Chapter 7

In the cab,I sanitize the hand that touched Fluffster's fur and open Leal's journal.

Oh boy. There's a lot of boring stuff here—experiments on his poor birds and pages upon pages of stream of consciousness on mundane issues, including such gross bits as records of his bowel movements.

I search for Soma as a keyword and find nothing, just as Felix warned me.

Disappointed, I settle in and just read. Eventually, I come across what Felix mentioned—paranoid-sounding ramblings about a secret society.

They worship Phobetor, the lord of nightmares. They think him a god. Does he exist? If so, what is he? Could he be a creature that is to Cognizant what we are to humans?

I try to parse that paragraph:

There are worlds where we, the Cognizant, are worshipped as gods. In fact, this happened in the distant past of Earth too. For example, Loki, the god of mischief, was a famous probability manipulator. But what would it mean for some being to be a god to us Cognizant?

The cab stops next to a shiny building, interrupting my musings.

I ride to the top floor, where a large "Bale Inc" plaque proudly announces the name of the company, and approach the front desk.

"Mr. Bale, your guest is here to see you," the receptionist announces into her phone.

Valerian comes out wearing another bespoke suit. Puck, he looks good in it. Like, cover-of-fashion-magazine kind of good.

Oh, and he must be the Mr. Bale she was referring to. That's why the company is Bale Inc.

Huh. So if I married Valerian and followed the antiquated coverture custom of taking the husband's last name, I'd be Bailey Bale.

Not sure how I feel about that.

"Where's the technomancer?" Valerian looks around as if Felix could be hiding in a corner somewhere.

"Turns out he has another commitment." I put my hands in a praying position. "Please don't renege on the deal."

He sighs. "How about you join us in the meeting room?"

I follow him into a big, glass-encased space where two other men are waiting at a glass conference table. One I already know, I realize—a mustachioed guy who looks like the video game character Mario, but with a scar on his forehead.

It's Bernard, the human Valerian commissioned me to "inspire" in his dreams. It's the job Valerian paid me that nice bonus for—as he should have, now that I'm thinking about it. Not only was I busted by the New York Council while doing it, but the job itself was quite complex due to Bernard's endless trauma loops. The poor guy lost a child to a monster, then himself became monstrous in his revenge.

Looking at him now, you'd never be able to tell what happened. He's the very picture of a mild-mannered software engineer. I wonder if he's a psychopath on some level, or if what he did lives in every parent, ready to be triggered by a horrible-enough stimulus.

The other man I've never met before, and it's a shame.

Despite being waif thin, he's almost as attractive as Valerian, with similarly symmetrical masculine features and strong dark eyebrows. His hair is pure black, and his skin tone is similar to mine.

"Bailey Spade, please meet Bernard Anderson and Ratridevi Bhairava," Valerian says and sits down.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Anderson," I say to Bernard. "And you, Mr. Bhairava."

"Please call me Bernie." Bernard smiles. "Because of the Matrix movies, I never go by Mr. Anderson."

Another fan of that franchise. He and Felix would get along—particularly if I never tell Felix about Bernie's gruesome past.

"I also don't go by my last name," Mr. Bhairava says with a slight Indian accent. "Please call me Rattie."

I blink at him.

"It's a play on Ratri, the short version of my first name," he explains. "People here find it easier to say it that way."

Well, okay then. If he doesn't mind that nickname, so be it. For what it's worth, he doesn't look at all ratty. If I had to compare him to a rodent, I'd say he looks more like a very handsome beaver. Or an otter, though that's no longer a rodent. Or even a cheburashka—a koala-like creature that lives in the preserved equatorial jungle on Gomorrah.

"Do I also have to come up with a nickname?" I ask, plopping into a sleek office chair.

Could I go by Bails? Or Beernuts?

Valerian sits down. "No need. We don't all go by nicknames."

I salute crisply. "Fair enough, Mr. Bale, sir."

A sensuous smile tugs at the corner of his lips. "I do let those close to me call me Valerian." His voice deepens in a way that sends a tendril of excitement into my nether regions—an awkward situation, especially in front of Bernie and Rattie.

