Chapter Fifteen

Red

Dread was the weight moored to her chest, anchoring in her stomach. Red's eyelids squeezed tightly shut to keep reality at bay. When she opened them, she'd have to deal with the cause of her anguish.

She could physically feel that her lids were shut. And yet, there she was, looking out across the park. Twitching her head this way and that, Red tried to get her bearings, yet the view didn't change.

That was when Red realized she was asleep; this was a dream.

It was such an unusual occurrence.

Typically, when she put her head down, Red—physically or emotionally exhausted from her day—grabbed at sleep. Clung to it.

Sleep had always been an ally, healing and restoring her.

And when it was time to wake up, Red never used her alarm. She'd never had to. Red simply said to her brain what time worked with her schedule. "Tomorrow morning, I need to be up by six thirty. I want to lie in bed for ten minutes to organize my day." And it worked. Red would become aware around six fifteen, blinking her eyes open by six twenty.

Sleep was reliable and dreamless.

She didn't like this experience. Red was aware that she was lying in a bed, her body heavy, and a movie playing—not a movie unless she was an actor, right? That was what it felt like—like being on a movie scene and acting in some kind of improv. It was fiction, but the set, the other actors, and everything about this made her believe it was real.

I want to wake up now!

No, she didn't like these sensations at all, and this wasn't a particularly useful dream. Red didn't really understand it.

The corners of her lips twitched with irritation.

Wake up! Open your eyes.

For some reason, Red had decided not to park her car where she always parked when she came here to this place.

What place?

It seemed familiar. It reminded her of school.

Was this one of those dreams she'd heard about where people forgot to study for an exam? Or the one where they forgot to show up to a class until the last day of the semester? Or maybe her clothes would disappear, and she'd walk into the lecture hall naked?

If this place wasn't college, maybe it related to what she'd learned at The Farm?

Red processed with the part of the brain that stood to the side, watching events unfold. Why not just go with the dream and see what happened? Though it seemed like a whole lot of nothing, maybe her brain had something to tell her.

Red got out of the car and locked the doors. A woman, bending over to pick up a pair of eyeglasses from the ground, distracted her.

Another woman said, "Hey, those are mine. I guess they dropped when I fell. Give them back." There was an accusation in the tone of her words that Red didn't like.

With keys in hand, Red turned to her car, but now she was somewhere with all grass and no streets for parking.

She had to find the car, and she needed to get going.

When people dreamed, was it always this much work? How did they wake up in the morning feeling refreshed?

"You could take the train," Helper-woman finder-of-glasses said.

"Thanks," Red answered.

Queasy and floaty, Red saw a children's train—the kind that takes kiddos back to the parking lot at amusement parks. When she climbed in, she was the only person on the train; there wasn't even a conductor at the front running things.

The train chugged upward in a steep climb. The ride was rollercoaster-like. As she looked to her left and the right, there was no bottom. She would just freefall into nothingness if the train were to skip the track. Clinging to the sides, Red looked for a safety strap, a harness, something that could hold her in the car as it plunged down the rails. The car swooped down and rattled her back and forth as it straightened out.

"I don't dream. This must be important," she stuttered out through clacking teeth. Biting her tongue, her mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. "I need to pay attention." And with that thought, the train came to a sudden, lurching stop that threw her body forward, then back again.

As she winged around another loop, plastered to the side of the car by centrifugal force, she screamed into an empty sky that she really, really hated the sensation of being between the conscious world and this bizarro make-believe space.

She found herself in the car she'd parked earlier, her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, the airbag deflating in front of her. She couldn't feel her legs. "Are you okay?" she managed to ask the person beside her. When he didn't answer, she reached a hand toward him. "Are you okay?" she mustered.

The dream stopped.

She was awake now, lying there with heavy lids, not knowing what to do. Not knowing how to feel normal in her body. What was wrong with her?

Think! What's happening here?

Her brain didn't feel like her own. Red remembered the meeting that Color Code had about Havana Syndrome and the pressure that CIA victims felt in the atmosphere, and then something happened in their brains.

Red hadn't paid close attention the day of that lecture. The attacks came at embassies. John Green should be worried. He worked out of the embassy in Bratislava. But she was a field officer, and nobody focused a secret brain-destroying weapon attack on her.

No one knew who she was.

And as meanspirited as her assessment felt, it was better that Green get hit with the danger waves and not her. The CIA didn't treat women well when they showed up with a job-related disability. Yeah, things went really badly for them. And some even died from that inattention.

