Chapter 1 – Dream On
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I’m in the middle of a bad dream. It’s not the good kind of bad, with monsters trying to kill me, or the bad kind of bad, with my father screaming at me, or even worse, not screaming at me. It’s the boring kind. I’m in the hallway at the Home, painting a new pattern on the carpet with an oversized roller. The other kids keep walking on the wet paint so that I have to start over. After about the billionth time, something finally clicks, and I realize I’m dreaming.

Lucidity achieved, the dream grinds to a halt. I’m still in the hallway outside my room, but all the other kids are gone. I’m free to do as I please. First, I do a (non) reality check, just to be sure. I put my hand on the nearest wall and push. I take it slowly, because one time that I tried this when I was awake,  I ended up punching a hole in the wall. That did not go over well with the staff.

My fingers sink through the wallpaper into the plaster beneath. So, definitely dreaming. Perfect. I close my hand on the material of the wall and pull. A door shaped section swings open, revealing . . . a closed door.

I sigh and open that one, too. Another door stands behind it. And another.

And another.

Four more doors in and I stop myself. No, this won’t be one of those times where I lose lucidity by falling into the rhythm of a repetitive task. Where I wake up frustrated and disappointed. Not this time.

I close my eyes, pull open this last door, and step through.

I open my eyes in the bathroom nearest my room. Crap. I should have been thinking of a destination. I glance around the room, my eyes avoiding the mirror out of habit. Whatever. I can look for someplace better after I change. 

I tense up as someone pounds on the door. Even before he speaks, I know who’s on the other side. Ugh.

“You’ve been in there forever. Give somebody else a turn.”

Jay. Even in my dreams he won’t give me a moment's peace. Usually, when I’m lucid dreaming, there aren’t any people around. The exceptions are almost always annoying.

“I know you're in there, Parker. Hurry it up!”

Case in point.

I have a lot of control over objects and my environment when I’m lucid, but never over the people, so there’s not a lot I can do about him. Still, I’m not going to waste a perfectly good lucid dream dealing with this jerk. I ignore him.

I close my eyes again, and this time concentrate on myself. Not the self everyone sees when they look at me, but my real self, the person I’m supposed to be. It’s harder than usual. I can feel Jay on the other side of the door, interfering just by being there. Focus, Parker.

"Parker!"

Focus.

"Park—"

A chime made up of a trillion voices tears through the dream. It’s beautiful. I can feel it vibrating in every nerve of my body. In every cell. In every atom. It blends with the image I hold of my true self, and it is glorious.

The chime begins to fade. 

No! I struggle to hold it there, but there’s nothing to hold. I focus my whole being on it as it grows fainter. I don’t want to let it go. After a few minutes, or maybe hours, or even days, it’s gone. But I can feel its echoes all through my body.

And it is my body. The right one. Not the mistake I have to wear in the real world. Even my clothes have shifted, although just enough to suit me a little better. My cargo pants are now cargo capris, and my tee shirt a tank top. A fine, steel-chain necklace, long gone in the real world, rests around my neck.

What now? I could find a mirror and see how I look in that dress I’ve been thinking about. No, I’m too full of energy to stand around playing dress up, however much fun that might be. Time to go looking for trouble.

Or sniffing for it. The faint scent of smoke drifts in under the bathroom door. I open it. No sign of Jay, so that’s good, but I definitely smell smoke; not strong, but it’s there. I look up and down the hall for any sign of a fire. Nothing. I sniff the air again. The acrid scent stings my nose. That way. I follow the scent to the door of my room.

Or at least to what should be the door to my room. Instead of the usual light wooden door, there’s a sturdy looking metal one with a sign bolted to it: "Authorized Personnel Only." 

The metal door opens onto a wood paneled hallway that I’ve never seen before. I try to step into it, but it resists. I push through anyway. My mind rings faintly with echoes of the chime. At the far end, I find my bedroom door. It looks perfectly normal except that it’s in the wrong place, and it has an "Emergency Exit Only" sign hanging on it. The smell of smoke comes from the other side. I open the door.

There’s my room. There’s my bed. And there’s me. That’s creepy. 

I can see myself lying there, asleep. I’m on the bottom bunk because I don’t trust the top one to support my weight. I stare at the other me through the open door. Ugh. I glance down at the improved version of me that only exists in my head and in my dreams. It feels so real. More than in any dream before. Real and comfortable. Just, right.

