Chapter 504
I needed to reach out to my sister. As much as I wanted to respect her time away, this seemed like an emergency to me, and I didn’t think she’d be happy if she came back in a few days and found out about these creatures; she’d wonder why no one had told her.
I didn’t want to use the phone, though. I realized that my IAC was just as traceable as the phone, but it seemed like, if I called her, Aaron could just grab her phone and dismiss the call and not even tell her it had rung. No, I was going to have to use my brain to get in touch with her. So I decided to try my IAC first.
Moving into the bedroom, I took a seat on the bed with the lights off and got ready to explain myself to my sister. A quick check in with Christian, in the periphery of his thinking, not a full-fledged “here I am” infiltration, let me know that he was wandering around in the forest now and not having any luck, so he should be okay. I figured Eliza was back at headquarters getting bandaged up. My friends knew it was my curfew so they wouldn’t bother me. Unless Brandon wanted to talk—oh, yeah. Nope... never mind. There was no time to think about that at the moment. I needed to get in touch with Cadence.
Her IAC was completely off—not just a little off but such that she wouldn’t even know that I was trying to get her. That stunk. I was hoping she’d have it so that she would be able to see who was trying to get her at least, not that she would necessarily take a message from me, but it didn’t matter. She was unreachable by IAC.
So... I’d have to do it the hard way. Leaning back against the pillows, I closed my eyes and concentrated, feeling out into the universe for my sister and hoping I didn’t go too deeply into her head. She was on her honeymoon after all.... It wasn’t hard for me to find her. Unfortunately, she seemed to be asleep. Her thoughts were all over the place, jumbled up with weird imagery. I’ve been in sleeping people’s heads before, but they’ve never known I was there. This really stunk. I needed to tell her what I’d seen....
Maybe I could wake her up. “Cadence! Hey, sis! I need to talk to you. Wake up!” Sleeping Beauty slept on. I tried imagining myself kicking a sleeping Cadence, seeing if that would wake her, but it didn’t have any effect on her either. Frustrated, I took myself out of her head to think.
What else could I do? Sure, I could wait a few hours like a civil human and hope she woke up on her own. But I am a teenage girl, and that, by definition, makes me impatient. I decided to try something I’d never done before.
I’ve embedded images before, like I did with the napkin in the club that showed the address earlier for Eliza. But I’ve never tried to construct an entire video-like story from something I’ve seen. It should work, though. If I can get it into my head, I should be able to get it into hers. I’d just have to go so far into her subconscious that I could override whatever she was dreaming about now. It all seemed a little too much like Inception.... If it could work for Leo, it could work for me. (Yes, I know--that is a movie, and this is real life. I still had to try.)
I went back through the IAC footage from Eliza’s hunt and constructed my own version, making it a little darker, a little scarier, and making sure none of the other teammates were recognizable. I wanted Cadence to think it was her. Well, I wanted her to think it was her up until she had the message. Then, maybe it wouldn’t matter if she knew it wasn’t. I needed her to see the black creatures and experience them the way that I had. Otherwise, she’d just chalk it up to a bad dream and forget about it. My sister has seen enough horrific sights in reality, there can’t be too much that scares her while she knows she’s sleeping.
I needed her to think she wasn’t sleeping.
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and felt out for my sister again. She was still asleep. Wasn’t it daytime there? Focus. I dug in deep, going through layers of her subconscious. It wasn’t dark and sticky like Daunator’s mind, but it was difficult to navigate, sort of like a path through the forest. There were lots of crisscrossing lanes, fallen branches, loops and switchbacks, like my sister is a complicated woman. Eventually, I felt like I was deep enough inside of her mind that I could plant my seed of a nightmare.
It took all of my concentration to transfer the movie from my thoughts to hers. It wasn’t enough that I was standing at what I thought was the epicenter of her subconscious. I had to get a complicated set of images, with sound and motion, from my head to hers. I could feel my heart racing as I pushed the thoughts through. Sweat began to drip off of my forehead, and I was pretty sure my skin was on fire. Why it was so hard, I couldn’t say, but I would’ve rather been running on the treadmill for three or four hours than building a nightmare in my sister’s head.
Once I got rolling, it got a little easier, and though it was a trying task, before I even finished, I was pretty sure it was working. Cadence wasn’t snoozing away in a blissful dream anymore. She seemed just as agitated as I felt.
At the end of the dream, Mila shouted Eliza’s name. I didn’t cut that out. I figured that would get Cadence’s attention as much as the creatures. It was mean, but necessary. Satisfied that my sister would be awake soon, I climbed back out of her head. With my heart still pounding out of my chest and perspiration pouring off of me, it was a long journey back to reality. It wasn’t as simple as opening my eyes and poofing home. I felt every step as I headed back down the trail through the forest. Hopefully, my sister was feeling every bit of the emotion Eliza had felt during the hunt.
At last, I opened my eyes, grateful to be back on my own bed. My heart was still pounding, an uncomfortable feeling to say the least. I fumbled for my phone and found it on the nightstand. I’d recently installed an app to measure my heartbeat. My treadmill had sensors on it for when I was running, but I liked to check it while I was cooling down. Sucking in deep breaths to try to calm myself, I checked my heart rate and saw that it was 230. That’s super high. I needed it to come down quickly.
