Nightmare

CHAPTER FIVE

Mother Araceil Rymar do Salman Reza dropped her bags on the foyer floor with a sigh. It was a relief to be home again. The windows in the house were open, letting a pleasant summer breeze waft through the screens. Outside, the deep green leaves of the talltree that supported the house rustled, and far below came the roar of a dinosaur. The newly-rescued slaves were in the capable hands of Brother Manny, who would get them settled in for the night and thereby free Ara to go home for the evening.

Then she heard it-a strange metallic clank. She frowned and stepped over her suitcases, following the noise. It came again and again in a rhythm that echoed off the hardwood floors and walls. Ara followed the sound, mystified, until she came to her son Ben’s room. The noise came from behind the closed door. She knocked once.

"Ben?" she called. "I’m home."

The noise stopped for a moment, then resumed. "Come in."

Ara opened the door. Ben was lying flat on his back on a narrow bench amid a series of levers and pulleys. He was pushing a curved horizontal lever straight up. Behind him, a short stack of black metal weights rose into the air, then descended with a clank. Ben’s freckled face was shiny with sweat, and his flame-red hair was darkened with it. The veins stood out on his arms as he struggled to lift the bar again.

"Hey, Mom," he grunted. "Good trip?"

"Ben, what in the world?" Ara said. "What are you doing?"

"What’s it look like I’m doing?" Clank. His voice carried a hint of annoyance.

Ara’s gaze wandered about the room. As usual, the place looked like something had exploded inside a computer store. To make room for the weight machine, Ben had shoved his unmade bed to one side, crowding it against his desk. The overflowing boxes of computer parts that usually lined the walls were piled into an unsteady mountain in the corner. Ara was thankful to see that Ben had at least put rugs underneath the weight machine so it wouldn’t scratch the floor. The room smelled of sweat despite the open windows.

"I meant, where did you get this from?" she said.

Clank. "Bought it," Ben grunted. Clank.

Ara suppressed a sigh and felt tired. Talking to Ben lately was like trying to roll a square rock. He had always been reticent as a child, but lately things had gotten worse. Maybe it was a function of being fifteen. She was glad to see him, but a certain amount of exasperation was overtaking the feeling. Things had been so much simpler when he ran up to give her a hug whenever she picked him up from her sister and brother-in-law’s house after a recruiting mission. Ara had recently decided he was old enough to stay by himself during her shorter trips-with someone checking on him from time to time-but now she questioned the wisdom of that idea.

"Who did you buy it from?" she asked. "And how did you get the money?"

"Computer work," Ben said, referring to the occasional odd jobs he did on the networks. "Found a guy on the nets …" Clank. "who had a gravity machine and was selling this one cheap." Clank. Sweat rolled off him and he paused long enough to wipe his face on his shoulder.

"Well," Ara said uncertainly. "Don’t hurt yourself. Did you have dinner?"

Ben shook his head, straining heavily to lift the bar one more time. His arms trembled and Ara was seized with the sudden impulse to help him lift it. At last he managed to straighten his arms and hold the weight stack in place for a moment before all but dropping them with a crash. Ara was about to suggest he end the workout and take a shower when the computer chimed.

"Attention! Attention!" it said. "Incoming call for Mother Araceil Rymar."

"Put it through to my office," Ara said. She nodded at Ben and went up the hall.

Ara’s office was done in the same decor as the house, with pale hardwood floors, wood paneling, and large rugs covering the floor. A leafy branch shaded one window while the other looked out over the long drop to the forest floor below. Outside, the sun shone in a golden summer haze. Ara’s desk was a moderate mess, but nothing like the sty in Ben’s room. That was another change. Ben had always been tidy as a child, but in the last year he hadn’t cleaned a thing unless Ara stood over him. She dreaded seeing the kitchen.

"Eliza," Ara addressed the house computer, "open call."

One wall blinked into a view screen. A silver-haired man with a kind, worried face appeared. He wore a soft brown robe. "Araceil. I’m glad you’re back."

"Grandfather Melthine," Ara said warmly. "If you’re looking for a report on my trip, I just got back. I can-"

"There’s been another death, Araceil," Melthine interrupted. "Like the others."

She stiffened. "Oh no."

