#wesley jager

[exeuntstormtroopers]

What are some headcanons you have about Wesley from Children of Hypnos that you haven’t shared yet? I’m obsessed with him rn idk why lol

Wes's favorite breakfast is oatmeal with banana

He loves banana the fruit but hates banana candy

He hasn't gotten rid of his ratty sweater because it used to be his dad's and his mom made it

He secretly thinks he would love needle crafts, if he ever got time to try them. Knitting, embroidery, etc. He tells no one.

His greatest fear is losing his eyesight

Lesser fears are small dark spaces, unexpected chunks in his pre-bottled protein shakes, and the call of mourning doves

He doesn't know why the call of mourning doves freaks him out

When he goes for his monthly sleep, he has dreams of being at a backyard cookout. His whole extended family is there, but one by one they start to disappear, until it's only him and Ridley.

Sometimes he thinks he remembers what it felt like to have White Sight, but it's fleeting

His favorite spot on Fenhallow's campus is one of the picnic tables on the quad outside Hothram Hall, where the trees make nice shade.

His dreamforming potential rivals Aldrich Ashworth's, though he hasn't reached that level yet.

He has actually always liked Emery, even when he found her annoying as hell or thought of her as aloof and entitled. Her confidence helped him believe that dreamhunting was a worthwhile pursuit, especially when he most felt like they only existed to die.

[krissys-art]

Selfshiptober 2020

Uh, so I stumbled across the wonderful @press-e-onemoretime​ and their self shiptober 2020 prompt list (shown below) So I decided to write a oneshot for today’s prompt. The writing is below the picture.

Note: I do writing for my own pleasure and I only do basic editing on my stuff. So there will be just writing errors as it’s just a hobby, not something I’m planning on doing for real.

6: First meeting

Fandom: Supernatural Actors

Ship: (actor oc) Wesley X Jensen

Warnings: N/A

----

    During convention season, Wesley would always check to see if his best friend was going to be at whatever ones he was lined up to do. They did align most of the time and Wes loved it. Though this year will be the first year where he won’t be at conventions as a presenter, he will be there as a fan. 

    ---

    Wes was quick to line up for the question line. He was at his best friends panel. Misha Collins panel. Though his co-star Jensen Ackles was there as well. Surprise addition. 

    “Uh, hi. I was wondering what the dumbest thing you did as a teenager was?” Wes asked as he did an accent. Some of the audience recognized him and started cheering. Misha started smiling like an idiot while Jensen was confused. 

    “Very good question. I would have to say that the time you brought me to Germany and I accidentally called someone a prostitute. You didn’t correct me but did explain to the, respectfully angry female, that I am still learning. Though I didn’t find any of this out until I got slapped. Now, get up here you idiot.” Misha spoke as Jensen watched the male come on stage with a smile, hugging Misha. 

    “As many of you know or don’t, this is Wesley Jager. My best friend since 8th grade and fellow actor. He will now be joining us until either he gets kicked off or the panel ends.” Misha spoke as the audience cheered. Wes was quick to steal Misha’s chair and stick his tongue out at him. 

    “He is a child. Now, you on the left.” Misha spoke as they turned their attention to the female standing behind the mic. 

    “Uh, hi. This actually works. So my question is for Misha and I’ve asked this question to Wesley in a past convention. I was wondering what your best drunk story of him is?” The woman asked as Wes laughed, Misha rolling his eyes. 

    “Well, am I allowed to tell the one from that holiday break?” Misha asked Wesley who nodded. 

    “Okay, so this was when we were about 16 or 17. Wes normally went back to Germany for breaks but he decided to not join his family for this trip. So it was just him in the house. It worked wonderful though because Wes could just watch their cats and not have to pay for someone to do so. Um, anyway, it was the middle of the break and I got a call. Note, we had a landline phone. So I picked up the phone as I was the closest. Then as soon as I put it to my ear, the first thing I hear is a cat purring. 

    I’m just waiting for a voice to come as I knew it was Wes but I wanted to see if he dialed me or not. Wondering if it was his sibling or something. It was dead silent. I was about to speak before I heard the sound of shattering glass. Then Wes, drunkenly slurred, ‘Hey Misha, you should come over. I might’ve just dropped a whole bottle of wine.’ and I’m just there, confused. I sighed before telling him I would come over. Hanging up, I informed my parents where I was going and went over. He lived down the street. I get there and knock on his door. I expect to see Wesley, just drunk. Not only in his fucking boxers and covered in bite marks. I will never get that out of my mind. I came over and he was just in boxers. I walk in and see about a six pack of beer empty. Note, Wes is a lightweight. Still is and always will be. I go up to him and he just starts giggling. He hugs me, and he reeked of alcohol and sex. So, I picked him up and laid him on the couch. I was like, ‘I’m going to get you some water, stay here while I do that. Then I will clean up the wine. Rest. You are very drunk.’ and so I left the room. I come back and he’s laying face down on the floor, giggling. It was just a whole ordeal.” Misha explained as the audience laughed. Jensen was smirking. 

    “We’re the boxers as the ones I showed you during a panel?” Jensen asked as people cheered. 

    “Don’t make me think about that again. Uh, he was wearing the joke ones someone got him for our class’ gift exchange. I will let him explain if he would like.” Misha said as Wes laughed. 

    “I have zero memory of that. I think he’s talking about the boxers that- wait. I got them bigger and I’m wearing them. How appropriate is this idea? Official people? I would like to know before I do something stupid that could ruin my career.” Wes spoke, Jensen laughing as he got a hesitant thumbs up from the people standing off to the side. 

    “Awesome, so, uh, you’re only seeing the boxers.” Wes said as he stood up, eyeing Misha who just walked away. Jensen was laughing as Wes undid his pants and showed about a thousand or more people his boxers. 

    They were all white with the words ‘you give me’ and then a heart with a dash next to it then ‘on’ written next to it. The crowd went fucking feral. After a minute, Wes put his pants back on and grabbed Misha’s mic that he set down. 

    “So, uh, this is a great first meeting with you Mr. Ackles.” Wes spoke as he blushed lightly, the audience laughing. 

    “I like him, can we keep him Misha?” Jensen asked as Misha sighed. 

    “Jensen, talk to the producers about that. It’s not my decision.” Misha spoke as Wes just smiled, Sitting with a light blush on his face. 

    ‘I’m going to try and get to know him better.’ Wes thought to himself as he couldn’t help but let his glance linger on the male. 

    Little did he know that this exotic first meeting would blossom into something wonderful

----

[pinkcheese]

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Review

Available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4

 Price: $14.99 at GameStop as of 10/23/2018

    Do you ever get done with an amazing game and wish you could have more of it? That's exactly what The Old Blood does with The New Order, it takes the good from it (story not withstanding) and polishes it up to an even higher degree. I started replaying this game for this review expecting it to just be a short, easy project to get me back into the swing of things, but I ended up having more to say about it than I thought I would. Since I've been gone for long time, let's just cut the bullshit and get right into it.

 Story

 The story is probably the thing I have the least to say about, mostly because of how short and barebones it is. It starts out with B.J. Blazkowicz and Wesley (Agent One) infiltrating Castle Wolfenstein to find and steal a folder with top secret information from Nazi archeologist Helga von Schabbs. Things quickly go wrong as they discover the folder isn't there and they get caught by Rudi Jager, your everyday run of the mill Nazi sadist who has an unhealthy attachment to his mechanically enhanced dogs. After you escape from the dungeon and kill a bunch of poor puppers, you escape into the village near the castle, and meet up with Kessler and Annette. You escape (again) into Wulfberg, try to steal the folder from Helga by disguising yourself as a waiter, and get caught. Then, zombies get released from the tombs and the plot basically ends for the next three chapters. At the end you fight a big monster thing and then Fergus rescues you and The New Order happens. The end. Like I said, it is very barebones and is easily the worst part of the game.

  (I just learned after writing this that the zombies came from the mist that the weird monster thing lets out.)

 Gameplay

 The gameplay is the real meat of The Old Blood's five-hour campaign. It's a First-Person Shooter with a very prominent stealth system that probably takes up more of your time playing than the actual running and gunning.

 During combat, you use the classic combo of melee, guns, and grenades to defeat your Nazi adversaries. You start off with a basic pistol, but quickly work yourself up to more powerful weapons, such as an assault rifle, a bolt-action rifle, and a semi-automatic shotgun that can be dual-wielded. Each weapon has some sort of alternate fire, going from something as simple as a suppressor on the pistol, to ricochet rounds for the shotgun. The combat can at times be very hectic, but it never gets to the point where it feels like you're losing control, like some games can. It stays satisfying throughout the experience.

 Stealth is based on a mix of line of sight and sound, although sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense, for instance when you shoot someone while he's standing right behind his friend and no one pays attention.

 There are secret "Nightmare" levels hidden throughout the game that are recreations of the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D with new models for pickups, and with modern B.J. instead of Wolf 3D B.J.

 Presentation

 Both this game and The New Order really make me wish that idTech 5 got more love. I don't know what it is but there's something about the look and feel of all the games on this engine, that just click with me. However, I am one of the few people that loved Rage so take that as you will.

 The team at MachineGames did such a fantastic job with the art direction. Every area in the game not only looks amazing, but each is just as memorable as can be. I can think back and remember just about every location in the game and what happened in it. The game runs great on console. I played on a base PS4 and it ran at a near locked 60fps with a dynamic resolution. I feel like I should have more to say about Mick Gordon's soundtrack but honestly, I can't really remember much of it.

 Final Verdict

 The Old Blood is a great example of an expansion pack. It took the majority of what made the original game so amazing and polished it to take it up that one last notch. The barebones story sullies the experience enough that I still prefer The New Order and wouldn't recommend it as a replacement, but if you've played The New Order and are looking for more of the same great gameplay, then give this a shot.

 Score

9/10

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 22: Klaus

As they entered, the lights came up. The room was a cube, fifteen by fifteen feet, separated in the middle by a wall of clear Plexiglas. On their side, there was only another folding chair in the corner. On the opposite side was a metal cot frame bolted to the wall, no mattress, blanket, or pillow; a toilet behind the frame; and a small sink.

Klaus sat on the floor against the back wall, long legs stretched out before him, blinking back the sudden light. His clothes were frayed and dirty, his hair unkempt, his jaw scruffy. A bandage covered his head where he’d been bleeding before. His goggles hung around his neck. His eyes, when he managed to open them, gave Emery pause. They were a clear liquid green, pale like the rest of him.

She had only really seen him in flashes and shadows, in the gaps between buildings, as a blur against the scenery. Even in her memories his face was smeared, though he’d been clear in her fever dream. He’d lived in an in-between place, not of the waking world and not of the Dream.

He looked at Marcia first and sat up straight, expression lifting. Then he glanced at Emery and Wes to either side of Marcia and sat back again, retreating into his hunched shoulders.

