Chapter 15 – Dream a Little Dream of Me
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That’s a problem I haven’t had much lately.

I study the box. Except for its size, it looks like one of those boxes that jewelry often comes in. It even has a white ribbon holding it closed. I remove the ribbon.

I hold the box at arms length to open it. No explosion. Good. I peek out through one eye. Hmm. No unearthly glow. Good. I look closer.

There is an axe sitting in the box. A battle axe that looks like something out of a video game, or anime. Stamped on the side of the blade are the letters TMI. Knowing I might regret it, I touch it.

Nothing.

“Over here.”

I turn around. There I am. Sitting on the edge of my bed. I’m wearing a really cute dress I’ve never seen before. It looks good on me. The shoes are nice, too.

“I know, right?” Doppel-me says, “I designed it while I was waiting for me to finish with this memory.”

Of course she can read my mind. She isn’t really there.

“Duh. It was too dangerous to try to shovel the bits of information in all the places it should go, so I made this memory to allow me to absorb the information at a more reasonable pace later, that is, now.”

I wonder if it was actually interactive, or if I had just known exactly how I would respond, and programmed the memory based on that.

“A little of one, a little of the other.”

“Get to the point. Please?”

She does.

Expanded me clearly believed in truth in labeling. It is way too much information.

The bad news is that if I go through the door again, there is a big chance that I will come completely apart, like I almost had in the Depths. The worse news is that it will probably eventually happen anyway, if I continue to use my abilities. Plus, If it happens here, I will probably take a substantial chunk of the nearby (say, within a hundred miles or so) population with me. No boiling seas or sinking continents, though, so there’s that.

Doppel-me comes across as sort of dreamy while she tries to describe what the coming apart really was. It wasn’t death, or even an end exactly, she said. The word she kept coming back to was transcendence. Becoming something more than I was. I get the creepy feeling that I had almost given in to whatever it was, and never made it back here.

So the impostors (as I have decided to think of them) might not have been completely full of it. Maybe that had happened on their world. People transcending left and right, taking big chunks of the population with them. That would have been freaky, and could make them paranoid about me.

Most of the rest of the report is about the impostors’ private little chats. Understanding their language had been no challenge for mega-me, and Doppel-me gives me the breakdown. It had mostly been discussion about the best way to deal with me. The suspicious one had actually been arguing that they should just let me go (yay!) and then take steps to make me look bad (boo!) during the upcoming insertions (what?). She didn’t win that argument.

Doppel-me says that the insertions probably referred to more monsters being sent in.

One of the men had suggested the possibility of me being kept as a backup in case one of the chosen vessels failed. All three of the others shot that down immediately. If one of the vessels failed, one of them (the impostors) would just be out of luck.

There had been a lot of mentions of their devices and technology as they monitored me. All considered, it really seemed like they did not understand their own technology. Doppel-me suggests that they probably hadn’t invented it, or even been trained by whoever did. More likely they had stumbled onto someone else’s abandoned installation. That whole world, outside the little compound, was dead.

“Is that it?” I ask out loud.

“No, they also said things indicating that they are on a timetable. Their big moment will be twelve nights from now.”

Big moment?

“They didn’t say anything more detailed.”

Is there any chance that it was all just a show? That they knew I’d be able to understand?

“We couldn’t rule it out completely, but we’d rate it as very unlikely.”

So, there are going to be more monsters coming in. The more I use my abilities to stop them, the more likely I’ll be to explode, taking the greater Austin area with me. If I go back through the door to try to stop things there, I’ll very likely explode, but I probably won’t take anyone with me. Is that it?

“Mostly. You’ll have at least some warning before you dissociate, so you can keep using your abilities until then. Changing clothes has hardly any impact at all, so you can do that pretty safely, at least until you feel dissociation coming on. ”

“Yay?”

“You should also be able to pull up TMI there,” she indicates the axe, “without a problem.”

“Why not just use Molly?”

“Molly pulls really heavily on the connection. Use her much and we’re a goner.”

So, I’m doomed.

“Not necessarily. There is a possible way around the problem.”

It probably involves going through the door.

“It does.”

She explains it to me. It goes in one ear and out the other, but I can feel some residue left behind. Ugh. Bad imagery. Anyway, if it comes down to it, I have an emergency back up plan, that I definitely have a small chance of surviving. What are the odds of me ever having to use it?

“One more thing you should know,” Dopple-me says.

Great. What is it? I’m going to lose my abilities anyway? I’m destined to die?

