81
Heather had the pillow wadded so tightly in her hand that the seam had split, sending the goose down puffing out through the rip, but that wasn’t what held her vision. She was so close to recalling the dream from which her violent shaking had awakened her. Deep inside her head, something hammered to get out, the pressure building to the point where her skull threatened to explode.
“God, just let me see it,” Heather breathed.
But it wasn’t happening. The more she tried to focus on the strands that remained of the dream, the faster they unraveled. A gasp of frustration slipped from her lips as she pushed herself upright in bed, the sudden movement sending fifty-four feathers floating away like a line of tiny paratroopers leaping from the back of a combat aircraft.
The sound of a door closing at the far end of the hall brought her back to the moment. Was it morning? The light coming into her room said it was, but what day? Was it Saturday already?
Heather stood up, then immediately sank back as a wave of dizziness narrowed her vision. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come. Must have stood up too fast. Moving more slowly this time, she made her way across her bedroom and slid into her summer bathrobe. It took her two tries to tie the bow that held it closed, so badly was her hand shaking.
Heather held her hands out before her, palms down. There was no doubt that the unremembered dream held a terror and a need that called to her, but it wasn’t causing this. The tremor was only in her left hand and had been getting worse for the last two weeks, a side effect of her new antipsychotic drug, Thorazine.
She regretted mentioning the rising intensity of her unremembered dreams to Dr. Sigmund. The doctor had increased her dosage and then switched drugs altogether in an attempt to bring peace to Heather’s sleep, expressing a fear that if the dreams got stronger they might reassert themselves in her waking life. As for the drug side effects, Dr. Sigmund had assured Heather and her parents that they would most likely stabilize when the drugs and dosages were finalized.
A shower. That’s what she needed. Worry damn sure wasn’t going to fix anything.
As she stepped into the hallway, she almost bumped into her mom.
“Oops. Sorry, Mom. Didn’t mean to run you over.”
“I was just coming to wake you for breakfast.” Mrs. McFarland smiled, the early morning light accentuating the lines in her face. It seemed to Heather that her mother had aged ten years over the course of these last few months.
“Do I have time for a shower first?”
“Sure, but not a long one. The Smythes will be over in half an hour.”
“Okay. I’ll hurry,” Heather said as she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
By the time she had washed her hair, letting the pulsing showerhead massage the back of her neck, Heather finally felt ready to mix with other people. Throwing on some faded jeans and a summer blouse, she made her way down to the kitchen.
Although the pancakes and bacon were fabulous, the jovial atmosphere of their weekend get-togethers failed to make an appearance. Their parents’ conversation turned to the assassination of the president, leaving little room for pleasantries.
Heather caught Mark staring at her left hand, although he quickly averted his gaze. It was stupid to let something that trivial upset her, but it did. Their attempts at conversation evaporated, leaving the adult discussion unchallenged. By the time breakfast ended, Heather could hardly wait to leave the table.
As she made her way to put her dishes in the dishwasher, Mark moved up beside her.
“Can you come over for a while? We need to talk.”
Heather looked into his eyes, but failed to see any hint of the disapproval or worry she had been expecting.
“I guess I can stop by for a few minutes.”
“Good. Jen and I’ll be waiting.”
Heather found the twins in their garage, standing in the corner they had come to call their workshop. Jennifer leaned back against the tool bench, her arms folded across her chest. From her smug expression and the thunderclouds gathered behind Mark’s face, Heather could tell that she had interrupted an argument.
Mark’s face lightened as he saw her.
“I didn’t come over here to get involved in another fight,” Heather said as she walked toward him.
Mark swallowed. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Just with me,” said Jennifer.
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Do I?”
Heather held up her hands. “I don’t care. Lately it seems like all we do is argue. I’m sick of it.”
Mark took a deep breath and Heather noticed the muscles in his face relax.
“Point taken.”
“So what did you want to discuss?”
Jennifer leaned forward. “He wants us to hack into the Rho Project.”
“What?”
“That’s not what I said.” Mark glared at his sister. “But we do need to talk about what is happening over there and what we should be doing about it.”
He pointed at the laptop computer that sat on the workbench. “Ever since that damn science contest, we’ve only done one thing. Leave that computer up and running so Jack and Janet could access it using the quantum twin link to their laptop. We’ve been so involved in our own problems that we’ve had our heads stuck in the sand, hoping that Jack and Janet would work a miracle and stop the Rho Project.”
Heather felt her heart rate tick up a couple of notches. “I don’t know what else we can do?”
“Besides nothing? We can get back in the game.”
Jennifer laughed. “You seem to have forgotten that we already played that game. That went really well. Head of the NSA dead. FBI director dead. President Harris dead. Jack’s team destroyed. Jack and Janet on the run. Dr. Stephenson more powerful than ever. Face it, Mark. We lost.”
“Not to mention,” said Heather, “we don’t have the Second Ship anymore. Stephenson has it.”
“I’m not saying things don’t suck. But I know this. Every second that goes by, Stephenson is making progress on that Rho Ship. And that scares the crap out of me.”
Heather stared at him. Never, in all the years she had known him, had she heard Mark admit that he was scared of anything. She could feel the probabilities swirling in the back of her mind. Something had happened to him that he wasn’t sharing.
“So what are you suggesting?”
Mark’s eyes locked with hers. “I don’t know why, but we were the ones who found the Second Ship. We were the ones it chose to change.”
“Yeah,” said Jennifer, “us and the Rag Man.”
“Mark,” Heather interrupted, “the ship probably would have changed anyone who tried on the headsets.”
“Okay. Doesn’t matter. Right now, we are it. And I think that if we don’t fight this thing, the whole planet is going to get flushed right down the toilet, just like all those worlds we watched being destroyed in the imagery on the Second Ship.”
The air of smugness left Jennifer’s face. Heather could see that, for all the bluster from her friend, Mark had struck a nerve in her too.
He moved in closer to Heather, invading her personal space in a way that focused all her attention back on his face.
“So what do your probabilities tell you?”
Heather felt a blockage rip loose in her head. It wasn’t a vision, but the equations in her mind cascaded through a set of multidimensional matrix calculations. For several seconds she just stood there, so involved in the complexity that she almost forgot that Mark and Jennifer stood next to her.
As a new wave of dizziness came and went, she slumped down into the chair.
“Heather?” Mark asked. “You all right?”
When she looked up again, she felt her jaw tighten.
“We’d better get busy. We have a lot of work to do.”