“Oh,” was all he said.

“Klaus Warwick, Emery Ashworth and Wesley Jager.” Marcia motioned between them. “You owe them explanations. They stole Lana’s keys to get in here, so I think they’ve earned it.”

Klaus’s head tipped to the side, expression worried. “Is she…she’s not…?”

“Don’t worry about Lana,” Marcia said. “She’s fine.”

He relaxed. Looked between the three of them. Frowned. “I’m not sure I’ve gathered enough information yet to start spreading ideas.”

Marcia crossed her arms. “I think you have plenty, or you wouldn’t have gone this far.”

Klaus scratched at his scruff, looking uninterested.

Emery stepped forward. He heart galloped in her chest. “There was a drawing of my doppelgänger in your dream,” she said. “Why? And was that why you were following me?”

Klaus stopped moving. His head was slightly turned, but his eyes shifted to focus on Emery, and the effect sent chills up her spine. It was like being watched by an animal. There was something feral in the way his eyes narrowed, in the stillness of his hands.

“We only have fifteen minutes,” Emery said.

Klaus’s gaze flicked to Marcia.

“No microphones,” she said. “Only cameras.”

A long exhale whistled through his nose. “Well. I should probably do it while I’m still lucid.”

“What does that mean?” Marcia snapped. “Still lucid?”

Klaus shrugged. “I found a way to keep myself awake. When you’re a wanted dreamhunter, and when your dreams are as volatile as mine, it can be more dangerous to go to sleep than it’s worth.”

“You’ve been drugging yourself?” Marcia seethed.

“Drugging yourself?” Emery looked between them. “With what? Not sleeping sand, right?”

“Sleeping sand puts you to sleep,” Wes said. “That’s the whole point. It can’t keep you awake.”

Klaus frowned. “They were serious about hamstringing the curriculum, weren’t they? There are forms of sand capable of keeping the user awake.”

“But they’re highly addictive,” Marcia added, “just like any other kind. They change your brain chemistry, make you rely on them to continue staying awake. All the forms we have now are extremely volatile and unreliable, which means this rat must have come up with something new. What is it? How long have you been using? When was the last time you slept?”

“Oh…” Klaus scratched absently at his jaw. “Two…three years?”

Marcia went ashen.

“You haven’t slept in three years?” Emery said.

Klaus shrugged.

“Three years, you’d definitely be addicted,” Wes said. “And now you don’t have it.”

“The State is a big proponent of going cold turkey.” Klaus smiled, looking far too calm. “They shot me up with a bit of DreamLess before they brought me in here, like they’d do for any other prisoner. Suppresses a few brain functions to keep you from manipulating dreamforms,” he added, when Wes and Emery looked at each other, confused. “I have absolutely no idea what the effects of that will be in combination with withdrawal, so that’ll be a fun experiment.”

Marcia looked like she was going to vomit. “They can’t let you go through withdrawal like that.”

“Mar, they’d sooner cut my head off than give me my things back. They think using sand in that way is an abomination against order. I have to dose myself every week or so, and I did the last one just before you caught me, so I’ve got a grace period. Let me deal with whatever happens, and let’s talk about this before someone comes down here to interrupt our party.”

Marcia began to protest, but Klaus was pulling himself to his feet and moving close to the Plexiglas, focused on Emery.

He said, “What do you know about the dreamkiller coup of the Hypnos State?”

“The dreamseekers in charge were scared of losing their power to the dreamkillers, so they allied themselves with doppelgängers to reduce the number of dreamkillers made, and to ensure the power structure remained as it was. The dreamkillers found out, and most dreamseekers were sentenced to dream death or chased into hiding.”

Klaus started shaking his head before Emery was finished. “No. There is no evidence that the Hypnos State dreamseekers had any kind of alliance with doppelgängers apart from what the new administration wrote into history themselves. There’s a lot spoken about after the fact—secret meetings between dreamseekers and doppelgängers in the Dream, attempts to strip down dreamhunter protections in State laws—but there are records—sign-in logs, security footage, transcripts from legislation meetings—it doesn’t add up, none of it adds up—”

Marcia threw her hands up. “Klaus. Slow down. How did you find all of this out? When?”

Klaus, startled, shut his mouth for a moment and paused to think. “It was before I left. It was why I left. I was doing research into doppelgängers because…for my own. I knew dreamseekers had done much of the research into doppelgängers because of their ability to traverse the Dream safely, but all the notes I found were by dreamhunters and dreamkillers. Many of them referenced articles by dreamseekers that no longer seemed to exist. There were gaps in the research. When I started looking into it, I realized it went deeper than I thought. That’s why the State was hunting me down. They knew I was onto something.”

Marcia’s hands fell first, then her shoulders. “That was why they were hunting you? I thought—I thought it was because you were stealing sand from the sleep center.”

“I was,” he said. “But if that’s what they told you, then that’s just more proof that they’re trying to cover up their cover-ups. There’s something wrong here, Mar. There’s been something wrong here for a while.” He paused. His head tilted to the other side. “If you thought they were just hunting me for the sand, then why did you think I left?”

Marcia flushed; her eyebrows furrowed in frustration. “I—I don’t know.”

Emery stepped forward again, closer to the wall. Klaus stepped back in a movement so smooth and easy it seemed instinctual. His gaze slid to her, wary, watchful.

“So there’s something wrong in the Hypnos State,” she said. “That doesn’t explain the drawing, or why you were following me.”

Klaus looked her up and down. “How old are you? Eighteen, nineteen? You must be at least eighteen, with a partner, doing missions. I saw you take down the whale, by the way—nice solo work.”

A hot flush worked its way across Emery’s cheeks and neck. Even Klaus had to bring up the damn whale.

“Eighteen,” she said.

“So, nowhere near your Insanity Prime. I would assume, at least. It’s different for everyone, but it so rarely starts before twenty. And your parents are Zoya Volkova and Liam Ashworth…”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“They’re living legends. If there was ever going to be a dreamhunter immune to the Insanity Prime, it was going to be you. I saw your parents once in person, here on campus. You were with them, but you were younger. You look so much like your mother—that’s why I was confused the day I saw her.”

“The day you saw my mom?”

“No,” Klaus said. “The day I saw your doppelgänger.”

The room went quiet. Emery’s heartbeat pounded in her ears. When she spoke, her voice sounded very far away.

“What did you just say?”

“I thought she was your mother’s at first,” Klaus said. “But Zoya Volkova has been a dreamkiller for years; she killed her doppelgänger on live television in the middle of Moscow. Hers couldn’t be active now. Then I remembered you.”

“You saw my doppelgänger.”

“Several months ago. She was lurking in the No Man’s Land of the Dream, the empty space between dream windows. I’ve seen active doppelgängers there before; they stay there when they need to hide from their dreamhunters, or when they’re not strong enough yet to leave the Dream on their own. I think your is the latter. She’s active—somehow—but not strong. That’s why I was following you. I was trying to figure out what that meant, and if it had anything to do with all that missing research. That’s why I came looking for you both once I realized you’d followed me into the Dream. You were in more danger there than you realized.”

“But…how? You said it yourself—I’m not near my Insanity Prime. I shouldn’t have a doppelgänger yet.”

“Everyone has a doppelgänger. The question is whether or not it’s active,” Klaus said. “The Dream had a strange reaction to the two of you inside it. Wesley, you seem great, but I doubt you were the cause.”

Wes grunted. He had a long and blank stare, like someone had recently slapped him across the face.

“With your lineage, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this is something we’ve never seen before,” Klaus went on. “I tried keeping tabs on your doppelgänger. I tried to see what she was doing wandering around. To see if there were other doppelgängers, if they were communicating, to see if I could talk to her myself.”

“She’ll kill you,” Marcia said, moving up beside Emery. This time Klaus took an even bigger step away, until he was backed against the wall. “You get in front of someone else’s doppelgänger and they’ll tear you limb from limb, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it.”

“The State told us that, Mar,” Klaus said. “And they’ve lied to us enough that I’m questioning all of it.”

“I don’t have to question it! I’ve seen it happen! You remember Hannah?”

Klaus flinched. “Of course I remember Hannah. But that doesn’t mean—”

Marcia cut him off. “If I’d known you were planning on getting in front of other people’s doppelgängers, I’d have come after you myself!”

Now Klaus was the one holding his hands up. “Mar, please.” He looked at Emery. “If you try to prepare to fight the doppelgänger now, you’re going to get stronger, and so will she. Being in the Dream for as long as you were no doubt nudged you along, and my poison couldn’t have helped.”

“Neither would you hitting them with two days’ worth of sleeping sand,” said Marcia quietly, still seething.

Klaus ignored her. “You came down here to talk to me, so here’s my advice: Until we know why your doppelgänger is active, and what made the Dream react the way it did while you were inside it, you should go about your normal business. Don’t go back into the Dream. Don’t tell anyone else that she exists, or they’ll serve up your termination papers and put you on a deadline to kill her. Nothing good will come of being rushed.”

A deadline. A literal deadline. If the North American Ward—or any member of the Hypnos State—found out about her doppelgänger, she’d be on a clock to kill it before they decided she was too much of a liability. They would kill her before her doppelgänger had the chance to take her over.

“In the meantime,” Klaus said, “I’m going to stay down here and try not to fall asleep. Whatever you could do to convince them I need my sand would be great.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Marcia said, checking her cuff, which had just lit up, and grabbing Emery’s collar. “Time to go, kids.”

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> xoxoxoxoxoxsandmanxoxoxoxoxoxoxo)

[juno-vanderbilt-blog1]

Jason Avery Twill

Age: 17 Birthday: March 15 Occupation: student FC: Hunter Parrish

Family

Father: Hunter Twill Mother: Hadley Wesley Brothers: Jean Twill (deceased)  Jager Twill multiple deceased relatives on both sides

Jason Twill was born in the capitol to Hunter and Hadley Twill. Only two years old when rebellion tore through Panem, he could not remember a time when the games were anything but bi-annual events. As he would learn, the fighting cost him family, but the games took more. Raised in the capitol, he had by all accounts a relatively happy early childhood. His parents loved each other, his grandmother visited regularly, and he soon had two younger brothers. Jason sat at his father's feet and it was from him that he learned how to drip sarcasm with every word and from him that he developed his fascination with fire. Tenacious and intelligent, the only person who could truly bring Jason to heel was his mother. Hadley Twill, despite her youth, had managed to climb up the social ladder of the capitol and was an escort supervisor by the time she was thirty years old.

Though Jason could excel in school, he choose not to. He spent most of his time skipping or simply not paying attention. The only subject he would put effort into was music. He learned to play the guitar before his tenth birthday and the drums followed soon after. He composed music in his free time and submitted, anonymously, songs to different radio stations. It was only to those that Jason was closest to that he would personally share his music.

