eace.
Peace and quiet.
In my experience there was nothing comparable to the calmness of a crisp ocean breeze paired with the smell of saltwater. I smiled contentedly with my eyes closed—basking in the pleasant atmosphere. Everything was perfect. Then I opened my eyes and saw myself standing about five feet in front of me.
And I wasn’t talking about a reflection. There was quite literally another Crisanta Knight standing before my eyes.
Other me was at the edge of a dock. She was wrapped in a blue blanket and clenching her fists nervously, a slender, gray boat with a scarlet sail passing across the water in front of her.
In a trance, I walked over to her and reached out. My hand went straight through her like she was a ghost. Or rather, since it was my hand that seemed to dematerialize as it passed through her, I was the ghost.
I figured I had to be dreaming. But no matter how realistic my dreams were, I always knew they were just that—dreams. For one, they were usually fairly blurry. Two, I’d never been a character in them; I was just an observer.
Yet there I was, standing right in front of me. So what other explanation could there be other than insanity?
“Hey, you sleepwalking or just taking in the sights?”
Me and other me spun around to find Blue trotting toward us. She approached the other me though, not me, me. And her not being able to see me, me reaffirmed that I was actually dreaming.
“Just getting an early start to the day,” dream me told her.
“You sure you’re okay?” Blue asked. “You look pretty beat. And SJ’s been looking out the kitchen window to check on you all morning with this worried expression on her face. But when I asked her what was up, she wouldn’t tell me.”
Dream me nodded absentmindedly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Then she raised her eyebrows—seeming confused by whatever realization had just occurred to her.
“I’m surprised though,” she said. “Between your Bruce obsession and what happened back in Book, I wouldn’t have expected you to notice . . . or even care for that matter.”
“Well, I’m not over either,” Blue said slowly, “but I think Bruce would want us to move forward. Don’t you?”
“I do,” dream me agreed.
A beat passed and she bit her lip—processing some unknown thought. Then she glanced in my direction.
I could’ve sworn she was looking at me. But she couldn’t have seen me because I wasn’t really there. This was but a dream. A vivid one, mind you, but a dream nonetheless.
Turning her attention back to Blue, dream me exhaled and continued her conversation. “Which is why . . .” she began slowly. “Which is why I need to tell you something, Blue. Something important.”
Whatever dream me was about to tell Blue must’ve been big because I’d never seen so much conflict wrought across one person’s face. It made me cringe to witness. Imaginary or not, that was still my face. And seeing that much pain so deeply etched into my own features was as strange as it was unsettling.
Dream me’s eyes drifted toward the floor as she got ready to reveal whatever grand secret was weighing down on her. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to know what she intended to say. As quickly as I’d been deposited into the scene, I was ejected from it.
Ripped away from the dock, my consciousness was flung to the sandy shores of Adelaide. I hadn’t been on those beaches since our schools’ field trip weeks ago. Nevertheless, I instantly recognized the cave-dotted cliffside.
SJ, Blue, Jason, Daniel, and dream me were running down the beach with great haste. Something was wrong. They dashed inside one of the cliff’s cave openings and merged into a great tunnel system. When they rounded the corner, though, dream me vanished.
I wasn’t sure where she’d gone, but the others were now running on without her. They proceeded through the cliffside labyrinth, passing countless caves, many of which were half-submerged in water. All around them the ceilings and floors sprouted large, luminescent crystals—clear like sea foam and sharp like daggers.
Eventually they turned into a low-roofed cavern. Jason and Daniel continued ahead to make sure the coast was clear, leaving SJ and Blue behind.
An unfamiliar, heart-shaped silver locket outlined in lime green crystals swung from SJ’s neck. Blue drew her hunting knife and paced as she waited for the others to return. SJ started to bring her fingers to her temples as she always did when she was stressed, but stopped short and stared off in the direction they’d just come.
“We should not have let her go off alone,” she stated abruptly. “It was a mistake.”
“I may still be upset with Crisa, but her plan makes sense,” Blue reassured her.
“It does if we assume she was being honest about all the factors in play.”
“She told us the truth,” Blue said firmly.
“Yes, but are we certain she told us all of the truth?” SJ responded. “Lately Crisa has been a need-to-know-basis type of girl.”