A few gray wisps drift in the open window. Maybe the smoke is real and this is my way of getting myself to wake up. But how? I usually don’t want to wake up from my dreams. Well, there’s one obvious thing to try. I step through the door.

The echoes of the chimes ring through my body again. I feel even more resistance than when I stepped into the hall. I push, more with my will than with my body. The world blurs as I force my way through the door, and then springs back into focus as two things happen at once. The door behind me vanishes, and I blink out of existence.

Well, not me, me. The other me. The one in the bed.

Am I awake or asleep? I look down at myself. I’m still in my new improved body. That’s a pretty strong argument for me being asleep. But I feel awake. More awake than I have in years. I look at myself again. Can this be real? 

Okay. I’ve made my best effort to wake up. If I am still dreaming, it’s not my fault. I’m going with it. After all, if it’s a dream and I treat it as real, there’s no harm done. If it’s the other way around, though, well, I don’t want to think about that. 

Instead, I look out the window, past the burglar bars. A small crowd is gathered in front of the apartments across the street, staring and pointing past the Home. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but they look worried. And confused. 

Welcome to the party on that one.

At least the Home isn’t on fire. The smoke is probably coming from whatever those people are staring at. Is it related to my dream? I need to get out there and see.

I could sneak out through the house, but no. I'd set off the alarms. The window, though, that’s a possibility. The old me would have never fit through the bars, but the new me just might. 

“Where are Daniel and Parker?” A voice sounds through the door. That’s Kevin, the night warden. Okay, his official title is Senior Therapeutic Adolescent Specialist, but who wants to say that all the time?

“Daniel is helping wrangle the littl’uns,” says Louis, a short-timer and suck up, “Chris said Parker wouldn’t wake up.”

“We’ll see about that.” Heavy footsteps approach my door. Dream or not, I don’t want to face Kevin looking like I do now. I run the rest of the way to the window as Kevin bangs on the door.

“Parker!” he yells, “Get your ass out here right now!”

Even at my new size, I’m not going to fit between the bars. But the gap on the right-hand side of the grate is a little wider. It’s worth a shot.

I squeeze through with a lot less effort than I expected. There is a tight moment getting my hips through, but with a creak of stressed metal, I push the bars a little farther away from the frame. I’m out.

I’m also hanging from a third-floor windowsill. Luckily, the folks across the street are still focused on something above and beyond the house, and don’t seem to notice me. I’m not sure how long that will last. I also don’t know how long I can hang here.

I look down. Probably a twelve-foot drop under my feet. At two hundred and fifty pounds, that would have killed my knees. At a hundred-or-so, it feels doable. Probably. Maybe. Stalling, I look up at the window. Are the bars bent? Inside the room, the door slams open. I let go.

Time does not stand still. It doesn’t even slow down. Not exactly. But something new happens. I am aware of each fraction of a second as I fall. It’s like I’m packing more thinking into the same amount of time. I use that to try to remember my years-ago gymnastics lessons. Absorb what I can with my legs, then roll and hope for the best.

Thump. My sense of time returns to normal.

The landing is almost a disappointment. I barely have to bend my knees. That doesn’t seem quite right, but there’s no time worry about that. I duck behind a bush as Kevin’s face appears in the window. He checks the bars, but there’s no way the Parker he knows could have fit through that gap. 

Once he’s gone from the window, I have another obstacle to deal with. The home is surrounded by an iron fence. Its bars are topped with iron spikes, half bend inward a little bit, the other half outward. If I jump up and grab the spikes, I might be able to get over without puncturing myself. Another long shot, but what the hell.

The jump is ridiculously easy. I flip myself over the fence and land neatly on the other side like it’s something I do every day. Weird.

Now I finally have a chance to see what the small crowd is staring at. Orange-tinged smoke billows up from a fire a few blocks past the Home. It doesn’t seem like enough to explain the crowd. Okay, then. I cross the street.

Almost to the people, I hesitate. For the first time since I changed myself I feel uncomfortable. What are these people going to see?

I check my reflection in a car mirror. If I’m crazy, they’ll see the old me; if this is real, they’ll see the new me; and if I’m dreaming, it doesn’t matter. There. All worked out.