Jason's life changed forever during the 141st Hunger Games. The year both Jean and Charlotte Tyr were reaped. His little brother, didn't last long in the arena and the fallout of Jean's death was immediate. His parent's marriage dissolved before his eyes and he was given a choice. Stay in the capitol with his father or move to district ten with his mother and brother. Jason choose to move and the change was drastic to say the least. His mother gradually overcame her grief, but she would never be the same. She refused to return to the capitol, instead dedicating her life to district ten. In the four years since, Jason has visited the capitol often. He comes to visit Charlotte and the Tyrs and most of all to see his father. The man he'd once seen as a hero, and now understood to be mortal and flawed.

CONNECTIONS

Hunter Twill (father) Charlotte Tyr (former crush/friend) The Tyrs (close friends) HMU for more!!!

[darcicoleauthor]

YES THANK YOU ELIZA FOR SHARING MY SHIP

emeryxwes forever

hello i have a possibly strange question haha. does eliza have any ships in children of hypnos? thank u!

UM, YES.

So first of all she is like the captain of the Marcia/Klaus ship. That’s these two:

She also ships Emery and Wes together, but she ships Emery with another character who isn’t in the first book, and she goes back and forth a lot on which pairing she likes best.

And she ships another set of characters who also aren’t in the first book, but NO SPOILERS HERE.

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 20: Order

By the time Emery got to Kirkland, the sky was brightening with the threat of sunrise. Emery had a rough idea of where they would have taken Klaus for holding, but her plan was still only half-formed. She needed to speak to him without anyone overhearing. She’d considered asking Grandpa Al to let her see Klaus alone, to try to get information out of him, but she didn’t know exactly what kind of information Grandpa Al would want, and there was always the chance he’d want to put a microphone on her. But if Klaus really was where she thought he might be, she’d need keys for the elevator in the administration building, and she only knew of a handful of people on campus who’d have a set.

The Kirkland lobby was mostly empty. Day division students weren’t yet up. Night division students had retired to their rooms until breakfast. Emery took the stairs to the third floor and had marched all the way down the hall and stopped in front of room 324, fist raised to knock, before she stopped to consider what she was doing.

The nameplate tacked on the door said Wesley Jager.

Wes didn’t really have a stake in this. Klaus had been following her, and it had been a picture of her doppelgänger. She was planning on breaking into the Fenhallow Underground, with almost a certain chance of getting caught either before or after—there was no point in getting Wes in trouble, too. Their mission was over; she couldn’t rope him into her schemes anymore. She dropped her fist, letting the sleeves of her sweater fall over her hands, and turned away from the door.

Wes stood at the other end of the hallway, covered in sweat and holding a milk jug full of water, scowling.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Did you already go on a run this morning?” Emery shot back, too loud, as she tried to walk past him. “And I thought I was an overachiever. Take a shower, you’re gross.”

He grabbed her arm. “Emery. Why are you standing in front of my door at the crack of dawn?”

“I wasn’t standing in front of your door, I was passing through.”

“Are you a compulsive liar now, too? There’s no other reason for you to be on the third floor.” He paused. “And why do you smell like Old Spice?”

“Old Spice smells good, shut up.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t smell good, I said—” Wes’s nostrils flared with his temper. “Answer my first question!”

“Fine! If you let me go.”

He did. Emery rubbed her arm through her sleeve, checking up and down the hall to make sure they hadn’t pulled anyone out of their rooms.

“I think I know where they’re holding Klaus. I need to talk to him so I can figure out what’s going on with that drawing, but I haven’t quite figured out how yet. I know I need keys for the admin building elevator, but I’m not sure who would have them besides my grandpa.”

“Okay. Why didn’t you want to tell me that?”

“Because…you didn’t need to know? It’s not your problem. We got out of the Dream, you can go back to whatever you do with your free time until we have another mission.”

The line between Wes’s eyebrows deepened until it looked like it’d been carved there by a chisel.

“Are you serious?” he said.

“I mean, yeah.”

“Not to sound obtuse, but do you know the meaning of the word ‘partners’?”

Emery rolled her eyes. “What, so we spent some time in the Dream and now we’re supposed to be inseparable? You don’t need to get in trouble for this.”

“No one said anything about inseparable,” Wes said. “I want to know what’s going on. And how is it not my problem? Only like seven of us know about that drawing--maybe I don't have to figure out what it is, but I'd like to know why it exists. Besides," he reaffirmed his grip on the jug of water, frustration fading from his expression, "if it was me, I'd want someone to help."

"God, you're such a boy scout," Emery said, but she couldn't keep the smile off her face. "Alright, so--" She looked around one more time, just to make sure they were still alone, and lowered her voice. "--beneath this school is another research facility. They built this whole place as a Hypnos State Headquarters in the Sleeping City, and there are important offices down there, labs, and most importantly, holding cells. I've overheard my Grandpa mention it a few times, and I saw a map of the school he had--there was a whole other level underground. There's no other reason they'd take Klaus to the admin building except to take him down there."

"And we need keys for the admin building elevator."

"Yes. Except the only person I know for sure who has some is my grandpa, and even if I knew where he kept them, we'd never get them from him."

Wes thought for a moment. "It would be someone in charge of something big. There's a better chance now if they would also need to speak to Klaus, because he's probably one of the few people they've held down there in years, right? They'd want someone who knows what he does, who understands it. Someone who's as sharp as he is. I thought of Marcia first, but nobody's seen her since the fight."

"Besides Marcia," Emery said, squeezing her almost-healed knuckle between her finger and thumb. "Besides Marcia, besides Grandpa Al, there's…"

It came to her all at once, in a bright flash, like Wes had knocked her upside the head with his hammer. In the rush of excitement, she punched him in the arm hard enough to make him wince.

"Lana," she said. "Lana would have a key."

~

Retrieving the key from Lana was a whole new plan to figure out, and before Emery could even begin to think about it, there was a much more pressing matter to attend.

Wes took a quick shower, then Emery pulled Wes downstairs to the atrium, texting Joel as they went to wake him up, and planted themselves at the far edge with a view of the fountain. The sculpture sat pretty on top, winking as the atrium lights came up. The kitchen staff apparently hadn't yet noticed it, and the fountain was turned on as normal. The school stirred back to life.

"What is that?" Wes asked, deadpan.

"That's art," Emery replied.

The first boy who noticed the statue stood by the table where his friends had already sat down with breakfast. He stared at the fountain, confused. Emery bit her lip and started filming the scene with her phone. The boy pointed it out to his friends. They stood and moved to the fountain, pulling out phones, taking pictures. In minutes, more students began to stream in. Some for breakfast. A few went straight for the fountain. Those who hadn't heard about it yet were attracted by the attention, and soon the atrium was a roaring mass of students of all ages with their phones out to take pictures or call their friends. The sculpture had already begun to melt.

Joel found Emery and Wes minutes before the rest of the Class Eighteen student council arrived. His cheeks were flushed red, his smile cranked up to eleven, and he'd brought coffee. Kris and Lewis found them not long afterward.

"I can't believe you did this," Lewis said, one hand on his forehead, looking pale. "This must violate at least ten school rules. Oh, you're going to get expelled. And we knew and didn't stop you. Are we going to get expelled, too? Oh…"

"I don't think they're going to get expelled," Kris said, looking unsure but patting Lewis's arm comfortingly. "I don't think. I'm pretty sure."

Lewis dropped his hand over his eyes, took a deep breath, and parted his fingers to look at Emery. "What's Jacqueline going to say?"

Emery choked on her coffee. "Um. I didn't think about it."

She hadn't. And suddenly she felt death descending upon her much faster than it ever could have inside the Dream. Like she'd been summoned, Jacqueline arrived then with no less than an army of maintenance staff. Her expression was placid, but her posture laced with rigid fury, and she split the sea of students just as the fountain's water cut off. The maintenance workers hustled the crowd away and climbed into the fountain to attempt removal of the sculpture. While they were working, a familiar spindly form pushed her way out of the crowd and hurried over to them. Ridley, clutching her phone in her hands.

"Wes!" she chirped. "Can you believe this! Look!" She showed him a picture. Wes looked at it, then at Emery.

"You're really dead," he said.

Emery felt it when Jacqueline turned and found them at their table. She felt it like ice on her spine. As Jacqueline crossed the atrium toward them, her calm never cracked, but nervous laughter bubbled up Emery's throat until she couldn't hold it in anymore.

"It's really funny, isn't it?" Jacqueline stopped before their table, looking between Emery and Joel. "Ha ha, the Fenhallows are all gone, let's make fun of them because who cares about dreamseekers anymore. It's not like being a dreamseeker actually means anything anymore. Seeking order in chaos. That's the school's motto, isn't it? But who needs to the order of the Fenhallows when you have the brute force of the Ashworths? Right?"

Jacqueline had lifted her chin in that way of hers to glare down her nose at them--and at Emery--but her imperious mask hadn't quite solidified. Tears gathered in her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something else, but her lip twitched, and she snapped it shut again and stormed out of the Crossing.

"Was she…" Lewis followed Jacqueline's exit with his finger. "Was she about to cry?"

"She was actually serious," Joel said, sounding stunned. "But we always do stuff like this, and she never gets serious."

Emery stood. "I'll be right back."

She jogged after Jacqueline. Outside, she stopped to grab the stone poppy from behind the bushes, then scanned the campus until she found Jacqueline already a surprising distance away, marching past the statues in the center of the quad.

"Jackie! Hey, wait up--"

"Stop calling me Jackie!" Jacqueline rounded on her. They were drawing attention from passing students now, but they were given a wide berth. "I hate it! It sounds so sixties." Tears rolled in steady trails down her cheeks, but her voice was steady. She glanced at the stone poppy. "Is that--"

"The top of the fountain. I hid it, I didn't want to damage it or anything."

Some of Jacqueline's wrath faded. Quieter, she said, "Can I?"

"It's heavy."

"Just for a minute."

Emery handed it over. Jacqueline cradled the stone poppy with the base resting on her hip, like a toddler. She traced the delicate edges of the flower petals with one finger. The stone was smooth as marble, sparkling a bit in the morning sunlight.

"I'm really sorry," Emery said. "When we say things about the Fenhallows, you get mad, but not seriously mad, you know? I just thought it would be funny."

Jacqueline continued tracing the poppy's lines, its delicate stone stem. Her eyebrows furrowed.

"This is the symbol of dreamseekers," she said. "That's why it's on the dean's door, why it's on everything all over campus. Dreamhunters are the sword, dreamkillers are the fan of swords, and dreamseekers are the poppy." She wiped her eyes. "I know you just did it as a stupid prank. I know people won't really think less of the Fenhallows because of it. They've thought less of all dreamseekers for a long time."

"That's not true--"

Jacqueline gave Emery a hard stare. "Did you even remember that I am a dreamseeker?"

Emery smoothed the hem of her sweater under her hands. "I mean. Sure I did."

