Legacy(31)

I stared at her in the mirror. “You taught me almost everything I know. You made me what I am.”

She shook her head. “Not really. I may have hurt you a lot, but Reed just explained in detail what Winter did to you—to Zack. I may have made a prisoner of your body to try and keep you safe, but he made a mess of your soul.”

“It’s all right,” I said, looking back at my face in the mirror. “I’ve got a few of those to spare now.”

She seemed to deflate. “Be safe,” she whispered and disappeared into the stall.





Chapter 13




The roads were snowy as we drove north out of the cities on Interstate 35. The snow wasn’t coming down terribly hard, just flurries caught in the beams of the headlights like little dots of white against the black of the night sky. Winter meant it got dark early, around six p.m., and we rode north in silence in Scott’s SUV. I pushed myself back against the soft leather as the seat heater warmed my backside, still a little bruised from the fight with my mother.

“You warm enough?” Scott asked as we passed Circle Pines, Minnesota.

“I’m fine,” I said. “You know, for a member of an endangered species who’s just been put in charge of our whole race’s survival.”

“No pressure, though, right?” He cracked a grin.

“No, none at all,” I said. “We’re never under any pressure, ever.”

His chuckles died as we pressed on into the growing dark. The smell of the heated air surrounded me, and I realized I hadn’t really slept last night. The tiredness crushed in on me.

“You can sleep,” Scott said, urging me on as he caught a glimpse of my fluttering eyelids. “I don’t mind.”

“You sure?” I could feel my eyelids fighting to close.

“It’s fine. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Okay,” I yawned.

“Besides,” he said as I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the side of the car, “I’ll probably need you to drive back.”

I drifted off into a quiet calm, warmth around me, feeling safe and secure. The steady sound of the tires on the road faded away, and the hard surface of the window against my cheek turned into something else, something soft. I opened my eyes and I was lying on my side on a couch. I sat up abruptly, looking around the room.

It was a little dim, the only light cast by ugly lamps on either side of the couch. It was all very familiar, somewhere I knew I had already been. Dim awareness pressed in on me. I had been here before, many times, but the colors were blurring in the dark and everything seemed strange. There was a man seated in a chair opposite the couch, just where he’d always sat when we were in this room in the real world, not in dreams.

“Hello, Sienna,” Dr. Quinton Zollers said to me, looking up from the pad on his lap.

“What’s up, Doc?” I asked calmly, not really feeling like I was in control of this.

He gave a light shrug. “It’s your dream, I’m just visiting.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Like a dreamwalk?”

He shook his head. “No. You can control those. I’m doing the shaping work here, but I’m not really in control, either. Your subconscious is, which means you’ll probably say things that will make sense to you now but not when you wake up.” He smiled. “If you even remember this when you wake up.”

“The price of cranberries is two pounds,” I said.

He looked at me evenly. “Thank you for proving my point.”

“Why am I here?” I asked.

He smiled. “It’s just a dream, Sienna. In spite of your remarkable abilities, you dream just like everyone else.”

“Cranberries to that, I say.”

“I came to tell you something,” he said with a smile, “and I should hurry, because I don’t have much time.” The smile disappeared. “Sovereign will be coming for you. I don’t know when it will happen, but he will. And when that time comes, you won’t be able to stop him.”

“The duck-billed platypus is a mammal,” I replied, my brain doing everything in its power to not be helpful.

He inclined his head like he was searching for the right thing to say. “Indeed. I’m warning you about this because you should be aware that he’s coming.”

“But how do you know?” I asked, and once more the world made sense for just a moment.

“Because,” he said, “I—”

There was the sound of a honking horn and the sudden feeling that the world was out of control. My head hit the glass hard enough to jar me awake. I took a sharp breath and realized that we’d just swerved, that we were still driving up the interstate, that whatever had happened had wakened me at exactly the wrong moment.