Taking a deep breath to settle my speeding pulse, I pull my sleeves down to cover Pom's fur—it's turned an embarrassing coral pink.

Valerian, meanwhile, is back to being all business. "Do you want your teams dialed in?" he asks Bernie and Rattie in a brisk tone.

"Not yet," Rattie says, and Bernie concurs.

"Fine." Valerian looks at me. "I've already explained the idea to them. You're going to be the model for a project we're calling Lucid Dreamer."

Rattie grins at me. "I convinced them that instead of this being a new character in an existing game, a new standalone VR game experience makes a lot more sense."

"One that uses the foundational work of the other projects," Bernie chimes in. "To deeply cut on prerequisite resources."

I drum my fingers on the glass table. "A new game? Does that mean it'll take longer?"

"In a way, yes," Valerian says. "But there's also good news. Rattie thinks his team could have a working level in a matter of days—between their Trembling in the Dark project and everything else, they have almost everything they need. It's just a matter of stitching bits together."

Trembling in the Dark? I heard about it from Felix. He said, and I quote, "It's the scariest horror video game of all time."

"So Lucid Dreamer will be scary?" I ask Rattie.

He shrugs. "If the game is about the mistress of dreams, I figured why not have her fight nightmares? Especially since my team is so good at that sort of thing."

"Valerian recently purchased Rattie's whole studio," Bernie explains. "They've been helping out on everything, but they want to sink their teeth into a game of their own."

"Which means a thousand-plus people will be working on this," Valerian says meaningfully.

Oh, puck. No wonder he said this is a big ask; the budget must be in the millions.

Bernie opens his mouth to speak, but his phone rings. He surreptitiously glances at the screen, and a tender smile appears on his face as he takes the call.

"Hi, honey, thank you so much for calling me back." Muting his phone, he looks at us apologetically. "It's my daughter. We haven't spoken in years. I'll be right back."

Valerian nods and Bernie takes the phone out of the room.

So they reconnected? In his dreams, it was something that tormented Bernard—I mean, Bernie. Perhaps having gone through his trauma loops under my watch, he feels better and has reached out to his family?

"Let me answer this for Bernie," Rattie says. "We'll obviously need to figure out more of the story than simply ‘fight nightmares,' but given my team's expertise and that Valerian wants the game bumped to phase one, this is the smart play."

"Right," I say, feeling a bit overwhelmed. "Whatever can speed this up sounds good to me."

Bernie comes back with an apology.

Ignoring him, Valerian gives me a knowing smile. "I never finished explaining why having a working level is good news. We have testers equipped with the Illusion Scope prototypes, waiting for something to play. There are twenty thousand of them, and growing." He looks at me pointedly.

I stare back at him blankly; other than being even more impressed with the budget he's throwing at this thing, I don't see what the special good news is.

Disembodied letters suddenly appear in the air in front of me. They look like LEGO pieces and form a paragraph of text—clearly the work of Valerian's illusion powers:

When thousands of humans play that demo, your powers will get a boost—I know this from personal experience. Not as big a boost as when the game goes live, obviously, but a noticeable one. If you're lucky, that boost might be what you need to best your mother.

Wow. I was settling in for a wait that would span months, but it turns out I might be able to save Mom in a matter of days.

I beam at him. "This is great news indeed. What can I do to speed this up?"

"I got that part," Valerian says to Rattie and Bernie. "Get in touch with your teams before Bailey and I leave."

We're leaving? Okay then.

Rattie presses a button on the side of the desk, and a bunch of giant screens slide from the ceiling and cover the walls. A video conference app chimes, and soon every screen displays the enthusiastic faces of hundreds of people—most likely developers, designers, animators, audio engineers, and so on.

Please introduce yourself and we'll go, Valerian tells me via the LEGO text.