Jacqueline rolled her eyes. Emery knew Jacqueline was a dreamseeker--she'd known it since they were little--but it was easy to forget. She was the only one in the entire Sleeping City, maybe the only one in all of North America. Dreamseekers couldn't manipulate the Dream the way hunters could, but they could sense it, they could open gateways to it, and they could navigate it without experiencing the Dream's clawing pressure or any of its negative effects. They were explorers, not warriors. And unlike dreamhunters, who had to be made, dreamseekers inherited their abilities.

"Did you know they won't teach me how to open gateways?" Jacqueline said. "Did you know there is an actual law saying I'm not allowed to learn how to use any ability I have pertaining to the Dream? The teachers here are literally forbidden from telling me how to do it. I have to look it up and try it myself, and even that's technically illegal. Illegal." She sounded like she might start crying again, but she stopped speaking, took a deep breath, and sat down on the edge of the statue, at Fabian Fenhallow's feet. "The dreamseekers who weren't driven completely out of the Hypnos State can only hold low-level positions now. That's all I'll ever get." She looked up at Fabian's face. "I know most people think he was just some pompous stuck-up French guy, and he totally was. But he made this place, and dreamseekers made the Hypnos State, and every time someone makes fun of him, it feels like they're forgetting. Everyone just thinks…if you're not able to fight what comes out of the Dream, you're pointless."

Emery perched on the corner of the statue base. “Why? I mean, why is there a law about that? I didn’t know—I always assumed you weren’t learning about it because you didn’t want to.”

“We were accused of allying with doppelgängers to keep dreamhunters in line. They had evidence of it. The dreamseekers the State didn’t sentence to dream death on were chased into hiding, or…” Jacqueline looked around, raising a hand to the campus, “…put somewhere they could be controlled. Dreamseekers don’t have doppelgängers, so they think it’s no big deal if we can’t do anything. It’s not like we have to defend ourselves.”

A group of class ten students passed by, giving them strange looks. Both Emery and Jacqueline glared at them until they scurried away. Emery sat on her hands, turtling into the collar of her sweater.

“Wes said I’m kind of oblivious to other people,” she said, “so I’m sorry things are this way and I’m sorry I didn’t know about it, or ask. That’s…that’s all horrible.”

Jacqueline dabbed under her eyes, careful of her mascara. “You know, whatever. Just don’t tell anyone I said I was learning how to open gateways on my own.”

“Yeah, of course.” Emery motioned to the poppy statue. “Do you want me to carry that? We can go put it back on the fountain.”

Jacqueline handed it over. “Um. I don’t really care if you call me Jackie. I was just upset.”

“You shouldn’t fold on that. I was totally going to call you whatever you wanted.”

“No you weren’t.”

“I would have pretended like I was.”

Jacqueline rolled her eyes and huffed, “Ashworths.”

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos —> Heist Job!)

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 13: Black Eyes

Emery woke up to Wes poking her in the ribs. She’d slid sideways and come to rest with her cheek on his shoulder. She had dreamed of the stuffy room and the VHS tapes and the cigarette carpet, but there were no three men, and the little boy really was Edgar. Waking from it had been relief enough, but another relief was that she and Wes were still at the same place on the edge of the lake. No dream windows had swallowed them while she slept. She righted herself and Wes, looking as if he’d just woken up himself, fell asleep almost instantly. In minutes--or what must have been minutes--he’d slumped into her, their shoulders together, his head resting atop hers. She let him stay there; the weight felt nice.

The breeze rippled the surface of the lake. The trees swayed gently on the opposite shore. The poppy fields, wide and endless, shivered. The hypnotism of it relaxed her and also kept her awake. She tore herself away from the scene only long enough to look up at the lone mountain. The rivers that fed the lake originated from high on the mountain, the top of which was so tall it was almost swallowed by the purple clouds.

Her head had stopped pounding, but exhaustion still weighed her down. After checking to make sure Wes was asleep, she let herself cry. She wanted to be sitting in Grandpa Al’s office, sipping tea and watching leaves fall from the woods to scatter across the sports fields. She wanted to be in her dorm room with Edgar, watching The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly and quoting lines before the characters had a chance to say them.

She really wanted her parents to climb through a gateway and pull her out of the Dream, but they were overseas somewhere, doing some kind of important, covert work for the Hypnos State.

With that last wish conceived, considered, and discarded, Emery wiped the tears from her face and took a deep breath.

Some time later, Wes woke up again. She didn’t know when, exactly, because she didn’t know he was awake until he lifted his head from hers. They sat in silence and watched the lake ripple.

“This place is different than the other parts of the Dream,” Emery said.

“It’s more peaceful.”

“More peaceful? Compared to everything else, this is heaven.”

Wes made a noise.

“Wesley Jager, did you just laugh?”

“I’d call it more of a snort, but whatever you want.”

“I wasn’t even trying to be funny.”

“You try to be funny? I thought you were trying to be annoying.”

“Well I do that, too, but--” Emery caught the smile sneaking across his face. “And cracking jokes, too? Wes, you’re scaring me.”

“Ridley says I’m only funny when I don’t mean to be. Most of my jokes don’t go over very well. I think they come off as harsh.”

“Hey, there’s one thing we have in common. And younger siblings, I guess.”

“I like Edgar. He’s…thoughtful.”

“Yeah, he likes you, too. When have you two ever interacted?”

“There were a few times. I think he gets teased a lot by some other kids in his class. I sat with him at lunch a few times so they would leave him alone. I know I’m not the most popular, either, but generally people don’t mess with a guy who has a giant hammer.”

Wes said it lightly, like it was no big deal. He looked away across the lake.

Everything inside Emery went very still, and in the stillness a single clear note rang out. She had felt the sensation only twice before: the first time when she met Joel; the second when she met Jacqueline.

“He does,” she said. “Thank you.”

Wes shrugged.

“I’m sorry for saying you were useless, and would get in my way.” She busied herself with her bootlaces so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “Actually sorry, not just saying it to get you off my back. I don’t want this to sound like one of those fake apologies. I, um, I’m glad I’m not here alone.”

“Oh.” He paused. “I am, too. Glad I’m not here alone.”

“You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”

“Yeah, well.”

Another long pause.

“Do you know why people don’t like you?” Wes said. He said it lightly, again, but in a way that made it very clear he was tiptoeing around her. “This is a legitimate question, I’m not trying to make you mad.”

“Because people like to hate people who are good at things?”

“It’s because of your parents.”

“Because my parents are good at things?”

“Because you have parents.”

Emery looked up.

“A lot of them--a lot of us--don’t have one parent, let alone two. A lot of us don’t have grandparents, either, and definitely not grandparents that run the school. I only have Ridley, and I still consider myself lucky. Last year, Isaiah Howard got the statistics for the number of dreamhunters under the North American Ward who pass their Insanity Primes. The percentage was so low they didn’t publicize the numbers.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Your parents were in that percentage. Ours weren’t. You’re going to be in that percentage. We’re not. We weren’t made to be great dreamhunters; we were made to be regular dreamhunters. At some point we all kind of realized we were here so that the Hypnos State has meat shields to throw at the nightmares. If some of us live longer, that’s a plus for them. If we don’t, oh well, there’ll be a new generation to take our place.

“But you--you’re their golden child. We all heard the stories about your parents. The others don’t dislike you because you’re good at things. They dislike you because you were made to be good at things. Because the Ward needs us, but they want you, so you have everything you need to do well. Your family, the best teachers, leniency when you do something wrong.”

Emery balked. “But…none of that is my fault.”

“No, it isn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not unfair, or that it’s wrong for the others to be angry. I was angry. It was worse because you clearly didn’t know, and you went happily on as if we were all jerks for treating you like that.”

“I didn’t--”

His look silenced her. “It was the way we felt. It’s the way they still feel.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not…about you. Not really. Most of them don’t know you.”

Emery sat back against the boulder, wanting to scoff but holding it in, because he’d said he wasn’t trying to make her angry, and she believed him. “What about you? Do you know me?”

“Better than I did. Honestly, if I had to be stuck in the Dream with anyone, I’m glad it’s you.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “You’re top of the class. If anyone could figure out how to get us out of here, it’s probably you.”

“Says the kid who can dreamform like he’s already graduated. Speaking of which—” Emery sat up straight. “You never did explain why you get such terrible grades when you can dreamform like you do. You made that ladder—twice—and you tore through that closet door. Where did you learn that? And why am I the only one who knows you can do it? I’m assuming I’m the only one?”

Wes looked away. Looked back. Sighed. “Ridley knows. I practiced a lot when we were younger. I was, um, inspired. I don’t tell anyone because the Ward tends to send particularly good dreamformers on certain kinds of missions. Missions that go into the Dream.”

“And you didn’t want to go?”

“I’d heard that hunters who entered the Dream often were more likely to suffer more serious Insanity Primes. I didn’t want to make things harder on myself than they were already going to be.”

He looked around and put his hands up in the air as if to say, Look at this mess.

“I don’t blame you,” Emery said. “I know everyone thinks I’m going to breeze through my Insanity Prime, but that just makes me feel like I’m not. It’ll be the big joke—Queen Emery couldn’t hack it, right? Everyone thought she’d pass the Prime, turns out she was the one who failed spectacularly. It seems silly to complain about it, though, because you’re right: I have my whole family to get me through it. It must be so much worse for someone who doesn’t. If—if you don’t mind me asking—”

“My parents are dead,” Wes said. “Both of them were hit hard by their Insanity Primes. They were so far gone, the North American Ward sentenced them to dream death before their doppelgängers could come looking for them.”

Emery had heard of dream death in passing, during studies of the Insanity Prime, but she had never seen it performed. That was a ritual left to the dreamkillers. All she knew was that it involved the separation of the subconscious from the conscious, releasing the hunter’s connection to the Dream and forcing their minds to cannibalize until the dreamhunter died. It was only performed once the dreamhunter was too far gone to realize it was happening, but to Emery it still sounded terrible.

“We do it that way,” Grandpa Al had said once, “because there’s nothing we can do to help them, and it stops their doppelgänger from wreaking havoc to get the hunter’s body, then wreaking more havoc once they have it.”

A doppelgänger was another dreamform, but this one developed without the dreamhunter’s permission. It was a manifestation of a hunter’s subconscious that grew as the hunter became more powerful. Doppelgängers were tied tightly to the Insanity Prime, since that was the time that most dreamhunters reached their peaks, and it was because of the doppelgängers that so many hunters succumbed.

“Did your parents ever see their doppelgängers?” Emery asked, quietly.

Wes shook his head. “I don’t know. They were taken to the Ward headquarters in D.C. a long time before I understood what was happening to them. I hope they didn’t. I heard it’s terrifying.”

So had Emery, but she’d heard it from her parents, who had both killed theirs. Doppelgängers wanted only one thing: to live in the waking world. To do that, they needed a real body, and only their dreamhunter’s would work.

