Chapter One—Part Four: The Nightmare

It was that dream again, the same dream, on repeat in the cutting room of my memory. It was the dream where I crept into his room, Kaz’s room. I climbed onto his bed. I laid my head down on a pillow that smelled like him. He rolled toward me and slung an arm over me in slumber. And then: fire. The dream was different this time because now I knew what burning flesh really smelled like, and the acrid stench of it filled the air and I choked on it. The fire grew, and I shouted, shouted and shook Kaz to make him wake. And when he didn’t wake, when I could see no clear exit through the flames, I laid myself down with my head on his chest and let the fire engulf us.

But when I woke up the next morning, I felt a sickening calm. The room smelled like an old space heater, and I wished that the old wives’ tale about dying in your dreams was true: I wish the fire had just eaten me up.

I blinked myself awake and sat up, quietly admonishing myself for my bleakness. And over a man, of all things. But what a man.

I shook my head and turned to scoot out from under the blankets and rise to my feet. I padded in bare feet across the cold cement floor and turned my twisted night shirt so that it lay the way it was supposed to, instead of bunching up on one side. But in an instant, I was overcome with sickness, and I threw myself down in front of the toilet and vomited up the bile in my belly, in wracking, heaving bursts.

I emptied myself utterly, panting between gusts of sick. It burned the sensitive tissue of my throat and tasted bitter on my tongue. And when it was over, I felt fine again. Stress did strange things to the body, I thought, and I rose and washed my mouth out with cool water.

I went about some semblance of my morning routine: peeing, brushing my teeth, splashing water on my face. But before I had the opportunity to dress myself, there came a knock on the door. And because I was completely out of any fucks to give about my present situation, I headed straight for the door and threw it open, clad as I was in a tee shirt and underwear.

The blushing visage of Riley Sinjin greeted me. He averted his emerald gaze. “Ah, sorry,” he said, even as I turned on my heel to go back to the bathroom, where I’d abandoned a hair tie on the sink’s porcelain edge.

“Don’t be,” I called back, gathering my curls into a knot at the nape of my neck, “come on in.”

“Did I wake you?” He asked, closing the door behind him. He was wearing jeans and workman’s boots, and that leather jacket that I so liked the smell of.

“Not at all,” I said, absently fingering my nanite necklace. I leaned against the doorway to the bathroom and peered at him. “What can I do for you”

“Uh,” he ventured a glance up, making eye contact with me before averting his eyes again. To think, this big, tough guy was bashful. “I thought you might be wanting breakfast.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying on half a smile, “I am a little hungry.” In truth: I was utterly ravenous.

“And, then after…” He let his sentence trail off, and my mood immediately soured. He and the rest of his resistance wanted to start pumping me for information. I stared him down for a moment before I disappeared into the bathroom. I decided to use my nanite necklace to make clothes for myself, but I didn’t want the resistance to know that I still had it. Who knows what kind of information they could have mined from it.

Which wasn't to say that I didn’t want to help the resistance. Truth be told, I had no idea what I wanted. But I thought it best to play my hand close to my chest.

“And then after,” I called out to him, pretending to dress while the nanite worked in a flurry across my bare flesh, “you want to probe me, is that it?”

I heard him chuckle, a warm, dry sort of laugh. “I wouldn't have phrased it that way, under the circumstances.”

I rolled my eyes, and I might have muttered “perv” under my breath. When the nanites had finished with me, they’d left me clad in a grey V-neck tee shirt and dark jeans, with a pair of boots that vaguely resembled the ones Riley was wearing. I added an industrial looking watch and stud earrings for good measure. I would have even added a jacket, except that the boys had never designed one for me, and I didn’t trust myself to make something that didn’t look like it was sketched by a middle schooler on Adderall.

Riley relaxed a little when I emerged from the bathroom, fully clothed. “You look nice,” he remarked, and I quirked a brow at him. Like I didn’t look nice without my clothes on? He went beet red and shook his head. “I didn't mean—I only…See, ok. Can we agree that I should never speak unless spoken to?”

