Chapter 5
In her dream, Jana had no body. Far from being stressful, this lack went unnoticed, the state of being raw awareness, detached from any physical reality, seemed only natural. She dreamed that she was being watched, and that she was flowing into her watcher’s eyes, eyes with only an iris and no pupil. She fell into that iris, and as it rose up to meet her she could see the threads of its construction. She fell through the surface of the eye and was awash in a sea of threads, an organic net of shimmering lines, pulsing with information and emotion. She was pulled along the lines, using groups of them to move where one alone could not suffice. She shuttled along the connections, breaking apart and coming back together, switching from node to node faster and faster. The lines became a blur as she accelerated, spreading to travel over thousands of threads at once. Slowly, the blur became structure, she zoomed out, seeing the structure as a whole, individual nodes hidden in the great pulsing mass of lines.
The mass had pattern, an organic construction of connections on a massive scale. Some areas were dim, nodes responding only rarely to the pings of energy from the rest of the structure. Some areas were shining with activity, emotion and connection feeding on itself in a multi-stage loop, sending out messages in the form of hundreds or thousands of flared connections every time it repeated. Lines broke and new ones were made endlessly, each change leading to a cascade of the same that altered small sections of the structure, rewriting over their organization from second to second.
One part of the pattern seemed to be especially active, a single point that was like a whirlpool and a supernova both, sending and receiving massive amounts of information. She started to zoom in on that point, to let the rest of the structure fall away as the node, heavy with connections, came into focus. She fell faster and faster, the scattered parts of her consciousness converging on the whirlpool. She hurtled towards it, everything else fell away and then, suddenly, she was thrown back. Even without a body the sudden change hurt, like bouncing off of a wall, being shoved back with an aggressive force.
Her consciousness returned as she accelerated away from the point, what had been passive awareness was now thinking, analyzing and remembering. She could feel the parts of herself bouncing around similar connections, all eventually leading to two points. The two nodes, people, she realized, were being led to another point, a place. The connections between them were discolored, stained with aggression and rage. The people soaked in these emotions and magnified them, their nodes glowing with hostility and action. She absorbed all this in the moment as she flew along their connections and to the place they were being led.
She was suddenly and jarringly stable at that point, that abstraction of a place, for a second, long enough to recognize Nicole’s node and the connections of her house one link away. Then, like a slap across the face, she was sucked back into her own body and awoke with a jolt violent enough to throw herself off the couch and onto the floor.
Nicole came running into the room, clearly concerned as she caught Jana picking herself up hastily from the ground. The concern doubled as she saw the expression on Jana’s face.
“It’s alive.”
“What?” Nicole said, walking to Jana’s side and gesturing for her to sit down. “What’s alive?”
“The city. I could… see it, all the connections in Gravewater. It was amazing. And there was this one point where it was… so dense, so active. I almost went into it but then—“ She gasped suddenly, jumping back to her feet. “We need to leave. Now.”
“Jana!” Nicole said, as Jana got back up and started moving towards the door. “What are you talking about? Why do we need to leave?”
“The city, it sent… it’s sending two people here, now. I don’t know how, but it’s directing them, its sending them next door, so you wouldn’t see the connection.” Nicole didn’t move. “Nicole. Please. You have to trust me, we have to go. When I saw them they were almost here.”
“Jana. I think it’s pretty common to have weird dreams, even nightmares, after first getting the Sight. If you would just slow down and tell me what happened, what you saw, I can figure out what’s going on. But you have to stop and—“
What she was going to say next was cut off by the crunching skid of tires on the road outside. A car’s engine cut out and, in a flurry of momentary lines, made and destroyed too fast to be tracked, two new connections appeared in the house. they were bright, powerful, and tinged with that same sick streak of artificial anger and violence that Jana remembered so clearly from her dream.
“Shit!” Jana yelled, her exclamation punctuated by simultaneous slamming of two car doors. “They’re already here!” They both looked out the window that made up the top half of the front door. Two large men were marching towards the house, bending forward slightly like they were walking into a strong wind. Their faces reminded Jana of pictures she had seen of pro-athletes in the middle of competition, twisted between pain and excitement, skin flushed by adrenaline. The new connections extended from them into the house.