"We need you to recreate the scene, and we have to move quickly," Melthine continued. "Before the echoes die away from the Dream. How soon can you be here?" He recited a monastery address which appeared across the bottom of the screen. The place was within walking distance.

"Give me ten minutes, maybe fifteen." Ara was already reaching for a computer pad from her desk. She also snatched up one of her dermosprays and checked to make sure the drug chamber was full.

"Every moment counts," Melthine said. "I’ll watch for you." The wall went blank.

Ara dashed out of her office and poked her head into Ben’s room. He was sitting up holding a free weight, elbow braced on the bench between his knees.

"Emergency investigation," she said. "Order supper if I’m not back soon, all right?"

Ben grunted and lifted the weight, biceps straining. Ara didn’t know if he meant the sound as assent or if it was a general noise, but she turned anyway and rushed toward the door.

Outside, she clattered up a set of wooden stairs to a walkway that ran above the house. Tiny flying lizards chirped and croaked in the leaves and the air was warm where the talltree shade didn’t reach. The overhead sky was clear and blue, and the breeze remained pleasant. Ara, however, was covered with goosebumps. Another murder, and she had been called to investigate.

Ara hurried up the walkway which connected her neighborhood’s talltree to the next talltree over. The entire monastery-and the city that surrounded it-was built into the canopy of the massive forest. Each talltree was over a hundred meters high, with thick, spreading branches that made ideal foundations for houses safely above the pods of saurians-dubbed dinosaurs by the original Bellerophon colonists-that stomped over the forest floor. Each tree could support half a dozen houses or more, and flexible walkways made of board and cable connected them to each other. Fine polymer netting covered the space between the cable railing and the floor of the walkway to prevent people from falling through, though the netting was hidden from view by a thick growth of ivy. Ara moved quickly from one tree to another, passing several other people with only the barest of nods until she came to the address Melthine had given her.

It was a small house, with a wide front deck and a gently-sloping roof that blended neatly into the talltree. A police officer in a blue tunic stood guard at the door, and a holographic stripe of blue light ringed the house at waist level. The words Do not cross by order of the Guardians were etched on the ring in yellow. Ara crossed the ring-it beeped at her in alarm-and held up the gold medallion that marked her a Child of Irfan.

"Grandfather Melthine called for me," she said.

The officer, a young man with pale hair and eyes, stuck his head inside the door and conferred briefly with someone Ara couldn’t see. Then he motioned her inside and shut the door after her.

The sharp smell of relaxed bowel hit her. Ara swallowed, unable to see much in the dark interior after the bright outdoor sunshine.

What am I doing here? she thought. This is a real murder with a real corpse. I’m not even a detective. What if I throw up when I see the body?

"Araceil!" boomed a voice from the gloom. Ara’s eyes finally adjusted and she recognized Grandfather Melthine. "Good. The body’s this way."

"Who is it?" Ara said, following him into the house.

"Sister Iris Temm."

The name meant nothing to Ara, for which she was grateful. It was bad enough to know the woman was-had been-a fellow Child. Melthine took her into the living room. The sun dropped slanted rectangles of gold light on the floor, and Ara took in her surroundings. Easy chairs, sofa, upright piano-a real one, with strings-coffee table. Shabby, but comfortable, typical for someone on a Sibling stipend. A fainting couch lay off to one side, and the body of a woman reposed quietly on it. Her arms were crossed over her stomach as if she were asleep or in the Dream. Iris Temm had been a tiny woman, almost doll-like, with curly blond hair and sallow skin. Both her eyes had been blackened and her nose looked broken. Other bruises darkened her pale skin, as if she’d been beaten before dying. Ara’s eye unwillingly went to Temm’s left hand. It was crusted with dried blood, and the littlest finger had a ring of cross stitches around the base. The finger above the stitches was clearly not original to Iris Temm. As she feared, Ara’s gorge tried to rise, and she swallowed hard. Grandfather Melthine had told her about this aspect of the murders, though she had never seen it. Seeing it in person was very different from hearing about it.

"The finger," she said, amazed at the steadiness in her voice. "Did it belong to-?"

