* * *

  Be patient, Pegasus had told her, but it was easier said than done. Sarah tapped her head against the table again, a poor demonstration of her patience—or sanity.

  “If someone asks me the name of the boy who stole my yellow bear in second grade one more time, I will scream,” she said, perfectly aware that someone would be watching, and laughing, in the next room.

  She looked up at where the cameras should be. For a second, she’d thought there was someone in the room with her, but the fleeting image vanished as soon as she blinked. If she wasn’t crazy enough already, sitting around here would soon finish the job. She’d been answering questions about her life for hours now.

  She was holding back the urge to scream in frustration when the door opened and her escort for the day, Foxtrot, came in. As usual, the man gave her a slight nod as a greeting.

  Pegasus and Unicorn had been taking turns ferrying her around the last couple of days, but they were out on a mission today. Nobody had given her any details, but she had overheard something about the New Nation.

  She wasn’t sure whether she should be offended or happy that they didn’t consider her enough of a threat to give her a field agent as an escort. Could be more of a formality at this point.

  Never in the mood for small talk—or any talk at all—Foxtrot took her back to her room and deposited her there without a word. The familiar sound of the lock clicking into place was grating to her ears.

  She kicked off her flip-flops—it had felt so weird going to the interrogation room in those—and was about to hurl herself onto her bed for a little more moping and grumbling when she saw a package waiting for her on the table about the size of a large book.

  There was a smaller envelope tucked halfway underneath it. There were no markings on the thing, not that she was expecting any mail in here. And if someone wanted to kill her, there were easier ways than putting a bomb on her table.

  It was also too early to be a birthday present.

  She opened the envelope first. The handwriting, a combination of odd swirls and crooked vowels, was obviously Pegasus’. He started the note by apologizing for missing out on all the ‘fun’.

  ‘I’m sure you passed your checks by now (marginally)’, he’d written.

  Sarah smiled. That was the only way she’d ever pass.

  ‘This is so you can keep a journal of your dreams and such.’

  By ‘such’, she figured he meant the hallucinations.

  ‘Better to keep it out of Cypher’s prying eyes.’

  Curious, she opened the package. It was a journal and colored pencils. Cypher probably wouldn’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t have a keyboard.

  Sarah went back to the note. ‘You can use the red for the dangerous stuff you see.’

  She’d likely run out of red sooner than the rest. She laughed at the words scribbled at the bottom of the note.

  ‘P.S.: Yes, I am trusting you with pointy objects, don’t make me regret this.’

  Pegasus had truly decided to embrace the insanity of it all.

  But where to start?

  She curled up on the couch with the journal and a blue and a red pencil. Upon opening the first page of the journal, she burst out laughing. Pegasus had written in large letters:

  SARAH’S PERSONAL DIARY

  CONTENTS MAY CAUSE PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE

  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

  Yeah, that sounded about right.

  Twirling the red pencil briefly back and forth between two fingers, she decided to write down the easy one first. Pegasus’ death.

  * * *

  Sarah stared at the page containing her unfinished notes from the day before. Dr. Rutger had asked her to write down as much as she could remember from the dreams to bring to the next session.

  His reasoning wasn’t that far off from what she’d initially thought. That sorting out her dreams and nightmares would get her closer to finding a meaning behind them. And the meaning, in turn, would lead to resolution and peace of mind.

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  So far that hadn’t worked very well. Not because understanding the dreams hadn’t brought any resolution, but because she had yet to understand the assortment of nightmare scenarios she’d seen.

  Still unsure how to organize it all, she decided to add everything to the list, starting with the more familiar images, such as the white room with the locked door and the empty gray corridors.

  * * *

  Sarah tapped the pencil to her temple. She wasn’t sure what else to put down.

  Part of the problem would be separating real dreams from would be visions and hallucinations. A glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye could be simply a glitch somewhere inside her brain.

  There was the time when she went to Pegasus’ door and the boy with the chocolate-colored eyes was there. But it wasn’t as if that were important. Neither was the time when she unsuccessfully tried stealing Pegasus’ pillow—if that was an actual thing.

  Then there was the Foundation Day celebration. She wasn’t sure what to think about that one. And no, kissing Pegasus was definitely not going on the list!

  She wasn’t sure about some of the things she saw that night, but Robyn had been there at the end. If nothing else, she could discard whatever contained her sister—and by extension her home—as a regular dream and nothing like the one that saved Pegasus’ life.

  But during the party, some of the parts weren’t matching up and things changed during the dream. Could it have been a dream within a dream? Or, in her case, a dream within a hallucination or vision?

  She decided to put that one on hold for the moment. Better to try working with the less confusing bits first. There had been something about a dark hallway, hadn’t there?