“That’s only because she was trying to deal with everything on her own instead of bugging us with it,” Blue replied.
SJ gave Blue an incredulous look. “And who is to say she is not doing the same thing now?”
Just then I was yanked away from Blue and SJ’s conversation. My consciousness zoomed through the elaborate tunnel system until it came to a stop in front of dream me. I didn’t know where we were. The surroundings had faded to indiscernible black and we were squared off in a void, me watching her and her concentrating on a threat I could not see.
It was weird to be staring at myself like this. What was substantially weirder though, was when my consciousness was suddenly absorbed into that body.
The feeling was like having your soul suctioned out by a giant, electric toilet plunger. I merged with dream me and looked through her eyes just in time to see a massive purple blast shoot out of the void in my direction.
The horizontal tornado pulled me off my feet and dragged me forward, consuming me inside its swirling abyss. No matter how I struggled, the strange force would not let me go.
At the last second I felt someone grab my arm—trying to pull me out of the vortex. But it was too late. The help was not enough to hold me, or keep me out of the vortex’s grasp. I was gone—trapped within its power as I was sucked deeper into some kind of black hole heart.
I was about to make full impact with this dark endpoint when I was curtly dumped into another room entirely.
The forceful tornado, the cave, and whoever had been holding onto my arm had all disappeared. I was in some kind of theater now—surrounded by the vague outline of a vast audience and the dim light of torches lining rock walls.
There was a performance taking place on an enormous stage across from me. Blue was there (on the stage, I mean), only instead of her typical blue cloak she was wearing a blood red one like her sister used to.
I blinked, and a moment later found myself on the stage too. Trace remains of green smoke were dissipating from the area, and the curtains to the left had collapsed—blocking the audience from view.
My eyes widened when I realized that standing right in front of Blue was a twenty-foot-long black wolf baring its teeth. Even more surprising still was the expression on Blue’s face. It was filled with . . . fear. Total, unrestrained fear that I never would’ve thought she was capable of showing.
“Blue!” I yelled.
She didn’t hear me.
“Blue!” I yelled again.
I ran for her as fast as I could, but as I did I began to evaporate into the air. Blue didn’t notice. She was busy using what looked like a rubber band around her wrist to fire something at the wolf lunging at her.
I didn’t get the chance to see what it was or what became of my friend. In the next instant I was pulled out of this strange vision too—my last view of the scene being the giant monster barreling down on my best friend.
“We should approach it from the side,” Daniel said.
I turned my head to find myself facing him, a completely new setting around us. Daniel looked a little older, more tired. But his expression was hard and determined as always. He nodded directly ahead of us. I followed his gesture and discovered an enormous white compound indented into the side of a desert mountain.
“Or we could just take the driveway,” said another familiar voice.
I felt a chill go up my spine and turned to my left to see Natalie Poole standing beside me. She, too, seemed older. Usually my dreams featured Natalie as a teenager. Here she looked about twenty.
Her curly, maple-colored hair cascaded around her. Her brown eyes were stained red like she’d been crying, though they reflected just as much strength as Daniel’s.
“After what they’ve already done, you don’t think they’ve accounted for a driveway? No way. There’s zero chance Arian hasn’t thought of that. It’d be too easy,” Daniel replied.
“Nothing about this is easy,” a third voice said.
I turned to look at the fourth member of our group. Mauvrey. Her golden-blonde hair was scooped up in an uncharacteristic ponytail. There was a pair of weird metallic contraptions around her wrists that looked like futuristic fingerless gloves. And the eyeliner around her blue eyes was black, like the strange vein pattern on the right side of her neck . . .
The scene blurred around her image until she was the last thing left. In an instant, she was gone too.
Everything that followed was pretty unclear and without connection. Images streamed through my head in a flood of bright flashes—a glowing red watering can, rocks crumbling around me in a cave-in, a set of plastic patio furniture with a tray of sandwiches, bronze animals running in every direction, a huge wave of lava crashing into a sea of fire, and then . . .
Stars in the sky, the smell of burning wood, grass beneath my fingertips.
I was awake again.