"Wren Hamil." Another person, a woman of Asian ancestry, entered the room. She was Ara’s height, but with a whipcord build and long hair that twisted in an intricate braid down her back. Civilian clothes, sensible shoes. She thrust a hand at Ara, who took it automatically. A jolt crackled down Ara’s spine. The woman was Silent.

"Inspector Lewa Tan-Guardians," she said. Her voice was oddly harsh and raspy, as if she were about to cough. "You the consultant in Dream theory?"

Ara nodded. The Guardians of Irfan were the legal enforcers of the Blessed and Most Beautiful Monastery of the Children of Irfan. The rank and file encompassed investigators, lawyers, judges, and other such folk, some of whom were Silent and some of whom were not. They had no jurisdiction outside the monastery, but Iris, like most Children, lived within its boundaries.

"So the finger did belong to the previous victim?" Ara asked.

"On-site DNA test says so," Tan agreed. Her tone was clipped, her words succinct, as if she wanted to get her talking done as fast as possible. "And when Wren Hamil’s body was found-" she checked her computer pad "-eighteen months ago, she was …’wearing’ the finger of a woman named Prinna Meg. Wish we could say Prinna Meg was the first victim, but we can’t. She was wearing the finger of another person. Someone we haven’t identified yet."

"The bruises-"

"Body’s covered with them. Medical examiner will tell us more."

"Who found her?" Ara asked. She felt as if she weren’t quite there, like the world around her wasn’t real.

"Boyfriend," Tan rasped. "Came over to pick her up for dinner and found her like that. My partner’s questioning him. Back deck."

"Do you suspect him?"

"Not seriously. Medical examiner’s on her way, but I did a prelim scan. Looks like Temm’s been dead an hour, maybe two. I registered heightened levels of psytonin in her brain. Means she was probably in the Dream when she died, just like Prinna Meg and Wren Hamil. Then we called you."

What had Ara been doing two hours ago? Sitting at her desk on the ship filling out a report on the recent buy while the four slaves that were the subject of the report slept the sleep of the exhausted in their cabins. At one point Ara had looked in on them and found Willa tossing restlessly on her mattress. Jeren, in contrast, slept so soundly that Ara had to look carefully to see his breathing. Kendi and Kite snored in the bunks above him. All while a Silent sister was being murdered in the Dream.

"Where’s her dermospray?" Ara asked. "I didn’t see it on the couch." It sounded to Ara like her own voice was coming from far away.

"Bagged and tagged," Tan told her. "Possible evidence."

"Time, Araceil," Melthine interrupted. "The Dream will move on."

Ara started and came to herself. "Of course, Grandfather. Is there a bedroom I can use?"

"Whole house is a crime scene," Tan said dubiously. "You just want a place to lie down, right?"

"Yes."

"Bed should be okay, then. We already checked it."

Tan escorted Ara into Iris Temm’s bedroom, a small but comfortable place containing a double bed, high dresser, and two bedside tables that didn’t match. The curtains were drawn in this room, making it feel gloomy. Ara lay down gingerly on the bed. It smelled faintly of bath powder.

"Need anything?" Tan asked.

"Just some quiet. I’ll let you know what I find."

"I’m joining you," Tan said. "Now that I can find you in the Dream."

Of course, Ara thought. That was why Tan had made such a point of shaking Ara’s hand.

"Yes, all right." Ara shut her eyes. "Just give me a few minutes to find Iris’s turf. It’ll be easier without another Silent mind around."

Tan took the hint, for Ara heard retreating footsteps and the sound of the bedroom door shutting. Ara took out her dermospray, pressed it to her upper arm, and thumbed the release. With a thump and a hiss, it injected Ara with a tailored drug cocktail. Ara lay back on the soft pillow, then inhaled and exhaled, following a pattern perfected over many years of practice. Her heartbeat slowed. After a while, the darkness behind her eyelids shifted and slowly filled with swirling colors. They mixed and whirled until a vibrant white light became Ara’s entire universe. Her body fell away and she felt light and airy. The light brightened further, growing incandescent. Then it flashed in a nova burst and vanished, leaving Ara standing on a flat, featureless plain that stretched from horizon to horizon. Soft sound filled Ara’s ears, thousands of whispers that blended together like the delicate roar of a seashell.

It was the Dream.

