Have you ever felt someone watching you in your dreams?

The client gave us little to work with, but I was able to get a lock a few days ago. Here's what I’ve scraped so far.”

In the window-portal, Paul walked down an aisle between rows of cubicles, looking for someone. Suddenly, he knew the person he was looking for was in the back office, and Gradie knew it too, like they were having the same dream. The vision took over his senses. The team faded into the background, and their words broke apart before he heard them. There was only Paul, walking across that nightmare office, trying to get to the people who had got him caught up in this shit in the first place.

Before Paul got to the door, the vision changed. He was dancing in a club, high on ketamine, grinding on some faceless woman. Another shift, and he was driving to work, very late, sun blazing at the top of the sky. His car lost its grip on the road and flew up into the air, like some mad god had entered a cheat code.

“Got his city,” Lucy said. The vision froze, freeing Gradie from his trance. He caught enough of Lucy’s tone to read something in it, like an old bitterness, that gave the city a bad name.

The window-portal vanished and a floating 3D map rotated in its place. Subtle beams of light shot from the surface to the faces of the team members, and they began moving their hands in quick motions.

Gradie tried a touchscreen zoom-in pinch in front of his face and the map shrunk to a single street in the center. It was so detailed, he would have thought it was a live camera feed if not for the complete absence of people.

“That’s half the hassle right there,” Philip said. No dropping in and dealing with fucking airports.”

“Can you get his POE from what we have?” Michael swiped his hands rapidly and searched whatever he was seeing for a sign.

“No,” Lucy said. “He never actually makes the trip. Gonna have to get it from the inside.”

Michael nodded. “Ok, I’ll put together the assignments once we locate him.”

“One last thing.” Klara banished the map with a flick of her wrist and brought up something else. It took a moment for Gradie to register what he was seeing.

A door. Plain wood laminate, simple knob. Could be in any office, back closet, or apartment in the country.

“I’m almost certain he’s got a Doormaker.”

“This from his dreams?” Michael sounded disappointed.

“Yes. Repeated, unprompted, promising escape and truth.”

“If the defense has a door, they’re probably one of the bigger corps,” said Lindsey. “Most Doormakers are on contract nowadays.”

“Well, at least we know where he’s headed if he gets spooked,” said Philip.

“Whats a door? Does it let him come back to the Otherworld?” Gradie asked.

The team looked at him like they had forgotten he was there. Klara smiled softly.

“No. A door allows travel from one Hardworld to another. It’s a hack, you could say, invented by a very crafty Hardworlder long before your time.”

“So, we would have to follow him through, or—”

“No, it only works for him. It only really exists in his mind.”

“Cant you just find him again. With his dreams?”

“Good question, but it’s not that easy. The secondary Hardworld will have a pull that’s much stronger than the first, as a result of the priming that makes him drawn to it in the first place. He won't stray outside of it even into the Dreamworlds. It would be a lot harder for me to scrape anything from there, so please,”

“Don’t let him get to it. I got you, Ma’am.” Luke nodded like it was a challenge.

“If it's so hard to get to, why not just put him in that second world to begin with?” Gradie asked.

“Because no one wants to stay dropped into a Hardworld forever,” Philip said. “Whoever is guarding him presumably would like to be able to bring him back to the Other once the heat dies down.”

“Does the heat ever die down?”

Philip smiled. “Not usually.”

“So, is he up?” Lindsey asked.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“My guess would be no,” said Klara. “but I cant say for sure.”

“Do we have no intel on who’s running the defense at least?”

Klara answered her, but Gradie’s mind pulled on him in a way that was becoming familiar. Time slowed, Klara’s voice stretched into white noise, and—

He got up late. Snoozed the alarm three times. No coffee. Walked into the office completely uncaffinated, miserable. Thursday. Missfire of the week, sputtering day. LCD screens that burned the eyes, devouring vision over decades. Pinching headset. Stale air and voices but no speaking. Outside, sunlight stretched its legs in a full dance, pale morning to bright blue noon, a brief exhale, then back down to rumbling evening orange, shadows slipping from its grasp and hiding in the corners, between the keys, down the hall. The drive home, smell of office clinging to him, dying on the way. Through the door into that other titled existence. Hours evaporate, sliced seconds of distraction and a scrambling search for purpose, now that the mold and vice were gone. The bed, resisted, until “might as well”. Dark sleepless tossing, too late for any hope of a full eight hours, besides calling in on a Wednesday. Unthinkable. At last, two am—

“No idea,” Klara said. Her voice snapped out of the fog, an echo becoming present sensation. The two parts of his memory fused just as before, the Otherworld rolling over the Real, the memory of his waking life subdued beneath it, complete but totally apart. Before he knew it, he wasn’t even thinking about it. Left with only a sensation like being well-rested, but from a different kind of weariness.

