* * *

  “Sarah!”

  Sarah whirled, any sense of calm vanishing amidst the sudden chaos of screams and crumbling walls. A mass of running, fleeing humans created a stampede. It was either move or get trampled by their despair.

  She shoved her way to a corner wall amidst a cloud of dust and smoke. Coughs rose as her throat and eyes burned.

  Her fingertips trailed along the wall. It was rougher than the slick walls of the compound and, despite the feel of an enclosed space, the air did not feel the same. She could’ve laughed. Was she really so used to that boxed up air that she could tell the difference even with all the smoke?

  When the panicking crowd thinned, she started moving again. There were too many screams coming from the direction where people fled. Was there not an exit there? Or maybe it was blocked.

  She tried grabbing a hold of a man as he ran by, but he slapped her hand away, his terrified eyes focused forward.

  Her attention shifted to her wrist, but dirt and blood covered anything that might’ve been there. Another red, vibrant and flowing, occupied her view. She touched her stomach as her mind processed the image. It wasn’t blood. The red fabric, dirty and torn, was a dress.

  Where would she be that wasn’t a mission?

  She heard her name again, lost amidst the screams, but when she turned to look, there was nothing but the gray walls of her room.

  Sarah curled up on her bed, coughing and gagging as if something was stuck in her throat. She stumbled to her feet, rushing to the bathroom to splash water on her face. It took her a few minutes and several gulps of water before her throat felt normal again.

  Calm, or calmer than she expected herself to be, she grabbed the notebook and wrote down the elements she remembered from the dream. The red dress was particularly confusing since she didn’t own one. A dress also meant that wherever she was in that dream or vision, she wasn’t on duty.

  She was heading over to the com to call Pegasus when she noticed a piece of paper on her desk. Pegasus’s handwriting, a bit neater than the version on her wrist, was easily identifiable.

  The note said he got called out and didn’t want to wake her. She would bet he considered waking her, hence the coming into her room instead of leaving her a message in the system. Not that she minded. The little hearts drawn in the bottom of the note along with loving words made her smile more than a message in the system ever would.

  * * *

  Pegasus checked his watch. Sarah should have seen his note by now.

  “What’s with that stupid look on your face?” Scorpion tossed a garbage bag at him.

  He caught it easily enough. Inside was a broken piece of thick plastic with obvious scorch marks. “Never mind my stupid face. Did you find anything else?”

  “No. Just that.”

  He tossed it back to her. “Anything on your end, Unicorn?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are we sure this report isn’t bogus?” Scorpion stepped on a paper bag, shoving it under the remnants of a broken chair. “How many times are we gonna go over this alley?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Everyone is tense right now because of the protests and that bomb that blew up downtown,” he said. “People are being overly cautious—”

  “You mean paranoid.”

  “Whatever word you choose, we still have to investigate.”

  She flipped her ponytail back. “Okay, but if anyone is checking dumpsters, that’s not gonna be me.”

  Pegasus laughed. “I could give you a boost.”

  Her hand went to rest on her gun. “Try it.”

  “Please don’t murder each other this early in the morning,” Mermaid said over the com.

  Pegasus placed a hand over Scorpion’s, ensuring she couldn’t pull out her gun. “At least wait until we get back to the compound. If we get blood in the van, Zeus will make us clean it.”

  Scorpion rolled her eyes.

  “Besides…” He released her, stepping away with a smile. “They emptied those early this morning. I already checked.”

  “Guys,” Cypher called through the com. “We had a message come in via the channel that Mermaid’s informant uses.”

  “Which song did he use?” Even over the com, Mermaid’s anxiousness came through loud and clear.

  “Say Goodbye to Tomorrow. He wants to meet, right?”

  “Yeah. Now.”

  “Your usual meeting spot?” Pegasus asked.

  “No. For this code, it’s a different one we only use when he has something urgent. It’s near the old post office on Avalon.”

  That wasn’t far. A fifteen-minute drive at most.

  “What do you want to do, Pegasus?” Cypher asked.

  Bad luck that he was the one in charge since Griffon was elsewhere. “Mermaid and I will go check it out. Scorpion, Unicorn, are you okay to finish up here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cypher, call them another transport. Mermaid and I will take the van.”

  He checked the time. So much for getting back to the compound before lunch.

  * * *

  Sarah hesitated, empty plate in her hands. The thought of seconds flitted through her mind, but then she remembered there was half a chocolate cake left in the fridge. A cacophony of strange sounds rose behind her, opposite from where the TV sat.

  She whirled. Flashes of darkness interspersed with bright lights erased her kitchen while dozens of faraway voices rose—too many to make out. A sense of despair gripped her as she looked around.

  The bright kitchen returned just as quickly as it had vanished. Her fists clenched, grabbing onto the plate as it was about to slip from her fingers. The knife and fork clattered onto the floor. She steadied her steps, putting down the plate before going back for the dropped silverware.

  That was a new hallucination. She wasn’t sure where she’d been, but this time she was outside. There was a feeling that she’d been looking for someone.

  Most of the weird hallucinations had her inside some deserted building or locked in a strange room. Even in the one with the smoke, she’d been somewhere inside. This was the first time she’d been out on the street.

  She grabbed her phone from where she’d left it balancing on top of the flour container and immediately called Robyn. Was it Robyn she’d been looking for in the hallucination? The scream was not a man’s scream, but she couldn’t say it was her sister’s either. How much would she be able to recognize a scream?

  Wait. Was there a scream?

  The call went through when Sarah was starting to panic.

  “What’s up?” Robyn sounded fine.

  “Where are you?” She shouldn’t still be in class.

  “Is everything ok? Where are you?” Robyn countered.

  “I’m home. Just finished eating.”

  “I’m headed back. Andie wanted to stop for snacks.”

  There was laughter in the background, overlapping with a faint: “There she goes, reassigning blame again.”

  They sounded like they were already in the car. The feeling that she needed to find someone—reach someone—did not lessen, but she still couldn’t say who it was. “Ok, just come straight home then.”

  “Yes, Mom.” Robyn laughed, ending the call.

  “Was that your sister?” Mom asked, coming into the kitchen.

  “Yeah, she said she’s on her way home.” The anxiety still remained, like being awakened from a nightmare that didn’t relinquish its hold on the dreamer. “I’m gonna go shower before she comes back and hogs the bathroom.”

  Sarah rushed to her room, pulling out the notebook that contained the jigsaw pieces from her maybe fractured mind. Past the pages with notes of Robyn killing her, of Robyn dying, she lingered on the notes about smoke and fire. Along with that and the ominous unintelligible words on a wall, there was a note about a red dress. She knew she didn’t have such a dress, and she’d checked with Robyn just to be sure. It was only one more little discrepancy.

  But today’s episode shouldn’t be related to that. The place looked completely different. On a new page, she wrote down: night, lights, outside. She added that it was a city, but she couldn’t be sure it was her city.

  She closed the notebook, pulling out her date planner from the backpack on the floor. For tomorrow, she had a couple of easy classes in the morning, but the problem was the afternoon. She was not looking forward to her next session with Dr. Rutger and having to tell him that there was yet another set of disturbing images fighting for space in her brain. Couldn’t her brain trick her with one thing at a time?