#something went wrong when they pricked me and so the pressure was going haywire

[oediex]

When the blood donation centre calls me, I usually recognise the number before I pick up. But on Friday their opening line was different from the usual one.

"We have vegan Magnums!"

In the summer, a freezer occupies the recovery spot at the centre, where you can have a drink and a snack. Besides the usual biscuits, cakes and pieces of fruit, you can have some ice cream. A treat. As a vegan, it's usually slim pickings. Just one or two types of ice lolly. Orange flavoured. Boring.

But when I donated earlier this summer, the nurses were all excited that, for once, they had seen vegan Magnums on the list of products that could be ordered. All of them were very keen to inform me.

"We've been saying, when Oedie comes, she can have a vegan Magnum!"

But when they went to check the freezer that day, while I was still locked to the machine singling out the plasma and platelets in my blood and giving the rest of it back to me, they returned with a disappointing message. Apparently, the vegan Magnums had not, in fact, been ordered. Bummer.

Hence Friday's opening line.

But today was the day. And as I was leaving after a, unfortunately, failed and early-terminated donation session (it happens), the nurse I get along with the most says conspiratorially, "let me come with you to get the vegan Magnums."

They had, I kid you not, hidden the vegan Magnums at the bottom of the freezer, underneath all the other ice cream and ice lollies, just to make sure that I, the one donor they know to be a vegan, would not miss out.

[welcometophu]

Missed Fortunes: Self 6

Twinned Book 2: Missed Fortunes

Self 6

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Risks are terrifying things, and Carolyn really doesn’t like taking more than one in a week. At this point, she’s lost count for this week, and it’s only Thursday.

On the one hand, she has a girlfriend. A sweet, adorable girlfriend.

On the other hand, she still has to convince Del to help with her final project. And while there are still more than two months left in the semester, Carolyn feels an urgency and need to help Sam now. She needs to make this call.

After more than two years of silence, it feels strange to dial Del’s number. Carolyn sits on her bed with her back to the wall. Nikita and Heather are curled together on Heather’s bed, sharing headphones as they watch a movie on Heather’s laptop. They offered to leave, but Carolyn asked if they could stay. She knows that it’s a crutch, but she also knows she might need Heather to help her stay calm, feel even and safe enough to have this conversation. And just that thought pricks at her skin, irritated by how much she’s let herself lean on Heather over the years without learning how to handle her own emotions.

Still.

This conversation isn’t going to be easy.

The phone rings at least six times before Carolyn fully realizes it. She takes the phone away from her ear, puts it on speaker, and lets it ring two more times.

It’s not going to voice mail, so she presses the button to end the call. She drops the phone on the bed, leans her head back against the wall with a thump.

“No luck?” Heather asks, her voice a little too loud.

Carolyn shrugs. It’s not like it’s time critical.

Lie.

There’s certainly a possibility it could be time critical. Sam’s been stuck there a long time, but it could be getting worse. Something’s been pushing him to try to escape. That’s why she’s doing this now, rather than putting it off until later in the semester. Until she’s done more research, until she has a better basis for what really needs to be done.

Her phone rings, the loud sound muffled by where it’s slipped under her comforter until she digs it free of the bed. She presses the button to answer, then speaker, waiting a heartbeat before calling out, “Hello.”

Heather glances over; Nikita touches the keyboard to pause the movie.

“Hi, Carolyn.” Del’s voice is light, but Carolyn hears the rustling of papers in the background. She’s fidgeting. Even after all this time, Carolyn can imagine the way she moves things around, picking up papers and neatening piles to have something to do with her hands.

“Are you alone?” It comes out sharper than Carolyn means it to, the words landing heavily enough that Del laughs.

“Why, is this some kind of weird—no, I’m not even going to go there,” Del says. “Yes, I’m alone. No Shawn, if that’s what you really want to know.”

Carolyn cradles the phone in her lap, breathes through the tension in her shoulders. “Yes, that’s what I really wanted to know. I don’t want to talk to him right now, just you.”

“Does this have to do with him?” Del asks.

Carolyn licks her lips. There are so many holes in this plan, so many things she hasn’t figured out and can’t get data for. But she gets the feeling that Del’s asking about an entirely different conversation, and this isn’t about that. Not really. Even if Shawn might have to be involved in the ritual. “Not right now, and not that way. Eventually we need to talk about him. But this is actually about Sam.”

“Oh.” The sound of a chair dragged across the floor, squeaking as Del settles into it. “Has he been trying to reach you again?”

“He did. And I went to see him.” Carolyn bends her knees, props her phone on them so she can wrap her arms around her legs and hunch over slightly. “We talked, as much as we could. He was only with me about half the time, maybe, but I’m guessing that’s better than usual.”

“You didn’t hurt him like I did,” Del says softly. “I loved him, you know that, right? I didn’t want to hurt him, or any of you, on purpose.”

