Dream Walker (Bailey Spade 1)

“Now be quiet,” he says.

I watch the device for any sign of something. Just as I’m about to ask Felix what gives, a strange magenta energy snakes from the phone into the comms unit.

“Got something,” he crows. “A few excerpts from some kind of diary. Emailing them to you now.”

I pocket the device and open the first email from Felix on my phone.

Roger came back with the newest batch of the medicine today. The bird I tested it on fell asleep instantly, and stayed asleep for six hours, three hours longer than with the prior formulation. But just like before, it died instead of waking up. Still, at only $10 per dove, this provides unlimited access to the dream world. Next time, I’ll have him—

The passage ends there.

“That’s it?” I ask Felix. “Any chance to see what came before or after this excerpt?”

“No, but there’s another piece when you’re ready.”

“In a second,” I say and start searching the room again.

But no matter how hard I try, I find no sign of the strange drug described in the email.

“Why would he kill birds by making them dream?” Felix asks as I finish looking through a nearby desk.

“To enter the dream world without falling asleep.” I look behind yet another painting—to no avail. “I use Pom for that. I guess this Leal guy found his own method.”

“By killing the poor doves,” Felix says disapprovingly.

“Right.” I cast an uneasy glance at the cooing creatures. “They got their revenge in the end, didn’t they?”

“I guess. Sending you the other bit of text I found in the cache.”

I check behind the last painting. Nothing. Oh, well.

I open my email.

Another werewolf, another failure. The inner wolf and the man attacked me together yet again, and I found them too hard to fight off. Lost my powers for the day as a result. Werewolves are proving to be the most difficult of all Cognizant to dreamwalk in. Eduardo isn’t making it easy, either. He forbade his pack from allowing me to continue this research. The son of a bitch likes me powerless against him. I’ll have to master the multibody technique if I’m to succeed. That way, one of my consciousnesses can attack the wolf while the other deals with the man. Alas, I fail at this too. Maybe if—

Crap, cut short again. I tap the earpiece. “Hey, I want to read the rest of that.”

“Sorry, there’s only one more tidbit left, and it’s from a different part of the diary.”

“Send it to me.”

“One sec. I want to understand what he meant by what you just read.”

“Isn’t it obvious? Werewolves are a problem when it comes to dreamwalking. I’ve heard of this sort of thing with some other types of Cognizant. They say you can never sneak into the dreams of gnomes, for instance, not unless they let you in.”

“Right, that part was more or less clear,” Felix says. “But I don’t get the part about losing his powers and the multibody thing.”

I reread the message. “I think he meant that he had to use his dreamwalking power so much inside the werewolf’s dream that he ran out of juice. There’s a limit to how much dreamwalking one can do in a day. He must’ve reached that limit.”

“And the multibody bit?”

I read the text once more. “Sounds like he’s talking about having two bodies in the dream world that can simultaneously think and feel. If so, that’s very intriguing and not something I’ve ever tried to do. I can sort of leave my body and reenter it, but that’s not the same. I’m going to have to give this a shot one day.”

“How trippy,” Felix says. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in two places at once, even in a dream.”

“Logic takes a vacation in the dream world, that’s for sure. Now stop stalling and send me the next piece of this diary or whatever.”

He types something so loudly I can hear it. “Done.”

I pull up the email.

Any dream can be hidden behind the black window—my own, a dream of another subject, or the dream of the subject herself. The remarkable thing is that when a dream is a memory of the subject, the memory itself becomes deeply suppressed. She has no recollection of the events at all. More fascinating still is that the subject doesn’t recover her memory when I reenter the black window. The breaking of the black window is the only way the subject gets to experience the events locked behind it. If it’s her memory, she recovers them, but if it’s an implanted dream, she dismisses it as a figment of her—

It cuts off.

Disappointed, I reread what is there. “You sure there was nothing more about this?”

“No, why?” Felix asks. “Does it make sense to you?”

“Vaguely.” I greedily scan every sentence for clues. “Whatever this black window is, it seems to let you erase people’s painful memories. I’ve never heard of that.”