Ara looked down. Her body felt perfectly solid and normal, as did the ground beneath her feet. This, she knew, was an illusion created by her own subconscious. Each particle of the earth she stood on, every molecule of air she breathed, was actually a sentient mind. Although every mind in the universe created the unconscious gestalt of the Dream, only the Silent could actually enter and use it. The whispers Ara heard were other Silent also in the Dream. If Ara desired, she could reach out to one or more of them, call to them.

The Silent could also sculpt the Dream into whatever environment they desired. Usually Ara chose a pleasure garden, complete with fruit trees, musical fountains, and sweet-smelling flowers. The flat plain was merely the default. This time Ara left it as it was.

Iris Temm and three other Children of Irfan had died while they were in the Dream, and the police were assuming they had been attacked and murdered there. Even the greenest student of the Children knew that injuries in the Dream were visited on the real-world body and that very few Silent had the concentration or strength to resist these psychosomatic wounds. Death by accident was not unknown in the Dream, but there was the matter of the substitute fingers. There was nothing accidental in this particular case.

The difficulty lay in the Dream itself. The place left no crime scene. Without a conscious mind to dictate reality, it reverted to the simple, featureless plain Ara now occupied. Once Iris Temm was dead and her killer left the Dream, there would be nothing to indicate either person had ever been there.

Or so the murderer probably thought.

Ara closed her eyes and widened her other senses. Delicately she probed at the ground beneath her feet and the air above her head. When Iris Temm had entered the Dream and created an environment for herself, she used the subconscious minds that were closest to her physical body-her neighbors, other Silent, even the more intelligent dinosaurs, if some of the wilder theories about them were correct. Each mind made up a piece of Iris’s Dream. Since Temm had only been dead for an hour or two, most of these people should still be fairly close to her-and to Ara. This meant that Ara’s Dream body now existed in the portion of the Dream created from the same minds that Temm had recently used.

And Ara could hear the echoes.

Each mind Iris Temm had touched from the Dream retained an unconscious memory of the form she had given it, a telepathic recording of what it had been. Ara stretched her own mind outward, listening, feeling, touching.

Duplicating.

Ara was an expert in Dream morphic theory, meaning she had a deep, almost instinctive knowledge of how the Dream was put together. Ara was one of the few human Silent whose touch was delicate enough to recreate what someone else had done. She used that touch now.

The plain warped and changed. Forms writhed upward from the ground and crawled across the sky. A moment later, Ara opened her eyes. An autumn forest stood around her. Gold and scarlet leaves decorated maple and oak trees, and the faint smell of smoke hung on the cool air. It was a relaxing environment with one strange feature-everything was translucent, ghost-like. The trees looked as if Ara might be able to push her hand through them, and the leaves looked like colored tracing paper. This was to be expected. The people whose subconscious minds Temm had used to create her Dream were beginning to forget what they had become for her. Still, it was enough to see what was going on.

Iris Temm herself sat beneath one of the trees talking with another Silent, a lizard-like karill from the Henkarill system. Here, Iris was vibrant and alive, her fair skin smooth instead of bruised, her face animated instead of still. Her movements were graceful and she was very pretty. But Ara could see through her as if she were a ghost.

The voice of the karill was low, and Ara couldn’t make out what it was saying. Ara wondered why Iris called up a Terran forest instead of the talltrees on Bellerophon. Perhaps she had been born on Earth or had spent time there.

Temm and the karill finished their business, and the karill vanished. Ara knew that once in the solid world it would doubtless begin transcribing their session, transferring letters, documents, financial accounts, diplomatic communiques, and other information into electronic or even hard copy. That was the primary function of the Silent, keeping the lines of communication open between planets and systems separated by thousands of light years and weeks of travel. All Children of Irfan were licensed and bonded, with oaths of secrecy not to reveal or share information that passed through their minds and hands. Temm would soon forget what she had seen, in any case. Short-term memory training was an essential part of the Children’s education program, including the "forget" reflex which kept transmitted information out of long-term memory.

No, Ara thought with a small shock. Iris will never be able to remember or forget anything again.

The ghostly Iris Temm stretched, stood, and glanced contentedly around her forest. Ara was about to move a bit closer when she felt a ripple in the Dream, like a distortion in the air, and Ara recognized Inspector Tan’s presence, though the other woman hadn’t created a Dream body for herself. The presence requested permission to approach.

