“With all due respect, sir, if the subject has any more treatments, we run the risk of damaging him permanently.” The tall man pointed to the readings on the screen beside him. “Why not just scrap him and start with a new subject?”
“Because he’s mine.” A grown man saying such a childish thing should have been amusing, but his harsh tone sent chills down Cym’s spine.
Cym walked around the sphere and saw a small, round window on one side with a panel next to it. Inside lay an eerily familiar-looking teenage boy strapped to a metal frame, with enough wires sticking out of his body to make him look like a porcupine. Cym turned to look at the trio behind him. How could they talk about the boy so callously?
The Colonel stalked over to where Cym stood and used his fist to smash a button next to a speaker on the black sphere. “Do you hear that, boy? You’ll stay in there until you know who you belong to!”
The boy’s eyes cracked open slightly. They were ringed with dark circles, and the corners were lined with pain, but he shakily held up a hand as far as his restraints would allow and gave the man a one-fingered salute.
Cym recognized his storm-gray eyes and gasped. Horror stole over him, leeching strength from his body. How dare they?
A wordless growl escaped the Colonel. “Do it.”
“But… sir!”
“Do it now!”
“Yes sir. Prep Subject Fourteen, maximum dose this time.”
After snapping the ominous order to his partner, the short one bustled around the room, poking at keyboards and squinting at computer monitors. The tall one took a large vial of clear liquid and inserted it into a compartment near the window.
The horror unfolding in front of him snapped Cym out of observer mode. He couldn’t just stand there and let it happen—even if he was fairly certain he was only in a dream.
But if what was happening wasn’t real, what could he do?
Cym didn’t know shit about magic, especially dream magic. His experience was too horribly lacking for him to do anything without explosive results, which meant he was left with mundane methods. When ear-piercing screams began to emerge from the sphere, Cym’s mind kicked into overdrive, forcing him into hyperfocus mode, and it only took seconds to spit out the answer.
If this was dream, what couldn’t he do?
Cym spotted a heavy-looking microscope, picked it up and swung it at the head of the Colonel, who collapsed to the ground like a bag of ground meat. Neither of the scientists reacted, so he gave them the same treatment. Both fell to the ground without uttering a sound. It was so ridiculously easy, Cym was disgusted it had taken him so long to figure it out.
The second the room was full of unconscious assholes instead of conscious ones, Cym turned his attention to the black sphere. Distress was fucking with his concentration and it was amplifying with each of Fourteen’s heart-wrenching screams.
Cym smacked himself repeatedly trying to bring himself back to the task at hand. He couldn’t get Fourteen out if he collapsed under pressure, and Fourteen had helped Cym so many times already. Even if this was only a dream, Cym couldn’t stand by and let the man be tortured right in front of him.
Cym tried to open the sphere, but it had no visible latch on the outside, so he abandoned the idea. He tried to read the screens to get some idea of how to stop the machine, but the words swam in front of him and refused to take any kind of recognizable shape.
Fuck. Stupid dream bullshit.
The stress of the situation was causing Cym’s higher mental functions to go haywire, and he became increasingly frantic. Smashing random buttons on the machine did nothing, neither did pounding on the window of the sphere helplessly. His knowledge of computers was limited to what he had learned from a bristly librarian a few weeks ago, and it hadn’t prepared him for this.
He had to do something. The boy’s screams were getting weaker, and they kept getting cut off by choking sounds.
Cym slapped himself again. He had to stop reacting and think. He tried to remember what the short man had been doing right before Fourteen started screaming, but all he knew for certain was that he had been poking at one of the computers. With no other options, Cym ran over and began to trash the computer station, hurling the monitors to the floor, ripping out chords and smashing hard drives.
His systematic destruction of the lab was so noisy that it took a moment for him to realize the screaming had stopped. The monitor he was using to beat against a tower fell to the ground with a loud crash and he raced back to the sphere, fearful of what he would find.
It was dark inside now, but it was still sealed tight. Cym could neither see nor sense any movement inside.
A scream of frustration tore from his throat, and he kicked the sphere as hard as he could. There was a hiss, and a crack appeared in the smooth surface of the sphere, revealing a tiny opening.
Huh.
Sometimes violence was the answer. Stupid teen self-help magazines weren’t so helpy after all.
Cym wedged shaking fingers into the crack and heaved, expecting to encounter resistance, but it slid open smoothly.
Small as he was, there wasn’t enough room in the sphere for Cym to fit inside too, but he was able to sit on the rim of the opening and inspect the boy. In the dim light of the pod, Cym could make out Fourteen’s closed eyes and the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Tremors racked his entire body and caused the wires attached to him to tear at his flesh. Cym knew very little about first aid, but he knew leaving Fourteen in the machine was a bad idea. He needed to get him someplace safe.
The wires were the first things that had to go, so he removed them as gently as he could. Some were taped to Fourteen’s skin like electrodes, while others were buried in his flesh. Cym’s stomach rolled as he took them out. Medical stuff was not his strong suit.
When he finally finished—no thanks to his useless, scaredy-cat stomach—Cym pulled Fourteen’s young, lanky body out of the sphere into his lap and held him close. It was good this was a younger version of Fourteen, otherwise Cym wouldn’t have a prayer of moving him. Grown up Fourteen was a wall of densely packed muscle.
“What do I do with you now? How can I keep you safe?” Cym looked at Fourteen’s poor, battered face and stroked his brow.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember Cym was in a dream and that the real Fourteen was sleeping safely beside him, especially when his heart was telling him the boy needed him now. Cym had no intention of allowing further harm to come to him, dream or no.
Cym leaned down to press a kiss into Fourteen’s dark hair and whispered, “I will keep you safe. I promise.”
When Cym pulled away, storm-gray eyes opened and looked into his. The room glowed brightly as the walls melted away, and the contents of the room shifted and bent in a dizzying array of colors. Once again, Cym’s stomach decided to be an asshole and let him know how it felt about the situation.
You are a dream stomach, jerkface. You do not get a say in things!
He closed his eyes and held onto Fourteen as tightly as possible. Cym couldn’t keep Fourteen safe if he lost him in the Dreamscape.
When he was able to make out his surroundings again, he was sitting in a field holding a very awake and very adult Fourteen in his lap.
Cym’s first coherent thought was surprise that Fourteen’s sheer mass wasn’t crushing him, and before he was able to finish pondering the concept, he was instantly overwhelmed by the weight of the man on top of him.