“What's going on?” I ask, managing to keep the hesitation from my voice.

My new voice, that is. This is the first time I’ve spoken since I changed. My voice is higher pitched, but also smoother. I like it. I'd never noticed my voice being different when I was dreaming. 

One of the men in the group drops his gaze from the sky to my face. Then he keeps dropping it all the way down, with a couple of big pauses along the way, before returning to my face. My skin crawls. Part of me wants to hide, but I fight that off. Some creep isn't going to ruin this for me.

“We came out to see what that awful noise was,” a woman, who appears to be with the man who is still leering at me, says, “and then we saw a dragon fly---”

“It wasn’t a dragon,” the creep interrupts, “There’s no such thing. Besides, it had tentacles or something. Dragons don’t have tentacles.”

“Whatever it was, it flew right over us. Somebody was chasing it.”

“That wasn’t a person. People don’t fly.”

“And dragons don’t exist, I know.” The woman shakes her head, “They went down over there.”

She points toward the fire.

A boy around my age, or maybe as old as seventeen, is looking at his phone. “There’s another one downtown,” he says, “check this out.”

He holds up his phone. On the screen is a picture of a nightmare creature in the parking lot of Whole Foods. The video is pretty poor quality, and all I can make out is a mass of tentacles and legs standing over what might be a body. The kid taps the screen and the video starts. A whirlwind of flame streaks into the frame, and bolts of fire start raining down onto the monster. The video zooms in on the whirlwind, and you can barely make out a human figure inside it, hurling those bolts.

A police car pulls up to curb next to us. The driver rolls down his window. “You folks should get inside.” It doesn’t sound like a suggestion.

“What’s happening? What was that thing? What was that noise?” the creep demands.

What noise? Is he talking about the chime? Did everyone else hear it, too?

“I don’t know sir. I know whatever happened over there,” the officer indicates the fire, “is taken care of, but there might be more. There’ll be an update on TV soon. Why don’t you go inside and check?”

The group mills around.

"We've had reports that there might be another one in the area."

He’s making that up. You don't spend years in the system without learning how to tell when grownups are lying. But it works. The people head into the apartment building, talking amongst themselves.

I turn and head up the street. What am I going to do? No one will recognize me now, and if they did, how would they react? Since we only get out of the Home to go to school and on field trips, I don’t know the neighborhood very well. Where can I go?

All I have are the clothes on my back, and my necklace. I run my fingers along its chain. My Aunt Tabitha gave it to me when I was nine. I’d been having a lot of nightmares after I lost my Mom, usually involving monsters, or being trapped. My aunt told me that I’d always be safe as long as I had that necklace. The molybdenum-steel chain itself was almost a hundred years old, and instead of a pendant it had two small, rough spheres made from meteorites. They were magnetic and served in place of a clasp.

At bedtime, she told me stories where the chain was magic. It would stretch or grow or change however I wanted. In the stories, it helped me defeat monsters and escape traps. I named it Molly.

The necklace did the trick. I always had the chain with me when I was awake. And, soon, it was there in my dreams, too. I kicked the asses of who-knew-how-many monsters with it, escaped a lot of traps, and bashed down a Home Depot worth of doors. I actually started looking forward to what used to be nightmares. 

Even when my father eventually took the necklace away, I still had it my dreams. And I have it now.

“Miss?” The police officer calls.

I need a destination, or at least a plan. I have to think of something. Or maybe it’s a dream and I’ll wake up. I look down at myself. I hope not. I want this new me to be real.

“Miss?” the police car has rolled along side me, “Miss!”

Oh right. He’s talking to me. Cool! But he’s a cop, and my interactions with the police have never been fun. Not cool. I pick up the pace.

“Sorry officer, I’m a little out of it from all this.” I gesture in the general direction of the fire. I want him to go away. I keep walking, and the car keeps pace.

“I can understand that.” But he doesn’t sound like he likes it. “Where do you live?”

“Oh, not more than a couple of blocks that way,” another vague gesture, this time toward the Home. I hate to outright lie. I’m not sure that being misleading isn’t just as bad, but it makes me feel better. A little.

“I guess I should hurry.” Still not technically a lie.

