Lightblade | Chapter 4

And I was back in my coffin, frigid air making me cough up a lung. For some cursed reason, that kiss woke me up. I’d fallen thousands of feet off a floating island, yet remained in the dream, but a simple kiss slapped me back to reality. Was life not cruel enough?

I’d paid six month’s salary to modify my companionship program into a lightblade training program. In doing so, I’d sworn off dream kisses and dream sex and dream love. It was all fake, I’d told myself. My dream wife Prisaya had been so obviously a script, repeating things again and again. “I love you,” she would say. “I missed you.” “Stay with me forever.” After a few weeks, I’d witnessed everything she could say or do. She never evolved.

But Zauri…Zauri was different. Zauri felt real.

Whatever that meant. Why had she kissed me, anyway? Why would a lightblade training program kiss a student? Doesn’t that interfere with training? It made no sense. Maybe it was a glitch in her script?

An icy gust blew through the crack in the wall. I bit my lip and shivered. I wanted nothing more than to have adventures with Zauri. Flying on the turtle shell, exploring that weird version of Harska, and even falling — it was just…fun. Crazy fun. Something I hadn’t had since I was twelve.

Was it so bad to work a sixteen-hour day and spend the rest of my time in the dream world, with her? It didn’t sound so bad. Maybe I could be happy that way.

A thought exploded in my mind: I didn’t have to kill Emperor Raja Sanga Surapsani.

I could just keep on surviving. I wasn’t totally used up yet. I could still conduct. Though my knees ached. Happens from standing too much in the factory.

  So many doubts, and yet one thing stirred in my heart, doubtless: I kind-of liked Zauri, more than I ever did Prisaya, maybe more than I ever did anyone except for my family. Though…I barely knew her.

She was full of surprises. Too many surprises for a simple lightblade training program.

I punched the wall. Agh! Why had a kiss woken me up? I lay down and tried to circuit more honey-colored light through my veins. My agitation made it impossible to drift away. With no hope of falling back to sleep, twenty toilsome hours would follow before I could ask her about it.

Oh well. Oh fucking well.

I went to the bathroom to pee and shave. To my surprise, Rahal was there, staring at himself in the mirror. What was he doing up so early?

“Praise Sanga,” I said, somewhat jittery.

His white beater was sweat soaked; from the pungent smell, it hadn’t been washed in weeks, like mine. We lacked the water, and especially the soap.

“Jyosh.” His smile seemed worn and his face cracked. “Up early yet again.”

I hunched my shoulders. How to explain this? “Yeah, I dunno what it is. Might be a problem with my dream stone. I’ll have to get it checked.”

Rahal sniggered. “You mean your modified dream stone?”

Like being stabbed in the throat. I darted my gaze to make sure no one else was here. How could Rahal know?

He chuckled and rubbed his parched, pockmarked cheek. “Relax. Not a soul to hear. Just you and me.”

A rusted razor sat on a nearby sink. Was planning to shave with it. Ought I to just slit his throat? We both glanced at it, then eyed each other.

“Think I’ll tattle?” he said. “Mine’s modded too. That’s why I can’t sleep.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s too real. And yet, the dream logic is taking me into places that shouldn’t exist. It’s starting to drive me mad, Jyosh. I’m being burned by the fire.”

“What fire? And please, keep your voice down.”

Rahal leaned his elbows on the nearest sink and stared at himself in the mirror. “No one’s listening to us shit in the middle of sleeping hours. I modified my stone because I got tired of my dream wife and dream island. I wanted a more real-feeling woman and larger dreamscape to explore — I’d heard such things were possible, so I did what you did — paid six month’s salary. But by Sanga’s hairy left nipple, I got more than I paid for.”

The image of the sleeping dragon circling around the sun flashed in my mind. “Rahal, why would the modder do this? Any idea who he is?”

“So…you’ve seen some shit, too. But it’s been what, two days for you? I’ve been drowning in this fire for weeks. You couldn’t possibly know what I know.”