I smiled, moving toward him and giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “You’re doing fine. You, sir, are the least of my problems.”

He led me out into the hallway, and I pulled the door to my room closed behind me. I hesitated strangely—I had no key—and he sensed my concern. “We have a sort of co-op mentality,” he explained as he led me toward the lift. “What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours you should really get into the habit of keeping on your person at all times.” He smiled, shaking his head as he opened the metal grating that would admit us onto the platform of the rusted metal lift. “I’m only kidding,” he said. “Thieves are shot on sight.” He closed the metal doors behind us and down we went. “Again,” he said, turning to face front, “only kidding.”

The stronghold was a flurry of activity, like a busy little beehive full of busy little resistance bees. And Blanche Ingram was, it seemed, their queen. After we’d disembarked from the lift, we made our way through the open-air hangar carved into the belly of a mountain, we headed into a cafeteria that was a hum of voices. Blanche was seated at an elevated table, a pair of human women flanking her. Everyone was eating and chatting, chatting and eating, except Blanche, who simply surveyed her kingdom.

“Who are those girls with Blanche?” I asked, following Riley as he weaved between metal picnic tables to get to the lunch line on the far wall.

“Mary and Diana,” he said by way of explanation. “My sisters.” As soon as he said it, I could see it immediately. They both had dark hair, and I would wager that they both had green eyes as well. But Mary looked a lot more like Riley than Diana did—which is to say that she was distinctly masculine in presentation. She had a strange beauty to her finely muscled form, and she kept her hair short and shaved on the sides and brushed forward so that the mop from on top fell into her eyes. She was eating an apple with a knife, the way a movie villain might, peeling it in one twisting rind and slicing off chunks that she bit straight off the tip of the knife. She wore a wife-beater that showed off the sleeves of tattoos up and down both arms, and even I could admit that she was striking, with a certain magnetism about her.

Diana was softer, but plainly her sister. She wore her brown hair long, in a high ponytail that still hit her waist, even drawn up as it was. And where Mary was angular, Diana was soft and round, pleasantly plump and boasting fine assets all over, really. She wore a red sweater than hung off one shoulder and took tiny nibbles of the scrambled eggs on her plate. She seemed utterly disinterested in the goings on around her, and she struck me as the type of girl who would have hated me in high school. But that was just a snap judgement.

At any rate, she stood out in stark contrast against the harshness of the surroundings: fluorescent tubes made the room glow in harsh white light, glinting against the metal tables. All of the utensils were plastic, even the knives which I thought was kind of odd. But Riley gave me a gentle tug at my elbow, and we got in the cafeteria line.

They had what you might imagine a cafeteria would have at breakfast: eggs and bacon and toast and coffee, all of it hot, and none of it good. But it was sustenance, and all I required it to do was keep me alive and still the rumble in the pit of my stomach, so to that end, it fulfilled its destiny. Plus, I ate it like it was the last meal I’d ever have, and even though it tasted bland, I couldn’t seem to get my fill.

We didn’t go sit with Blanche and his sisters; instead, he took me to the end of a half-empty table as far away from them as he could get while still staying in the same room. “What, too soon to meet your family?” I quipped, and immediately regretted it. I didn’t know this man, and already I’d flashed him my panties and made jokes at his expense. It wasn't his fault that my husband was a liar.

No, not my husband. I absently touched the place where my engagement used to be, absently touched the bandage and the pulsing skin of the wound beneath. “We should go to the med bay after this,” he said, “and get that looked at.”

“It’s fine,” I insisted.

“Probably,” he agreed, scooping eggs into his mouth, “but I want to be sure.” I watched him for a quiet moment, and I must have been staring pretty intently because after a beat he quirked a brow and asked, “do I have something on my face?”

I smiled a little and shook my head. “No,” I assured him. “I was just wondering why we weren’t sitting at the table of honor with your sisters and Ms. Ingram.”

