Chapter 36

I'm in.My powers are back—and I almost wish they weren't.

A dirty, beaten-up man is chained to a radiator in an abandoned warehouse.

I recognize him instantly. It's the wiry, balding middle-aged defendant from Bernard's courtroom dream, the one pronounced not guilty of murdering Bernard's boy. When his smell reaches me, I gag. What the hell? He stinks so bad my only option is to disable my olfactory sense. He also looks much thinner than at the trial, his shifty eyes filled with insanity and desperation.

His face stony, Bernard approaches, wood saw in hand.

"I'm sorry," the chained guy croaks. "Please let me out. I didn't mean to kill him. Things got out of control. I was abused when I was—"

"You want out? Here." Bernard drops the saw and kicks it within the prisoner's reach.

The guy frantically saws at the chain but only destroys the tool in the process. He hurls the toothless saw back at Bernard with a guttural cry—and misses.

"You can't cut metal with a wood saw," Bernard says coldly. "You know what you really need to do. You're just not ready yet."

Oh, no. I kind of knew where this was going, but still. Mega yuck.

A few days pass in a blink, and Bernard returns with a new saw identical to the last. This time, the insanity in the prisoner's eyes is even clearer. He doesn't even plead with Bernard, just sits there, gaze glued to the saw in his tormentor's hands. Without a word, Bernard drops the saw to the floor and kicks it over. The guy grabs it and reluctantly places the sharp edge above his wrist.

I shift my gaze to Bernard's face, and when the nauseating sounds begin, I disable my hearing. From Bernard's expression, you'd think it was his wrist being sawed in half. He's muttering something, and though I'm not great at reading lips, I think he's saying, "I'm a monster. I've become worse than the very evil I was trying to—"

Suddenly, his eyes widen to the size of plates.

I follow his gaze.

His right arm a gory mess, the prisoner leaps at Bernard with an animalistic snarl, shouting something.

I reenable my hearing.

The guttural roar is something I'd expect from a wounded bear, not a man.

Clutching the saw in his remaining hand, the man slices at Bernard's face. The teeth of the saw bite into his forehead, and Bernard screams in pain.

I shudder. So this is how he got that scar.

Bernard shoves his attacker away. The malnourished man tips backward but instantly begins crawling back toward Bernard, growling like a demon.

Hand trembling, Bernard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gun.

Bang.

The growling stops, but the guy still crawls forward.

Bang.

The crawling stops as well.

Bernard keeps shooting until his gun is empty. Then he falls onto his hands and knees and vomits.

The dream shifts at this point. Bernard is staring at the empty walls of his apartment.

I swallow down the bitter tang of the previous dream. Okay, so his trauma loop is over. That's a good thing. Now that it's handled, I could in theory perform my job.

This dream is a memory, though, and I'm curious to let it play out.

The phone rings, and he lets voicemail pick up.

It's the ex-wife. "Your daughter's birthday is today. She misses you. Call her."

A shiver ripples through Bernard. "Why?" he whispers raggedly. "Why would she want to talk to a monster?"

The next dream is also a memory but takes place years later. Bernard watches his daughter from afar, his eyes filled with regret.

The next dream is later still. Bernard is sitting in a large conference hall surrounded by other humans. I recognize the keynote speaker.

It's Valerian.

In this memory, Valerian looks exactly as he appeared to me. Does that mean this is what he really looks like?

"By the end of next year, Bale Inc. will take virtual reality to the next level," the gorgeous illusionist says passionately, channeling Tony Robbins. "Further down the line, the world you see around you"—he clicks his remote control, and a space view of Earth appears on the screen behind him—"will be one of the many possible places people can inhabit. My hope is that most will thrive in these limitless illusory worlds that we will create for them, worlds undistinguishable from vanilla reality. It will be the biggest…"

I stop listening because something dawns on me.

What Valerian is trying to do. And why.

He wants to bring illusory worlds to billions of Earth humans. More than that, he wants his name—his and his company's—to be the name everyone associates with these worlds. He wants his name to be synonymous with illusions.

It's a mind-boggling ambition.

There's a relationship between Cognizant powers and the human belief in said powers. That's how Lilith, a vampire who declared herself a goddess of blood on a world she subjugated, became nearly unstoppable. By making his company synonymous with illusions, Valerian might become the most powerful illusionist on Earth, if not throughout the Cogniverse, all without declaring himself a god—something that would get him executed by the local Cognizant.

This must be why he hires me for shady jobs such as what I might be about to do: He needs to keep his nose clean as far as the Earth Councils are concerned.

Bernard's dream shifts to a time some nine months later. He's sitting in a meeting room with a bunch of people. Valerian is there too, looking at Bernard expectantly with those hypnotic blue eyes.

"The VR motion sickness is the most urgent issue to resolve before we go live," Valerian says. "Has your team made any progress on that?"

Bernard glances at his notepad. "We've been slaving at it for months, but we don't have much. We don't even know if the problem is caused by sensory conflict or postural instability. You're against removing body visualization…"

I ignore the rest of Bernard's speech. It's time to decide if I want to finish the job Valerian hired me for. Given this dream, it would take almost no effort to do so, as the dream happens to be about the very issue in question. Valerian is working on producing VR products that don't make people nauseated, a major hurdle facing the industry at the moment, so he's hired me to secretly provide Bernard with an inspiration—a solution to come "in a dream." The task is trivial, of course, since Gomorrah is light years ahead of Earth when it comes to all technology, but especially anything to do with virtual reality.

Fine. Given how easy this is, I'm just going to do it.

I leave my body and jump into Valerian's, then stride up to the drawing board. "What if we tried this?" I proceed to present a comprehensive solution, from hardware to software tricks.

Bernard's eyes light up greedily as I draw an algorithm that's particularly ahead of its time. I can't help but grin; the most difficult part of this job was actually memorizing all this.

When I'm done, I exit Valerian's body and wake Bernard with a jolt of my power. If I allow him to dream more, he could forget what he's just learned.

Pom is waiting eagerly in Bernard's nook in the tower of sleepers.

"That's it," I tell him when I reappear. "I've gone Inception on his ass."

Pom claps his tiny paws together. "So he'll make a technological discovery when he wakes up?"

"And he'll be positive he came up with it on his own. Valerian, of course, will profit." I leave the nook behind me to fly alongside Pom. "I wonder how often my kind has been responsible for big discoveries that are really just information from another world? Maybe this is how Earth's Dmitri Mendeleev came up with the periodic table in his dream. Niels Bohr is also said to have come up with the structure of the atom in his dream, and even Albert Einstein—"

I stop short because I notice something that can't be.

A sleeper who shouldn't be sleeping, yet is.

I look at Pom. "You see him too, right?" I point at the nook in question.

Pom turns a hodgepodge of colors. "I see. But isn't that—"

"Exactly." I whoosh toward the room.

"But how?" He flies after me.

"I think he was doing his best to stay awake until I'm executed, but he must've accidentally fallen asleep." I loom over the sleeper, still having trouble believing my eyes.

"Do you think it means—"

"Oh yeah." My voice crackles with excitement. "This must be the murderer."