The clock by my bed reads 1:07.

I’ve been considering the idea since getting back to my room. Something strange, and maybe dangerous, is going on with my friends. How can I say no? But I really have no idea how to do it.

I stare at my wall, trying not to stare at it, but through it. The first time I created a dream door, I wasn’t even trying. The second time, I was trying to open a door through the wall. My real problem, okay, one of my real problems, is that I don’t know what I’m doing.

I don’t even have words to describe my new abilities. I can describe the results, sure: Switch outfits, change my shape, slip into the zone, and so on. But that doesn’t describe how I do them.

I try thinking of the way I control the abilities as moving little switches, or levers in my head, but a) that is too mechanical and b) it’s not in my head; not exactly. I finally settle on thinking of the whole thing as if I have muscles that I’ve never had before, but instead of moving my body around, they change my world, and me.

That helps. Muscles wouldn’t do us much good if we didn’t know where our body parts were. We’d just flail around randomly. Using my abilities doesn’t feel like flailing, so there has to be some new sense there, too.

I close my eyes and stand up. The wall is five feet in front of me. Is that a memory or some sort of sense telling me that? I balance on the toes of my left foot and spin myself around. After twenty spins exactly, I stop. I’m facing the wall, right? I open my eyes to check. Yep.

But wait, that doesn’t prove anything. That could just be an enhanced version of my regular old sense of position. Hmm. What’s around me. Bed, neatly made. Desk, school books on top. A ton of crap I’ve managed to collect already in the drawers. Closet, mostly empty.

Okay, that could all be from memory. Which would still be cool, but not what I’m looking for. What can’t I sense? How about my friends? Cindy is there, about fifty feet away. Kelly off in another direction about eighty feet. Henry, there, Kristen, yep. Sebastian. there and awake. Huh.

Of course I can’t go check all that. I also realize I can’t sense what any of them are wearing. Or their surroundings, only them. That’s something to work with.

I keep it up, finding what I can and can’t sense. My range for most stuff seems to be around ten feet. Things that I’m really familiar with I can feel further out. I can tell pretty much where all the kids are, but I already knew they were in their rooms, so that might be influencing me. Emily, tonight’s counselor, is somewhere in the compound, probably not within forty feet of me. Meg exists. That’s about all I could get on her.

I finish up with Valeria. She shines like a beacon. She is six miles, eight-hundred-thirty-four feet, six and a half inches that way. She is asleep, and dreaming. Wow.

Now the clock reads 3:50. If I’m going to try to enter their dreams, I’ll have to do it soon.

I sit back down in front of the wall and close my eyes. I tried to push a door into the wall. That was too easy. I walk over and open the door. The cool breeze from outside is disappointing. I relax my door creating muscle and the door melts back into the wall.

I create two more doors to the outside. I need to think of something else.

Instead of creating a door, I reach out to find one. Not just any door, but that door. The one that leads to the hallway. Got it. I pull, not push, it into place on my wall, and open my eyes.

I got it this time. I can tell. It’s different from the simple physical doors I’d made. It’s trying to slip away. Pulling it into position used up some of whatever energy fueled me these days, and even holding it there uses a little. I won’t be able to hold it there for too long.

I put my hand on the knob and visualize what will be on the other side. The wood paneled hallway. A door at the far end. That door is going to lead into Kelly’s dream instead of my own. They were the first to volunteer and this feels like my best bet. I open the door.

The hallway is there. The sense of enormous energies flowing right outside the walls has backed off. Not gone away, though. I can still feel something there. It’s been there all along, but I’m better at interpreting my new sense (or senses) now.

I don’t bother with the rope. I can feel my room as if I were still standing in it. There won’t be any trouble getting back. I close the door into my room and the energy drain drops to almost nothing.

The door at the far end has Kelly’s name on it. I open it. Onto a blank wall. Ugh. Maybe Kelly isn’t dreaming yet? I lean on the wall to wait.

While I wait, I tried to get a better sense of the energy flowing through this place. I find channels and eddies in it. Or threads and loops. Or maybe tracks and clearings. They aren’t any of those things, but that’s the best I can come up with. Then I stumble backwards through where the wall had been.