Dreamkillers, like Grandpa Al, like her parents, were named for killing their doppelgängers. If they didn’t, the doppelgängers would kill them.

“Did your parents say what it was like?” Wes asked.

“They said it was the hardest thing they’ve ever done.” Emery pulled her knees up to her chest. “You’re destroying a part of your own mind, and it looks like you. That can’t be easy.”

“I know you only survive if you do see it and kill it, but I’ve always wished I wouldn’t have to. I jump every time I look in a mirror.”

“Only if your hair floats.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I think Lenton mentioned it a few times in class,” Emery said. “That’s how you know the doppelgänger from the dreamhunter. The doppelgänger’s hair floats, like they’re in water. My dad says it’s because they’re still part of the Dream, and no matter how much they want to be corporeal, they can’t completely separate themselves.”

“Floating hair.” Wes scrubbed his hand through his brown waves. After so many dream-windows and however much time without a shower, his hair was limp and dull. “They look exactly like us, don’t they? Is that based on our actual forms, or how we think we look? Our current state, or how we should look?”

“How you should look? What does that mean? You look how you look.”

“I mean like…if anything changed between now and when we were born.”

Emery let out a long, exaggerated sigh. “Hypnos’s balls, Wes, I hate riddles. What are you talking about?”

Wes frowned. “I’m talking about my eyes. Isn’t…I thought everyone knew. I thought you’d know, anyway, because of your grandpa.”

“Your eyes?”

His eyes were black, flat black, as always, like they were all pupil. It made him look drugged sometimes. Intense. Emery had always thought they were strange. Sometimes people just looked strange. But people didn’t have black eyes. Very dark brown, maybe, but not black. Emery shifted. His gaze followed her.

“They’re dreamforms?”

He nodded.

Permanent dreamforms took a degree of skill most dreamhunters never mastered. Their weapons were the only permanent dreamform most dreamhunters managed to make, and they were guided carefully through every step of the process for over two years. Other permanent dreamforms took months of molding and shaping, hard focus, and a depth of understanding about what was being created in order to make the dreamform function on its own in the waking world. Dreamhunters in the medical field learned how to do it, but it was impractical for most others.

Emery caught herself staring. “Eyes must be complex as hell,” she said. “Who did them? What for? Did something happen? Were you--I mean--“

“I was born with white sight. It’s rare…people with white sight see the Dream, but not the waking world. Most people who have it don’t live through infancy.”

“I didn’t know they did eye transplants for white sight sufferers.”

“They didn’t, until me.” He smiled a little. “I went from white eyes to black ones. It was your grandpa who made them.”

“Grandpa Al made your eyes?” She’d known Grandpa Al was a great dreamformer, and had been slated to enter the Hypnos State’s medical division instead of their administration, but she’d never imagined him making something as complex as eyes. “No, he didn’t tell me. But--do they see like normal eyes? Do you have X-ray vision or something? Can you see colors no one else can?”

“I think they see like normal eyes. If he’d formed them differently, they may not have worked. I’ve tried to research what went into making them, but at some point it’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of focus. You have to stay so intent on that one thing. You start thinking about how nice the weather is and suddenly there’s a leaf growing out of your optic nerve. I want to learn how to have that kind of focus someday.”

“Well, you’re already part of the way there. You’re a great dreamformer.”

“Hopefully I don’t lose my mind first.”

Emery snorted. “Same here. Don’t worry, everyone expects me to be stable, so I’m probably actually a giant time bomb. We’ll lose our minds together.”

The poppies swayed. Water lapped at the shore.

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Wes said.

Emery began to close her eyes again when something shimmered on the edge of her vision. Past Wes, halfway up the poppy hill they’d come down, a dream-window pulled itself fully into existence. The inside was dark except for the two big, old oaks framing it in.

Emery jabbed Wes in the arm. “Look!”

Wes gaped. “It’s his.”

They scrambled to their feet. Wes turned in a circle, searching the area. “Is he here? Nearby? He must be--do you think he’s been following us this whole time?”

“Who cares? What if that’s not a window? What if it’s his gateway? Wes, we could get out!”

“I don’t think—” Wes started, but Emery was already running.

This time, when she sprinted for the darkness between the oaks, she didn’t have to pull Wes with her.

[childrenofhypnos]

~sandman~

The Sandman finds them sitting on the shores of the Waking Lake. The boy looks like he was supposed to be keeping watch, his back still straight and his hands clenched around the handle of his war hammer, but now he snores softly with his chin on his chest.

Emery Ashworth looks just like her mother. The Sandman never paid attention to her when he was still at Fenhallow, and he has never been this close to her in the light, but the resemblance is terrifying. Like another doppelgänger. He’s already got one of those to deal with; he doesn’t need another.

The boy, Wesley Jager, he remembers only a little bit. Marcia mentioned him a few times; he’s her cousin, but with the dreamhunter families the way they are, everyone is everyone’s cousin.

He feels bad for both these young dreamhunters. He normally has no trouble navigating the Dream, but their presence made it seize so badly even he lost track of them. Perhaps it was because they’d never entered the Dream before and the Dream rejected them, but he thinks the more likely answer is Ashworth. Both her parents reportedly cause spikes in activity when they enter the Dream; their child would no doubt cause chaos.

But here, beside the Waking Lake, she and Jager should be safe.

The Sandman settles on the rocky shore before them and takes a few items from a bag hanging on his belt. A small tripod with a burner beneath its round, flat top. A cup that he fills with water from the lake and sets on the tripod. Then a small teabag that he loads with a bit of azure dust he takes from another pouch on his belt. He lights the burner with a match, drops the teabag in the water, and waits.

Wind ruffles the trees. The lake laps gently at the shore. Wesley Jager snores, and Emery Ashworth’s head sinks to land on his shoulder. The Sandman lets his armor disappear and pulls his goggles down around his neck.

It’s nice to sit here with them, he thinks. Almost like having friends again.

When the tea is ready, he nurses it between his hands and lets it warm his fingers. He sips until it cools off a bit, then removes the teabag and chucks it as far as he can into the poppy field. His head feels lighter than it has in weeks. He sighs, smiles, and drinks until there’s only a bit left at the bottom of the cup. It’s cooled off completely now.

He tilts his head back and tosses the rest of the tea directly into his eyes.

Then he packs up his things, pulls his goggles on, and reforms his armor. He’s got the two of them here in the Dream; now he needs to figure out how to get them out again. He could just open his gate and put them through, but he doesn’t want to use sleeping sand on them again so soon after the last time, and he can’t run the risk of one of them trying to touch him. Or worse, shoot him.

He needs to get them in a contained place. A dream space that won’t be easy to unravel. A place where the Dean of Fenhallow—who is undoubtedly hunting for his granddaughter at this very moment—will find them. And he needs to get them there soon.

Dangerous things lurk in the Dream.

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 11: The Dream

Emery fell into the Dream.

It was a fall and it wasn’t. There was no forest on the other side of the gateway, but when the light returned, Emery was collapsing back-first onto a pile of…foam? Cushions? She couldn’t see what she’d fallen onto, but it didn’t hurt. She had not come from anywhere. There was no gateway. There were no walls or ceiling or sky. For a moment, after she pushed herself off the surface of her soft landing, there was no ground.

There was nothingness around her in the way that there could be nothingness in a dream: she couldn’t focus on her surroundings. There was something in her brain telling her they weren’t important. She didn’t need to make sense of them.

She grasped at the thought. Dream logic. They did sections of dream logic every year in dreamforming class, and by their final year of school, they would have an entire class of just that. How the dream functioned while a dreamhunter was physically inside it, what it did to their bodies and minds, and the strange and unusual things it did to protect itself. The first rule of dream logic was the will of the Dream itself: the Dream wanted everyone inside to forget where they were, to unravel their memories and their lives piece by piece until they couldn’t leave. A dreamer could exit the Dream by waking up, but a physical body from the waking world, once caught, would rot away there forever.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Emery dropped to her knees and threw her arms over her head. The Dream wanted her to forget, so she had to remember. She had to remember anything and everything she could about the waking world.

Grandpa Al had a special teacup that he only used in his office. It sat beside the nameplate on his desk. Powder blue with cobalt designs and a gold rim. Grandma Juno had given it to him years ago, after they got married and before she was lost in the Dream.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Grandma Juno had forgotten and had gotten lost, and had probably died here. Emery growled and thought harder. Edgar. The sleeves of Edgar’s favorite sweater hung well past his hands. It was a hand-me-down from their father, and Edgar insisted on wearing it every time he watched A Fistful of Dollars.

Why, though?

Why?

Because their father was the one who had shown him that movie for the first time.

The Dream’s oppressive pushing against Emery’s mind let up, but she needed more to keep it away.

Her father could stand in a room full of people and still hide behind his glasses. He was Grandpa Al, but younger and taller and tealess. When she was little, when he still smoked, he gave her piggyback rides, and she felt like she was on top of the world.

Her mother could hide in an empty maze and everyone within five miles would still know she was there. They called her “the Siberian.” She came from…from…Emery cursed. She always forgot the name of it because she was stupid and had never cared enough about where her parents had come from. Khakassia! Her mother was from Khakassia. They’d first come to the Sleeping City from Moscow when Emery was eight, and her mother had let Emery hide behind the protective wall of her legs until Emery had worked up the courage to venture out.

The pressure drained away.

She needed more. Something recent.

Lewis brought Kris flowers for her botany notebook at student council meetings. He’d done it every week for two years, and Emery was no longer sure where he was getting the flowers, but he never missed a week.

Kris wore a different barrette every day of the week, always butterflies on Monday. If she forgot to put it in or wore the wrong one, her anxiety would have her flitting around the student council room in a panic until Jacqueline let her leave to fix the situation.

Joel had found Emery on her first day at Fenhallow. He’d pulled her away from her mother’s protective covering, and he hadn’t even cared that she tried speaking Russian to him sometimes. He liked her before everyone else. He liked her after everyone else. She knew where his family lived in the city, but he may as well have sprung out of the campus ground. There was no Fenhallow without Joel.

Emery thought of Jacqueline standing over her, black hair pulled back in an imperious ponytail, snapping, “Get up, Ashworth. I’d tell you to stop being useless, but that might be too difficult for you.”

Emery got up.

She had her armor and her guns. From the Sandman’s portal she’d expected to enter a forest, but she stood now on a cracked and barren plain that stretched endlessly into the distance. Purple clouds filled the sky, flashing with the threat of lightning.

“Wes?”

Emery turned in a full circle. She was alone. It was a strange kind of aloneness, like standing on an empty arena floor, looked down upon by thousands of spectators. Every mind in the world was connected to the Dream, but the people of the Sleeping City would be the closest. The air around her rippled with half-formed images, there and gone again and replaced by something new. Green fields. Dark oceans. Rooms with blank walls. The insides of homes, the outsides of homes. Schools, planets, pitch black. To her left, a the image of a jungle treehouse solidified and began to move, a window in the midst of her great barren plain, looking onto a whole other world. After a few moments, it trickled away, and Emery had trouble remembering exactly what she’d seen inside it. The Dream oriented its windows around Emery, circling her.