"It’s ready, Inspector," Ara said. "Just come slowly. You’ll disrupt everything if you appear too fast."

Tan faded into existence. The forest bent and rippled around her until she got her bearings and was able to insert her mind into the scene around her without forcing her own expectations on it and thereby destroying it. She looked around the forest with a sharp, practiced eye.

"Temm’s over there. She just finished work," Ara said.

"I’m impressed at the level of detail," Tan said, and her voice was deep and mellow, like a fine wine.

"Thank you," Ara said, a bit mystified. Although Tan’s lips moved and Ara heard the words, Ara knew that it was all illusion created by her own subconscious. In the Dream, communication consisted of concepts transferred directly from mind to mind. Ara’s mind, however, expected sound and language, so it provided them for her. Thought became reality in the Dream. Apparently Tan’s conception of her own voice was different from reality.

At that moment the light level dropped, as if the sun had leaped to the horizon. The leaves lost their bright colors and fell to the ground, leaving behind black, skeletal branches. A cold breeze stirred the papery leaves with a hiss and a rustle. Dread stole over Ara like a cold hand. Temm had noticed the change as well. Confused, Iris remained still, apparently concentrating in an attempt to change the landscape back. It didn’t work.

"Who’s there?" Iris called in a frightened voice. "What are you doing to my turf?"

Another gust of air whirled the leaves around in a tiny brown tornado. From behind a tree stepped a man. His back was to Ara and Tan, and all she could see was that he was tall, with a broad, strong build. He wore loose black trousers and a dark shirt. A wide-brimmed black hat covered his hair. Like the rest of the scene, he was translucent. Temm made a little squeak and stepped back.

Run, girl! Ara thought, even though she knew how it had to end. Get out of the Dream!

"Darling," the man said. "I’m on my way. I’m coming for you."

This didn’t seem to be what Iris Temm had been expecting him to say. "Coming for me?" she echoed, puzzled. "What do you mean? Who are you?"

"I love you, you know. You’ve always known." He took another step toward her. "We’re going to make love in the flowers. The red ones."

Tan grabbed Ara’s arm. "Let’s move to the other side," she hissed. "Maybe we can see his face."

"You don’t have to whisper," Ara told her. "They can’t hear us. They aren’t really here." But she closed her eyes and gathered her concentration. A Silent’s relative position in the Dream was based solely on where she expected to be. Right now Ara was here and she wanted to be there. On the count of three, there would be here. One. two …three.

There was a slight wrench and Ara opened her eyes. She was standing less than two meters behind Temm. Inspector Tan stood with her. Distortions rippled through the forest, Temm, and the man, as if the scene were reflected in a pool and someone had thrown a pebble. The conversation between Temm and the man wavered and swooped unintelligibly. Ara cursed herself for not realizing this would happen.

"Hold still," she ordered Tan. "It’ll clear sooner if you don’t move."

After a moment, the scene settled. The man’s features, however, were shrouded in the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat.

"— me alone," Temm was saying. "I don’t want you near me."

The man lunged for her. Temm gave a scream and ran. Ara and Tan turned as one to follow her. Then both of them halted and stared. The bare trees came to life. They lashed downward like stiff snakes, trapping Iris Temm in a mesh of branches and bark. The wind rose and howled like a cold living thing. Temm struggled and tore at the branches but she couldn’t get free. Ara’s stomach clenched in fear and she had to remind herself that this was nothing more than a recording, that the trees wouldn’t-couldn’t-attack her. Temm’s scream wailed on the wind as the man in the wide-brimmed hat drew close to her.

"You bitch!" he screeched, and smashed her across the face. She screamed again, and Ara noticed the branches had wrapped around her shins and forearms. "I want the flowers! Pretty flowers!"

The branches stiffened and Temm screamed again. Ara realized tears were running down her face. She wanted to run, leave the Dream, or even look away, but she found she couldn’t. Inspector Tan’s face remained completely impassive. Iris Temm’s scream went on and on, mingling with the wind and the growls of the dark man.

"I don’t want to do this," he cried to the skies. "Don’t make me do this!"

