“What the hell?” Cat mumbled.

“That’s not a baby,” Kass answered. “It’s them. The mimics.”

Something rammed the wall from the other side. It hit the wall hard enough that the whole corridor shook slightly.

The baby’s crying got more persistent.

“We should keep moving,” Kass whispered.

Cat hesitated and then nodded.

They found some stairs not far along the next corridor. After a brief glance at one another, they headed down. There they got lucky.

“What is this? Some sort of observation room?” Cat asked.

The room was long and slightly curved. Newer in construction, the upper half of one entire wall was made with a thick glass. A control panel was situated in front of one of the windows. Cat walked up to it.

She glanced down at the buttons and then hit one that had a familiar looking symbol on it.

A bright light suddenly lit up the room on the other side of the glass. This was followed by a blood-curdling scream as the mimic inside the room suddenly moved its head in their direction. It started running toward them.

Cat switched off the light.

The room went silent. Not even a thump.

Cat glanced back at Kass who looked slightly annoyed.

Cat gave her a confused expression and a shrug. When she mouthed ‘what?’ Kass actually rolled her eyes. Cat almost wanted to laugh.

Kass moved forward a little closer to the glass. She gave it a serious look.

“I thought mimics were blind?” Cat asked in a whisper. “How did it know the light was on and how come it didn’t put it out?”

“They might be able to see changes in light. And I don’t think that was them controlling it. Maybe they were just making use of it. I looked them up after we got back home. I couldn’t find anything on them manipulating electricity.”

“You think they’re trying to figure out how to kill it?”

“That or use it,” Kass replied.

Cat frowned. “Use it?”

She shrugged. “It would make a pretty good weapon don’t you think?” She turned and began searching the rest of the room.

Cat was confused. “How is that thing a weapon?” she asked as she followed Kass around the room.

Kass opened drawers and shuffled through papers and handwritten notes. She shrugged again. “Imagine letting several of those loose in a town or a city. They ‘can’t be killed by any means’.” She held up a sheet of paper and pointed to that exact wording.

“What good would that do? They can’t kill them either.”

“They wouldn’t need to. They could just pretend like they know how to deal with them. If they had trackers on them, release and catch wouldn’t be so hard. You could use it to extort money or intimidate an enemy.”

“To what end?”

“Power, to win a war.”

“We’re not in the north Kass.”

“Just because the war isn’t obvious doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There’s always been a power struggle between the sorcerers, the aristocrats, and Mercy politicians.”

“That would be escalating things quite a bit though don’t you think? Even people who want power don’t usually want that kind of mess.”

Kass nodded and sighed. “Yeah, maybe.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Information. A computer...” she trailed off as she noticed that exact thing in one corner, half buried beneath a bunch of loose paper. She went over to it and wriggled the mouse. She was confronted with a login screen. She glanced toward Cat.

Cat shrugged. “Don’t look at me. Computer’s are Indi’s territory.”

Kass turned back to computer with a frown.

Casually, Cat reached for some of the nearby paperwork. “What do you think this is?” She tilted her head and the paper, as if it would help her make sense of the markings.

Kass glanced over at it. “Looks like test results of some kind. I don’t know. Probably from the mimic.” She turned her focus back to the computer. After another moment of thought and then she made a decisive move. She turned the thing off and started unplugging everything from the main box.

“What are you doing?” Cat asked.

“I’m bringing it with us. Indi can hack it from home.”

“Didn’t we already get all the stuff off the computers when we were last here?”

Kass shook her head and handed Cat the box. “Weren’t you listening to those two guys before. This is a different department so this is probably their computer and if not, well we still might find something new.”

Cat sighed and rolled her eyes but she did as Kass asked.

Kass glanced at the time. “We should keep moving. They’ll probably be changing shifts soon. We should probably be on our way...” But she didn’t immediately move. Instead she stood and eyed the rest of the room.

Cat narrowed her own eyes. “Kass, what are you really looking for?”

“I don’t know,” she replied breathlessly.

“We’ve got everything we came for don’t we? We know who these guys are, what they’re doing, mostly, and we’ve got their computer.”

Still Kass hesitated.

“Kass.”

Finally she spun and faced Cat. “I was hoping we could get access to the old computer system and all the printed files and just burn anything that survived the first explosion. When we first came in here, they had information on us. They probably still have that. If these guys find it, they’ll be able to find us, and who knows who else might come looking.”

“Oh, you’re worried about your old enemies from the north.”

“And new ones.”

“It probably all burned up.”

“This section survived.”