“I don’t think what happened was entirely your fault.” Carolyn can’t say that none of it was Del’s fault. The more research she does, the more she thinks that she and Sam and Del might all have been on the same axis of Talent as Dreamwalkers, and their ritual probably enhanced it to the point where it catapulted them into the Dreamscape. Or wherever it really is. “But that’s all past, Del. What we need to do is figure out how to unmake the problem.”

“And you think you know the answer?” Del’s tone puts up walls against the idea. Disbelief.

“I think I have enough pieces of the puzzle to put together a ritual that should work. With Pawel’s help,” Carolyn says slowly. “I’ve sent him a pitch and I’m meeting with him tomorrow, along with Kit, and Kit’s boyfriend.”

“Kit has a boyfriend?”

“Soulmate, actually.” It would be easy to shift topics, to skate away from the difficult things while rediscovering friendship and bonding around the good things in their lives. Carolyn can’t let that happen. “You can talk to him when we all get together.” For all she knows, Rory may end up somehow involved; she’s not sure exactly why Kit’s bringing him to the meeting in the first place, but there must be a reason. “That’s not the point of this.”

Silence for a long moment. “I know.”

Carolyn picks at the fabric of her pajama pants, waits to see if Del has anything else to say. As the silence stretches out again, Carolyn gives in and breaks it first. “So, he was telling me about the Dreamscape. About what he sees, when he’s there.”

Del makes a small noise, and Carolyn interprets it as go on.

“He’s in a forest,” Carolyn says quietly. “He’s lost in a forest, and there are paths everywhere. He thinks it’s your forest, and he thinks you’ve stuck him there.”

“I’ve never seen a forest,” Del says.

“You have the meadow. He knows about that, too. We were all there together.” Carolyn glances over at Heather and Nikita, who are absolutely focused on her conversation. “But now he’s in a forest and he think that when we went into the Dreamscape, all our Talents leaked out and into Shawn. But he’s self-destructed since then because he was never meant to hold it all. And now… Sam thinks we all need to find the right path to walk to get free. All of us together.”

“In the Dreaming,” Del says quietly. “You want me to put all of us into a dream, then we walk some kind of path and it puts us back to start. Like senior year never happened.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Good. Neither do I.” Del’s words fall harder than Carolyn’s, tone sharp and vicious. “Nothing is going to reset this, Caro. We did what we did. There was fallout. There’s no path that’s a magical reset button.”

“That’s not what we’re looking for.” Carolyn hugs her legs hard, the press of her thighs against her chest a comforting pressure. “Del.”

“What.” It’s not a question. It’s a defensive word, thrown up like another wall between them.

“You’re helping Kit,” Carolyn says quietly. “You’re helping Kit with that project he’s working on with Rory.”

Silence for a long moment, almost long enough that Carolyn wonders if she needs to break it.

“Rory,” Del says slowly. “Wait, he was holding hands with—is that the boyfriend?”

“Please don’t get sidetracked.”

“I just realized that I may have missed some information along the way, but hey, I’m not designing the Ritual so I’m not the one trying to account for interpersonal relationships,” Del says glibly. “On the other hand, maybe that’s where we went wrong in ours.”

Oh.

She doesn’t mean….

“Del,” Carolyn says quietly. “None of what happened was because Shawn—”

“You and Shawn fought,” Del responds, just as quietly. “You fought just before everything happened, and when things went sideways, he was locked out of the Dreaming, just as much as the three of us were locked in.”

“That could affect a Ritual,” Heather murmurs, and Carolyn’s heart skips. She’d almost forgotten they were still sitting there, listening to every word.

She licks her lips, picks at the fabric of her comforter. “Fine. When things went haywire, I was probably at least a little bit at fault,” she mumbles. “We were all a mess. Don’t forget Kit was outside the Dreaming as well.”

“And he didn’t end up with less or more power after,” Del says. “He wasn’t affected. It’s like everything just skipped over him.”

Carolyn chews on her lower lip. “Okay. Yes. Point taken.”

“Okay,” Del agrees.

Silence again, and this time Carolyn’s lost track of the conversation. Del somehow railroaded them so far off track that Carolyn isn’t sure there’s an easy way back.

Which means taking the hard way instead. It’s time to be blunt.

“I need your help,” she says quietly. “And I might need it soon. This is partly a final project for my independent study, so technically Pawel can say we’re waiting until April and I’ll be required to listen to him if I want to get credit for it.”

“Would you?” Del asks, and Carolyn ignores the little dig.

“The thing is, Sam’s getting worse. This is obvious to all of us, and to his mom. And it might actually be that he’s getting better: he’s reaching out, which means he’s more in this world. But it makes him a more difficult patient since he’s not really, truly coherent.” Carolyn pauses for a breath. “I’m going to push for that Ritual design to be finished when we meet with Pawel tomorrow. I want to go see Sam this weekend. And I want to get him out of there. I want this over. The rest of my semester can be spent peacefully looking at the sociological and psychological implications of the links between different Talents, and maybe Kit can look at the biological side of the same thing, I don’t know. I just know that we need to help Sam, and we need to do it now.”