Sitting up, I wiped some of the cold sweat from my forehead and glanced around the still campsite. The fire was almost extinguished except for a few dying embers that glowed orange against the black night. Just knowing they were real was enough to calm me a bit, and I exhaled deeply as I tried to expel the feelings of anxiety my nightmares had stirred.
“Bad dream?”
I whipped my head around to find SJ wide awake in her sleeping bag.
“You scared me,” I said as I pushed loose strands of hair behind my ears. “What are you doing up?”
“You are not the only one who has trouble sleeping, Crisa,” she replied. “So tell me, which beach was it, Adelaide or Whoozalee?”
“Sorry?”
She sat up and lowered her voice to a whisper so as not to wake the others. “As I told you before, Crisa, you talk in your sleep. Blue has never noticed because she sleeps so deeply.” SJ gestured to a nearby Blue whose face was buried inside her puffy sleeping bag. “I, however, have been woken quite frequently by the things you say while you dream. Just minutes ago you were going on about running down a beach and hiding from something. So I ask again, which beach was it?”
“Adelaide,” I said absentmindedly. “I dreamt that we were all on the beach there. And that . . .”
“That what?”
I hesitated, but then sighed and conceded to giving her a recap of my dreams. I told her about the gray boat with the scarlet sail, all of us being on the beaches of Adelaide, the heart-shaped locket she’d been wearing, and that at some point I was alone and saw some kind of purple tornado coming toward me. I explained the vision of Blue with the wolf in the theater and the short vision I had of Natalie, Mauvrey, and Daniel. Finally, I described the image flashes I’d seen—the glowing watering can, the patio furniture, and so on.
SJ listened the whole time without interrupting. When I finished she shook her head in what I gathered was disbelief, disapproval, or a combination of the two.
“You should have told the others about your dream, Crisa,” she said.
“SJ, I just had it.”
“No, not this one,” she clarified, “the dream you had last week about that bunker we found beneath the Capitol Building. You knew all those things were down there without ever having seen them. How is that even possible? And then there is the whole Natalie Poole revelation. Crisa, before today were you aware that she was real?”
I rubbed my neck awkwardly. “Well . . .”
SJ’s eyes widened. “You knew. You knew and you . . . chose not to tell me?”
“It’s not like that,” I replied rapidly. “I’ve only known since our trip to Fairy Godmother Headquarters. There was information about her in a folder I took from the Grand File Room before we met Lenore. But I didn’t know that bunker and all that other stuff we saw today was real. I swear.”
SJ blinked, still in shock. “You should have told me.”
“I just . . . didn’t know how.”
Her blank expression suddenly sharpened. “And did you also not know how to tell me what really happened to you when we were separated in Century City?” she asked.
“I got lost. I found my way back. That’s all there is to it,” I responded flatly.
I gritted my teeth but held my ground. I hated lying to her. At the same time, I felt like I had no other choice. While closing myself off to SJ may have stung, I didn’t feel comfortable letting her in on all the things that were eating away at me, especially when I couldn’t even bring myself to fully come to terms with them.
After a moment of silence SJ shrugged. “Okay. Be that way,” she said. “You do not have to tell me what happened back there, Crisa. But as I said before, you certainly should have told the others about your dream concerning that room beneath the Capitol Building. And all these other dreams you are having for that matter. They mean something, Crisa, and our friends deserve to know all the facts. You need to let them, and me, in on what is happening with you.”
“SJ, the truth would only freak them out.”
And freak me out.
“They are already ‘freaked out’ as it is. A bit of trust on your part would not overwhelm them, I assure you.”
“Oh, you assure me. That changes everything,” I said sharply, my instincts going on the defensive before I could stop them. “Look, SJ, I’m just not ready to tell them. So I don’t need you passing your high-and-mighty princess judgment on me and the morality of my choices in the meantime. It’s my secret and I’ll tell them when the time is right.”
SJ eyed me in a way that made the guilt brewing inside me start to simmer.
“Fine,” she replied after a pause. “But think about this, Crisa. From the moment we took off after that carriage in Adelaide and followed you to Fairy Godmother Headquarters, we have all put our faith in you. Maybe you should consider returning the favor.”
SJ lay back down and rolled to her right so we would no longer be facing each other. As if on cue, the last ember in the fire burned away. Sitting there, I watched it go out and witnessed darkness once again consume the silent world.