What did he know? Could it explain what I was experiencing, too? “I saw a dragon. My dream wife,” Zauri wasn’t a companionship program, but I wasn’t about to tell him about the lightblade training, “said it was a daeva. Does your dream wife know about strange things, too?”

“A dragon?” Rahul held out his hands, palms open. “That’s it? That’s nothing at all. There’s far better…or far worse, depending on your valor. Let’s talk in a few days when you’ve really gone in deep. A word of warning, though…” He cleared his throat. “I’ve begun to distrust my dream wife. I think she’s the one causing me to wake up. I think she’s doing things in the dream world even when I’m not there.”

An icy shudder swept through me. No…Zauri was honest and open. She couldn’t have some hidden agenda, could she? “Why, though? What could they be up to? They’re not even real. They’re just scripts.”

“Just scripts. Karsha, the mightiest country on the bright side of the world, is supposedly run by a script. They’re not just scripts — haven’t you realized that, yet? They’re smarter than we are.”

That scared me somewhat. My urge to pee became desperate. I stood in the corner, unzipped, and did my business. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t trust her?”

“I’m saying don’t get too comfortable. If I don’t know what’s happening, then you definitely don’t. The man who modded these stones, I’ve been asking around about him. He no longer comes to the usual spot beneath the bridge.” Rahal threw up his hands and grunted in annoyance. “If I don’t get a good night’s rest, I fear I’m gonna mess up at work. Then you’ll have to, well, you know.” He mimed slicing his own neck. “I lost the ability to fall asleep without a dream stone long ago, and now I can’t even sleep well with one!”

How terrifying. Until now, I thought things couldn’t get worse — except for dying — but Rahal’s problems seemed an even deeper hell — a pit I had to avoid.

Also, I shuddered at the thought of having to behead him.

“So if the guy doesn’t come to camp anymore, then what?” I said. “Those bridge vendors come and go all the time. He obviously has a special skill set. He probably found more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. I think…I think we just have glitched stones. Nothing deeper than that.” That’s what I wanted to believe. Perhaps being sleep deprived was getting Rahal thinking crazy thoughts.

“You’re but a babe in the woods, Jyosh. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, then we’ll talk.” At that, Rahal left the bathroom.

I shaved with a dull blade, poured water over my cut-up cheeks, and went back to my room. Lay in bed and thought about Zauri. She was nothing like Prisaya, although she weirdly enough had her facial structure and body. The way she looked with her blue hair and fire-colored eyes: nothing alike. And she kissed me. She kissed me. If, as both her and Rahal claimed, her script was as large as mine, then could she have developed feelings for me?

And if so, how did I feel about her?

Work was the usual dread-filled tedium. However, it was one of Sanga Surapsani’s daughter’s birthday, so they let us off two hours early. I passed by the bazaar — if you could call it that. Just a bunch of droopy men from the nearest town selling wares under the bridge aside the trash-ridden stream that flowed near camp. They had a few things laid out on blankets: razors, shirts, pants, socks, dice, cards.

No soap. No deodorant. Not even a fragrant fucking rock.

As these folks were from the town, the camp managers had to give them special permission to sell to us. Once in a while, more skilled folks show up, such as those who could do maintenance on a dream stone. Or modify a dream stone, like the guy I’d met here a few days ago.

I’d once paid a month’s salary for a bar soap: well worth it. Here at camp, you lived to work and you worked to not die. Both living and working were worse when you smelled bad and when the dead skin and weeks old sweat on your sheets made you scratch holes into your skin. Ugh.

“Any idea when there’ll be soap?” I asked the guy selling razors. He was missing a finger on each hand — a common punishment for charging a different price than what the government had set.

He beckoned me to kneel and come closer.

“No soap this year,” he whispered. “There isn’t a single factory in the flatland making any.”

I sighed, bitterly annoyed. “Where’s the dream stone maintenance guy? He was here last week.”

“Haven’t seen him. Don’t know him.”

No good news, whatsoever.