“Why don’t I give you a ride.” It sounds less like an offer, and more like an order.

“I’m good. Thanks, though.”

He stops the car and steps out.

“Do you have any ID on you, miss?”

Reflex kicks in. I run. I don’t have a destination in mind. I just run. At the end of the next block, I slow down and look back over my shoulder. The cop is back in his car and headed my way. Crap. I speed back up.

Behind me, there is a crunching sound, followed by squealing brakes and another crunch. I have to look. The front of the police car is wrapped around a scaly, horned . . . gorilla? As far as I can tell, it appeared out of nowhere.

The creature shoves the car away, sweeps one massive arm down, and tears three gashes into the car's hood. 

Okay, a scaly, horned, clawed gorilla.

The cop rolls out of his car and fires at the creature, but it isn’t even fazed. 

It tilts back its head and roars. Now I can see that its head is shaped more like a bull's than a gorilla's. A minotaur, then. But it has fangs. Big fangs. 

I’m going to have to file a complaint with whoever designed this thing. It is definitely not mythologically correct.

The cop scrambles out of the way as the huge claws dig grooves in the pavement. Crap. The cop wouldn’t still be around if it weren’t for me. And what if the thing being here has something to do with my changes? I have to do something. But even at six and a half feet, I wouldn’t have been a match for this thing. Double crap.

Maybe I can distract it. This new me seems pretty fast, and if I can get it chasing me, maybe I can outdistance it while the cop gets away. It’s not exactly a great plan, but it’s the best I’ve got.

“Hey, ugly!” I shout as I get closer, “Over here!” I wave my arms for good measure. I’ve closed half the distance between us before it turns its head to look at me.

I’d swear it’s grinning as it completes its turn and jumps straight at me. It’s still fifty feet away from me, easy, but it’s going to clear the distance in that one leap. Did I mention, crap?

Time, or my sense of it, does that weird thing again, but it’s more than that. I know things. With a glance at the minotaur I know that, if I don’t drastically change my course, it will land right on top of me. I know that if I slow down, its momentum will have it on top of me in a second and a half, and that if I swerve, I’ll still be close enough for one of those long arms to reach me. I don’t have to figure it out, I just know.

I speed up, and throw myself at the ground as I pass under it. I land on my shoulder, and roll to my feet, still running. My blood sings in my ears. 

That. Was. Amazing.

The thing smashes into the street behind me. I can hear its claws scraping into the ground as it slows itself. I keep running, straight at the police car, faster than I have ever run in my life. A lot faster. I leap over the car in a crouch, my feet almost brushing the roof, and hit the ground still running. Then, I duck.

A jagged, three-foot chunk of road sails inches over my head and the minotaur roars. That would have hurt. I speed up. 

I risk a glance back and see the cop scrambling back to his car. The minotaur ignores him and runs on all fours after me. And it’s gaining. 

Running away isn’t going to solve this problem. I touch my necklace. I’m moving like I usually do in dreams, so maybe . . .

I separate the magnetic spheres holding Molly in place. Picturing what I want to happen, I hold tight to the middle of the chain and flick the ends outward. It works. The spheres reach what should be the end of the chain and keep going, stretching the chain behind them with a singing hiss of metal, until it’s easily twenty feet long. The spheres themselves grow, too, reaching the size of large grapefruits. With a tug, I set them spinning around my head, one on each side.

The sound of the minotaur's claws scraping the road grow closer. As if the potholes on this street aren’t bad enough already.

Molly is now a meteor hammer, a weapon I learned about watching old martial-arts movies with my aunt. I feel the inertia of the weights as I spin them over my head, a comforting tug. Cool. With Molly in hand, I can face anything.

I dive to the side and send one of the weights flying in the opposite direction, letting all but the last few feet of the chain slip through my fingers. Momentum wraps the remaining length around my left arm.

The minotaur is still on all fours, running with a weird side-to-side gait. The chain catches its right wrist and ankle, and the end whips around twice before the weight catches on the rest of the chain. 

I yank as hard as I can, and the minotaur goes tumbling. With a flick of my wrist, I send a ripple down the chain that frees it before I can get dragged along.

As the thing rolls, I yank the weight back. I let its momentum wrap Molly’s free end around my waist. I don’t think the physics of that entirely worked out, but that isn’t my problem. I look around. All that running, and I’m almost back where I started. I can’t see the cop, but there might be movement in the car. Oops. Distracted.