Nicole’s eyes widened as she took in the glowing lines and the quickly approaching men.
“Run.” She glanced at Jana for a moment, “Go out the back door, through the yard, jump the fence and run down the alley. Keep moving, don’t try to hide, I’ll find you.”
Jana looked at the back door, imagining the series of events, the transition to relative safety. Then she imagined Nicole, staying here, alone.
“No. I’m not running if you don’t.”
“Jana! This is not a negotiation, Go! They’ll follow us if I don’t—“
The whole house shook as the door was hit so hard the widow cracked, the heads of the two men clearly visible through the ruined glass.
Nicole stopped talking and concentrated on the door. Jana could see a connection form between her and the edges of the frame. The area around the hinges and the locks started to glow as if they were being welded. The next impact shook the house more but the door actually moved less. Nicole twitched violently at the hit and started backing up towards the kitchen, still focused on the door. Where the next impact should have been, there was only strained silence and then, a second later, the windows at the front of the house shattered inwards, spraying the inside of the heavy curtains with shards of glass.
The instant the men emerged out from under the cloth the discolored connection switched to target Jana and Nicole specifically, drawing a damning line directly from one pair to the other. Nicole started to reduce the strength of the connection, pulling the power out of it like Jana did with the mug. But before she could make a real difference another source less flurry of connections blew through the room and brought the line back to full strength, still full of that poisonous aggression.
“Fuck.” Nicole said, almost whispering. “I knew I should have kept a second gun down here.”
The men smiled as they advanced, they had heard.
“Well, If you wanted to give running another chance, now would be a great time.”
“What?” Jana looked back just in time to see Nicole grab the two largest knives out of the knife block and take off running at the nearest of the two intruders. “Nicole!” Jana’s scream was drowned out by Nicole, who was yelling as loud as she could, sprinting across the short gap. The man, who probably weighed as much as Nicole and Jana combined, smiled even wider.
Nicole had been focusing on the man on the left and, just as his arms stretched out to meet her and block her knives, she switched direction, turning sharply to the right and dropping to the ground simultaneously. The second man’s arms, late to react to the sudden shift in focus, went over her head as she slid on the hardwood. She reached one of the knives out, slashing the man’s shins with the blade as she slid past. He grunted loudly but otherwise made no sound as his smile turned into a snarl. Nicole had turned her slide into a roll and popped up, still holding both knives.
The man with the bleeding shins had just enough time to turn to her before she hurled the knife in her right hand at his head. Her aim wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to get him to instinctively protect his face, bringing his arms up and letting the knife clatter against them. Nicole was already running again straight at him. She held the knife out in front of her with both hands, like a spear, and hit the man before he could bring his hands down and see her approach. She buried the knife halfway into the man’s chest and this time, he did scream. He bellowed and swung both hands blindly in front of him, catching Nicole with his wrecking ball fists before she could get out of the way. She was thrown to the side, sliding into the legs of the coffee table where she coughed violently and struggled to rise again.
The small size of the house was working in Nicole’s advantage, and only the injured man was in a position to approach her. He took an unsteady step forward, grimacing as the muscles in his chest shifted the position of the blade. He took one more step forward before a heavy weight landed on his back.
Jana had leaped onto him, and was using another knife liberated from the kitchen to try to stab at his neck. She missed badly and the knife barely pierced the skin before hitting his collar bone and bouncing away. In the attempt to pull it out she lost her grip and the knife clattered to the ground. As it fell, the second man grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled her off the first man. He held Jana by the arms, her back pressed against his belt, his hands and arms like iron, unmovable.
“Hey!” The man who was holding Jana said, the first time either of them had spoken. The other man turned from his approach toward Nicole, seething with rage. Jana could see blood soaking his shirt below where the knife was embedded. “We kill her first.” And he shook Jana for emphasis, “Then we can deal with the other one.”
The other man nodded and bent down as slowly and carefully as possible to retrieve the knife that Jana had tried to stab him with.