Boom! Something exploded above. A quake shook my bones and caused the wares on the blankets to scatter. The glass on the little mirrors someone was selling cracked. I crossed my arms over my face as if blocking a punch and got low. The others around did similar; the salesman I was talking to curled into the fetal position.

“A sonic boom?” someone said when it was over.

That was what it sounded like. But not just one sonic boom; several.

A group of workers who’d been relaxing by the dirty stream stared up at the air. I joined them.

“See anything?”

They each shook their heads.

“Probably the air force drilling nearby,” someone said.

That made sense. Wasn’t the first time sonic booms had sounded over camp. But it had rattled my bones. Another sad reminder that we were each pathetic sacks of flesh compared to the power the Emperor could muster against us.

I got permission to visit a nearby trail. They’d let us go once or twice a month to gain a love for the land. It wasn’t much more than a small forest: some banyans, mahoganies, and even palms. Nice to breathe greener air and let the dragon flies fluttering about distract my mind. A much cleaner stream ran through it, too. Was hoping I could wash myself there and use the tree leaves as soap. Anything not to smell like a decaying sack of flesh.

While walking the dirt road leading to it, I saw something gleaming on the ground. A translucent green coin. A single emiril — the currency of Maniza. I picked it up and put it to the sun. Emperor Sanga’s eyes glared at me from the coin’s face.

Someone must’ve dropped it. Considering I earned one emiril a day for my labor, I didn’t mind holding onto it.

But then I came upon another emiril, and another. Each time, I picked them up and placed them in my pocket, darting my head in every direction to make sure no one was around.

Who had dropped so much money on the road?

A shiny green mound appeared in the distance. A mound of emirils! Was this some kind of trick? Was I still dreaming?

Could smugglers have dropped their money here, or something?

Worried, I emptied my pockets of every coin I’d picked up. Then I turned around and returned to camp. Smugglers weren’t nice folks, and I didn’t want to die just yet. An odd feeling, to have something to live for.

Or at least, I hoped I did.

I took a shower in the dorm bathroom — though I had to make do with a quarter bucket of water. After, I went to my room, ready to sleep and dream. I put my dream stone in and lay down. Despite how itchy I was, its orange breeze carried me away.

I awoke in the black room where I’d been sentenced to a lifetime of labor. A spotlight shone on me, burning my soul and hope as it’d done twelve years ago.

I stood and glanced around. Shadows loomed on the distant benches: the audience to my judgment. The applauders of my despair.

I opened my left palm to summon a terminal. The window appeared, glowing faintly. I tapped the commands to relocate to the beach. But like last time, I remained where I was.

Seemed I’d have to find the door, travel to the edge of the floating city, and jump off again. Would it be like this every time? How much more glitchy was this dream stone going to get?

I tried to use the terminal to summon a flashlight, but that didn’t work either. Tried to use the terminal to see in the dark, but its glow was too weak. So I stepped out of the spotlight and groped at the dark.

Clank. Something clattered at my feet; I jumped as if I were dodging a light cannon shot. Just then, a spotlight appeared where I stood. A sword hilt gleamed on the floor. I picked it up.

Across the room, another spotlight turned on. A shadow stood in its glow. It was him.

But he was no shadow. His straight black hair reached his shoulders, and he wore the navy, silver-trimmed long shirt of a captain in the Manizan Air Guard.

“K-Kediri?” I uttered.

Silence. I stepped toward him, expecting him to evaporate. Just an illusion, right? My sad memories and unaddressed anger must’ve been leaking into the dream stone, which itself had been corrupted by the modder.

The spotlight shining on him turned off, as did the one that’d been shining on me. Darkness engulfed the room.

“Jyosh,” he whispered.

And then I saw red. A beam of the purest, bloodiest fire. A lightblade. Kediri raised it to his chest and brandished it at me.

“She was easy, Jyosh,” he said.

My arms shook. My legs numbed. My soul shivered. Rage burned in every part of me. I could hardly move my tongue.

“T-This isn’t real,” I said.

Kediri and his red blade vanished.

“I want you to be alone.” It came from behind.