Riley cast a furtive glance at his coterie and tossed his fork down onto his plate. He leaned back, lacing his fingers and lifting his hands so that they cradled his head, his elbows winging out to the sides. He regarded me for a moment, his expression unreadable, before I could detect the hint of a smile from beneath his prominent facial hair. “Why do you suspect that we’re not sitting with them?”

“Probably so that I don’t feel overwhelmed, interrogated all at once. Or maybe it’s that you are trying to get me to warm up to you so that I’ll open up to you about everything you think I know.” I inclined my head somewhat, brows arched. “Am I close?”

Riley Sinjin sniffed, hooked one corner of his mouth up in a grin, and leaned forward to dig once more into his eggs. “There aren’t any open seats at their table.”

I turned with a start to give the table a closer look, and he was right: it wasn’t a picnic table like this one, and there are no vacant chairs at it. I felt myself blush a little before I turned my attention to a dry piece of toast; I nibbled at it, feeling chagrined.

“It’s ok,” Riley said at last, fishing a small tub of restaurant jelly from the pocket of his jacket and putting it on my tray. “I wouldn’t trust anything going on here either, if I were in your shoes.” I hesitated, but ultimately scooped up the jelly and deposited it in one sizable dollop onto what remained of my toast. I spread it with the back of my fork and ate; it was much improved by the ersatz strawberry preserve.

“Thanks,” I muttered around bites, and he proffered an elegiac smile. Why, I wondered, did he make that smile look so full of melancholy?

“It’s gotta be difficult for you,” he said. “After, you know…everything.”

“What, is this pity jelly, then?” I asked, and he chuckled a little.

“No, Ma’am. I just snagged some from a diner that we hit on our way to get you, because I knew how severely lacking in flavor the food around here can be.”

“You stopped to eat on your way to ruin my life?”

“Uh, liberate you,” he said teasingly, “and, yes. A growing boy’s gotta eat.” But all the mirth went out of him again in an instant, and his eyes got all wide, like he felt bad for me.

“Quit it,” I insisted, and ate some eggs: they tasted like they were made of powder that hadn’t been completely mixed up.

“What?”

“Quit looking at me with those sad eyes of yours.”

“My eyes aren’t sad,” he said, and tried to grin big and wide, but it just looked plastic, forced. “That’s just my face. That’s just how my face looks.” He relaxed, and his expression softened, and he leaned forward so that his elbows were on either side of his tray. “But I do feel bad,” he said. “A little.”

The room hummed with a series of conversations, but I felt like he and I were in our own little bubble. Maybe this was some trick, but I trusted his sincerity. “It isn’t your fault,” I said. “You just shined a light on something I’d been too blind to see. Though if I’d been paying better attention, I could have put the pieces together.” I sighed, and squeezed my eyes shut, rubbing at the bridge of my nose with my thumb and index finger to keep the throb of a headache at bay. “I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to believe his lies—maybe I just wanted the life he was promising, and I was just being…naive and stupid not to ask more questions. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Still,” he said, nudging my tray forward with his index finger, the international symbol for eat more of the junk on this plate. I obliged. “I feel responsible. Me and Blanche, we both do.”

“Yeah, well,” I said between unsatisfying bites of powder-egg, “Blanche tried to warn me. But I didn’t listen to her.”

“But I hope you’re not beating yourself up,” Riley said, and I thought for a moment he might reach out take my hand; he didn’t.

“Don’t you think I should?” I laughed, a dry, acid sort of laugh. “God. I was never one of those girls, you know? The kind who cared about men or getting married, but I was just so eager to throw everything to the side for the promise of a life with him. A life and a family and a permanent place at someone’s table.”

“Well that makes a certain amount of sense,” he observed, and I blinked, owlish, wondering what he meant. “I read your file,” he explained. I had a file? My expression must have belied my confusion. He seemed almost bashful as he proceeded. “You were…an orphan.”