Jana’s breathing sped up. She could smell smoke, sweat, and gasoline coming from the man who was holding her. She took a second to control her breathing and push the panic that was trying to invade her mind away, focusing on the man in front of her, who was holding the second knife and limping slowly forward.
As she focused the connections in the air became clear. She had almost forgotten about them in the chaos. She looked at the connection between these men and her, a blood tainted line of hate. She looked at the connection between the two men and noticed that it also looked wrong, an artificial familiarity. As she focused, she saw a line from the center of that connection to her, and she realized that she had connected to their connection. She pulled in information from along her new line, getting the feeling for the relationship between these two men. As the man with the knife got close enough to reach her she had already formulated a plan, a last chance to survive what had quickly become an execution.
The stabbed man took one more step and stared at her, changing the grip on his knife to one better suited for a sharp forward motion. She concentrated not on the knife but on the connection between the men, doing her best to modify the already artificial tether. She was siphoning off the recognition, the comradery, the affection that had been welded between these two killers, and she was magnifying the animosity, the little bits of disagreement that existed in any relationship, until they were closer to hatred. She worked quickly and then, the moment before he stabbed, took that toxic aggression that she had been siphoning from the connection between her and the men, that she had been storing in some pool in her mind, and pushed it into the line between the men, forcing as much of the twisted energy into it as she could. She concentrated on the violence and the undeniable urge to push past any pain and attack.
Their connection flared and grew brighter as Jana continued to push energy into it, magnifying what she had made it. Jana was suddenly forgotten, dropped to the floor as the two men were pulled together like magnets, attacking each other without skill or hesitation. The man who had been holding the knife made quick work of the other, slashing his head and neck with the blade so many times that his face was unrecognizable. Jana screamed in terror and horror as she scrambled backwards from where she had been dropped, trying to keep moving as the edges of her vision darkened and her head spun with a sudden, all-consuming exhaustion.
The man with the knife, now covered in blood, turned his attention to Jana as the other man stopped moving. The connection switched from the corpse to Jana as the focus of his rage shifted. Most of the energy she had put into the line had been depleted, but it was still stained with more than enough vitriol to get her killed. She scrambled faster, crawling backwards, deeper into the kitchen. He started advancing on her, half blind from the multitude of cuts and scratches his partner had inflicted in the seconds before his death. Jana stopped crawling, her arms and legs refusing to support her, and focused on the connections again, hoping there would be some way to stop him there.
She focused on him, lumbering towards her, on the connection between her and him, on the blood covering his clothing, on the knife half embedded in his chest. She reached for their line, maybe she could confuse him by pushing good things into the connection, since she couldn’t take anything out. It was weak, she knew, but so was she. Jana reached for the line and concentrated on what little mental strength she had left, resisting the pull of unconsciousness.
The sound of the vase shattering ripped Jana out of her concentration. Shards of glass rained down from the man’s head and his eyes fluttered shut. He swayed forward, threatening to fall and crush Jana, but was pulled away. He fell backwards as his legs gave out, and his body crumpled into a heap on the floor, revealing Nicole where she stood behind him. She shimmered slightly from the shards of glass that had gotten stuck in her clothes and hair when she had slammed the vase on the man’s head.
“Hey.” She said, looking at Jana as she leaned on the wall for support. “Don’t go passing out on me, not yet. You were right before, we gotta get out of here.”
Nicole stepped gingerly over the body of the unconscious man, carefully avoiding the worst of the glass and the blood. She reached Jana and pulled her up, helping her stand against the counter. She pulled the out the hose that was attached to the sink and then turned the tap on, spraying Jana in the face with the stream of cold water.
“Sorry!” Nicole shouted over the rush of the water, “It’s a lot better to be soaking wet then covered in blood.” She sprayed Jana’s clothing until the water stopped running red then turned the hose on herself, washing most of the glass out along with the blood.
“Okay, let’s go.” Nicole threw Jana’s arm over her shoulder and half-carried her over the two bodies and out the front door. Jana, soaking wet and only mostly conscious, let herself be led down the walkway and into the passenger seat of her own car. Nicole got in the driver’s side and started the engine. Jana decided that the end of the street was far enough from the house to be safe, and let the darkness take her.