I’m standing in Kelly’s bedroom. It’s a mostly featureless box, but it radiates Kelly’s bedroomness. No one is home. I look in the (smaller featureless box) closet. Nobody there. I look under the (featureless block) bed. Nope.

I’m no expert on dreams, but it seems to me that as a rule, people are present in their own dreams. So, where is Kelly? As soon as I think of the question, I know how to find out. I reach out and feel for them. There.

I walk over to a blank wall and push right through it. It gives a little resistance, but this part of the dream is so weak that it just doesn’t have much substance.

I come out in another (almost) featureless box. I’ve found Kelly. And everyone else.

It isn’t the dining room this time. It’s the Halloween party. Sort of. Everybody is there. Sort of. The room isn’t shaped like the rec room, but it is the rec room. It has vague details that are also clearly the Halloween decorations. Twelve Promise kids are there, clearly recognizable as themselves. They are, in some very real sense, those kids I know from Promise. The whole gang is there except for Sebastian, and me.

Then there are another twenty to forty placeholder people. I really can’t pin the number down better than that. They aren’t consistently there, or representing the same people when they are there. There are two Sebastians, then three, then none.

Their motions aren’t random, though. They tend to keep the real people away from each other. When the real Cindy and Henry start to talk to each other, a placeholder pushes between them, and then they’re each talking to a placeholder of the other.

And there I am. And there. And there. A placeholder representing me dressed as Tip bumps into Cindy and makes her spill her punch on her beautiful gown. Another complains to Layla about the quality of the decorations. One more is telling Henry that she can hardly tell that he’s really a girl. Then all the fake Parkers fade into the background.

Something big is coming. The placeholders start herding the real dreamers together. They’re being controlled somehow. I can’t yet tell how, or from where. There’s too much information. Traces from the dreamers lead off somewhere, probably back to their bodies in the real world. Those same traces seem to link to various features of the room. Wherever Layla’s attention focuses, the decorations seem more distinct and real. Cindy’s attention makes the placeholders’s clothes more defined.

Then Not-me shows up. Fake Parker supreme. She is a ridiculous parody of me. Ridiculous amounts of makeup. A dress that makes my Ozma dress look like boys clothes.

“Look at me!” she screams, “You are all so lucky to have me here to look at!”

She is more solid than the other placeholders. There is someone actually there. It’s not anyone I know or recognize, but it is someone, or maybe something. The wise course of action is to hang back and see what happens. Maybe I’ll try to follow it wherever it goes when the dream ends. But behind its back, where none of the dreamers can see, it holds a machete.

“Hey!” I call out, “You in the dress.”

Not-me turns. Its face keeps that ridiculous expression, but I can see, or sense, something underneath. Evaluating. Planning.

Nope. I’m not going to allow it time for that.

I don’t even need a few seconds to get Molly up to speed. I just decide that I had already done that a couple of seconds ago. I’d tried something similar out in the real world a couple of times since the change, but messing with time seems to be outside of my limits out there. Here, though, it works perfectly.

Smash. The wrecking ball carries the thing straight through the wall and out of the room. The placeholders react with horror and panic, but the real dreamers just look sort of confused.

“This is just a dream, guys!” I shout, “See?”

I had found the lines that were making the dream room register as the rec room and pull them loose. The room dissolves around us.

The twelve dreamers look around in confusion, fear starting to creep in on most of their faces.

Not-me chooses that moment to come charging back. She stops ten feet away from me and flips a metaphysical switch. I’m forced away from the dream. The pressure is enormous. Way more than I can fight. So I don’t.

I let the pressure wave push me a little way, but drift across it. I’m not in a place anymore: it doesn’t seem worth the time to try to force imagery on the surroundings. Once I’m away from Not-me, I slip out from in front of the pressure wave. It isn’t deep, and soon it passes me by.

One step is enough to take me back to the scene of the dream. The rec room walls, such as they are, are back, and I stay just outside them. Inside, Not-me busily chases placeholders around with her machete. She doesn’t seem to notice me.

I think placeholder thoughts and step into the room. Not-me continues her machete rampage. As I approached Kristen, I envision myself as Meg in a sorceress costume.

I grab a handful of the energies that are flowing around this place and shape them into a sword. I hand it to Kristen.

“That is not the true Parker. It must be stopped.”

Lame, but it seems to do the trick. Kristen steps forward to do battle.

