Page 2 of The Edge of Dawn

But really, freedom was just an illusion. A distortion of perception.

Because he’d allowed himself to be dragged into the consciousness of another being.

This time…

Hm.

This is where she’d conjured him?

Into this silent underground room, carved into the thick stone of Earth’s crust. It was filled with strange human objects. Some, he could guess the function of. There was a table and chairs. An area arranged with low seating. A pipe and a metal basin—presumably for water and washing.

But there were other objects that he couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Flat, square things on the walls depicting various scenes. Soft, square things on the seats. Vegetation growing in mismatched round vessels. A bowl filled with sickly-sweet smelling, bizarrely shaped fruits.

Sensing the magnetic pull of her presence, he crossed the chamber, passing through an arched doorway fringed with long beaded strings.

If he were in his corporeal form, he would have pushed them aside, but he just drifted through them, entering what was obviously a sleeping room.

There was a pod in the middle. Human-made: flat, rectangular, uncomfortably exposed. Dressed with inelegantly crumpled linens.

And in the midst of that small nest of chaos, there was her.

“Oh. It’s you again.” She lay on one side of the rectangular pod, her arms and legs splayed out, hair tousled, eyes barely open. Her brow was slightly furrowed… as if she were in some sort of discomfort. “Hello again, dream-boy. This is the third time you’ve appeared now. I’ve never had that before. My subconscious must be trying to tell me something.” Her voice was tinged with irony. She spoke in heavily accented Universal, staring at him with a half-lidded gaze.

“I am not a boy,” he said mildly, hiding his irritation. It was because that old hag—the Mistress—used to call him that. Well, she was dead now.

“You look young. But I suppose I’m saying that from a human perspective.”

“I am older than I look.”

“Well, if my suspected reasons for conjuring you are anything to go by, then it figures. Lucky you.”

He snorted derisively. What was she even talking about? Conjuring? Lucky? If only you knew, foolish human. “And neither am I a dream—whatever that is.”

“But you are my dream.”

“Explain.” He leaned his incorporeal body against the wall and folded his arms, not sure what to make of this strange being.

The only thing he knew for certain was that when he meditated, drifting in and out of the physical world… into the void that existed between all worlds, he’d somehow appeared in her consciousness.

Their first contact had been fleeting. The second one had been intriguing. And this time—the third—she was completely unsurprised to see him.

“Well, since I’m asleep, and this is all a dream, and you’re not real, I suppose I can tell you anything I want.” She closed her eyes and placed her hand on her forehead, brushing back her long, messy hair. “What are dreams, huh? I suppose they’re little alternate realities that our brains randomly create when we’re asleep. They’re made of lost thoughts and memories and hopes and fears. Wishes. The impossible. Guided by our subconscious… trying to tell us something, I suppose. Maybe they predict the future. I don’t know.”

“Ah. Thought-walking.” He’d experienced something similar once or twice when he hadn’t yet developed full control over his ka’qui. There were times when his sleep-thoughts had become wild and terrifying.

Did humans lose control of their minds all the time?

“Is that what your people call it?”

That’s what I call it. He shrugged. Outside of The Program, he hadn’t had much contact with his so-called people.

Her eyes widened. They glowed with bright, luminous energy and all-too-human curiosity.

She was completely unafraid of him.

But if she understood what he truly was…

She would run.

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