I lie on a slick wet floor. Blood. I bolt upright and crawl out of the wetness. Blood everywhere. I cry out. Then my eyes focus. It’s not blood. It’s sweat. I’m on the floor of the Somnus University lab.
I’m awake.
Emotions zip in and out of my veins, sending my heart pounding and my breath gasping. The heightened Nightmare emotions fade to a dull pulse, like old dreams used to.
The scene I just lived through does no such thing. My actions scream at me, pointing an accusing finger. Reminding me of the kris knife in my hand, the Spore girl pinned to the sandy floor of the Arena. My arm striking her.
Striking as though it was the only thing that mattered.
In the Nightmare, it was. It consumed my mind and my impulses, yet in the Real World, I can’t explain it. But I know one thing:
I’m a murderer.
I murdered a girl in the Nightmare. Not by accident either. I craved it. I picture her body on a couch under the care and watch of a loved one, twitching like Nole’s did. Her breath disappears. Her green eyes never open.
Her skin turns cold.
Her mom or sister or boyfriend won’t know what happened to her. They’ll be left to wonder what could have possibly gotten to her in the Nightmare to stop her heart from beating.
I crawl to the nearest trash bin and am sick. How could I lose myself in the Nightmare so deeply? That’s not who I am. At least, it’s not who I was. But it’s who I am now. A murderer.
The clock reads 12:02. Midnight.
Something about that doesn’t seem right. I spit several times into the bin, then wipe my sleeve across my mouth, trying to recall what happened before I entered the Nightmare. It all comes back with another sickening wave. The cure. It failed me.
Not only that, but when it seemed to work yesterday—was it only yesterday?—it hadn’t delayed the virus but merely skipped a single day. I look at the clock again. I returned to the Nightmare for eighteen hours instead of what should have been seventeen.
But it didn’t work at all the second day. Why not? I’d done nothing different. Luc said the virus couldn’t be cured. Not without his father, Hex Galilei. Galilei holds the answers . . . for both of us. For all of us. Maybe that’s why Luc hates the Spores so much—he’s jealous that they can wake up at will.
But if that’s true, why didn’t the girl I killed simply wake up before I stabbed her? Why didn’t she save herself?
I pull up my email. There are 96 new messages from clients. The first 5 are enough to tell me what I need to know. The cure hasn’t worked on them—not even the first time. From what I read, I’m the only person who had positive results. Many of the messages are from people who are afraid they took the dose incorrectly.
I don’t know what to tell them.
My social medias show the same responses. Several people call me out as a fraud and crook. Others demand their money back. Some ask where I’ve gone—I sold the serum and then disappeared.
I slam the laptop shut and press my fist to my eyes.
What have I become? A failed-cure-peddling monster who murders people inside the Nightmare. I feel like I’m watching someone else—viewing a movie screen and not my own life.
Messages keep coming as the approaching morning gains speed. All I can do is sit and read them. I read every single one, hoping beyond hope for a positive response. Just one single success apart from mine.
The closest I get is a woman whose entry into the Nightmare was delayed by an hour.
One hour.
That’s proof that something inside my serum fights the virus, but I have no idea where to start in figuring out what that is. And I have little heart to try. I can’t return anyone’s money, it’s spent. Gone. I have nothing to give them except the snake oil I concocted.
So I do the only thing I can: I fulfill the last of my orders to cries of outrage and emails with death threats. In a detached, zombie-like state, I finish mixing the serum. I package it and deliver it to the designated mailboxes.
I welcome the email threats. I deserve to be killed for what I’ve done here and in the Nightmare, even though no one knows what I did in the Nightmare. No one needs to know.
My thoughts screech to a halt. Someone might know. Someone could have been in the Arena audience and now recognize me out here in the Real World. Unless everyone inside Tenebra has run out of time or unless they’re all in LifeSuPods.
Crixus hinted as much: that everyone else in Tenebra had run out of Sleeps, earned their citizenships, and accepted their new lives.
But still . . . nervous energy wiggles in the back of my mind.
I pull The Fire Swamp up to the final house and deliver the last package to the mailbox. Then I move a couple streets down and park in the dark. Sunrise nears. I won’t be awake to see it, but I long for it.
The night is gone, and I’m starving. It’s only an hour until 6:00 a.m. My Sleep time. How did it come up again so soon? At this point, it would almost be a relief to leave the Real World.
And yet I fear returning to the Nightmare. I fear what I’ll do when I’m back in there. Will I kill someone else? Will those deafening emotions take over again? Will I be placed under arrest and sentenced for my crime?
I’ve never felt so out of control.
I fill my lone pot with potatoes and water and set them to boiling, hardly paying attention to my actions. I collapse back onto the couch. I’ll need to move the house—haul it to a new city, a new state. A new . . . somewhere. I don’t need the university lab anymore. In fact, I don’t want to be anywhere near it.
I close my eyes and try to stop thinking, to shut out the voices, including my own. I focus on the hiss of the propane feeding the flame beneath my pot. The soothing roll of water boiling. The subtle tick, tick, tick of my alarm clock. It’s been silenced since yesterday, but I don’t move to turn it on. The Nightmare will come. My serum and my will are useless against it.
I feel it before I see it—the chill and the darkness stealing over my body. Lapping at my emotions like a stray mutt on the streets. It feeds off my helplessness, off my defeat. And it draws me toward it like a captor would coax its prey.
I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to kill. I don’t want to face what I’ve become inside that place.
As the black veins crawl across my vision, I notice with a sick lurch that I’ve left the potatoes on the hot burner. They’ve been boiling for too long and a plume of gray smoke rises from the pot. The water has evaporated. The potatoes are burning. The pot is burning.
A spark of flame. I struggle off the couch and crawl toward the stovetop. The Nightmare joins the race, pulling at my ankles . . . my mind.