Her mother had always said the Dream was a living thing. It knew when a dreamhunter entered it like a body knew a virus. And like a body and a virus, the Dream resisted invaders. It rejected the waking world.

It had wanted her to forget herself, and she hadn’t. Now, it seemed like it planned to let the dreams of the Sleeping City scare her off.

The problem was, she didn’t know how to get back. The Sandman’s gateway was gone, and even if she did know how to open one herself, she couldn’t leave the Dream without Wes.

Jumping through the Sandman’s gateway had not been her best decision ever. And now that she was out of the moment, trying to catch him in the Dream didn’t sound so appealing, either.

Her first order of business was finding Wes without upsetting the Dream. She had no idea how to do either of those, but standing around wasn’t getting her anywhere.

She looked at her cuff. It had clearly been too much to hope that she could just message Wes. Hey bud, where’re you at? Around the corner from the creepy sunken ship dream-window? Cool, I’ll be there in a sec. The cuff was a no-go. Not only did it get no signal in the Dream, it didn’t even turn on. The Dream didn’t like people, and it didn’t like technology.

“Alright, Em.” She clapped her hands together. “You are in the collective subconscious of the human race. How do you find another person?”

Maybe by wishing really hard.

She snorted. The Dream couldn’t take sarcasm from her.

Professor Lenton hadn’t been any help at all when it came to the Dream. They needed a dreamhunter to teach them these things. Class Twenty got special sessions from the full-time dreamhunters, but two more years seemed like an awfully long time to wait for adequate schooling when they were already allowed out on missions.

Breathe, Emery. Marcia told them to breathe. Yelled at them to breathe, actually. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t breathe, she’d say.

Emery breathed, and thought.

She could track nightmares, dreamhunters, even minor dreamforms in the waking world. All dreamhunters could, because they straddled the line between worlds. Those things felt different, like they didn’t belong. Maybe in the Dream she could track something from the waking world. But that meant she needed to move.

All the directions looked the same—long barren plain, angry flashing sky—so she picked one and started walking. She passed dream-windows as the Dream shifted them to keep its focus on her. Maybe, if this place knew she was here, it would know Wes and the Sandman were here, too. Maybe they would also cause disturbances.

“Wes!” Her voice echoed back to her, as if there were mountains in the distance. The only answer she expected was a slight shift in her mind, that sense she had in the waking world when a nightmare moved suddenly. There was nothing except the heavy, clogging fabric of the Dream pressing in around her. Though the landscape looked arid, the air felt humid.

Nothing to do about it. She’d have to keep moving.

“Wesley Jager, you useless piece of garbage!”

Insults pulled no replies, either. Emery’s boots kicked up little puffs of dust.

“Wes, I’m secretly in love with you. Thought you should know.”

Her sensing-the-waking-world in the Dream theory was probably nonsense. Or Wes was too far away.

How far could he be, really? She’d been holding as tight to him as she could when they went through the gateway. He hadn’t broken out of her grasp before, either, because she remembered a moment of falling through blackness with him at her side, his hammer flashing in the dark.

Her stomach turned. She started to jog.

“Wesley! I am straight up going to have my grandpa fail you if you don’t respond to this!”

The only response she got was a dream-window opening in her face. She pitched headfirst into someone’s mind.

She was on the plain one moment, and in the next standing on a long gravel road in a hazy cloudbank. She started running before she knew why. Sudden, immediate fear pulsed through her legs, clawing at her chest. Something was chasing her. She knew it before she heard it on the gravel behind her, before she felt the change in the air. She knew it the way a dreamer knows it when they drop into that familiar nightmare. The thing was big and had scales and when it caught her—when, not if—it was going to rip her arms out of their sockets.

Her legs sank into the gravel like mud. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. There was no end to the path.

She tripped. Her hands came out to stop her, and she realized she was holding guns. Revolvers.

Revolvers.

The Peacemakers snapped her back into herself. She twisted on the ground. The thing chasing her was lost to the mist, shape indistinct. She aimed for the center of the silhouette.

Her bullets tore through the dream like tissue paper. Instead of bursting in a cloud, the silhouette crumpled to the ground. A dead creature. It was already in the Dream; it had nowhere to return to.

Emery lowered her guns. This creature might have been cute, if it had ever come to the waking world. She would have dispatched it like all the rest, of course, but it might have been shambling and nonsensical and cute. Now it was dead.

The Dream wavered around her. The fear was gone now. The entire span of this person’s nightmare was probably being chased; there was nothing beyond that, so when the chase was done, the nightmare ended. The cloud bank shifted and revealed a patch of cracked and barren earth, angry purple sky. Emery holstered her guns and sprinted for it. She threw herself back into the wasteland.

It was a new area. Or maybe the old area, changed. Low scrub bushes grew from the cracks in the baked ground. The terrain rolled with hills.

She looked at her dead wrist cuff and wondered idly how long she’d been in the Dream. Time flowed differently here. That was what everyone said, at least. A few minutes could last the whole night; a lifetime could be compressed into seconds.

Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since dinner, however long ago that had been, and she was fairly certain a waking world body couldn’t survive on Dream food. Or water.

She wasn’t panicking. She totally wasn’t panicking.

“WES!”

“Emery!”

His voice came from afar, as if echoing down a long hallway. She turned. Another window exploded around her. Wes’s hand caught hers and they fell; it happened so quickly she didn’t have time to be confused. Emery grabbed the hard ridges of Wes’s armor beneath his arms before the force of their fall could drag them apart again, and the handle of his hammer slid across the small of her back, barring her in.

“We’re falling!” she yelped.

The walls—if they really were walls, they were uniform gray and too far away to touch—led both up and down into blackness.

“I’ve been stuck here.” They were close enough that she heard him over the rushing of the wind. His eyes were wide, his expression relieved. “I kept seeing you through the windows in the walls, but I couldn’t get close enough to grab you. I don’t know how to get out.”

“You sound way too calm for this!” Emery’s stomach floated somewhere in her throat. “How much time do you think has passed?”

“A few hours. My cuff is dead.”

“So is mine, but it’s only felt like half an hour for me.”

He frowned. “We have no idea.”

“I do know that we can get out of here by reaching the end of the dream, though.”

They spun as they fell, and Emery’s hair whipped upward into Wes’s face. Spitting, he managed to swing them around until she was on top.

“How do you end a dream about falling?” he said.

“Usually…you wake up.”

Entirely unhelpful. Not only were they not alseep, the dreamer wasn’t around. If they had been, Emery might have been able to slap them awake at the very least. Enough disturbance in their dream space would wake up a dreamer.

Past Wes, a window opened. A slash of bright light against the darkness, directly below them, getting big fast. There was no way to stop and no time to warn Wes, so Emery wrapped her arms around his head and braced for the impact.

They dropped through the window and hung suspended above the cracked wasteland earth for a heartbeat, just long enough for Emery to realize they’d stopped. Then they started again and dropped the last five feet with a heavy thud.

Wes grunted. Emery unraveled her arms. His head thumped against the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine. I think.” He sat up, pushing her back. He shrank his hammer and hung it on the chain around his neck. When he tried to stand, he wobbled and immediately fell back, face green. “Oh. I need to sit here for a second. I was falling for a long time.” He shoved his head between his knees.

Around them, the wasteland had changed again. Now sparse grass poked up in shoots and spurts through the cracks in the ground, and in the distance, skeletal trees created a path down a long hill. The purple clouds overhead had lightened, and in the distance far at the bottom of the hill, she spotted honest patches of green.

Emery rocked back on her heels and hooked two fingers over the lip of Wes’s boot. If she fell through another window, she was taking him with her, Dream physics be damned.

“For a while I thought I came in alone,” she said.

He glanced at her fingers on his boot, then at her face. “For a while I thought you threw me in.”

“I—I mean, I pulled you in, but I came, too—”

“I know.”

Her cheeks burned with humiliation. And she’d thought, before she’d tried to fire off her flare the first time, that Grandpa Al would be proud of her. She hated it. “Sorry. I didn’t think it through.”

Wes was silent for a moment.

Then: “Well, that was better than the last apology.”

She gave him a small rueful smile. He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look angry either, and with him that seemed like a successful interaction.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I don’t really care about the Sandman anymore. How are we getting out of here?”

“I have no clue. A gateway to the Dream can be opened from anywhere, so it seems reasonable to assume that a gateway back to the waking world can also be opened anywhere. I just don’t know how.”

Dream-windows continued to fade in and out around them. Emery watched, wary. She felt Wes tense at the same time she did when one window materialized a little too close.

“We could stay here and wait for help,” Wes said, “but I don’t think the Dream is going to let us.”

Emery snorted. “Really? What was your first—”

A window opened below their feet.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Some Dreams Are Worse Than Others)

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 9: Hugs and Punches

Emery floated. She dreamed, but slipped through the dreams without holding them, skimming her fingers over the clouds as she sailed past. She thought vaguely about those dark purple dream-clouds, but these were made of white cotton candy and soap bubbles, oil slick rainbows and sugar sculptures. They were floating on the ocean and the rocking made her sleepy.

Fabian Fenhallow leaped from the water, leading a troupe of dolphins. He was naked. He waved at Emery as he passed by, and Emery waved back, confused.

“Em. Wake up, Em.”

Darkness bled into the dream. The bubbles popped. The sculptures shattered. The dream fell around her in rips and tears and gave way to the muted colors of the Fenhallow Academy Clinic.

Her mouth was a desert. She tried to raise her head off the pillow, but there no longer seemed to be any muscles in her neck. Grandpa Al sat in a cushy chair beside the bed, one leg crossed over the other, a saucer and teacup balanced on his knee. Steam wafted from the cup.

“I’m in one piece, right?” Her voice came out scratchy.

Grandpa Al smiled. “Yes, all in one piece.”

Behind him, the windows down the long room were dark, and all but one of the other beds were empty, their curtains open. A lamp was on at the nurse’s desk on the far end of the room. Another was on at Emery’s bedside.  She twitched her fingers to urge some feeling back into them.

“How did I get here? What happened?”

“Well, judging by the state we found you in, it seems you and Mr. Jager had a run-in with the Sandman. The two of you were left outside our front gates, unconscious. As to what actually happened, I was hoping you could answer that.”

Drawing all her strength, Emery pushed herself up on noodle arms. “Oh, wow.”

Grandpa Al raised an eyebrow. “Feeling refreshed?”

“He said—before he threw the sand in my face, he said it’d be the best sleep I’d ever had.”

“We’re lucky he was feeling benevolent. There are much worse types of sleeping sand he could’ve used. You were due for your monthly sleep soon, anyway. You certainly won’t need it after this.”