I spun around. He stood an arm span away, lightblade raised and forward. I ducked as the sun exploded through the black ceiling. All the walls burned away. Suddenly, we were outside, and a rageful red bathed the world.

Twelve years had passed, but he looked the same. He’d always been tall and light on his feet, but with that lightblade in his hands, he seemed so unusually purposed.

“This isn’t real. You’re dead, Kediri. You got what you deserved. But Amma and Abba and Chaya, they didn’t deserve what you did to them. Neither did I.”

If it wasn’t real, why was I talking to it? I’d pent up what I wanted to say to my older brother for twelve years. Now that his image, his voice, his presence stood before me, why not let it out? Better a shadow hear than it remain inside, poisoning even happy moments.

“They died for the truth.”

“What truth, you selfish bastard? You didn’t have to see their heads on the floor, I did!”

“There is only one truth.”

“Shut up!”

I stood straight and willed all the red light in existence into me. It circuited through my core, through my heart, through my soul itself. I became the light, I became rage. And then it erupted off my sword hilt, producing the most intense, bloody blade that’d ever been seen by the sun.

I wound it back and pounded my brother with it, as if I were sundering a log with an axe. But he blinked away and reappeared in the distance, leaving me heaving and breathless.

“She was easy, Jyosh.” What was this asshole trying to say? “Zauri was her name, right? I defeated her, then I deleted her. I want you to be alone. I want you to drown in my despair. The despair of the truth-seekers, those who sleep with eyes-wide-open, if only to taste nirvana.”

What the hell was he saying? What did he mean he killed Zauri? Could it be…could he be a rogue program? A poisonous shadow in the dream stone? If so…if so…was Zauri really gone?

I couldn’t let it go. Not again. I couldn’t swallow my rage. My sorrow. My hatred. I ran at him, lightblade angled forward at my chest, just how Zauri had taught me. I lunged at the evil creature who’d taken everything from me, who’d bled me of hope when I was just a child.

Just as my thrust was about to pierce his abdomen, he lowered his lightblade to parry. Light smashed into light, sparking and sending waves of green and blue and yellow swimming through the air. I wound again to go for his neck, but he swiped back. The force reverberated through my blade, into the hilt, and knocked me to my knees.

Tears burned in my eyes. I wiped them with my forearm before pushing to my feet. I inhaled more red light and deepened the intensity of my blade. Perhaps I could overpower him with my rage alone. With how much of the sun I was absorbing, there’d be no light left. I’d gorge on the sun and leave not just this world, but all worlds in darkness!

I swiped at his other arm, but his lightblade found mine. Rainbow hues colored the air as our lights collided, dazzling and wondrous.

“She was inadequate.” He laughed. “Barely fit to teach children. Me, though — I can make you a god.”

No! What was he saying? Zauri was…she was more than just my teacher! She was my respite! She was real!

“Fuck you!” What else could I say? “Why’d you have to come back? Why’d you have to be in my dreams? Why’d you have to ruin them, too?”

He parried each of my swipes; every time I thought I’d found an opening, he was there to show me how slow, predictable, and weak I was. Every color ever imagined and unimagined danced around our blades.

“Jyosh, don’t you see?” Kediri said after sending me, once again, to my knees with a graceful parry. “It’s always been there, lurking. Strength. You just bottled it up. Hid it beneath all that pain. Let it out, Brother.”

“Shut your mouth!”

I swung wildly, hoping, praying, willing for him to burn by my blade! I screamed and heaved. I even lost control of my breathing. Sweat and tears bled into my eyes. All the while, Kediri blinked and blinked away from every strike.

An earthquake in my core turned my arms and legs to pudding. Burned out, my lightblade fizzled into sparks. They fed back and scathed my hands. I dropped the blazing steel and collapsed.

I awoke on wet sand. Waves kissed the shore. Birdsong played all around, and turtle shells wooshed across the air, ridden by my pale, headless, pot-bellied friends.

Someone was strumming my hair and humming. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Zauri smiled at me, the brightest thing in the world.