The cold air sliced through Ara’s clothes and made the tears on her face feel like rivers of ice. Temm screamed one last time like a banshee howl. With a horrible sound that Ara knew she would never forget, the branches tore the limbs from Iris Temm’s body.

The wind stopped. The branches snapped back upward with bony rattle, leaving the bloody pieces of Temm’s body behind. As Ara stared in horror, the dark man knelt beside the remains.

"Why did you make me do that?" he said in a calm, chill voice. "You make me do it every time. Every goddamned time."

He reached down and came up with a small, pink object. Ara’s gorge rose when she realized it was one of Temm’s fingers. A bit of yellow-gray bone poked out of the torn end. Temm’s sightless eyes gazed up at the black branches above them. Using the bloody end of the finger like a paintbrush, the man wrote something on Temm’s forehead.

Tan leaped forward to get a look. Ara stood frozen where she was. The man flung the finger away and put his hands over his face beneath the hat. Then he vanished like a burst soap bubble. A split-second later, so did the ghostly forest and the body of Iris Temm. Ara stood on the featureless plain alone with Tan. Whispers fluttered on the empty air all around them. It was as if the entire thing had never happened.

"Did …did you see what he wrote?" Ara asked finally. Her throat was dry and she wanted a drink with more than just water in it.

"Yes." Tan’s rich voice was flat. "It’s worse than I thought."

"Why? What did he write."

Tan looked at her. "The number twelve."

Grandfather Melthine ran a hand through his silvery hair as Ara finished the story. They were in his study, a busy-looking office lined with bookdisks and comfortable chairs. Holographic models of spaceships floated just below the ceiling. Outside, the sun was setting, and purple shadows gathered among the talltree branches. The office was a bit stuffy-Melthine preferred to keep the windows shut. Ara occupied a deep armchair, and an empty glass sat on a table at her elbow. Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Inspector Tan sat rigid in another chair while her partner Linus Gray leaned against one wall. He was a tall, spare man, with ash-blond hair that was receding from a high forehead. Around his neck he wore a medallion of worked silver instead of plain gold, a symbol of his position as Inspector with the Guardians of Irfan. Tan, presumably, wore hers underneath her shirt.

"This opens up a great many questions," Melthine said at last. "We need to discuss them."

"You and Mother Ara are both experts in Dream theory," Gray said. "Whatever information you can give us will help."

"The number twelve is significant," Tan said, voice raspy again. "Obviously."

"You think Iris was his twelfth victim?" Ara asked.

Tan shrugged. "Could be. Or he might write the number twelve on all his victims. No way to know yet. If we assume-" her emphasis on that word made it clear what she thought of the idea "-that the number twelve means he’s killed eleven other people, and if we assume he killed the other two finger victims, that would mean there are nine other corpses we don’t know about yet. I’ve already checked the databases. In the entire recorded history we have of Bellerophon, there isn’t a single incident in which a murder victim turned up with someone else’s finger sewn on."

She sat back in her chair, as if exhausted by the long speech.

"Which means the killer came to us from another planet," Melthine said.

"No," Tan groused. "It only means we’ve made a lot of assumptions. He might be a native and he hid the other bodies. Or he dropped them off a balcony, fed the dinosaurs. But it looks like we need to operate on the theory that the same person killed all three women and that he’s going to do it again."

"I’m not Silent," Gray said, "and I’m nowhere near an expert in Dream theory, but doesn’t a Silent’s landscape disappear when they leave the Dream or if they die while in it? Temm-and her forest-should have disappeared the moment she died. Why did her Dream body hang around after this hat guy killed her?"

Ara picked up the glass. She could still smell the scotch. "I imagine it did vanish. But he recreated her body and her turf long enough to …do what he did. That scares the hell out of me."

"Why?" Gray said intently.

"Because he did it without a noticeable break in the scenery. There should have been a flicker or something between the time Iris’s Dream ended and he took it over. There wasn’t. That means he’s highly skilled in the Dream, in addition to being frighteningly powerful."

"Powerful because he could kill her, you mean?" Gray said. "There’ve been other Dream murders over the centuries, and in all cases the killer had to be more powerful than the victim."