“One night of sleep and I feel like a million bucks.”

Grandpa Al coughed lightly.

“What?”

“Two nights,” he said, sipping tea, “and two days.”

Emery balked. “I’ve been asleep for two days?”

“And two nights.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up sooner?”

“Once we ascertained that the sleeping sand he used was the beneficial sort, there was no reason. It would’ve done more harm than good, and you both needed the rest.”

“We both?”

Grandpa Al nodded toward the only other occupied bed in the room. The curtain was half-drawn, but she could see legs and feet tenting the sheets.

“Wesley has been under as long as you have. I can’t say I’m happy that the two of you were drugged and transported halfway across the city by a fugitive, but I am thankful nothing worse happened.”

“Is Wes okay? He ran into a wall.”

“He’s fine. Where were you? Tell me what happened.”

Emery told him. She skipped over the fight with Wes and explained the chase over the rooftops and through the alley. The closer she got to the point where she fell asleep, the blurrier her memories became. She could no longer remember what the Sandman’s face looked like, though she knew she’d gotten a good look at him. She couldn’t remember what color his hair was, or whether his goggles had been round or square. She was surprised she even remembered that he’d had goggles.

She remembered what he’d said, though. Pieces of it.

“He knew who I was,” she said. “Or at least he recognized me.”

Grandpa Al frowned into his teacup. He sipped, thought a moment, then sipped again. He said, “You do look quite a lot like your mother, and our family is well-known among dreamhunters. I’d be surprised if he didn’t recognize you.”

It hadn’t seemed like the simple matter of knowing her mother. The Sandman had been worried by the recognition, and despite her parents’ reputation, she knew no one that powerful would be worried by her.

“He said not to come after him again.”

“I have to agree with him on that. You and Wesley will have a few days to get back on your feet, and you can resume taking normal missions from here on out.”

Emery sat straight up. “What? But—but we found him! We found him when the full-timers couldn’t! We must have done something right, if we could just—”

“No.” Grandpa Al’s voice cracked across her. He stood, setting his empty teacup on the bedside table and smoothing out his sweater. “You were given orders: if you find the Sandman, do not engage. You violated those orders. We were lucky this time that nothing worse happened to the two of you, but until I know that you can obey commands, I won’t risk your safety again.”

“Grandpa—”

“Edgar was very worried about you. I convinced him to go back to his room only a few hours ago. He’ll want to see you now. Stay here and I’ll get him.”

Then he was gone, striding from the clinic without another word. He said something to the nurse at the station before the door; the nurse glanced down the row at Emery, then nodded. Emery had the creeping suspicion that Grandpa Al had given the order to keep her there.

With a growl of anger, Emery swung her still-heavy legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She swayed for a moment, then realized she had an IV stuck in her arm and ripped it out. Instead of hospital clothes, she was wearing the special pink unicorn pajamas she kept for the monthly sleeps. Each unicorn skewered a bright red heart with its horn. She smoothed them out, then shuffled down the row to rip the curtain away from Wes’s bed.

He was asleep with his arms splayed. One leg hung off the bed. His head had tilted sideways off the pillow, and his hair ruffled out around it.

“Hey.” Emery leaned over him. “Hey, wake up.”

He snorted.

She tapped his cheek. “Wes. Wesley. Wake up.”

“No mango,” he mumbled. “Mango’s gross.”

Emery tore his sheets off, yanked the IV from his arm, and yelled, “WESLEY. WAKE. UP.”

His eyes opened a little, then snapped wide. He focused past her, then on her face.

“Emery—what happened?”

“We’ve been asleep for two days. Sandman Jerkwad got both of us.”

Wes dragged a limp hand over his eyes. Glanced at the bloody spot on his arm where Emery had pulled out his IV. “Two days?”

“Yeah. We’re going to have a metric crapton of homework to catch up on. But my grandpa is taking us off the mission, so I guess we’ll have plenty of time…”

Wes frowned at her and tried to sit up. He fell back against his pillow, groaning. “You were—I don’t even know what he did, but he did something, and you’re worried about homework? What did he do?”

“Nothing. He recognized me, he told me to stop following him, and he put me to sleep. Did you see him?”

“No. I knew he was there, but all I saw was…I think he might have been wearing goggles. He stood over me before he threw that sand at me.”

“Are you okay? You ran into a wall.”

“I could be worse.” Wes tried to sit up again. This time he levered himself into a sitting position against the headboard. “Wow. I feel…”

“Great, right?”

“Yes.”

Emery sat on the edge of the bed and looked toward the end of the clinic. She rubbed her wrists. The Sandman had subdued both of them with so little effort, and then had had the mercy to use such a pleasant form of sleeping sand on them. He’d recognized her, and seemed upset by it. Something wasn’t right.

“Nice pajamas,” Wes said.

Emery sneered at him. “Look who’s talking. White shirt and shorts. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more boring.”

Wes frowned. “I wasn’t—”

The clinic doors burst open. The nurse sprang up, but Edgar was already past him, jerking out of a headlong sprint to march, red-faced, down the aisle between the beds. His sweater sleeves were balled in his fists

Ridley was next through the clinic door. She smoothed her hair down and righted her clothes like she’d pulled herself out of a sprint somewhere before the doors. She caught up to Edgar easily, then passed him to slide up to the other side of Wes’s bed.

Edgar came to a stop in front of Emery. He shifted from foot to foot, wearing only socks, glancing between Emery’s lap, Wes, and Ridley.

“Where are your shoes?” Emery asked.

Edgar shrugged.

Ridley was already examining Wes’s face. “Are you okay? Are you really okay? They said you were okay, but it took you so long to wake up.” She pulled one of his eyelids wide open. Emery wasn’t sure what she was trying to see; Wes’s eyes were so black there didn’t seem to be a pupil to dilate.

Wes jerked his head away and mumbled something Emery couldn’t hear.

“Grandpa said you woke up.” Edgar’s voice was so quiet she wouldn’t have heard him if she hadn’t been waiting for it.

Emery stood and hugged him. He hugged her back so viciously she almost toppled over, then subtly turned her so she stood between him and the bed, blocking him from view.

“Edgar…”

He shook his head against her stomach. Ridley and Wes were mumbling to each other, so Emery took Edgar by the elbows, pried him away from her, and walked him down the aisle back to her bed. She sat him down facing the wall. His gaunt eyes were red and shining.

“Edgar, I’m fine. Nothing happened to me.”

He swiped his sleeve-covered hands under his eyes quickly, as if she wouldn’t notice if he did it fast enough. “You keep doing really dangerous things. You should stop.”

“‘Really dangerous’? We’re dreamhunters. Our job is messing around with the human subconscious; it’s dangerous by definition. We can’t stop doing it because we’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“I—I didn’t say you were.”

She hadn’t, and he hadn’t, and though she knew fear in him when she saw it, she hadn’t said it because she recognized it. She hesitated, trying to understand why the words had come out so easily. Then Edgar looked at her with his gaunt eyes and solemn expression, and she felt the stone around her wrists and hopelessness pressing down on her chest, and she noticed the fear in herself. A little kernel of it, tight and hot, sitting in the exact middle of her chest.

“I’ll be more careful from now on,” she said softly.

Edgar looked away.

She wanted to hug him again, but both his hands were resting on his legs now, still balled up in his sleeves, and Wes and Ridley had gone quiet enough that they might be looking. Edgar had only recently become okay showing affection in front of Morris, his roommate. In dire situations like this, he could be convinced to do it in front of near-strangers like Wes and Ridley. But only once. He wouldn’t do it a second time.

So Emery punched him in the arm instead.

“Stop worrying, runt. Who do you think I am?”

Edgar rubbed his arm and smiled.

The nurse shooed Edgar and Ridley out just as Ridley turned on Emery with an expression of impending fury. The nurse then ordered Wes and Emery to rest until sunrise. Emery lay in bed for exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds before the nurse took a restroom break.

Emery stood at the end of Wes’s bed. “Get up. We need to prepare.”

Wes had his fingers laced together on his chest. “Prepare for what? We’re off the mission.”

“Really? You’re going to give up that easily? We found him, Wes. And he knew who I was.”

“Didn’t he also tell you to stop following him?”

“All the more reason!”

“It’s been two days. He’s probably long gone.”

“We won’t know until we look. Come on, before the nurse gets back.” Emery grabbed Wes’s ankles and tugged.

Wes latched onto the headboard and held himself in place. “No.”

“Wesley.”

“We just woke up. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Fine, I’ll go by myself. Are you really going to let your partner go hunting the Sandman alone?”

“You’re going to give me an aneurysm.”

Emery dropped his legs and turned for the door. “Going. Leaving.”

Wes sat up. “Wait.”

She paused mid-stride and looked over her shoulder, eyebrows raised.

“Can you wait a day? Tomorrow? If we leave now we’ll only have a few hours until dawn anyway, and they’ll know we left and they’ll have half the hunting teams out looking for us.”

Emery huffed air at her bangs. She turned back. “You’re such a buzzkill.” A correct buzzkill, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “Can we at least sneak out to get breakfast? I’m starving.”

After a moment of hesitation, Wes swung himself off the bed.

Emery stole a sticky note from the nurse and pasted it in the middle of the nurse station’s computer screen.

WENT FOR BREAKFAST

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos —> Never Give Up!)

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 2: Reluctant Deals

The first nightmares arrived with Babylon.

It was the first city in history to reach a population size large enough to thin the veil between the waking world and the Dream. There were only a few sparse records left of the nightmares that appeared during that time, and mentions of only one person who knew how to vanquish them. Every official Hypnos State text called her Iltani, and named her the first dreamhunter.

There was a statue of Iltani at the center of Fenhallow Academy’s campus—accompanied by Fabian Fenhallow, the school’s founder, whom most students forgot about until reminded—her arms raised, wreathed in flame. Emery was eight years old when she stood before the statue the first time, and as she looked into Iltani’s fierce bronzecast face, she began to understand the responsibility she’d been given.

Dreamhunters, forged by exposure to the Dream in the cities they protected, had worked alone and unorganized until the formation of small dreamhunting societies in China, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Middle East. Over time, more societies appeared across the globe, grew, and evolved to their current form: the Hypnos State. A neutral world government that worked outside politics to bring peace to nightmare-riddled cities across the globe, named for the Greek god of sleep.

That was what the textbooks said, anyway. Emery thought it was mostly garbage. The history all sounded good, but nothing as far-reaching as the Hypnos State would be “outside politics.”