“You’re alive?” I said.

I put a hand on her shoulder, just to make sure she wasn’t a ghost. She stroked my ear, her eyes a mix of apprehension and adoration.

“You did it, Jyosh. You made a lightblade. All on your own.”

Images from my desperate fight with Kediri flashed in my mind, as did the rage that seized my soul, that pulled it into its hurricane.

“He said you were dead. That he’d deleted you.”

Zauri shook her head. “No. But he was right about one thing. I’d failed to help you. Tender care didn’t work and neither did fear. But your anger…it brought your strength into the light. It resonated with the red. Real anger, Jyosh.”

None of it made sense until I read the shame on her reddened cheeks. Beneath her congratulatory words lay a strand of deception.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” I said.

“I didn’t want to fail you, Jyosh. I’d been reading you…your memories…your soul, all this time. At first, I was considering having you fight Raja Sanga, until I realized there was someone you hated more. So I chose him instead. Your brother Kediri.” Her eyes wet. “I’m sorry if you’re upset. If you feel betrayed or violated. But I’m a lightblade training program. I have to find that breakthrough, however I can.”

Nausea washed through my chest as if I were on a tumbling levship. I couldn’t trust her either, could I? Even my dream companion was out to trick me — although, she wasn’t my companion, she was a lightblade training script. Some sad part of me was confusing her with what she was never meant to be.

Perhaps she kissed me to make me fall for her, so she could bring out my anger by fooling me into believing Kediri’s shadow had murdered her.

Well, it had worked. Too damn well.

“So when you kissed me, yesterday…” It was almost too painful to ask, but bitterness made me brave. “It was part of your trick?”

She shook her head vigorously, wavy blue strands getting on her face. “I care about you. I really do. But my purpose is to teach you, so that has to come first. Or at least, I think it does.”

From how dismal her eyes shown, she seemed as conflicted as me. Whereas Prisaya had been predictable, one dimensional, a puddle, Zauri was a layered ocean. Too layered. It reminded me why I’d never trusted people in the real world. Because, like Kediri, they all hid things beneath their layers. Things they’d used to betray me.

“You know what my brother did to me, to my family, and yet…you saw fit to use that horror to trick me.” I inhaled to suck up my sobs, then crushed the tears with my eyelids. “I’ll never see Amma and Abba and Chaya because of him. He’s not a tool for my training, Zauri. He’s…he’s the worst thing to ever happen to everyone I’ve ever loved.”

“I’m sorry.” Zauri shuffled to her knees, then bowed to me as if I were Emperor Sanga. “Forgive me. I agonized over whether to do it or not. But now, seeing your reaction, I realize I made the wrong choice. I just didn’t want to fail you — you have so little time. Please understand. I’m sorry.”

I stood and brushed off sand. “To tell you the truth, I don’t want to learn the lightblade anymore. It was a dumb idea in the first place. Replacing Prisaya with you…also a dumb idea, for which I’m clearly being punished. This dream stone is corrupted, so maybe what you did is a manifestation of that. Even your…too-human-like behavior, and your strange decisions…maybe it all stems from that corruption, from whatever the modder did. Mistakes that born more mistakes.”

I realized I was telling Zauri that I wished she didn’t exist. But it was how I felt. Actions have consequences: the most obvious wisdom. Every light has a shadow, every beautiful thing an imperfection, and those imperfections grow overtime as decay sets in. Dream stones needed maintenance to endure, and a corrupted dream stone was already well on its path to ruin. I’d need to save up another six month’s salary to reverse my rash decision and fix this dream stone back to how it was.

Zauri wouldn’t raise her head off the sand. “For some reason, I’m in pain. Not like the singe of getting burned by a lightblade…it’s something else. Some kind of ache, deep inside. I’ve been feeling it since the moment I kissed you and you disappeared. After that, the dream didn’t end for me. I stayed here, alone, wondering how I could help you. It may have been twenty hours for you, but it was twenty days for me. So in that time, I dreamt your memories.” She sniffled and sucked in a wet breath. “I know who you are now, Jyosh. And I want to be by your side, to help you however I can. Please don’t make me disappear.”

