Waking The Dreamlost

CHAPTER One “We must take a different approach,” Itana said. “We’ve tried everything. You trying to teach me to block myself psychically against this thing. You buckling a GPS tracker onto me. Nothing’s worked.” She refused to think of the so-called ‘mindleech,’ the thing stealing her memories, as a human being. “You’re right. We need more information,” the masked man admitted. Sometimes Itana called him ‘Vazata,’ because she thought of him as a guardian spirit, but he didn’t like it when she did that. “I’ve even gotten a lead on someone who might be able to help. But...to follow that lead, I’d have to leave here. Leave you.” “You would probably do more good there than here. We keep meeting again and again, and it just puts us both in more danger,” Itana went on. “What if the mindleech figures out who you are?” “I’ll take that chance,” he said casually. Itana had made it a point not to learn too much about this man, who wore a kerchief over his face whenever they met. But she did know two things about him: he didn’t like it when she called him ‘Vazata,’ and danger didn’t faze him. “The mindleech hasn’t hurt me so far,” Itana said. “Not physically. But what if it freaks out the next time we try to trap it? What if it decides to get rid of me?” That would convince him to leave her, if anything could. “You may be right,” he said after a pause. “I shouldn’t risk your life over this.” Itana took his hand and shook it. “Good luck,” she said.... Itana woke up from a strange dream she could only vaguely remember, about a masked man and an evil creature. She found herself in a small, dimly lit storeroom with her hands tied in front of her. For a moment, she could not remember how she had gotten here, and then it all came flooding back. Her carefully planned vacation to the snow-capped mountains on the border of Jaiya. The tour bus whose driver had taken them the wrong way. The men with machine guns who had stopped the bus at the narrowest part of the winding mountain road and let the driver go with a handshake. The way the intruders had searched the tourists, taking anything valuable away from them and sorting them into groups. “These are citizens of the Doomsday Collective,” the leader of the men had said of one young couple with a small child. “They should be sent home.” “I renounced Collective citizenship years ago, when I was a teenager,” the husband had pleaded. “My wife and child are Jaiyan. You can’t do this to us—” One of the men had slammed the butt of his weapon into the captive’s belly, and the young husband had crumpled up like a piece of discarded paper. Itana had gasped, and the leader of the men had seemed to notice her then. “Here’s the girlfriend of that Jaiyan politician,” the leader said. “We’ll dispose of her on camera, along with this one. He’s former Jaiyan military, probably served around here.” He pointed to a tall, golden-skinned man with a fierce, hawklike face and a floppy, fashionable hairstyle—long on top, short on the sides—that didn’t seem to go with the face. He seemed vaguely familiar, but she could not put a name to him. The other men with guns had hooted when the leader had talked of “disposing” of Itana. Deep down, she knew what they were planning to do, but her brain had frozen and refused to process it. The hawk-faced man had looked fiercer and took a step toward her. “None of that,” the leader had snapped. “You can do what you want to the soldier, but if we give the girl anything but a quick, clean death, Jaiya’s media will run with the story and make things worse for us.” Itana had wanted to say that she didn’t want any kind of death, even a quick, clean one, but the words had stuck in her throat. She had been frozen in place like a statue until they tried to tie her up. Then the former soldier had started struggling against the men grabbing him, and watching him do that had unfrozen her. She had squirmed and screamed as one of the men grabbed her arms. She had flung herself backward so hard that she’d slipped out of his hands and hit her head against the cracked concrete. She had knocked herself out—that was the embarrassing part. The base of her head throbbed, and a tiny moan escaped from her. “It was a good try,” a soft, nasally voice said. She squinted toward the sound. She was lying in the only patch of direct sunlight in the room, coming from a window high overhead. Between the dazzling sunlight and the pain in her head, which felt like a hammer driving thumbtacks into the base of her skull, she could not focus on the dark areas of the room very clearly. Her captors had not tied up her legs, so she half-scrambled, half-flopped sideways out of the sunlight so that her eyes would begin to adjust. “Are you the soldier?” she asked. “My name’s Itana.” “My name is Marish, and yes, I am former military, and I probably did kill someone’s relatives around here at some time or another,” he said dryly. Itana shivered. “The separatists must hate us very much.” She could make out a vague human shape in the gloom, sitting sprawled against something that looked like a barrel. There was a pause and a movement from Marish that might have been a shrug. “Probably. We haven’t always done right by the people here on the border.” “Maybe our people should just leave.” “If we do that, the Collective will just take it over, Jaiya will have a new border that’s harder to defend, and the Borderlanders will be no better off.” “I never thought of it like that,” Itana said. “And you a politician’s fiancée!” Marish’s tone was light and bantering. His attitude annoyed Itana. Itana wasn’t happy with her engagement, and would have gotten out of it if she could, but she didn’t feel like allowing this stranger to sass her. “Sekheret’s more concerned with