“Does anyone ever really stop being an orphan?” I remarked under my breath.

“Spent some time in foster care until you were adopted, but then your adoptive caregivers died in a car accident.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said rather too sharply.

“Sorry,” Riley said, shaking his head. “I only meant to draw the logical conclusion: of course you wanted a home.” And then he did reach across the table and take my hand, squeezing it briefly before letting it go. “All I’m saying is give yourself a break.”

I dropped my hand into my lap and leaned back, having lost my appetite. And I didn’t say anything, stooge that I was. Had Kaz known all of this, somehow? Had I been a target? But no, I shook my head. I wasn’t going to let the entire experience become a lie. Surely I could hold some part of it in my heart, couldn’t I?

“Come on,” Riley said at length, sensing that I wasn’t going to eat any more of what they had the nerve to call “food”. He rose to his feet and grabbed both our trays. “Let’s have the doc take a look at that arm.”

I followed close at Riley’s heels as he led me through the bustling stronghold. Even in my dejected state, I couldn’t help but marvel at its grandeur. They’d certainly chosen the perfect place to hole up, there in the stone bowels of a mountain. The center of it was wide open, and we were walking across a great stone floor so that when I looked up, I could see the rings of the various levels above us. There was Riley’s door, and there was mine, right next to it. “This way,” Riley said, urging me gently by the elbow.

We veered off to the right, pushing through a pair of swinging double doors that gave way into a bright lit corridor. Gurneys and trays of medical instruments gave it away for what it was: a makeshift hospital that was, blessedly, underused. “We’re set up for any eventuality,” Riley explained as we brushed past a few medical personnel who looked like they were doing inventory. Ever ready, but not yet needed in any grand capacity. We rounded a corner and came to a closed door with the name Dr. Earnshaw scrawled across it in black marker.

“Come in,” a female voice said from inside, and Riley opened the door and ushered me through. It was an office space rendered comfortably cozy with old, plush and patched chairs, and shelves and shelves of books. The woman I assumed was Dr. Earnshaw sat behind the desk, looking through a stack of paperwork, and she smiled up at us as we entered. She was a staggering beauty, in her early forties, with auburn hair tied into a tight knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were a glittering blue; they reminded me of Kaz and the boys, actually. My heart did a little flip in my ribcage. She had a spray of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and when she smiled, her teeth were perfect pearls framed by the thick pout of her lips.

“I hope we’re not disturbing you, Doc,” Riley said, dropping unceremoniously down into one of the seats in front of the desk.

“Not at all,” Dr. Earnshaw said, rising and extending her hand to me. I took it, shook it, dropped it. “Hi, I’m Catherine Earnshaw. And you are?”

“Jane Lockewood,” I said, and took the seat next to Riley’s.

“You’re not busy, I hope,” Riley said, and I wondered why we were here at all if he so badly did not want to interrupt her.

“No—inventory. Please, let me deal with a human being and not check-lists of supplies.” She smiled and turned her attentive gaze back to me. “What can I do for you today?”

“See, she’s got this wound—” Riley began, but I cut him off.

“It’s nothing. I guess we just want to make sure it’s not infected.”

“Of course.” The doctor rose from her chair, donned her white coat with a bit of a flourish, and moved into the corner, whereupon she doused her hands with sanitizer before pulling on a fresh pair of latex gloves. Then she came around to sit in front of me on the edge of her desk. I raised my arm, and she set about gently removing the bandage thereon.

“What happened, Jane?” She asked as she worked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I got married. Well. Sort of.”