Now that Red had moved her thoughts to illness, she remembered she was in recovery. She'd been in an explosion on top of being sick.

This stupid dream about losing her car and getting stuck on the kiddie train from hell must be a fever dream.

Red hoped that once she was well again, she'd go back to her dreamless sleep.

And with that thought, Red blinked her eyes open to green tiles and fresh white sheets with not the slightest pink tinge from the Lebanese river water.

Did she slide into a new dream?

What was all this?

She skated her hand over the surface of her sheets. They weren't soft, but they weren't thin and rough like at the hotel.

An I.V. was stuck in her arm. That was it as far as medical equipment went—no heart monitors, no automatic cuff that would check her blood pressure every so many minutes.

She'd woken up to that before. This setup told her she wasn't in a life-or-death fight for survival. Whatever her situation, she was stable.

Then she remembered that in her dream, she was in some kind of event that left her without sensations.

Was that real?

With a sudden jerk, eyelids held rigidly open, Red threw back the covers and looked down her body. The visual of legs and toes wasn't enough. She curled up and touched her body parts, pinching until the sensation registered. Ten toes, two legs. Fingers, hands, arms. She touched her ears and felt her face and neck for bandaging.

Her eyes felt wild in her head as she looked around. She was so disoriented. So fuzzy.

Where the hell was she?

How did she get here?

A nurse in blue scrubs watched Red's odd behaviors as she drew up a syringe then pressed the liquid into Red's IV line. "Well, hello there. That was a surprising way to wake up." She chuckled. "I'm Tomi. I'm your nurse today."

Red shifted her leg as she twisted to see better. "What's wrong with me?" It seemed like the most reasonable place to start. Much higher on the need-to-know list than "Where the heck am I?"

"Salmonella Typhoid, I bet you got that typhoid vaccination, not the oral dose." Tomi wrinkled her nose.

"Yeah, that's right. I …" This woman was American. That meant Red hadn't gotten herself to the hospital down the road. That was the last plan she remembered. Drop the bag of money into Moussa's lap, walk out the door to a car, and ask for a ride to the hospital.

They didn't have American nurses at that Lebanese hospital.

Where the hell was she? How did she get here?

Red's mind scurried around, trying to find a way out from under the blanket of panic.

"Well, it's good you were taking your antibiotic pills." Tomi's voice was too bright for the darkness that covered Red. Something terrible had happened.

The explosion.

Moussa was dead.

She hadn't given him the money. He couldn't use it anymore.

Where was it? Where did she put the bag?

"You're probably feeling odd. You've been sedated to get some deep rest." Tomi smiled.

Red followed the tubing from her arm up to the IV.

"You should be coming around now. I just added your last dose of antibiotics. Your blood work is looking good. Counting backward, you were on the last days of this beast. You got severely dehydrated. How are you feeling?"

"I'm not cramping. Tired. A little woozy and disoriented. Other than that, okay." In Red's mind, she was back at the scene of the explosion. She was stepping over bodies and crushed walls. She's stumbled down the road out of the cloud of dust, coughing.

And now, she remembered deciding that no matter how sick she was, she shouldn't go to the hospital. It was going to fill with victims from the blast. They'd need all their medical staff to cover the bombing. She'd lie in some hallway, ignored because she was low on the triage scale. No one would be assessing her to see if her appendix burst.

She'd just be in the way.

For everyone's sake, Red decided she might as well go back to bed and try to survive.

But this scene didn't make any sense at all. "How'd I get here?"

"Some concerned friends went to find you and brought you in."

"Where's ‘in' exactly?"

"You're at a US Army base in eastern Türkiye." Tomi smiled. "Not many people know we exist, but here we are. And here you are."

Türkiye?

"I'm told your hotel was bombed. I'm sorry that happened to you. You came out of that relatively unscathed. You had crap in your lungs, but no ear issues, no brain trauma, no bruising or internal bleeding."

"I was in the women's room, sitting on the toilet, cramping from salmonella."

"That's your story?" Tomi laughed hard, the medical version of gallows humor, Red guessed.

"Yeah. Very glam, right?"

Tomi picked up her tablet and tucked it under her arm. "Well, if you feel up to it, you have a visitor."

Who in the world? "Yes. Thanks."

As Tomi went out, she held the door wide. "She's awake. You can see her now."