Naomi

Naomi stood in the center of her dream courtyard. It was twilight now, and the leaves on the trees were turning yellow and orange. She glanced over at Adrin’s empty bench, but only spared a moment’s thought for him, then strode down the one path that led out of the dreamspace that her mind had created.

Beneath her feet the tessellated pattern of tiles continued, but twilight turned to darkness all around her. Naomi realized that she didn’t exactly know where she was going, or what she was doing, or much of anything at all in the dark wilderness of the unconscious sea.

The darkness was not unbroken. All around her colored light sparked and flowed, twisted and undulated. There was no pattern to the motion that she could discern. Light bloomed and traveled all around her, including above her head and below her feet; the tiles gave her solid ground to stand on, but beyond those lay a dark, infinite abyss.

She should have felt some vertigo when she looked down, but there was no gravity to pull her in any direction. She found that she could step up or down or even sideways and manifest tiles beneath her feet, moving in any direction. However, the tiles a few steps behind her disappeared into nothingness. It was going to be very easy to lose her orientation in this place.

When one of the colored currents struck her, it buffeted her like a wave, knocking her off balance. She felt as if a stranger had just brushed by her, muttering under their breath.

Zafrys had taught her that connections existed between Naomi and everyone she knew. She tried to picture a connection to Kelsam, a cord that tied her to him the way the cord had connected her to Adrin.

Instead, what she saw was a multitude of ghostly strings stretching in every direction, some thicker than others, connecting her to everyone she’d ever known. How could she know so many people? The unconscious sea must touch people on Earth as well as Elorhe, for there to be so many connections. One of those lines must lead to her mother. Maybe Naomi could visit her in a dream, reassure her that she was all right—

But now wasn’t the time. She’d come out here to find Kelsam, and she was determined to do so. But which of those lines connected her to Kelsam? She touched the strings, one after another, but none of them felt particularly Kelsam-ish.

So she decided to try calling out to him, instead.

“Kelsam!” Naomi screamed. His name emanated from her in a sphere of waves, a bubble spreading through the unconscious medium. One of the strings seemed to resonate with his name. She grabbed hold of it, focused on it to follow—

Something pressed up against her leg, winding around it like a lost cat. She shuddered, but there was nothing there that she could see, not even a shimmer of light. It felt like a living thing, warm and soft, but after a moment it was gone. Maybe I shouldn’t have shouted like that, Naomi thought. Who knows what’s out there listening?

She followed the cord that connected her to Kelsam for what felt like several minutes, but it was hard to make sense of time in this vast, dark place. Was she getting closer, or was there no end to this rope? Her feet struck tile as she quickened her pace. It was almost fun to run in this place, and she forgot to watch out for the colored lights until the largest current she’d yet encountered swept over her.

There were multiple colors in this one, all bubbling and boiling together in a maelstrom. It crested over her, covering her body, filling her mind with several emotions at once. For a moment she was euphoric, sure of herself in a way she’d never been. Then she was too terrified to even breathe. It was trying to eat her, surrounding her like an amoeba that found something it wanted to digest. Naomi fell backward, but she didn’t fall far, landing on the tile that stretched back from her feet.

And despair gripped her, despair like she’d never felt before. There wasn’t room in her head for anything else. Self-hatred stomped down on her like the marching feet of a regiment. Worthless, worthless, worthless. No one loved her. No one could ever love her. She deserved to die.

At last the storm moved on, leaving Naomi weighed down by the overwhelming horror of it. She curled up on her side, pulling her legs close to her body with a soft whimper. She had to fight it. Those feelings weren’t hers, they came from that—whatever that was.

“I don’t deserve to die,” Naomi whispered. “I’m not worthless. I don’t deserve to die.”

She had to repeat it a few more times before she started to believe it. The storm hadn’t hurt her body—not that she really had a body here so much as a manifestation—but her mind felt as if it had been pounded flat, and needed time to rebound. It was hard to judge how long it took, but finally she was able to uncoil herself from the fetal position and get back on her feet.

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Naomi found the cord that connected her to Kelsam and continued to follow it with more caution, watching out for the aurora-like waves of colored light so one wouldn’t catch her off guard again. The medium through which she moved was becoming thicker, more difficult to move through. She could feel currents now that she couldn’t see. They didn’t carry any thoughts or emotions, but they got in her way, trying to push her off the path. Yet she could feel that she was getting closer to Kelsam, only the closer she came, the harder it was to make any progress. At last she came to what felt like an invisible wall, but she was sure Kelsam was right on the other side of it.