By the time I turn back, the minotaur is charging, head down, like a bull. The tip of one of its horns is broken off, embedded in the road. What’s left is a jagged spear tip instead of a clean one. Great. 

I can’t get the chain moving fast enough to do anything before it gets here, and there is no way to get out of its reach. So I charge, too.

As we meet, I grab the minotaur by the horns and leap. It whips its head up. Whether it means to throw me, or is trying to keep me in view, it’s what I was counting on. What I wasn’t counting on were the claws. As I let go of its horns, it slashes me across my left arm. Blood immediately wells up in three deep gashes.

For an instant, those gashes are my world. I’ve never felt pain like that before, and it takes all my will to not curl up in a ball to escape it. Instead, I focus on it. When I get hurt in a dream, I feel the pain, but I can push it aside, make it something separate. I try that now, and the world comes back.

The pain isn’t gone, but now it’s just another fact. Like the fact that I was born in the wrong body. Like the fact that I live in a group home, instead of with a family. Like the fact that I’m tumbling through the air toward the spiked iron fence of the Home.

That last one seems like the one I should focus on at the moment.

I’m reaching the top of my arc, and about to pass under a streetlight. I whip Molly outward, and, with a tug, wrap the far weight tightly around the light’s arm. Fire shoots through my shoulder as it absorbs the force of my abrupt change of direction. At the top of my new arc, I pull the chain free. Now I’m sailing through the air, forty feet off the ground. But not toward a spiky iron fence. I call it a win.

Down on the ground, the minotaur is searching for me. I don’t think it can see me past the glare of the street light, and I pass back over its head and approach the next streetlight. I wrap Molly around this one, like I did the last, but with twenty or so loops. Instead of doing another loop-the-loop, I let the unreeling of the chain slow me down. I hit the ground at a little faster than a good running clip and roll to my feet. It’s a good landing, but it sends jolts of pain up my arm from my injury. I push the pain down, but it’s still almost enough to make me hope I’m dreaming. 

 I start Molly spinning again immediately and turn back toward the minotaur. It spots me at the same time and braces itself for another leap.

I’m ready. Awake or asleep, dream rules are in force. And I am lucid.

It springs. I release one of the weights to intercept it. By the time it meets the minotaur, I’ve expanded the weight to the size of a large wrecking ball. The minotaur tries to bat it aside, but momentum wins. The creature is slammed backwards. I shrink the weight to its five-inch size and tug it back into orbit around me. I don’t give the minotaur a chance to find its feet this time. I hurl the weight at it again, expanding it again.

“Stay down!” I shout at it and wait, with Molly spinning, “I don’t want to keep hurting you!” I really don’t. I just want it to stop. If this were a dream, maybe I wouldn't care, but everything feels so real, so immediate.

It surges to its feet. I hit it with a wrecking ball again. “Stay. Down.”

Again the thing tries to charge. Again I knock it down. And again. And again.

We’re back under the streetlight in front of the Home, and I can finally get a good look at it. Its scales are made from a yellowish metal, pitted with dents where Molly has struck it. Even its eyes seem to have a thick protective layer of something. One of them is crazed with cracks from impact with the ground.

But the minotaur will not stay down. Every swing of Molly sends bolts of pain shooting up my arm from the gashes. That pain is making a strong argument for promotion to the most relevant fact. On top of that, I hear footsteps behind me. The cop is about to tag in. I need to finish this.

I knock the thing backwards once more, to buy myself a few extra seconds, then set both weights spinning as fast as I can. The minotaur takes advantage of the time, too. It gets back to its feet for another charge.

I send both weights swinging toward it from opposite sides, expanding them as they close in. Right before they meet, with the minotaur in the middle, I hear a loud bang from the cop’s direction. He fired his shotgun, and as the twin wrecking balls hit their target, I feel a few stings on my face and arms. Ricochets, I guess.

The minotaur collapses in on itself. In seconds there is a pile of goo and corroding metal plates where it last stood. I pull Molly free of the mess. She comes out as shiny and clean as ever. The cop and I both stare silently at the remains. 

I beat the monster. If this were a dream, I‘d be waking up right about now.

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