Chapter 7 by Green

Chapter 7

By Green

The first thing I saw when Frazer opened the door at the end of the corridor was a flight of stairs. We climbed them and came into a room with what looked like a front desk, which made me confused because this clearly couldn’t be the “front” of the building.

The woman behind the desk immediately stood up as soon as she spotted us approaching.

“Mr. Maerd,” she greeted Frazer politely. “Welcome back. My visitor records didn’t note that you were returning.” Her eyes flicked to Bluu and I. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Sorry about the sudden visit,” Frazer said. “These are my friends from the Wang Group. We’re here to see my father.”

I noticed that he didn’t introduce us by name and wondered if it was because he didn’t trust this receptionist. I remembered his words about Sunside-sympathizers being in Nozpin.

Keep a low-profile, Jimmy, I told myself.

“Of course,” the woman said, making a quick check-in on her computer. “Let me see where he is.”

She picked up the front desk phone and, in less than a minute, she directed us to go down another hallway, where she said someone would be waiting to take us to Freddy Maerd. Our guide was another woman, taller than the previous one and with honey-colored skin. The first room she took us through was a large conference room that could seat almost a hundred people. I started to wonder how many members were in Nozpin and whether Wang Group had the same amount.

We stepped into an elevator and the woman pressed a button for the second floor. No one wanted to climb one flight of stairs after all. When the elevator doors slid open, I was shocked. At least ten beds were perfectly laid out from wall to wall, all with comfy-looking mattresses and blankets and even pillows on some of them. They were different colors and had different patterns on the fabric, and each bed looked personalized in some way.

“Do you guys live here or something?” I asked incredulously.

“We do,” the woman chuckled as she led us between the beds. “This is the floor where our most powerful members dream, so they get the nice beds. We call this the Dreamroom. Every floor has one. Of course, the Dreamrooms are only for Dreamworld purposes. We have our own rooms on every floor where we actually sleep and live.”

“You have separate rooms for how powerful your Dreamers are?” Bluu asked.

“Yes.” The woman raised an arched eyebrow. “Don’t you?”

Bluu was silent, which meant no. I guessed Wang Group members didn’t have as much luxury as Nozpin.

“Nozpin designs it this way for strategic purposes,” Frazer explained. “There are six stories in this building. The first is the lobby. The second, this one, is dedicated to the strongest Nozpin Dreamers: Rank One. The floor above us is for the Rank Twos, above that is Rank Threes, and so on. In the event that there’s an attack, the strongest Dreamers are already near the bottom, so they can defend the best while reinforcements from the other floors arrive.”

The woman was frowning at Frazer, probably because he’d revealed a security secret. “You must trust these two very much,” she said.

“I do,” Frazer said. “This is Bluu Mrengo and our newest recruit Jimmy Cartwright.”

There went the introduction. That meant Frazer thought this woman was trustworthy, more so than the receptionist.

“Do you sleep on this level?” I asked her.

“No, no, I’m a Rank Two,” she said. “But one of the Rank Ones got transferred to a different branch yesterday, so Mr. Maerd is deciding who to promote. I hope I get it. It’s a great honor to be a Rank One.”

I scanned the room. “Do one of these beds belong to Mr. Freddy Maerd?”

“He has his own personal room. Here we are.”

She knocked on the door at the very end of the room—Freddy’s personal room, damn—and there was a short pause. A thump of footsteps. A deep clearing of the throat. The door opened and out stepped a giant of a man.

I liked to imagine that he looked like the clean-shaved version of Frazer, but I really couldn’t tell from Frazer’s hobo appearance. Freddy had a broader build than Frazer and was about half a head taller—which was pretty tall because Freddy was already above average. His hair was slightly bedraggled. But I guess that was commonplace among Dreamers.

“Z, my boy!” Freddy said, and his voice was as deep and booming as I expected. “Come in, come in.”

Frazer rolled his eyes at the use of his nickname as we all filed inside, except for the woman who left the Dreamroom now that she was done with her job. Freddy’s personal space was really his personal room. If I was being honest, it looked a lot like those fancy hotel rooms, minus the floor-to-ceiling windows. In fact, there were no windows in here—probably for security reasons. The king-sized bed in the center had a mattress the color of black coffee and lighter brown blankets that were piled in a heap at the corner. On one side of the room was a glass table, a leather couch, and sofas that faced a TV screen on the wall. Another side of the room had dark wooden drawers, along with a board pinned full of notes and papers and calendars.

“Welcome to my world,” Freddy chuckled. “Have a seat everyone.”

Frazer introduced us again as we sat, although it looked like Freddy already knew who we were.

“So what are your Dream abilities?” the senior Maerd asked.

I let Bluu go first. After all this time, I actually didn’t know what Bluu’s powers were yet.

“I grow wings when I’m in the Dreamworld,” Bluu explained. “Cobalt blue ones. I can make them disappear and reappear when I need them.”

“Ah, the embodiment of man’s dream to fly,” Freddy observed. “You should show them to me someday, I’m sure they’re magnificent.”

He turned to me. I took a deep breath.

“Well, according to my Wang Group profile, I’m an emotion manipulator,” I said.

“The emotion manipulator, you mean,” Freddy said. “There’s been whispers all about you, in Sunside and Nozpin.”

“How do you know they’ve been talking about me at Sunside?”