This was all too much. It seemed I’d become her consoler once again, a role I wasn’t fit for. Dream stones were supposed to be a place of refuge for us laborers, the only balm in our sad lives as Sanga Surapsani’s weapon makers. Only the red sky knows what he did with those weapons. If, as that paper that slapped me in the face said, Maniza was one of the poorest countries in the world, then these weapons were likely too weak to be used on other countries. But they were likely good enough to use on us, his own people. I was just a cog in an evil machine, and I needed escape from that. I didn’t need whatever this was!

I bent down and lifted Zauri up by her shoulders. Her tears dripped onto the sand, the redness beneath her eyes bright like a sunburn. I took her in my arms, like my sister Chaya would do whenever I cried. Despite how angry I was, being with someone was better than being alone.

“I’m not going to try to kill the Raja,” I said. “I’ll…bear the consequences of my actions. I’ll work six more months and get this stone fixed up.” I sighed, about to make a heavy promise. Hopefully I wouldn’t regret it. “I’ll make sure the modder doesn’t delete you, but just gets rid of the corrupted parts.” Even that wouldn’t make things right, unfortunately. “And if I have to execute eight more men, I’ll do it. I’ll have to live with it. It’s what I signed up for. There’s no way I can pull out of that contract and keep my life. I’ll just have to become…strong.”

That seemed the best course. And even though it was still awful, I’d get to live. Last time, I’d asked Zauri if she had any bad behaviors. Truth is, if she didn’t, then she wouldn’t be like a human at all. We’re all defined by our bad traits, in a way.

Now, I’d seen hers. She was…ambitious. Deceitful. And though it worried me, it made me feel less alone to be with someone as imperfect as myself.

Zauri clung to my waist, her head on my chest. How suddenly our roles had reversed.

“Can I keep teaching you, though?” she asked, hope lifting her tone. “It’s what I was made to do. It’s satisfying to see you learn new things. I can’t really explain why — it just is.”

We’re all meant for something, right? I was meant to be the lowest of the low, a body to be used up breathing sunlight into machines. She was meant to teach children lightblades. “Yeah, all right. It can’t hurt, I suppose. Maybe one day, it’ll save me in a moment of danger, like the one I had earlier.” Like if ever I encountered smugglers on the road. They never left witnesses. Though even if I could make a lightblade, I couldn’t inhale red light with a green machinist stone, nor did I own a sword hilt in the real world.

“Earlier?” Zauri said. “Something happened?”

“Yup. Saw a mound of emirils on the road. Smugglers must have dropped it. Only hours after a bunch of sonic booms, too. Been a strange day.”

Zauri shuffled off my chest and onto her knees, face-to-face. She tapped her chin. “Only really advanced levships can travel faster than the speed of sound. I don’t think they were smugglers.”

“Oh?”

She kept tapping her chin, as if it were how she processed her thoughts. “You ever heard of a money bomb?”

I imagined a bomb exploding, flinging shiny green emirils in all directions. “Nope, but it sounds fun.”

“It’s a strategy the Red Veil concocted to destabilize enemy countries. Flood a country with indistinguishable forgeries of its own currency, so that there’d be crazy inflation. This would plunge rich and poor alike into a deep downturn. And the rich don’t play around — they’ll overthrow the government if things get bad for them.”

“Insane,” I scoffed. “You’re telling me…no way. Wait, who are the Red Veil?”

“An organization that reports directly to the Raja of Karsha. They aren’t bound by any laws.”

It didn’t sound so impossible. Those sonic booms could’ve been Karshan levships flying over the flatlands and dropping emirils all over.

“Why now, though?”

Zauri hunched her shoulders. “I don’t know. I was scripted nineteen years ago — I don’t actually know anything about what’s going on right now, just how the world was back then. At that time, there was a general panic in Karsha because people thought the Padishah from the Nightscape was about to invade — everyone wanted to unite the Dayworld under one flag…the Karshan flag, obviously. So I have the money bomb thing in my memory.”