“Yeah, cause it’s offset a little from the rest of compound. All the access is welded up anyway. We can’t get down there and even if we could...” she trailed off and glanced toward the darkened observation room.

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Kass was silent.

Cat turned back to study her. With the cock of an eyebrow she added, “Unless you want to blow this place up as well?” But as she said it, Cat’s thoughts went to the sleeping men they’d overheard just earlier. It would be effectively like killing them in their sleep and that seemed horribly unsportsmanlike. To her relief, Kass shook her head.

“Let’s go.”

But Cat’s thoughts of the sleeping men had given her another idea. “What if I dreamwalk them?”

Kass spun. “What?”

“Well, everybody’s asleep right.”

Kass checked her watch. Then she nodded. “15 minutes, then we leave.”

Cat made herself comfortable between two filing cabinets at the back of the room.

“Try and target someone higher up in rank if you can. They’re probably all on this floor. Anyone outside, maybe we can try from back at the car anyway. Who knows if they have binding magic at the shaft.”

“They don’t,” Cat replied. “I just have to make sure to avoid any other dreamwalkers.” As she slipped into the dreamworld she found she could see many sleepers nearby, both above ground and below. Then the real world faded away as did her sense of time. Kass would wake her if anyone approached though. She hoped.

She aimed the two whose room they’d searched earlier.

Their dreams revealed very little about their work though. One man dreamed of playing ball with his wife and kids. The other dreamed he was running along a remote mountain path. Cat focused on the second one. As he ran she molded the world around him. Shifted it into dark hallways instead of countryside. Placed him in the compound. But soon things altered beyond Cat’s control. Behind them, a group of mimics suddenly appeared, making sounds like helpless kittens all the while they chased them. The man ran and Cat ran with him. She’d wanted him to walk somewhere to act out his day so she could learn something but instead he was living his nightmare.

Cat released her hold on his dream before applying her magic again, this time to shape it back into mountainside and then a tent, a blurry man who paced, one she hoped this man would fill in the details and view as a superior officer. What were they talking about? Cat gave him free reign and was annoyed when the room shifted to a well-lit living room and half a dozen real life kittens instead. The man sat on the floor and began to trail a piece of string among them.

Cat sighed and was about to leave to try someone else when a woman’s voice called from the kitchen, “Trick, can you come help me.”

Curious, Cat followed.

Trick made his way into a fancy looking kitchen. The whole place looked modern with extra high ceilings and plants and fluffy rugs, not a hint of mess. It looked more like something done up for an open home than somewhere someone lived.

A woman stood by the stove. She gestured down at it. “The damn starter’s broken again.”

Trick nodded, and as the woman started the gas again, he waved his hands and caused a flame to burst up from one burner. The woman clapped her hands together softly, then leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. A neat little peck that fell away into something more passionate.

Cat scrunched up her face, worried she was going to have to intervene again, but they drifted apart a moment later and then the man returned to living room where the kittens were bounding about over furniture or sleeping all stretched out on the sheepskin rug.

Cat was about to leave again when she thought of something else she could try. She shifted into a version of his wife and made her presence more known.

He glanced up as she took a seat on one of the comfy white armchairs. She practiced a gentle smile, something that felt out of place on her own face. This woman was not the type she usually pretended to be.

“So how’s work at the moment?” she asked, figuring it a common enough question among couples.

His face widened into a loving smile but he shook his head. “Now, you know I’m not supposed to talk about work.”

“Not even to me?” she pouted, unsure if the woman would act like this but doing her best impression of sweet and tidy housewife. Cat wasn’t untidy but the way the house was decorated, as if designed specifically for company, made Cat think this woman and herself had very little in common.

Trick frowned. Perhaps he sensed something was off. Usually dreamers didn’t question as much as they would when awake but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still pick up on irregularities, and it always seemed to be the subtle things. Stick a literal elephant in someone’s living room and they might not notice, but shift the tone of voice their loved one uses regularly and it could upset their entire world. Cat didn’t understand why, she just knew that some details were important to get right.

“No, not even to you.”

Cat tried one last time. “Who am I going to tell?”

But his eyes narrowed, going from a frown to outright suspicion. If she wasn’t careful she could soon have him questioning his entire reality and then he might figure out it was a dream. So she gave a smile and had an image of his wife leave the room as Cat stood up from the chair.

He returned to happily playing with the kittens.

Cat paced unhappily nearby. There was something unsettling about seeing these soldiers in their family homes with their loved ones. Had Derek, the guy they’d killed on the way in had a family? He must have at least had parents.

