I lurch after her and grab her arm. “Stranna!” I don’t care that she’s annoyed or that she probably wishes the snakes had eaten me.
She’s still alive.
She tenses at my touch. I release her, hoping I haven’t grabbed her too hard.
When she turns, her face carries only fear. Wide eyes and pale skin. Quick pulse.
“How . . . how do you know my name?”
“You have to wake up. Now!”
“What?” She backs away, but that movement alone reveals her weakness. Her hand finds the corner of a home, and she leans half her body against it to stay upright. She must sense that her physical body is injured.
“Wake up! Get back to the Real World. Contact your people for help.” I grab her forearms. “You’re not safe. You’ve been shot twice, and we’re overheating in a car, completely stranded.”
She tries to pull away but instead gives a pained gasp.
“What are you talking about?”
I release her, afraid to strain her mind or body. Can’t she sense the urgency?
“I’m the guy you saved from the fire. The burning tiny house. That’s me.”
“What?” she breathes. “No. I saw your face . . .”
“Covered in soot.”
“No.” She looks to the heavens. “You wouldn’t be that cruel. I saved the guy who killed me? The cure guy who robbed me?”
“Forget that!” I slash the air with a hand. “Are you even hearing me? We’re lost. We’re bleeding. We’re probably dying. I’ve done everything I can to get here and to find you.”
“I found you.”
“Who cares!” This is maddening. “Can you wake up and get help or not?”
“It’s not that simple!”
The fight goes out of me. “You and the other Spores can enter and exit the Nightmare at will.” I say it more as a hope than a belief.
“Not at will,” she says. “There has to be a cause.”
“The Emperor said—”
“The Emperor doesn’t know anything about us.”
I deflate. All these victories to conclude with this?
“So you can’t wake up?”
She shakes her head. “Not the way you seem to think I can.” She looks around the alley. “We’re still alive for now.”
“But for how long?”
She lifts a shoulder. “I guess until you return to the Old World and figure out how to save us. How many more Awakes do you have?”
“Only one. The next will be my last.” How can she be so calm through this? This isn’t like her dying in Tenebra and magically resurrecting. This is her body I’m talking about. The real one. The one that stays dead once it’s killed.
She swallows hard. “I hear you, Cain. But I really can’t do anything. I just have to hope . . . and have faith, I guess.”
“Faith? Are you serious? What’s that going to accomplish?”
Her tone turns cold. “It’s helped me in plenty of other ways and in times far worse than what you’re describing.”
“Great. Fine. Have faith that someone will coincidentally wander past our abandoned vehicle and take it upon themselves to save us.” I want to stomp away, but it took so much to find her. She’s just like Mom. She doesn’t even want to save herself. Is it because it’s easier to be ignorant and distanced here in Tenebra rather than suffering in the Real World?
We stand at an impasse, neither knowing what to say next. What is there?
Stranna’s too busy having faith like some brainwashed megachurch attendee. She shuffles her feet, and I try to imagine what it might be like for her—to learn that she saved the guy who killed her in the Nightmare and then he got her in an even worse situation. And now her body is at his mercy. She’s trapped here like I am, and all I did was give her information that will eat at her mind.
Of course she’d cling to faith and hope that everything will be okay. What else does she have? Isn’t that the natural last resort? When people are desperate, they turn to God—like I did when searching for her. But then we pull ourselves out of our weakness and realize we can do it ourselves.
Nole used to say turning to God wasn’t weakness. That being weak is where the true strength came from. Yeah, well, he and Mom are dead, so . . .
I search for something to say, my eyes jumping from one snake carcass to the next without truly focusing. The wind has gone out of my sails, the panic out of my bones, and a half-hearted acceptance takes its place. I gesture to the snakes.
“These nightbeasts were . . . something else. I think I would rather battle a thousand real snakes.”
“Mmm.”