"Hi, everyone," I say, looking into the cameras. "My name is Bailey, and I will be the model for the Lucid Dreamer project. I also happen to know something about game design, so I'd be happy to help in any way I can—just let me know what you need when you need it." I keep going in that vein, eventually starting to sound like an army general psyching his troops for an attack.

"Thank you," Valerian says when I finish my speech. "Why don't we go to the motion capture lab so we can get started?"

Everyone applauds and waves to me as we leave.

I feel pleasantly odd, as if I just took a tiny sip of diluted vampire blood for the first time.

Am I high on being involved in game development, or is it Valerian's proximity?

As we enter the elevator, I notice him watching me intently.

"I feel strange," I blurt. "In a good way."

Valerian presses the button for the fifteenth floor. "There's a chance your powers got boosted by merely having that many humans believe in you as the game model for a dreamwalker-related game," he says in a low voice. "When my own power got boosted, I felt very peculiar." He closes his eyes, as if in bliss, and I store that expression in my memory banks for use in the dream world.

I imagine that's what his O-face looks like.

The elevator opens, and we enter a room with green screens for walls and enough computer equipment to oversee a space launch.

Valerian picks up a small piece of cloth from a chair and hands it to me. "Put this on."

It's a onesie-like outfit made from a blue material with big gray dots. I look at it, then at him.

Nope, he's not kidding. He actually expects me to wear it.

I heave a sigh. "Where's the fitting room?"

An amused gleam appears in his ocean-blue eyes. "Why?"

I don't justify that with a reply.

"I'll just look away." Matching actions to words, he turns his broad back to me.

At least I think his back is to me. He can be using his powers to make me think he's looking away, while in actuality, he's standing there with a magnifying glass directed at my privates.

Then again, where do I draw the line when it comes to paranoia? He can just as easily use his power to make himself invisible and stand in any fitting room—like he did the other day in the bathroom while I showered.

It's a recollection that should enrage me, but it makes me feel warm and tingly instead.

Without further ado, I strip off my clothes and pull on the onesie. It's stretchy, so it fits.

I look at Valerian's back.

There's a tension in his shoulders that I choose to interpret as him suffering with the effort not to turn around and gawk at my awesomeness.

"Done," I announce.

He turns around and grins at me before going to a nearby table to pick up a bunch of objects that look like the dots attached to my outfit.

"I need to glue these to your face," he says, approaching me.

"You what?"

"They're sterile, I swear," he says, and before I can object, he attaches the first one to my forehead, the tips of his fingers brushing over the skin around the dot.

Holy digitization. I had no idea my forehead was an erogenous zone.

He attaches another dot to my forehead, then another.

My breathing turns shallow.

Valerian grins, his eyes gleaming wickedly, and starts gluing dots to my nose, cheeks, and near my lips. By the time he finally attaches a dot to my chin, I feel like I need a change of panties.

Leaving me utterly discombobulated, he goes to set up the primitive Earth equipment.

"Can you follow instructions?" he asks with a smirk.

I clear my dry throat. "What do you need me to do?"

He asks me to display different emotions with my face, and I do my best—sometimes doing such a good job that Pom changes color on my wrist to match the expression. He then asks me to move for him, directing me this way and that. The weird part is that I find all this bossing around kind of hot—and not just the parts where he asks me to sway my hips and things like that.

Hours of motion capture later, Valerian says, "That's enough. We should be good for the demo, but might need you back after that."

I hold my breath as he carefully removes the dots from my face and turns his back to me again.

I shake off my hormone-induced daze and slip out of the onesie. Before putting on my original outfit, I use up all of my remaining hand sanitizer on my face and body—because that's the rational thing to do.

However much it turns me on, I can't forget that Valerian's touch is full of Earth germs.

"I have some business on Gomorrah," he says when he turns around. "But you should stay and work with Rattie and the team for as long as you can. In fifteen hours, though, I'll need you for the first part of the Senate investigation, so meet me back at Erato's then."

Erato's? "We're eating there again?"

He shakes his head. "In fifteen Earth hours, it will be midnight on Gomorrah. Instead of dining, we'll be invading Erato's dreams."

