Chapter 13
Colleen forced herself to work her brush smoothly and evenly. She wanted her memory on paper as fast as possible. Her hands ached with the effort to keep them steady. She’d worked on this piece before school and since she’d come home. All the details she could recall were sketched out already, but without color or shadow, the scene didn’t have the same impact.
She’d never painted something that wasn’t right in front of her, let alone a scene from her vivid nightmares. The violence in most of these dreams would send Mother Kendrick into fits if she saw them on paper. Colleen worked around that, painting simple portraits of the two people she’d seen. The gray man was decisively not human, and that was made apparent in his proportions. With the swordsman, however, she could not pinpoint what made him seem so alien. His voice cinched it — she shuddered as his raspy words cut across her mind for the hundredth time — but she’d known he was not human before he’d spoken. Had her own thoughts altered his voice? She’d never been able to change her dreams before.
She considered asking Misty, who sat on her own bed, cruising through her math homework. Misty was a brilliant student according to her teachers, but had a problem with authority. The first few days, she’d refused to eat anything, stirring up the house mothers. Colleen saw her throw her lunch straight in the trash at school, or try to trade it for Skaeya pendants. Then after a while, Misty ate so fast she finished dinner before Colleen. No wonder, she must have been very hungry.
Unlike Colleen, Misty did not leave the table after she was finished. In spite of how uneasy she made the other girls her first day, she grew to fit in quite well. Veronica still avoided her, but the other girls were eager to hear her cynical take on everything from school to the universe in general. Colleen listened sometimes, from a corner, behind cover of a thick book. The other girls were even a little friendly, now that Misty had assured them Colleen was not some kind of living bad luck charm.
“Time is set,” she told them. “It goes in a circle forever. A clock is actually a really good way to capture the whole essence of time. If whatever happens in Colleen’s dreams happens in real life, she doesn’t cause them. She just sees them. You get what I’m saying?”
While Colleen got it, something about Misty’s explanation nagged at her. She glanced up at Misty, who barely looked at the problems before she wrote answers. “How do you know time is set?”
Misty returned her glance. “We don’t have free will.”
Colleen frowned. She felt hesitant challenging what might have been her only friend at Breckenridge, but Misty hadn’t answered the question well enough. “How do you know?”
“Our choices are made by the way we were born or the way we are raised, right? Either by your genetics or by your environment. Whatever you are born with or taught determines how you’ll react to every future situation you find yourself in. It’s all one big chain reaction that makes up the whole of time.” Misty caught the blank stare on Colleen’s face and set down her pencil. “Why do you always leave the dinner table early?”
“To protect my things. The girls get into them if I’m not there.”
“Why do you want to protect your things?”
“Because a lot of them were my mom and dad’s.”
“Why does that mean anything to you?”
Colleen’s voice caught and her lips trembled. Misty immediately took a step back, unlatching her steel gaze. “Sorry. I keep forgetting, everyone here’s really touchy about where they came from. But the point is, there’s a reason for that, isn’t it? There’s always a reason.” She went back to her homework. “I think the real question is, can we ever break free? Right now we’re just stuck playing pawns to higher powers.”
The direction of conversation made Colleen nervous, and not just because the more religious of the house mothers might get worked up over it. Thankfully Misty changed the subject. “I want to know where some of the others come from though. It’d be nice to know I’m not the only one being punished.”
“Your mom and dad are alive?” Colleen asked sadly. “So you’ll go home for the summer. Like Veronica.”
“Not if I or my parents have anything to say about it,” Misty grunted. “It’s not like I had many friends to leave behind. You have one on the outside, right? That Prudence girl?”
Colleen nodded. “Ru’s been my best friend forever. Our parents were friends too.”
“Can I ask you where they are now?”
Her throat constricted again as a cloud of bad memories unearthed itself, but she made the effort to speak. “No one knows. Ru’s dad went missing at the same time.”
Misty’s expression was suspicious, rightfully so, as there was a lot Colleen was holding back. Still, she didn’t pry. “My parents think I’m a monster. Not in a cute way, like they probably think of Veronica. They actually think I’m possessed by a demon.” She gave half a smile. “I guess it isn’t all that shocking, they thought everything was demonic. Hey, can I see what you’re working on?”
Colleen gingerly propped up the painting. There was a silence. Misty’s voice sounded as if she hadn’t had water for two days. “What is that?”
A startling change had come over Misty. Her eyes were intense, furious, her jaw hung slack. The blankets rippled under her fingernails. “A dream I had,” Colleen replied, cowed by her friend’s silent rage.
Misty turned that nail gun glare on her, and Colleen felt strongly pressured to elaborate. At the same time, a voice in her head was screaming for her to keep being stingy with her explanations. She bottled up all the words threatening to spill. “What?”
“I know them,” Misty said. “I saw them in a dream too.”
Colleen laid the painting back down. Her hands felt numb and shaky. “Did you see the city in the red desert?”
“Yes.”
“Whenever I see something there, I know it will happen in real life, somewhere.” Colleen eyed the painting and shook her head. “This one doesn’t make sense. They weren’t human. What did you see them do?”
Misty walked to Colleen’s desk. She rubbed her eyes, and seemed to relax a bit. Her voice was still weak and sandy. “This one,” she pointed at the gray man, “was leading an army against this other guy. The other guy was going to fight the entire army by himself. I didn’t see how it ended. Did you?”
“I must have seen what happened after.”
As Colleen explained, a bigger picture unfolded in her mind, something that made the dream seem even more ominous. There were no soldiers with the gray man, who had been running and screaming in terror before he’d been skewered. She remembered the distorted speech of the swordsman, the way he physically only took up a small portion of the sky but seemed to infect the entire thing with his corrupt aura. His victory was not a good thing.
When the story was finished, Misty looked as unsettled as Colleen felt. She leaned over and whispered in Colleen’s ear. Her hand trembled on Colleen’s shoulder. “Can you keep a secret?”
