertigo.

Where was Jordan? Had they let her go?

Finally, he began to perceive the manner in which he was held captive. A shiny ribbon of gold wound around his arms, which were folded at his chest. The ribbon circled down his hips and constrained his bent legs. The sinuous stuff ultimately disappeared into the sand at his knees. Scrape sand. The thick ribbon had been spun from the stuff like melted and stretched sugar.

He’d never seen the sand like this before. Scrape sand originated from the vast, unending nothingness outside of dreamscapes where the great dust storm blew. That blond freak, the one with eyes like Coll’s, had to be responsible for manipulating the stuff. No one in the waking world even understood the sand’s properties, though there was plenty of theoretical mumbo jumbo: the sand was the windblown, leftover chaff of millennia’s worth of humanity’s dreams, or the sand was the discarded cells of the collective unconscious’s psyche.
Blah, blah, blah.
It was the kind of bullshit Didier Lambert published in long-ass, ponderous, paragraphs-for-sentences essays that didn’t translate well from his native French to English but were nevertheless quoted ad nauseam.

A shadow of a man approached, but Rook recognized his height and proportions—Chuck.

Rook inclined his head toward the memory transfer. “Please don’t make me have sex with that douchebag.” It was an attempt at a joke, but, seriously, having that first-person sex memory in his head would be the end of him.

Chuck laughed. “That’s ZANE, all caps, no last name. Up-and-coming pop royalty, or so says his publicity team. 50K for five minutes with his perky cock.”

“Just kill me now.”

“No, no.” Chuck grinned. “I need you for something else. But get this: his
manager
actually set this up. The pop star gets black market cred, some idiot women get their fantasies, and the money is crazy. And it’s all almost legit. Win-win, man.”

“You’ve got to get out of this business.”

“Nah. This is the good stuff, the easy stuff.”

Damaging that woman’s mind to carry
that
memory? No.

Rook shrugged as much as his bonds would allow. “Why am I here?” And restrained on his knees by a ribbon of Scrape sand? Where was the white-haired freak girl? Did Jordan get away?

“Wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Chuck said. “You were supposed to want work. I heard you were back and looking for a scam.”

“It’s no good, Chuck. I told you Chimera is after me.”

“There’s no one else to do what I need. Talent is dying out.”

“Then you’re screwed.”

“No, you are.”

“We both are,” Rook said. “You’ve got to get away from the nightmare chick. Pay her off with your pop-royalty money.”

“No amount of money will do her. Her kid is missing. Little boy.”

Rook quit straining against the sand ribbon. A missing kid? Darkside? Shit. “Your best bet is Chimera, even if it is corrupt as hell. Have them find the kid, then steal him away as fast as you can.”

Chuck reared back and raised his face to the nonexistent sky, palms open, to beseech some higher power. “Come on, man.” He looked down at Rook again. “We could’ve,
should’ve
grabbed your woman back in the waking world and done all sorts of fun things to her to make you cooperate. What were you doing with a nice girl anyway?”

Rook still didn’t believe they
hadn’t
grabbed her. If they had, she’d have fought them. If they hadn’t, she’d be plotting, in which case Chuck was going to find himself cast far out into the Scrape.

“Leave the girl alone. I only met her last week. And I’m not taking work.”

The idea of a missing little boy burned, though. He tried not to let it bother him.

“You know why we didn’t take your woman?”

Chuck hated mess?

“Because I know you have a soft spot for kids. In the old days you were always making sure that no one bothered with them or gave them bad dreams. It’s because you killed your little brother and can’t ever make it right. I told Mirren that there was no
need
to motivate you. That you were motivated already.”

The dreamwaters were bitter with Chuck’s lies. Funny thing was, Rook
knew
Chuck didn’t care if he believed him or not. He just liked to hear himself talk, mixing in truth so that nobody could tell what was a lie and what wasn’t. It was strategic, and it worked—a person had to decide what to believe on their own, just like in the waking world. But Rook had made his peace with Joshua’s death. Yes, it had been his fault, but it had also been a terrible accident. Joshua didn’t haunt him anymore.

Didn’t mean another little boy couldn’t. Being lost Darkside was bad. But Rook shook his head, again. “I have no idea how to go about finding the child of the nightmare chick in the first place.”

“I told Mirren you’re the best tracker there is.”

“You don’t get it, Chuck,” Rook said. “Their kind don’t have their own dreamscapes like normal people do.” Which was why Didier Lambert had wanted Maisie’s incredible Maze City for his own. Steve Coll didn’t have a dreamscape, either. He’d said that he’d spent the first part of his life wandering in and out of other people’s dreams, trying to find his own. “The good news is that the monsters out in the Scrape won’t harm him. Maybe.”

Coll had said they hadn’t harmed him.

The blond nightmare chick—Mirren, was it?—advanced out of the shadows. Rook had guessed she was probably close by. “How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been in the dreamwaters a long time.”

“You aren’t scared of me?”

“I don’t like you much.” For obvious reasons.

“I didn’t touch your woman.”

“And I didn’t touch your kid.”

“I need you to find him.”

Rook strained against the Scrape ribbon again, then smiled bitterly when he failed. “And I need to adjust my junk.” It was a metaphor. He had no idea what state he was in or where he was in the waking world. For all he knew, he could still be in that tiny apartment. Jordan could be bound and gagged at his side. She could even be dead, one of Chuck’s many messes.

“You used to have more heart, man,” Chuck said.

“My heart’s all tied up right now.”

Mirren took a step forward and touched the band of ribbon. The bonds fell from him in a rain of sand. He shook the excess off like glitter.

“We let the woman go,” she said again, and there, in the water, was something that felt clean.

Could nightmares disguise a lie?

Chuck heaved a groaning sigh. “I suppose I can go find her to prove it to you.”

“Just leave her alone.” Rook didn’t want Chuck anywhere near Jordan. “Which one of you am I doing business with?”

Mirren waved a hand in Chuck’s direction, and he disappeared into a vortex of darkness, taking the suspended woman and the rock-star memory with him. “Find my boy.”

“I have no idea how.” Plus, the kid might try to eat him. That’s what the inhuman creatures in the Scrape did—ate revelers. “I’m being honest with you. Can you tell I’m being honest?”

“I can tell you won’t even try.”

Rook bowed his head and looked at the sand. Kid missing. The mom would grow more ruthless with her desperation, not less. “Do you at least know who took him?”