  * * *

  Below the phrase ‘Robyn shoots me again’, Sarah wrote down ‘Ten minutes’. So ten minutes leading up to something? Or ten minutes while waiting for something.

  * * *

  ‘A hallway, in the dark’, she wrote. She’d been going somewhere or maybe looking for something. She definitely wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  ‘I always know something’s wrong, but I’m not sure what. I know I’m dreaming at this point. Or rather, I think I’m dreaming, I’m never sure.’

  * * *

  Pegasus is there.

  * * *

  ‘He always says I’m not dreaming.’ Sarah laughed. As if that would help. Whoever he was in the dream, she felt as if she should know him. As if she trusted him.

  * * *

  ‘And then something happens.’ Sarah glared at her own words. That was very helpful—something. ‘We die.’ Still not helpful.

  * * *

  ‘An explosion maybe.’ Somewhere nearby, but out of sight. But then it had to be big enough to get them all, didn’t it?

  Her hand hovered over the page. All of whom?

  * * *

  Coughing, maybe? Trouble breathing? So maybe a fire—a bomb?

  They would’ve been in the building somewhere, surely, but she’d never seen any explosive device.

  * * *

  There had to be fire because there was smoke. She was sure there was smoke at some point. Maybe the explosion caused the fire.

  And she was sure there was an explosion. She stared at the page, at the line where she’d tried to remember how many people had been with her in the hallway. She shuddered involuntarily. How many people had died.

  A knock on the door startled her.

  * * *

  Sarah looked up at the sound. “Come in.” Then she rolled her eyes. Of course they can come in, they’re the ones with the lock code now.

  Pegasus came inside, closing the door behind him. “I see you found my present.”

  “How’s the verification going?” She tried for her best impression of a pleading puppy. “Can I please get out of here?”

  He shook his head. “There’s a lot of ground to cover, they’re checking back to when you first came in.”

  “I was hoping to get out of here sometime before my twilight years. I guess I’ll have to rethink my retirement plans.”

  “It’ll take a while, but it’s coming along. A few more days and you’ll be clear.”

  “You’re sure of that, are you? That I’ll be cleared?”

  He shrugged, lips twitching. “Wishful thinking on my part.”

  “Did you get anything from the prisoner?” She wanted to know if the New Nation really had been involved in Pegasus’ death.

  “Not yet. But we will. Scorpion is working on it right now.”

  “And did you get anything today?”

  “Dead end.”

  “Mermaid’s informant?”

  “Still in place, but he’s getting worried. We still have those other three locations to check. He hasn’t been able to narrow it down. Zeus took it up with Center yesterday, and they think it’s best that we move slowly.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  He shrugged as a response, but wasn’t forthcoming with his thoughts. There should be some plan in motion that he wasn’t allowed to discuss with her—especially while she was still under investigation. He already replied more than he should.

  Pegasus pointed at the notebook. “Do you want to talk about that?”

  Sarah clutched it to her chest automatically, as if to keep the images she’d put into words from escaping their new home. Suppressing her reluctance, she offered it to him. “There’s not much there.”

  Pegasus made no move to take the notebook from her. “I meant do you want to talk about what this all might mean?”

  “That the other Robyn may have been telling the truth? That I’m dangerous?”

  He sat down on the nearest chair. “Not exactly where I was going with that.”

  It was the obvious next step from thinking that this—whatever this was—might the reason for the target on her back last year.

  “If this is real…” She tapped the notebook, a physical representation of all the things inside her mind. “If even some part of what I’m seeing is real, that means there’s a chance that Robyn was right.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

  “You said she couldn’t be right because there was no way I could ever do anything to endanger a world, but…” Maybe she should start hoping that she was losing her mind.

  “You’re forgetting something. Even if this is real, even if you’re dangerous for some reason, there’s still one more thing that would make all the difference.”

  She sank back on the couch, Scorpion’s voice coming to the forefront of her thoughts. “Dangerous to whom?”

  At the moment, she couldn’t really see herself being dangerous to anyone but herself and her friends, but the man she’d killed when saving Pegasus would disagree. It sounded so far-fetched, thinking that this giant mess of fragmented images could be useful.

  And yet, Pegasus was alive, wasn’t he? She was awake and he was alive.

  He smiled as if privy to the direction her thoughts had taken, but the smile was gone way too soon. “I have to go. I just wanted to see you.”

  Fluttering suddenly manifested inside her chest, spread to her stomach. Silly, hyperactive butterflies.

  “To make sure you weren’t bleeding again for some reason,” he added as an after-thought.

  Sarah was still smiling when the lock clicked in place.

  She opened the notebook on a new page. This might work.

  This might actually work.