Naomi threw herself at the wall, aiming her shoulder at it, as if she was trying to break through a door. She was thrown backwards, and again she landed on tiles, smarting with the sharp pain of rejection. A tiny thread of yellow-orange light drifted out of her chest and away into nothingness.

It felt the same as when she had tried to use her vitricity on Esar, Naomi realized. His mind had forced her back with the same sort of dramatic recoil. So she couldn’t force her way into someone else’s mind. She needed to take a different approach.

Naomi stood up and dusted herself off, a meaningless motion to keep her hands busy while she gathered her thoughts. She stepped slowly towards the barrier this time and spoke softly.

“Come on, Kelsam. You’ve got to let me in so I can talk to you. It’s me, Naomi. I need to talk to you. I want to make sure you’re okay. For Esar’s sake. He’s worried about you.”

Mentioning Esar seemed to make the difference. The resistance eased, then abated completely. Naomi stepped through the barrier and she was no longer in that dense, dark sea, but standing in a forest that had grown up between crumbling stone foundations.

“Which way did she go?” said a boy with dark, curly hair and big brown eyes. He was on the brink of adolescence, dressed in a uniform like the students in Norana had worn.

“Kelsam?” Naomi asked softly. He must have been dreaming he was a child again.

“My sister. Have you seen her?”

“Kelsam, you’re dreaming,” Naomi said. “Where are you? What happened to you?”

Kelsam shook his head. “There’s no time for that now. They’re coming for us. You’d better run, too.” And he took off at a run, leaving Naomi no choice but to follow him.

“Who are we running away from??” Naomi asked, plunging through a ravine with him and clambering up the other bank.

“Soldiers. They’re from Nalla-Bidharac. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know why they’re after me. I just—we have to get away—”

Naomi looked back over her shoulder but saw no signs of pursuit.

“I’ll climb up to get a better look,” she said, and leapt up into a nearby tree, climbing the branches to the top with ease. She looked around, but even from up high, she couldn’t see very far. The Asprai barrier was in the way.

“What’s that doing here?” she wondered.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asked. Naomi jumped—he had apparently been able to follow her up to the treetop.

“Do you know who I am?” Naomi asked.

“Well, sure. But I don’t think you’re supposed to be—you know, here.”

“I’m real. I’m not just a dream. Can we talk?”

“Um, I guess?” Kelsam said. Without climbing down, they were both standing on the ground again. Kelsam didn’t seem distressed any more—he was accepting the change in their situation with a dreamer’s equanimity—but Naomi was disoriented.

“What happened? Are you and Jason okay? Where are you?” Naomi asked.

“We’re near Norana,” Kelsam said, waving a hand to demonstrate. “These are Thady’s ruins.”

Naomi didn’t care about the ruins buried beneath Kelsam’s dream-forest.

“I mean, when you were awake. Where were you? Where are you?”

“I was looking for my sister. I thought . . . something happened to her, but then I saw her. She came back. Like she always wanted to.”

Naomi groaned. She wasn’t going to get through to him this way—he was too absorbed in his own dreaming state.

“Esar is so worried about you!” she said, hoping that hearing his husband’s name would bring out some lucidity in Kelsam.

“I’ll be fine. Esar worries too much,” Kelsam said. It wasn’t a great answer, but at least now Naomi found herself facing the forty-year-old man she knew instead of the child version of Kelsam.

“This isn’t just a dream,” Naomi insisted. “Please, if there’s anything you can tell me about where you and Jason are, Esar and I are on our way to come get you.”

They were standing right next to the Asprai barrier now, and Kelsam walked toward it, extended a hand.

“I still don’t understand . . .” he said softly.

“Neither do I!” Naomi said. It was nauseating, the way things kept changing in his dream without any rhyme or reason, but Kelsam didn’t seem at all fazed by it.

“I am worried. But . . . maybe that was the dream. It doesn’t make sense.”

“What are you talking about?” Naomi asked.

Kelsam shook his head. “You know, you don’t belong here.”

He walked right through the Asprai barrier. Naomi followed him and found herself back in the unconscious sea.

Well, at least she’d found him. At least she could go back and tell Esar he was alive. Naomi dodged a whirling pattern of yellow and green. How was she supposed to get back to where she began?

As soon as she pictured her mental courtyard, she snapped back to it like a stretched-out rubber band.

“I guess I took it with me,” she said to herself. “It is part of me, after all.”

Sore and fatigued, she sank down onto her bench. She knew she should wake up and tell Esar what had happened, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a little rest first. Her journey across the unconscious sea had left her exhausted in a way she didn’t know was possible. She slipped down to lie on her bench, which obligingly softened beneath her into something more like a sofa. Before long she fell into a true, dreamless sleep.