Cindy is next. From behind I whisper into her ear as I take another handful of the stuff that powers this place.

“Surely your wand can defeat the fake Parker.”

I use the energy to set her wand to glowing. It feels like the right thing to do.

I go to each of the other dreamers and use what I knew of them to give them something to fight Not-me. Except for one. Kelly is the only one who seems to have grasped that this is a dream. I whispered a message, take an armful of energy, and shove. An instant later, Kelly is gone.

It’s just in time, too. Not-me has called in reinforcements. Eight more Not-mes step through the walls into the room. At this point the placeholders turn on the dreamers as well.

I feel a little bad for letting the others fight this battle for me, but, first of all, this is just a dream for them. Their bodies are still out there in their beds. My body is here. I can probably heal anything that happens to it, but I’m not positive about that.

Second, I have something else I need to do.

While fireballs explode, swords slash, bullets fly, and halloween decorations animate and charge across the room I study it all. The Not-me’s are doing some of the same stuff I do, but not the same way. For them, the switch and lever metaphor seem to fit. Pull a lever — Get a sword. Flip a switch—Teleport.

I don’t stay completely out of the battle. The kids would have been taken out in no time. I just dance around providing support. A little push here, a blow deflected there. Patch up a wounded arm. That sort of thing. As long as I’m not interacting directly with them, the Not-Me’s seem completely unaware of me.

They don’t even notice that, when Layla disappears, I tweak the last couple of seconds to have placeholders swarm her to cover exactly what happened.

Cindy and Sam disappear within seconds of each other. I don’t bother trying to cover this time.

The Not-Me’s are communicating with each other. Even though it isn’t out loud, I can almost hear what they are saying. Almost. I know that they have an idea of what’s happening, though.

It’s time for another diversion. I have been feeling around behind the scenes, and have a pretty good idea of how they’re controlling the placeholders, so I reach around their control and take over. The placeholders rush the Not-Me’s.

It doesn’t last long. One of them flips a switch and the placeholders all vanish. That’s okay. So do Henry, Kristen, Pierce and Tasha.

If they had had any doubts, the Not-Me’s don’t anymore. They know I’m here somewhere. I have a feeling that they have some mechanism that can track me down if I give them the time to do it.

The last four kids should be safe within seconds. For tonight, anyway. I need to stay long enough to make sure they’ll be safe tomorrow night, too. And after that.

While the Not-me’s are still preoccupied with the remaining kids, I need to keep searching. How are they pulling the kids all into one dream? How can I keep them from doing it again?

The four remaining kids vanish. I owe Kelly a big ‘Thank You.’

But the dream is still here. And the Not-me’s are conferring. They are about to do something big. Then I know whose dream it was. Mine.

Whatever this place is, I’d dreamed myself into it that first night. When I walked out into the real world, I left part of myself here. They were using that to find the people near me in the real world and pull them into my dreams. I can even see how they do it. Maybe I could---

Later. Two more Not-me’s arrive. They have something with them. With enough time, I think I’d be able to figure it out, but since they’re about to use it . . .

I scram. I push through the wall, into the hallway out of the dream. I sprint for the door back to the real world. 

The machine activates and I’m yanked backwards. With the door out of my reach, and getting further away by the second, I consider trying to bash it open with Molly. That’s a no go, though. I have no idea what that could do to the world on the other side of the door. Probably nothing good, if it worked at all.

I have to do something else.

I’m being pulled back down the hallway, toward the open door into my dream. Slipping to the side isn’t an option. The pull is way too strong for me to resist. I’m going through that door.

Or at least a door. A door had taken me to a dream of Aunt Tabitha. I remember that door. I can still feel it. And I can feel this door, with the Not-me’s and their machine right on the other side. I flex what I hope is the right non-muscle and twist, just as I pass through the door.

I crash into a wall opposite the door that has just slammed behind me. I’m in a carpeted hallway, just like the one in the Aunt Tabitha dream. 

This isn’t a dream though. I take a moment to get my bearing and be sure. Yeah, I’m sure. After the steep learning curve of the last couple of hours, I’ll never be confused about whether or not I’m in a dream again.

“Little one?”

I look up.

“Aunt Tabitha?”

Okay, maybe a little confused.