“Our scouts say their scouts talk about you. Not you specifically—I don’t think they know who Jimmy Cartwright is—but they do know someone with your ability exists,” Freddy laughed heartily. “I’m told some of them even sound scared of you.”

It was hard to imagine me being scary at all but perhaps that was a plus going into battle.

“So how does your ability work?” Freddy prompted.

“When I go into the Dreamworld, I see silhouettes of normal people who are sleeping. It’s like their essence in the Dreamworld, if they aren’t Dreamers. The troubled folks have stains on their silhouettes, and it’s kind of my job to fix those stains. They usually show up as a puzzle that I have to solve.”

“Interesting,” Freddy hummed. “I’m glad you're on our side, Jimmy. I can see where that could be used for evil—it’s not pretty. You too, Bluu. I’d hate to have a flying terror out to snipe me in a fight.”

Bluu beamed, and even I appreciated the fact that Freddy was making everyone feel special. He clearly had leadership material and recognized the strengths of all his members.

“Now then, Z, what brings you back to Nozpin?” Freddy turned to his son. “You look very different from the last time I saw you.”

“I went undercover, like you advised me to,” said Frazer. “I got quite a bit of intel, including the same scoop your spies got about Jimmy’s ability. But I was only able to infiltrate Sunside at the henchman level. Can’t get to the higher-ups, let alone dear sissy Freya. That’s when I remembered that Eric Wang used to be from Sunside, and I was getting ready to go back to Wang Group when I ran into these two. They told me Eric was out of commission because Freya poisoned him.”

“Right. Her Black Ribbons, eh?” Freddy sighed. “Y was always a tough one.”

I assumed “Y” was referring to Freya. This man had interesting nicknames for his children.

“We’re looking for a cure, sir,” Bluu said. “Eric is currently in a safe place, but we don’t know if he’ll last much longer. He looked like the Walking Dead when we found him.”

I noticed Freddy gave his son an odd look. A silent conversation seemed to pass between the two, one that entailed a lot of serious frowning from the older man.

Freddy started, “I don’t know if—”

“Dad, please,” Frazer interrupted. “It’s just Freya’s poison, we have the antidote for that.”

“But who knows if it works anymore?” Freddy retorted. “She’s gotten stronger these past years. The antidote might be outdated. Worse, it could cause more severe side-effects than it already does.”

“Side-effects?” It was my turn to interject, although I wished I didn’t because having the eyes of both Maerds on me was rather daunting. “What kind of side-effects?”

“When Freya was on her rebelling spree,” said Frazer, “she hurt a lot of people with her tendrils. We ended up having to develop an antidote with the number of casualties we were getting. It didn’t always work, though, since everyone’s body is different. There’s a 30% chance of having severe reactions to it.”

“It’s more like 60 to 70 percent now,” Freddy said. “Outdated. Risky. You could end up finishing the job for Freya and killing Eric.”

“Are there other options?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Frazer mumbled.

We were all stumped deep in thought for a while. A flawed cure. And here I thought we’d just get an antidote, bring back Eric, and give Freya a taste of her own medicine. I could manipulate emotions and heal people in the Dreamworld. It just wasn’t so ideal in reality.

Bluu complicated things further when he spoke up, “We could give them Jimmy.”

“WHAT?” My mouth fell open.

“Why would we do that?” asked Frazer.

“Sunside wants Jimmy. That’s what they wrote on the note outside Wang Group headquarters. Bring Jimmy, or they kill the remaining hostages.”

“There are hostages involved?” Freddy exclaimed.

“I don’t know how many,” Bluu said quietly. “But everyone else is dead.”

Silence again. I was fuming inside. Bluu had tried to capture me previously to deliver me to Sunside, before Frazer came along. The fact that there were no immediate objections from Frazer or Freddy right now also made me churn. It meant they were actively considering handing me to Sunside to be brainwashed into some evil-doing puppet.

To save his friends. He’s just trying to do what he thinks is best for Wang Group. I stood up. Bluu stood up with me, his eyes flickering from me to the door. But I wasn’t going to run away. I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked Bluu straight in the eye.

“You want to give me to Sunside,” I said. “I get it. I’m new around here and those hostages are probably close friends of yours that you’ve worked with for years.”

Bluu hesitated. He nodded his head solemnly.

“I don’t know Eric very well,” I continued. “He was supposed to be my client before a hole opened up in my therapy room and sucked us both into the parking lot. But I do know this. Eric saved my life that day. He was buying me time and he ended up like that: poisoned and unconscious.”

I looked to Freddy. “That cure has a chance of healing him,” I said. “Even if it’s a small chance, I’m willing to take it because it beats imminent death. If you don’t give the cure, that’s fine. I’ll steal it.”

Frazer gawked at me but I kept talking, “And obviously, I’m not going to walk into Sunside and let them have me. I’ll fight my way in there. Mess up their inner puzzles...somehow. Make them all sad or depressed. They’d probably kill me or throw me in a cell while they figure out what to do with me before I can even take down one of them. At least I tried. For good people.”

Various expressions stared back at me: Freddy’s face curious, Frazer’s face astonished, and Bluu’s a little guilty. I was pretty much ready to resign myself to my promise when Freddy stood up and patted my shoulder.

“You’d take that risk?” he said.

“...Yeah.”

“Well, those odds look smaller than the antidote’s. Seems like it would be more in your favor if you had the cure.” Freddy nodded at Frazer. “I’ll give it to you.”