As Cat thought about him she found herself drawn to that spot where he had been and she was surprised to find there a mind that matched. She slipped in.

But as she entered it she immediately knew something was wrong. It felt off, in strangely familiar way.

She found herself as the dreamer then and an overwhelming hunger overcame her. She found herself in the room where he had died but her mind felt confused. She sat on the floor, her thoughts filled with longing for flesh, delicious juicy flesh. She needed to eat.

Creeped out, Cat pulled herself back awake with a jolt.

The bang of Cat’s elbow into the side of one of the filing cabinets jerked Kass’s head in her direction. In a worried voice, Kass asked, “What’s wrong?”

Cat shook her head, unsure what exactly she had just experienced. “Nothing, just something weird.” She leaned back and was soon back in the dreamworld. Pushing aside the strange experience she’d just had, she hunted for a new mind.

She jumped between several but found little of consequence. She did glean a little information about their structure and that the Mercy army also had their own departments, each one serving different government departments in a complex hierarchy of command and responsibility that made the Gordian Knot look like a simple piece of string. This wasn’t one organisation here but at least three, some with their own subgroups.

One group was dedicated entirely to the health and safety of excavation and no earth-moving work was allowed to be done without their knowledge, another was a 3rd party so proficient in the workings of the HPL that they were regularly hired as mediators to help with paperwork of any incident involving a human. The main organisation was the Necromancy Department, supported by an offshoot of the Mercy main defense force who were here for security purposes. The necromancy department was apparently headed by some guy named Harold, who was quite high up in the main Mercy chain of command. He was positioned such and well enough off that no one had any issues with him teleporting in all the way from Mercy everyday, at least not any they vocalised where command could hear them.

The necromancy department wasn’t just politicians either. Some were scientists and researchers. In the head of one sleeper, Cat found herself standing in what was very likely Harold’s office, listening to the guy give a report.

“Sir, I’m not sure what happened by when we went to find those old scripts in the history archives they weren’t there. Apparently, some time ago they got lent to the linguistics department and were never returned but when I went to talk to the linguistics department they had no record of it. Beryl did mention they’ve had issues with some of the newer interns signing things our under the wrong department so I asked around at the Department for the Preservation of Historic Calligraphy and the Department of Archeological Acquisitions but nobody knew anything about them.”

“Somebody must know where they are. I saw them on display at the museum not that long ago,” said a man Cat assumed was Harold. He was of average height and had a square shaped sort of stature. He had probably been quite fit in his younger days but had since found himself in an office with little time for exercise. Now he wore well fitted but not overly flashy suits. His hair was a luscious blonde and parted perfectly down the middle. His top collar was unbuttoned, suggesting he had a preference for comfort and practicality over showy aesthetics.

Cat wandered around the room, wondering how accurate it was. It was based on one man’s memory after all. The view was nice. The office was high up. It overlooked both the city and surrounding countryside. It was far inland and there was no sea in sight but Cat could make out the shimmer of what might have been a winding river in the distance. The room itself was filled with vases, books, and photographs of various people, some of them obviously family, others more political.

She opened a drawer below a yellow vase with strange markings on it and was unsurprised to find it contained documents with nothing but indecipherable scribbles on them. The dreamer obviously hadn’t seen the contents of these documents and so his mind had filled in something vaguely realistic looking but without meaning.

Their conversation droned on and Cat, not hearing anything of interest, left and went in search of another dreamer.

She found a soldier’s tent a few rows over and dipped down into one head as usual. She found herself in a park. Kids were screaming with laughter in the distance and dogs were playing fetch with their owners. The grass rippled like water and that wasn’t a metaphor. Cat winced and solidified the earth beneath her feet while nearby a picnic blanket drifted past containing two ducks holding tea cups.

They saw her and suddenly went flying off. The rest of the surrounding ground stilled. Cat relaxed but when she turned around to look for her new dreamer she came face to face with a man wearing a soldier’s combat pants and a white singlet. He was looking directly at her.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my dream?” he very clearly asked as he took a step toward her.

Cat immediately pulled herself out of the dream but it was too late. She could already feel him waking up and given this man was obviously another dreamwalker she knew she didn’t have a chance at keeping him asleep.

She sprung awake and was already on her feet before Kass could ask her how it went.

“We gotta go!” Cat told her.

“What happened?” Kass asked, already making a move toward the door.

“You know how I said the one thing I had to worry about was not meeting another dreamwalker, well, I’m pretty sure they know we’re here now.”