domestic issues. He feels that our country should leave these foreign affairs alone.” “That would be absolutely fantastic, if the foreign affairs would leave us alone.” “How can you talk like that when we’re about to be executed?” she snapped. “I don’t know about you, but I never planned on dying on camera.” “Nobody plans on dying when they do and how they do.” Marish spoke so softly that she could barely hear him. “Even the ones who try suicide, when they’re found in time and saved, say that it wasn’t what they expected.” Itana laughed nervously, not because he had said anything funny, but because she didn’t want to cry. “When I was young and stupid, I always imagined myself as one of those heroines in a tragic romance,” she said. “You know, the kind who dies kissing her handsome but politically unsuitable lover while the evil warlord who wants her for himself rams a spear through both of them.” “I don’t plan on either of us dying today,” Marish answered. “But you’re welcome to kiss me if you want.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Itana said. “You know I’m engaged.” “A couple of minutes ago, talking about politics, you were defending yourself for accepting his priorities more than you were defending him.” “A couple of seconds ago, talking about death, you were flashing back on a teenager’s fantasies, not wishing you could see your fiancée one more time. It’s no business of mine, but...that’s not the way someone in love thinks.” Itana opened her mouth for a sharp retort and then closed it again when she realized he was right. Her eyes had become more accustomed to the shadows, and she realized that Marish’s hands were tied in front of him, just as hers were. But his were writhing, constantly in motion, and she realized that he was somehow working on the knots. “I wish I could do that,” she said. “Don’t try,” he warned her. “There’s a trick to getting the knots loosened. If you do it wrong, you will just tighten them, and then I might not be able to get yours undone.” “If you do manage to untie me, you might just get that kiss after all.” She made the joke out of nervousness, and her voice quavered as she spoke. A moment later, she saw Marish spread his hands wide and sigh with relief. Then he crawled toward her. “Could you hold your hands up to the light? It might go quicker.” Itana did as he asked and watched him work. She still could not see him very well. Her main impression of his face was a long, beaky nose and a pair of shining green eyes bending over the knotted ropes on her hands. Marish seemed to be wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, much the worse for wear, and only a lightweight jacket on top of that. His dirty white sneakers stood out in the gloom. She turned her attention to his hands, moving around her wrists in the square of sunlight. The first thing that struck her was that they were huge hands, not just long but broad and muscular, with fingers to match. And yet they made adjustments to the knots as quickly and delicately as a watchmaker’s might. Then she caught a glimpse of his wrists, which had been rubbed raw and bleeding by the work of freeing themselves. In all the time since she had woken up in the storeroom, she had not heard him so much as grunt in pain. “That should do it,” Marish said. Itana wriggled her hands out of the ropes while Marish shifted to a more upright squatting position, clearly just about to stand up. “No, wait,” Itana said, and grabbed his shoulder. He froze in place. On impulse, she kissed him. He kissed her back hungrily, and for just a moment she could feel her own heartbeat in the throb of her mouth against his and taste the dried blood from a cut on his lips. And then the moment passed, and he pulled away from her. “I hear footsteps,” he said quietly. “They might be coming here. Could you lie down in the light with your hands in front of you, more or less the way you were?” “Why?” Itana asked, but she moved into position anyway. Marish draped the untied rope loosely across the tops of her wrists. She couldn’t help flinching, but Marish did not try to tie her up again. “I have a plan,” he said, and stepped behind the door, a moment before it opened.... I shouldn’t have asked her to kiss me, Marish told himself, and then he put that distraction out of his head and got into position. The terrorist with the green aura walked through the door. All his attention was on the beautiful young woman in the short skirt, sprawled in the light from the window. Marish grabbed him by the throat, squeezing it so tightly that the man could not make a sound, and snapped his neck. The faint green aura disappeared from Marish’s inner sight at the exact instant that the man stopped breathing. Itana’s eyes widened, but she didn’t cry out as Marish grabbed the man’s machine gun so that it wouldn’t drop and clatter. He lowered the body carefully to the ground. “If it makes you feel any better, that wasn’t a separatist or any other kind of local patriot,” Marish said. “This bunch takes money and weapons from the Doomsday Collective to burn and kill for the fun of it. I’ve had run-ins with them before.” Itana got to her feet. “What do we do now?” Marish searched the man’s pockets and transferred a set of keys to his own pocket. He unclipped a sheathed knife from the dead man’s belt and attached it to his own. When Marish found the dead man’s pistol, he offered it to Itana. “You know how to use this, right?” He knew that she had been trained with handguns before she had amnesia, but there was no guarantee that she would remember that any more than she remembered him. “Sekheret doesn’t like me to...but, yes, I do.” “Good.” That meant that she hadn’t forgotten everything. Then he stood up and hefted the machine gun.