“Your period is going to start tomorrow.”

Worse.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I tell Meg everything. For the first time, I see a little bit of fear in her eyes. She hides it quickly, and I try not to let her see that I saw it. I promise her that I will find the door and go through before I take any risk of blowing up here. I promise I will let the police and the others deal with any monsters unless I have to get involved to save lives. I promise I’ll be careful.

That last one might have been pushing it.

We write up an email to Deputy Marshal Miller. We cover the basics, including that there would probably be more monsters over the next few days, and when to expect the big event. We leave out the possibility of me going thermonuclear. And the part about my period.

All that and I still have to go to school. On Halloween.

My school allows the kids to dress up on Halloween, so I can’t resist wearing my Ozma costume. Although I do chicken out and go with Cindy’s original, not-so-backless version. Kristen gives me a hard time about it, but considering she doesn’t wear her costume at all, she’s one to talk.

It turned out maybe a third of the kids come in actual costumes (as opposed to ‘High School Student’, ‘Serial Killer’, and other non-costumes). I stand out a little more than I like, but at times the attention is sort of nice.

When I get out of school, a familiar car is waiting just this side of the bus stop.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Parker,” Deputy Marshall Lewis says, “Would you mind if we had a chat?”

He’s polite enough, but I can tell it wasn’t exactly a request. I consider just getting on the bus, or even walking away. Nah.

“Let me just text Ms. LeDonne.”

I let him hold the car door for me. I am a princess after all.

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“Some residents reported seeing a man or teenage boy encased in glass leap from the top of their neighborhood library last night,” he says, “Would you know anything about that?”

I suppress a smile. I don’t want to be proud of baiting Jay to make a fool of himself. I don’t want to be like my father. But he is such a complete asshole. all I did was give him the opportunity to show that to Valeria. What is the question again? Oh, right.

“That was Jay Duncan. He lives at the Heart of Hope Home,” I reply, “but you probably already knew that.”

He doesn’t blink.

“Like I said in the email, the people behind all this stuff were badmouthing me to the other kids. I was trying to convince one of them that I was one her side when Jay showed up. I ignored him. He attacked me. I dodged.”

“Did it work? Did she believe you?”

“Yes.”

“So about these people.”

He spends an hour quizzing me on every detail of my expedition out of the world. I still leave out the part about my status as a weapon of mass destruction, but otherwise I tell him what he wants to know.

When I tell him it wouldn’t be safe for me to go back through the door, his face falls. He probably had high hopes of using me as a spy on the impostors. He tries to persuade me to make one more trip, but I refuse. It would almost certainly end me, I say, and not get him anything. He isn’t happy.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

“Nice dress,” says Cindy, “where did you find it?”

The car had dropped me off just in time for dinner, and I’d changed into the dress Doppel-me had been wearing as I walked into the dining room.

“I made it up,” I say, “sort of.”

I give a really short version of my trip through dreamland and follow-up conversation with myself. I once again leave out the worst parts. I really don’t want them to be afraid of me, and there is no way I’m going to risk blowing up in the real world.

“You’re not telling us something . . .,” Kelly observes.

Damn it. Well, then . . .

“Let’s just say I warned me to add certain products of a feminine nature that I’ve never had to deal with before in my purse for tomorrow.”

“I was going to finish, ‘and that’s okay’,” Kelly continues.

Oops. It does the trick anyway. With a little sympathy and a little snickering, the subject is quickly changed.

On my way back to my room, Henry and Kristen catch up with me.

“If you need any help or tips tomorrow,” Kristen says, “you can come get either of us.”

Henry just nods.

My friends rule.

The next day I find the directions on the box surprisingly easy to follow, so I don’t end up needing any help or advice. I mostly convince myself that I would have asked for it if I had needed it.

All in all, it isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I know it’s different for everyone, but since I’d built my body to my own spec, I guess I’d gone easy on myself there. I wonder if I should feel guilty about that. Nah, I’m okay with it.

At around eleven that evening, the chime sounds. I call Valeria and tell her that I’m going to sit this one out, but make her promise she would let me know if I’m needed.

“I need you,” she says.

“For fighting monsters.”

“Spoilsport.”

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I can’t do it. I can’t just sit in my room while people might be getting hurt or killed. Especially if Valeria is one of them. I’ll just go hang out at the edges, and only get involved if I’m needed. Hardly any use of my abilities at all.

Outside the fence, I orient on Valeria. Ping.

Damn.