Fenhallow had been created to give the Hypnos State a base of operations in the U.S. As the largest training center for future State employees in North America, it was the reason the Sleeping City had been built at all—and the Sleeping City was the only one of its kind. There was a billboard outside the city limits that had never changed and never would; a black background that disappeared against the night sky so the stark white letters, lit from below, hovered over the city:

FIND HOME HERE,

CHILDREN OF HYPNOS

Emery could see the back of the sign far in the distance where she sat on the sidewalk outside the Miller’s home. Her mission had taken her to the suburbs—and on a Saturday night, no less—so it took the cleanup crew forty-five minutes to reach her. By then, Cora was dead asleep in her father’s arms, exhausted by the night’s events, and Emery was ignoring the messages popping up on her wrist cuff and instead typing one out to her boyfriend, Joel, who was not a dreamhunter, and who would most certainly be asleep in his dorm room on Fenhallow’s campus.

Don’t listen to what anyone says tomorrow. 100% owned this mission by myself.

She sent it out and stared for a moment at the dark span of yard between the houses on the other side of the street, trying not to think of how much trouble she was going to be in when she got back to campus. As she stared, something shifted in the shadows, and she realized there was a man standing there, watching her. Only his face was visible, and only barely, and his eyes were covered by goggles.

Then a few members of the cleanup crew passed in front of Emery, and when she looked again, he’d slipped around the back of the house and disappeared. She’d heard from full-time hunters about people in the city who liked to creep on dreamhunters before or after jobs, like fanboys with celebrities, but she’d never seen it for herself.

The Millers had some weird neighbors.

The Hypnos cleanup crew consisted of two teams: one outfitted in gray jumpsuits, the other in jackets and ties. The jumpsuits took in the damage to the house, the broken window and bedroom door, and began calculating the repair costs. The jackets and ties spoke to Cora’s father about what had happened, then to the neighbors who had come from their houses to inspect the commotion.

Sarah Stainer, one of the jackets and ties, approached Emery where she sat on the curb. Stainer had still been in classes when Emery first arrived at Fenhallow; now she was in charge of her own crew out of the Hypnos State dispatch center on Main and Cherry. The crews worked nights, like the dreamhunters, so Stainer’s shirt already bore the scars of several cups of coffee. Still, compared to the sweat gathering under every part of Emery’s dreamform armor, Stainer looked the picture of spring. She loped over with an easy smile, a sheaf of her dark curly hair covering one eye, and her hands in her pockets.

“Really did it this time, huh, Em?” Stainer said.

Emery knew she wasn’t talking about the nightmares. “Hypnos’s eyeballs, Stainer, you could look a little less smug about it.”

“I’m the one who has to clean up your messes, Ashworth. I’ll look smug when I want to look smug.” She nodded her head back toward the car she’d driven to the scene. “Come on, let’s get you back. The dean has words for you.”

“Of course he does.”

The ride into the city felt like it took half the time it should’ve. Stainer remained mercifully silent the whole way to the school, which was Emery’s first clue that she was indeed in deep trouble. She would get the credit for completeing the termination request, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she’d completed the request alone.

Her dreamhunting class, only recently released to take on real requests, had received their partners earlier that week. They’d been chosen for each other by the North American Ward based on skill and personality tests and the recommendations of their professors, a process that had taken the last several years to complete. No dreamhunter was ever supposed to go without a partner, ever.

It wasn’t Emery’s fault her partner was the most useless stick-in-the-mud ever born.

Stainer scanned her ID at the security station outside the school. Fenhallow’s wide front gates swung open for the car. Towering oaks and wrought-iron lamp posts lined the main road into Fenhallow’s sprawling campus grounds. They first passed the dorms, a picture of Gothic Revival in pale stone, where lights burned bright with students up late into the night. Though they took classes together, the students were split into a day division and a night division. The night division—the dreamhunters-in-training—shared buildings but not rooms with the day division—the students who would become part of the cleanup crews, like Stainer, or security officers, or professors, or researchers for the Hypnos State. Some would go to work in Terminations and Request Fulfillments, that soul-sucking pit in the public Hypnos centers throughout the city.

Farther in, they passed the education buildings. All were dark except for the three main buildings around the quad: Hothram Hall, the athletic center, where dreamhunters trained to keep in peak physical fitness and learned how to use their weapons; the student center, lovingly referred to as the Crossing; and the administration building, three stories tall and stretching toward the sky, where the lights were always on. The three buildings surrounded the center of campus, where Iltani’s statue stood guard.

Stainer parked on the curb in the small roundabout at the foot of the admin building. Sweeping stone steps led the way the double oak doors. On each landing of the steps, a set of bronze plaques had been fixed in the stone, engraved with quotes from famous members of the Hypnos State. Emery had seen these for the first time when she was eight, too, shortly after she’d looked up into Iltani’s face, and she had dreamed of having her own words immortalized into Fenhallow’s very bones. Iltani had made dreamhunting the noblest profession in the world—there could be no greater achievement than inspiring future generations of dreamhunters.

Inside the admin building’s double front doors, the receptionist, David, looked up from the front desk and waved them through the lobby. He gave Emery a pained look and made some vaguely apologetic hand gestures. Emery could hear the laughter threatening to break through Stainer’s carefully pursed lips as they made their way up the staircase past David’s desk.

The whole building smelled of warm carpet and rich wood. Purple velvet covered the stairs. Portraits of past deans of the academy lined the wall, and all of them looked down on Emery with disapproval. At the top of the stairs they took a left down the hallway, and went to the very last room. Carved into the door was the closed eye of Hypnos, like an upside-down sunrise, in front of a blooming poppy. The doorknob was silver covered in a delicate gold filigree, the same as every dreamhunter weapon.

The plaque beside the door—also gold and silver—said Dean of Fenhallow Academy.

Stainer smiled. “Have fun in there.”

Emery sighed.

~

The Dean of Fenhallow was a dreamkiller: a dreamhunter who had defeated the worst the Dream could throw at him and won the ability to live out the rest of his life in service to the Hypnos State. He hadn’t pulled his weapon in years, and he still moved like a forty-year-old, despite toeing the line of sixty-five. He had a thick head of gray hair, warm hands, and lines around his eyes from a perpetual smile.

Well, near-perpetual.

Perpetual until now.

Emery stood before his desk with her eyes cast down to his teacup, because she couldn’t bear to look him in the face. Not while there were others in the room.

Stainer moved to the left of the desk with another dreamhunter student, still dressed in his t-shirt and sweatpants leisure wear, arms crossed over his barrel chest as he huffed out his indignation.

Wesley Jager.

Wes looked a little like an enraged bull when he got upset. His biceps strained against his sleeves, his nostrils flared, his black eyes narrowed into two glittering pits. He was a uniform brown from head to toe, except for those eyes. His bronze hair stuck up in the back.

“How did the hunting go, Emery?” said the dean. She’d heard him use many voices before. This was not actually his Dean of Fenhallow voice, though she doubted Wes or Stainer would know that.

Emery pressed her hands to her thighs. “I took care of both nightmares without any issues. I received the proper signatures and kept the subject safe. Everything was performed to procedure.” She wanted to scoff. She sounded so dull and formal, and she never talked to him this way.

Wes let out an angry huff.

“Was it?” The dean laced his fingers together. “I didn’t have you brought here for a simple debriefing. There is a reason dreamhunters have partners, and it isn’t so that you can leave them behind when you go on missions. Stainer tells me there was a class four nightmare involved tonight.”

“Class four is a little much. I mean, it was a flying whale, but—”

“When you dispatched that nightmare, what was the resulting dream cloud like?”

Emery coughed. “Big.”

“Mm. I suspect it was a bit difficult to breathe when it came for you. All that Dream essence hitting you at once, the body would go into shock.”

“A bit.”

“If you’d had a partner there,” the dean gestured to Wes, “he might have shared the burden. Not to mention having your back if that big nightmare got the better of you.”

Wes’s black gaze drilled into the side of her head. If he thought he was getting an admission of wrongdoing out of her, he was going to have a very bad night.

“I don’t think he would have.”

She didn’t have to look at Wes to feel him bristle. Stainer put a hand to her forehead. The dean sat up straighter.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s the lowest ranked in our class. I’m the highest. You can’t honestly expect him to keep up with me in the field. He can barely hold his weapon, much less fight something with it. If you wanted me to have a useful partner, I should have been paired with someone on my level.”

The dean’s expression settled into disappointment. Emery couldn’t look away from him, now that she’d met his eye; his gaze was a magnet, and to force herself to avert hers was to incite further disappointment. The dean turned to Stainer and Wes.

“Could I have a moment alone with Emery, please?” he said.

Stainer put a hand on Wes’s shoulder—he was half a head taller than her—and led him from the room. When the door clicked shut behind them, the dean stood from his desk and said, “Em.”

Guilt slammed into her in hot waves.

“Sorry, Grandpa.”

“If you’re sorry,” Grandpa Al said, “why did you do it?”

Emery growled. “Because he gets in the way! We have to climb on the roof to get to a nightmare? I have to make sure Wes isn’t falling off the side. I can shoot something and get rid of it right away? I have to make sure Wes isn’t in my line of sight, swinging that stupid hammer. If I have to have a partner, it should be someone who understands how things work.”

Grandpa Al’s disappointment softened. “Em, I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s why you’re still considered in training. Right now you’re supposed to learn how to work with your partner. I would have been shocked had you performed perfectly together immediately after being assigned. Did you give him any chance at all?”

“I’ve been in class with him for years. I know what he’s capable of.”

“I’m not going to request the Ward give you a new partner. Wesley deserves a chance.”

Emery took a deep breath and flexed her hands, trying to work out some of the tension. She finally looked away, because more disappointment was better than the soft, appeasing look he was giving her now. The look when he wanted something.

“How much of a chance?” she said.

“One month.” He said it so fast he had to have had it ready, maybe since she’d entered the room, maybe since he’d heard she’d left for the mission without Wes. “Give him one month of missions, and if you still can’t work together at the end of that, I’ll see about doing some rearranging.”

“Just one?”

“Just one.”

When she was thirteen, Grandpa Al had managed to reform her dorm-cleaning habits in an instant by mentioning that every dreamhunter engraved on the Fenhallow steps had been a notorious neat freak. She searched his face for any kind of duplicity now. He raised his hands and his eyebrows, innocent.

“Fine,” Emery said.

“That’s my girl.” He stood from the desk. “You know, Edgar was very worried about you. You should stop by his room so he knows you’re okay.”

Emery groaned. “Who told Edgar?”

“No one. He started checking the request logs religiously to see if you go on missions. He was actually the one who told me.”

Emery growled again and yanked the ponytail out of her hair as she turned for the door.

“Oh, and Em?”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob.

“Apologize to Wesley. You were speaking your truth, but it was a hurtful truth, and not one he needed to hear that way.”

Emery shouldered the door open.

Apparently, Wes wasn’t going to have as bad a night as she thought.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Apologies Are Hard)

[exeuntstormtroopers]

hi!! is wes's last name pronounced like eren jaeger or like mick jagger or neither?

Hi!

Like Eren Jaeger. YAY-grr. (Well in German I guess it’s more like “YAY-gahr” lol @ American ‘r’ sounds.) Both Jaeger and Jager are German surnames meaning “hunter.”