"We?" Is he including himself in this dreamwalking adventure?

"We'll talk details after you make a dream link and get away from Erato's dwelling. I assume you can dreamwalk in a dryad?"

"I don't see why not, but—"

"Good. Let's go."

He leads me back to the elevator, and as he presses the button for the top floor, I recall something I've been meaning to ask him. "Does the word ‘Soma' mean anything to you?"

He stiffens for a second, then his expression smooths out. "Can you give me some context?"

"It's something Hekima mentioned in his last moments," I say, puzzled by his reaction. "He made it sound like a place where dreamwalkers live. It also sounded like at least one illusionist family lived there too—Hekima's own."

Valerian's jaw tightens. "You can't trust anything that murderer said."

"So you don't know?" I ask—though it's obvious to me that he does.

"I'm sorry. I can't help you with this."

"But—"

"If you want me to keep helping you, drop it," he growls just as the elevator doors open.

Fine. If he's going to ask me nicely like that, I guess I won't pry anymore.

He strides back into the meeting room, and I follow. Bernie and Rattie are there, but instead of the teleconference, the screens feature drawings of bone-chilling monsters and mind-bending environments. Clearly, the work on the demo is proceeding at breakneck speed.

"My team is extremely excited," Rattie says to Valerian. "I already have some stuff I want to run past you."

Valerian holds up his hand. "I have a prior commitment, but Bailey can serve in my stead." He glances at me. "I trust her implicitly when it comes to the Lucid Dreamer."

As Valerian leaves us there, Bernie looks at me dubiously, but Rattie doesn't bat an eye. "So, Bailey," he says, "in your opinion, when in someone's dream, should the dreamwalker character actually walk? Some folks suggested she fly or teleport around."

"Let her walk," I say. "If dreamwalking were real, I imagine all of the above would be possible, but she might still walk by default as that's what's familiar and doesn't require extra effort and concentration."

"Logical," Rattie says. "And no flying cuts on dev time."

"We haven't done flying in VR before," Bernie adds.

"Flying also has a higher chance of giving the gamer VR sickness," I say, without sharing why I think so. There are flying games on Gomorrah that did that to me—and I'm an experienced flyer, at least in my dreams.

Rattie peppers me with more questions, and I answer as best I can, drawing on my game design knowledge when I need to, as well as on dreamwalker experience.

After a while, Rattie yawns in the most contagious manner. "I think it's time for a few hours in the pod," he says apologetically. "I'm still on Bangalore time."

Bernie stifles a yawn of his own. "It's not your jet lag. I could use some time in the pod myself."

Catching the bug, I can't help but yawn too. "What's this pod business?" I stretch to banish the sleepiness.

Rattie stands up. "Game development is a crazy business. We often work so much there isn't time to go home and sleep."

"Which is why we installed sleeping pods here at the New York offices," Bernie says, rising to his feet as well.

I look at each man in turn. "You sleep on the job?"

Rattie shrugs. "When it's needed. Usually during crunch times."

I nod, then yawn again.

"We have a pod not assigned to anyone," Bernie says. "It's yours if you want a power nap." Seeing me cringe in disgust, he adds, "It's brand new. You'd be the first person to use it."

Curiosity getting the better of me, I agree.

Rattie leads the way until we reach a room filled with the aforementioned pods—which look like a hybrid between a rocket and a coffin.

Rattie opens the clear plastic lid of one of them. With a wave, he lies down, shuts the lid, and closes his eyes.

"This is the pod I mentioned." Bernie points at one that does indeed look brand new.

"Thanks," I say. "I just might use it."

Bernie smiles and heads over to a pod that has a picture of a child glued on the inside. I recognize the image as that of his daughter—I've seen her in his dreams. Climbing in, he mumbles something about sweet dreams and closes the lid.

Huh. I never realized game development was such hectic work that you don't even get to go home to sleep. I think I might stick to dreamwalking as my primary career, after all—at least once I save Mom.

Setting my alarm on "vibrate" so I don't wake up others, I climb into my own pod and close my eyes.