Doctor Earnshaw quirked a brow, but said nothing, finally removing the bandage completely. I peered curiously down at the wound and furrowed my brow to find it completely healed. “I don’t understand,” I said. “This just happened yesterday.” The octagon shapes looked almost like a honeycomb on my skin, and the scars shimmered silver, just as they did on Kazimir’s flesh. There was some blood smudged here and there, but that was left over from the bandage. The doctor peered curiously down at it and moved away from me to tuck the bloody bandage into a hazardous waste container. Then, she tore open an antiseptic wipe and returned. She ran the wipe carefully over my skin, and while my arm ached like it was still healing, it seemed totally fine. The pressure, even as delicate as it was, from her wiping my arm made me flinch, but once she was done, all of the excess blood had been removed, and my arm looked fine. You know, except for the silver scars that represented the house and people of the man to whom I used to be engaged.

“This is Ivaldan,” Doctor Earnshaw remarked.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“You married one?” She looked me in the eye then, and I felt myself blush, as though it were something of which I ought to be profoundly ashamed.

“Nearly,” I said. “It…it’s complicated.”

“It often is,” she muttered, rising and plucking the gloves from her hands. She hesitated, hovering near me, and fingering the aquamarine pendant of my necklace. “That’s Ivaldan, too, isn’t it?”

I didn’t have to look at Riley to feel him perk up next to me, to sense him lean forward to try to get a closer look. My cover officially blown, I just leaned back where I sat and sank into the well-worn embrace of the cushioned chair.

“In any event,” Dr. Earnshaw went on after she’d let me stay silent, “your arm seems as though it’s healed quite beautifully. Are you having any pain?”

“A little,” I confirmed.

“What is it, sharp? Dull?”

“A sort of dull ache, I think.”

The doctor nodded and threw out her gloves. “That should fade in a few days. But if it does not, come back and see me.”

“Thank you,” I said, rising to my feet.

“Yeah,” Riley said, also standing. “Very illuminating. Thanks, Doc.”

“My pleasure.”

I was impressed: Riley actually waited until we’d exited the medical wing entirely to confront me about the necklace. And he did so by curling his fingers around my bicep and tugging me into a dark corridor. “Were you ever going to tell me?” He demanded.

“I hadn’t decided,” I said, jerking free of his grip. “Forgive me if I’m being cautious.”

“What does it do?” He asked, crossing his arms in front of his chest as he glared down at me. “The necklace. What does it do?”

“It’s…I don’t really know what it does. I swear—”

“Show me what you know it can do.” What could it hurt? It was basically a closet that I wore around my neck.

“Fine, all right?” I said, lifting my hand to press my thumb against the back of the pendant. “But don’t be weird about it.”

The nanites set to work undressing me, my clothes siphoning down into their most basic atomic parts and leaving me in a plain white bra and underwear. The look of stunned amazement on Riley’s face must have been about the tech, and not me in my skivvies. The necklace itself reformed into a datapad, and I held it in front of me, opening the design element. He watched me work as I ran my fingers across the touch screen, using the camera on the back of the datapad to snap a shot of his clothes. I resized them, and rendered them, and the nanites went to work dressing me in a precise replica of the James-Dean Homage that Riley was wearing.

“Holy Christ,” Riley remarked. “That’s incredible.” He was reaching out, almost as though he didn’t realize he was doing it, like he wanted to take the datapad from me. So I pressed a button and the datapad dissolved into its component parts and the nanites crept in a little ant line up my arm, around my neck, and re-settled into the aquamarine pendant he’d seen me sporting before.

“It is incredible,” I agreed. “And I’m sure Blanche had one as well.”

“She did,” he said. “But she wasn’t allowed to bring it with her when she left the house. She told us about it, told us how it worked, but she didn’t say it was like magic.”

“It’s not magic,” I countered, “it’s science.”

But Riley just rolled his eyes. “Please. It’s alien tech—it might as well be fucking magic.”

I crossed my arms in front of me, on the defensive, wondering if he would take it from me. And he read my expression as easily as if it had been written across my forehead. “I’m not gonna confiscate it,” he assured me. “I won’t even tell the others what it is.”

I furrowed my brow. “Why would you do that?”

“Because,” he said. “I’d like for you to be able to trust me. Besides, I’m not a total asshole.” He grinned and turned on his heel and I followed him out of the dark corridor.