There was a lot to unpack, there.

“So…who do you think is the Raja of Karsha?” I asked.

“It’s probably not Rivata Haurva.”

I laughed at that. Damn, he was the Raja of Karsha when I was a little kid. It made Zauri seem…old. “It’s some woman named Subha Pavand. They make us curse her at the morning meeting, sometimes.”

“Not surprising. The Pavands and the Haurvas have been trading the Rajaship between them for-like-ever. Used to be one family, way back. So, really, not much has changed.”

Whatever. I couldn’t give Sanga’s left testicle about Karshan politics. Or politics in general. It was so far removed from my problems. Like the clouds in the sky, you had no control, but sometimes it rained, sometimes it poured, and sometimes you thirsted for a drop.

A disturbing thought intruded: Rahal had said not to trust my dream wife. That a corruption was causing him to wake up, and that it had infected every part of his dream.

“Zauri, do you know what caused me to wake up suddenly last time?”

“No. But it could be like you said. It could be an error or a glitch of some sort. Sad that it happened, right as I’d kissed you.”

“What if that’s what caused it?”

She shrugged. Frustrating that she didn’t know.

A silence drenched us. A silence full of dilemmas, mysteries, and, heaviest of all, a rather awkward question.

“So, what do you wanna do today,” Zauri asked. That wasn’t the question, but it lightened the awkwardness, in any case. “Train?”

I shook my head. “Strange as this sounds, I want to explore where we went last time. It’s just…why did the modder add an incomplete, life-sized model of Harska to this dream stone? Why is there a dragon in the sky? Doesn’t it make you wonder?”

“Of course. But the terminal doesn’t work up there. We’ll be at the mercy of whatever we find. Are you sure you want to spend your dream time doing something so stressful?”

I wasn’t sure. The fear and rage from my fight with Kediri still wounded me. But something bizarre was happening here, and I didn’t like that my dreams — the only place where I had freedom, where I could sip happiness and comfort and other things that could be considered good — were housing a mystery beyond my control. Something that had made Rahal so afraid, so agonized. Something that, perhaps, could hurt Zauri, too.

I cared about Zauri, didn’t I? Whether she was real or not, her presence alone lit up my dismal existence.

“Let’s just do it,” I said. “We can’t relocate from there, but can we relocate to there? When I awakened in the dream, I was in that courtroom from earlier. That’s where you took my brother’s from, right?”

“Mhmm. I set it to your awaken position. And yes, we can relocate to there, just not from there.” She tapped her chin. “However, weird things happened, remember? The sun turned so bright red, it actually went beyond what the settings show is possible. And when that happened, it literally melted the courthouse you were standing in.”

“In my brother’s form, you seemed not to have been affected by that, though. Unlike me, you were entirely calm and in control.”

Zauri swallowed, folded her arms, and stared at me as if ashamed. “Look, earlier, I told you the short story, but there is a long story. Here it is — I didn’t take your brother’s form.”

“Wait…what?”

“I don’t have the ability to change my appearance. I can change clothes, but everything else — even my blue hair — is hardcoded.”

“So, then, what was Kediri?”

“I…sort of…created him from a flow that — I think — came from your memories. He’s a shadow script that you can face, though his script is limited. The things he was saying to you are just phrases I pulled from that flow…and a few taunts I composed myself.”

It was all so disturbingly elaborate. But I understood why Zauri did it — she’d achieved her purpose for existing when that fight, that anger, brought the lightblade out of me.

“I get it, Zauri. And I have it in me to forget and forgive.” I gazed away. These next words made me feel somewhat vulnerable. “To be completely honest, you might be the only person in the world I don’t want to feel anger for. So let’s see what’s going on up in Harska.

She beamed at that. “It’ll be like an adventure!”

 

“Yep, an adventure.” It was more than that, but might as well have a bit of fun. That’s what these dreams were for, right?

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