Each time I had used my abilities since my little self lecture, I had gotten a sense of how much closer I was bringing my inevitable explosion. A sort of ping. Changing outfits was barely perceptible. I had started to open a door to outside on my wall, but that had pinged big time. I reached around a corner and grabbed TMI. Hardly any ping at all. I strapped the axe to my back.

Orienting on Valeria pings. Not huge, but not something I want to maintain for any length of time. Luckily, we had shared locations with each other on our phones, so I have back up. I bring up a map, pick a course, and run.

Running, it turns out, doesn’t register at all, if I keep myself to merely ridiculous speeds. I do a little parkour, and that is fine, too, until I mistarget a jump and have to think fast to recover. Getting into the zone will be an issue. Anything I try that couldn’t be handled by increased speed and reflexes pings the meter.

This time I can feel the laws of physics laughing at me. Stupid physics.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I catch up with Valeria in the parking lot of some pricey looking condos in Southwest Austin. A couple of times I’d had to slow myself down as the meter started to ping, so I’m not especially surprised to see that the show is over. Valeria floats just off the ground next to Michelle and a guy I haven’t seen before. He’s on fire, like Michelle, and standing in a puddle of melted asphalt. That has to be hard on his shoes.

They’re about ten feet away from a pile of metal and goo, which is rapidly becoming more goo and less metal. There are a couple of flipped over cars, and another car sticking out of the side of one of the condos. It looks like it had been thrown at the patio doors and jammed partway through.

A police car sits at the far end of the parking lot, with two cops crouched behind it. Their guns are drawn, but they aren’t pointing them at anything, now.

Michelle and her boy counterpart are discussing something, their heads close, and on fire. Valeria is looking at her phone.

My phone buzzes.

- All clear. I’m fine. V.

That’s sweet.

- You sure are. At least from where I’m standing.

Valeria looks around. I give a little wave when her eyes pass over me. She says something to the others and shoots off into the sky. I decline to be startled a few seconds later when she drifts in behind me.

“I thought you were sitting this one out?”

“It turns out that that is harder than it sounds.”

“I don’t want you exploding on me,” she said, “Wait, no, that’s not---”

She’s cute when she’s flustered. I decide to rescue her.

“I know what you meant. I don’t want to explode either. But I can’t just sit at home wondering what’s going on. I want to at least be nearby in case I’m needed.”

“We’re going to need a better plan,” we both say.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

We have a chance to try the better plan the next night.

When the chime sounds, I get into uniform, TMI strapped to my back, and jump up onto my roof to wait. Four minutes later I fall straight up a hundred feet or so into Valeria’s arms. It’s chilly up there, so we stay close to preserve body heat while we watch for anything unusual in East Austin.

About ten minutes in, Valeria gets a text from one of the chosen I hadn’t met yet, Alan. He’s the other gravity controller. My displeasure apparently shows on my face because I get a major eye-roll from Valeria. Alan has spotted something stomping around and was going in to check it out.

Valeria drops me off a block out. None of the others would be particularly thrilled to see the two of us together. Or me at all, probably. I come in through some heavily treed yards so I can stay out of sight, but keep an eye on things.

Alan had alerted the whole gang, but Valeria and Jay are the only ones who make it in time to do anything about the thing. The thing in question is another near miss on mythology. This time a three headed monster with one lizard head, one vaguely lionlike head, and a fanged dog head. It has wings, but they don’t look big enough to let it fly.

It really doesn’t stand a chance. Either Valeria or Alan could have taken it out pretty easily on their own. Jay has to put on a show, though. When the thing starts to fall upward, Jay comes in under it and starts slashing at it with glass-looking blades he projects from his hands. It gets messy. Sadly, his force-field is frictionless, so the stuff just slides off of him.

None of them have noticed the thing’s twin sitting on the nearby roof, watching, ready to pounce. That’s okay, though. It hasn’t noticed me, either.

I’m cleaning TMI when Valeria drops next to me. She looks at the remains of the monster, already melting away.

“Sitting it out doesn’t work for you, does it?”

I shrug.

The monsters keep coming. By the weekend, there have been four more insertions (if that’s what they are). Valeria and I make it to two of them, but Valeria gets the all clear on the other two before we get there. We have noticed by now that they always happened close enough to one of the chosen that they can get there before the police. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

The late nights are starting to affect Valeria. Friday night she’s looking pretty tired. I suggest she sit out whatever happens on Saturday.

“I will if you will,” is her response.

So much for that, then.

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