“So all four of us go to Sam,” Del says slowly. “And I take you all to meet him in the dream, and then all five of us walk out.”

Carolyn exhales. “Yes.”

“What if I can’t?” A soft hiccup from Del’s side. “Carolyn, this isn’t exactly a natural Talent that I’ve had much control over. I’m a Mage. I’m not a Dreamwalker, and when we go in there, it feels like I change. Like I—like there’s someone else inside of me. She knows how it works, but she isn’t telling me, and she isn’t telling you, and I think she wants us to stay there. In her domain.”

“You’re not insane, Del.”

“I’m not saying I am.” More rustling as Del fidgets. “I’m saying I’m scared, Carolyn. I’m actually terrified. I don’t want to go in there, and I don’t want to help Sam more. And what if instead of helping Shawn become stable, I just somehow make things get all shaken up again? What if this time you get stuck, or Shawn does, or we all do? What if we come out and now Shawn goes traveling through pictures, and Sam gets his illusions back, and you’ve got nothing? What if I just make a mess of everything?”

“There are a lot of variables.” Carolyn’s notebook is on her desk, nowhere near her. Heather slides off her bed, grabs the notebook and pen and hands it to her, anticipating her need. Carolyn flips it open and starts making notes. “And you’ve got things I didn’t even think about.”

“I am the one who’s actually done this.”

“Don’t be snippy.” Carolyn quickly scribbles down as much as she can remember. “Maybe the problem is that last time we were five people sharing our Talents. Maybe this time we have to act as one person. We’re better at Rituals now. We’re older, and we understand our Talents more.”

“Maybe you do,” Del mutters dryly.

Okay, no, Carolyn really doesn’t. Things are still changing, and she feels like she’s somehow in Talent adolescence all over again with Kit. “We know how to work with variables,” she says, which is far more accurate.

“What does your professor think?” Del’s voice is small. Scared. It’s hard to reconcile the vulnerable sound with the image still in Carolyn’s mind of this strong woman, always standing up to the world in ways that Carolyn never really could.

“He kind of thinks I’m nuts, in some ways,” Carolyn admits. She has to tell the truth; they have to walk in with eyes open, aware of the pitfalls. “I think he’s exhausted, Del. He’s been fighting all of this since last fall, and it’s so much more than just this thing with Sam. This part isn’t his battle, but he’s taking it on because it’s still something to do with the shadows. And with the things killing people around here, and the way Nikita’s Talent just exploded into the worst winter storms we’ve ever had. Weird has become a way of life, and it’s burying Pawel. So if we can stop some small part of the weird, and maybe even understand it, I think he’s on board. He wants to understand.”

“And you think this’ll help us—him—understand?”

“I think it’ll be more data and I think we need it.” Carolyn glances at Nikita. “I think it’ll give us a fighting chance.”

“Okay.” The word is a soft exhale, and Heather’s suddenly there, sitting next to Carolyn, one arm around her, a calming presence against the prick of insecurity from Del’s cautious response.

“Okay?” Carolyn confirms.

Another low exhale, then Del whispers, “Fine. Okay. I’m in. Call me tomorrow for this meeting or whatever. Right now I need to—” She cuts off, and Carolyn fills in a series of potential endings for that sentence.

“Tell Shawn,” she says. “We’ll need him there, too.”

A soft huff from Del. “I will. I will.” Quiet for two heartbeats, before Del says, “Carolyn?”

“Hm?” Carolyn says.

“Don’t leave me behind.”

Carolyn exhales, the air punched out of her. It hits her then what she’s asked, for Del to take them all into the Dreamscape. Del, Kit, Shawn, herself, all there to meet Sam and bring him out. “I won’t,” she promises. “We won’t leave anyone behind. That’s the whole point of this.”

“Good. Good.” Another soft rush of breath. “I have to go.”

“Goodbye, Del. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Carolyn’s left staring at the phone propped on her knees, the call ending as the phone flickers back to her normal background image.

“So that’s it?” Heather asks. She leans with her hand behind Carolyn’s back, her head tipped against her shoulder. Her hair is out of the ponytail, curly and thick and teasing Carolyn’s nose.

She’s comforting like a blanket, tension seeping from Carolyn’s bones.

“Thank you,” Carolyn says.

“Any time, you know that.” The peace intensifies before it retreats, and as Heather sits up, Carolyn can breathe on her own. Heather crosses her legs, sits looking at her. “Be careful, Carolyn. I’m pretty sure Del knows that place better than you do.”

“And I know how weird Del gets when we go there,” Carolyn says. She remembers how strange she was in the Berman place, a little like a dream herself. “I have a vague idea what we’re getting ourselves into. Don’t worry, Heather. We’ll all come back.”

“Good. You’re my best friend and I don’t want to lose you.” Heather slips from the bed, heads back to her own to rejoin Nikita. It gives Carolyn space to breathe while the two of them snuggle under the covers, watching their movie.

It’s all set. It’s going to happen. Planning, then attack. Rescue.

Carolyn has to believe they’ll all come back. Anything else is too terrifying to contemplate.

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