“But we can assume it’s a serious outfit if they have a Doormaker,” Lindsey said. It was only a question on the edges.

“Not necessarily,” Klara said.

“I’m sure they’ll introduce themselves eventually.” Philip flicked his small espresso cup out into the black. Lindsey twisted towards him.

“Be good to have an idea before that, don’t you think? Maybe prevent a repeat of—”

“I’m sorry Lindsey. I wish I had more for you.” Klara said.

Lindsey’s face froze in embarrassment. “No, that’s fine, Thank you Klara.”

“Any other concerns? We need to drop in ASAP.” Michael’s voice boomed in the darkness.

“Let’s do it.” Luke smiled with more enthusiasm than Gradie had thought him capable of. The rest of the team nodded and the map collapsed into a small light and flew off into the sky, becoming just another star in the night.

Suddenly, Gradie recognized the starfield. The same constellations had orbited above Lucy’s home. The memory of her digging through his mind still disturbed him, and he struggled to meet her eyes as she called to him.

“Gradie,” She flicked something across the room and he caught it, then almost let it go. It was dripping wet. A small matte-blue crystal. The rest of the team took theirs with the same air they might accept a handgun.

“What—”

Lucy got ahead of him. “Memory crystal. Has all the info we have on his hardworld. It’ll help you drop in.”

Luke held the crystal up to his face and it blinked with a dappled light, like a projector lens seen from an angle. He flickered and dimmed for a moment, like a hologram, then the light stopped and he put it in his pocket, now again a solid form.

Sam studied hers like a puzzle, the light flickering in random rhythms. Gradie looked down at his, still dripping a tingling blue liquid, like Listerine with an electric charge, down his hand.

“Why is it wet?”

“They’re dissolving,” Lucy said. “In an hour they’ll be gone. It's to keep the intel secure.”

Gradie nodded, again avoiding those eyes by staring at the dripping crystal. He tried to guess how to use it. Sam held hers like a game boy, and Luke had looked through his like a rifle scope, but no two team members used it the same way. Lindsey pressed hers to her forehead and her eyes flashed, Celeste popped hers in her mouth and rolled it around like a hard candy while looking thoughtfully at the sky, and Philip hadn’t even touched his beyond slipping it in his pocket.

Gradie guessed it was one of those things where only the intent matters, like so much in this place. He squeezed one half of the crystal with his fingertips and the facets on the other half opened and fanned out, exposing a blazing dot of sunbright light inside the hollow interior. He pointed it at his face and the light blinded him to everything else.

A gentle whine like a jet engine grew in his ears, then the noise of traffic and muffled stereos. He was floating above a packed highway, cars creeping by below him, brakes squeaking at the stop-and-go pace. Dark clouds swarmed in towards the orange evening on the horizon, preparing for rain.

“It defaults to a projection of last night’s weather,” Lucy said, her voice breaking the vision from a fully immersive experience into something between a video and a daydream. The dark astrolarium returned in his peripherals.

“But you can roll it back to the day before if you need to.” She was standing very close to Gradie, watching him, like she might watch someone she was instructing take shots on a range. He scanned the projection of the city to distract himself, zooming in on a coffee shop he’d gone to last weekend. What were the chances the target was also in the metroplex? The clubhouse wasn’t even twenty miles away.

“Essentially, I’ve distilled all the real memories from his dreams and arranged them into a projection fragment,” she continued. “You need to focus on dropping into a self in the Hardworld with those features so you can link up with the team.”

“Can’t I just call Michael? That’s what I did last time.”

Michael stepped into his peripheral vision, the sliver of black and stars framing the window to the concrete world. Gradie let the crystal’s vision fade away and Michael stood there glowing in the dark.

“That time we were dropping into your Hardworld. This time you need to enter the one the target is in, which may have been changed by the defense in ways to make merging more difficult.”

“What does that mean?” Gradie felt that fear of failure creep into his mind, coloring his words with anger. Here he was moments from “dropping in”, and he still had only the flimsiest grasp of what the hell he was even doing.

“The Hardworlds want to accommodate your mind,” Michael said. “They will default to putting you in your own Hardworld when you drop in. You need to force them to put you into the target’s world.”

“What if I cant?”

“Then I’ll come find you,” Klara said softly. “But don’t worry. This is mainly a precaution. Your Spirit should gravitate to the right world when you focus on the projection we’ve given you. The mind fears the unknown, and will naturally run from it towards something familiar.”

“Half this shit works best when you don’t think too hard, bro,” Luke said over his shoulder. “See ya in there.” With a wave, he stepped through a door that disappeared with a slam behind him. All around Graide, the rest of the team made similar exits, and he felt a sinking fear that they were going somewhere he would be unable to follow.