"It’s more than just the amount of power." Ara set the glass back down and turned her gaze to the darkening window. "First, he was able to wrench control of her own turf away from her and change it. That means his mind was stronger than Iris’s. Second, he was able to disrupt her concentration enough that she couldn’t leave the Dream to escape. That isn’t easy to do because every Silent knows that the Dream is just that-a dream. You can wake up whenever you want. He scared Iris so much that she forgot this fact. Third, he was powerful enough to convince Iris’s mind that she was being torn limb from limb. The human survival instinct is very strong, Inspector. It takes a lot of power to convince someone that they’re dead. This guy is both potent and skilled, and the idea that I myself might run across him in the Dream makes me shake."

"What’s the official cause of death?" Melthine asked.

"Mental trauma," Gray said. "The patterns of bruises on Temm’s body are consistent with being wrapped up and partially crushed by something with an irregular surface, such as a tree branch. Her body created the bruises in psychosomatic response to what happened to her mind in the Dream. Being torn to pieces, however, is more than your average human brain can pull off, so to speak."

Tan pursed her lips. "We need to discuss the finger angle." When the others didn’t respond, she continued. "Medical examiner confirmed that Temm’s finger was severed and replaced post mortem. Less than an hour after Temm died, in fact. Means that the killer murdered her in the Dream, came into her house afterward, cut the finger off, sewed Wren Hamil’s finger on, and left. We’ve interviewed the neighbors. None of them saw anyone."

"What about her boyfriend?" Melthine said. "Is he a suspect? The neighbors wouldn’t think anything of him going inside."

Linus Gray shook his head. "He’s not Silent. Genetic scan confirms. He couldn’t kill anyone in the Dream. And he has an iron-clad alibi for the time before and after she died. He’s a monorail engineer and he was driving one all day. Plenty of witnesses."

"He kills them," Tan mused aloud, "tears off a finger in the Dream, writes a number on their foreheads. Then he goes to their house, cuts a finger off, replaces it with a finger from the last victim."

"Whose finger was sewn onto the first victim-Prinna Meg?" Ara asked. "Do you know?"

"The finger’s DNA isn’t in any computer records," Gray said. "All we know is that the thing came from a woman and she was Silent."

"So maybe the killer does come from off planet," Ara postulated. "The killer brought the finger with him from somewhere else."

"That would seem to follow," Gray agreed.

"What do all the victims have in common?" Tan said. "That might give us a clue, too."

"They’re all women," Gray said, ticking his fingers. "They’re all Silent, and they’re all Children of Irfan."

"Wren Hamil, the second victim, was a student," Melthine pointed out. "Not a full Child."

"But they’re all associated with the Children in some way," Gray said. "They were all between eighteen and forty. Hair and eye color are all different. So are height and weight. None of them knew each other as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll have to do a deeper comparison just to be sure, but I’m not optimistic."

"Did the forensics team find any clues at Iris’s house?" Melthine asked.

"Not yet," Gray replied. "But it doesn’t look good either. No fingerprints, no blood or other body fluids except the victim’s. We’re looking into fibers, but since there wasn’t a struggle where any would get rubbed off, we aren’t hopeful."

"Why does he do it?" Ara blurted.

Tan shrugged again. "Been doing some reading, but I’m not an expert on serial killers. Maybe he hates Silent women, or just the Children. Hope we can figure it out. It’ll bring us one step closer to catching him." Her face hardened. "We will catch him."

They discussed the case further, but brought nothing new to light. Ara walked home, jumping at every shadow and every fluttering leaf. She regretted passing up Tan and Gray’s offer of an escort. The warm summer breeze only reminded her of the cold one in the Dream, and it seemed like she could hear Iris Temm’s final heart-rending scream in the far distance. Once, a dinosaur roared below her and she nearly leaped off the walkway in panic.

When Ara got home, the house was dark. Fear clutched at her and she ran inside. Ben’s door was shut. Shakily, Ara opened it and peered inside. Ben lay face-up on his bed in a puddle of silver moonlight. The sheets were tangled around him, leaving his bed as messy as the rest of the room. His skin looked like marble, and she saw with relief the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.

She almost ran into the room to gather him close to her but stopped herself. Ben wouldn’t appreciate being woken up, and the logical part of her knew the killer wouldn’t come for him. He was male and not-

— not Silent.

Ara looked at her son for a long time, then gently closed the door and went to bed.