Created the damn thing? I leaned in closer, nearly banging my head against the door frame.
That was impossible. Jabberwock couldn’t create nightmares—no one could. They were…manifestations of a psyche far outside our control, dredged up and cobbled together out of memories and fears and pains. Evidently Jabberwock could dress up old fears and make them new again, evoke the question of “oh, God, what is that?” when memory wouldn’t serve.
None of that matched the fear of building a chimera from thin air. “Doctor Serhoeyen,” Valorian continued. “Many of those who work under me do so because they fear the bullet in their heart or the knife at their throat. They scuttled out of the streets to join me because they could smell the change in the air. Not so you. You were supposed to be the best, doctor. I have given you everything and more, and you have certainly not been shy about enjoying those luxuries, have you, doctor?” Every time he repeated the word, he injected fresh venom into it like a syringe.
I couldn’t see him. I could only see the faint shifting of the light as their pacing cast shadows in front of it: the whole three-dimensional scene distilled down to the single one-dimensional crack where the door met the wall. I could hear Serhoeyen cringe nonetheless. “I tell you, it cannot be done. If we could retrieve the Dreamwalker somehow, restore it to its cage…”
“Then go out there and get it.”
“The sedation does not work! It was contained as well as could be-”
“Was it really?” I winced. That was a dangerous tone. “Or was it just another opportunity to enjoy what is mine? It is a lovely boat, way out there on the ocean, away from the rotting morass of this city. How convenient that it could be contained there, that the black water would do you job for you-” His voice dropped. “Except, doctor, it didn’t. How long should I give you now to fail me? There are those waiting in the wings to replace you, loyal soldiers that will do as I ask. How much do you think Petra Fletcher hungers for your position? What will she do for it?”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“One week,” he said. “One week, please.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Bait the Dreamwalker and capture it.”
“That was supposed to happen here! And yet it is across the city killing again. Explain that.”
Valorian was evidently quick to anger. That wasn’t uncommon, but it told me something of the nature of his nightmare. He wouldn’t have a calm, constructed one like Fletcher, or likely even an unemotional one like Conjager. His was designed to flare up, to be pressed upon its victims with heated emotion. Serhoeyen was scurrying away from him now, certainly his hands raised in supplication. “Please, I do not know how that happened! It was Fletcher’s plan, her design to draw it here with that human. I would not have been so crude. The child is the key and she failed there-”
“Enough.” Valorian stomped the floor, and I heard the ringing metal of a knife. Snick it went against wood—a desk, maybe, or the wall, peeling off a thin strand so that it curled like a fingernail. “I am not running a laboratory. I am running a machine. And if the teeth grind against one another, if they cannot do the job which they are set to do…” His voice was so low that it was almost impossible to hear, and yet the words were familiar. “…the machine will be gutted and they will be replaced.”
“I understand.”
Then Valorian drove the knife in. Serhoeyen’s arm, I thought, or his shoulder. It was quick and silent and even the doctor didn’t say a word—I knew it only when I heard the sound of the blade being drawn out, wiped on the desk. “Now you understand,” Valorian said. All the anger was gone—it had flowed into that one, swift strike and bled out just as quickly. “Clean it up. You’re a doctor.”
“Yes.”
Serhoeyen walked with a limp. He clutched his elbow, through which a stain of blood darkened his already navy-blue jacket. There was an indescribable sense about him that must have made up his nightmare: a despair, slow and encroaching, muddy and viscous, that contrasted with his hurried, panicked words of earlier. He had thick glasses, bending the light into an iridescent sheen. When he was halfway down the hallway, he stopped, as if he had something else to say to Valorian, something that would redeem him in those cruel eyes.
But—as I realized just too late—that meant his gaze fell on my hiding spot, and on me.