Chapter One
I swallow a droplet of diluted vampire blood.
“Alarm and surveillance disabled,” Felix whispers in my earpiece. “Breaking and entering may commence.”
Before I can reply, the blood kicks in, lifting the weight off my eyelids as my sleep deprivation retreats. Except the droplet must’ve been too big, or I drank it too soon after the last dose. I feel an unwelcome side effect—orgasmic pleasure—coming on.
Tightening my grip on the lockpick until it hurts, I stab myself in the forearm.
“What the hell?” Felix exclaims. “What’d you do that for?”
The camera on my lapel didn’t catch my stealthy sip, so I can see why this looks odd on his end. “Never mind that.”
The pain quickly annuls my euphoria, and I thank my lucky stars I took the time to sterilize my equipment, or else this would end with gangrene. When I pull the lockpick out of my arm, the wound heals instantly—and best of all, no sign of the orgasmic pleasure remains.
There we go. I didn’t enjoy that vampire blood one bit, other than the boost of alertness that was my goal—and my libido skyrocketing to the levels of a teenage boy in a strip club.
“I thought your weirdness was limited to cleansing rituals.” Felix sounds bizarrely sexy in the vamp blood afterglow.
I don’t reply. Instead, I take a quick internal scan to make sure no part of me is still feeling the pull of the highly addictive substance. With all my current problems, becoming a vampire blood addict would be like jumping off a cliff after drowning myself in cyanide.
All good so far. I grasp the doorknob. “I’m going in.”
“What you’re about to do is illegal on this world,” Felix reminds me, as if I didn’t already know.
“What about hacking all those banks?” I whisper back. “You wouldn’t like it if I lectured you about that.”
A Cognizant like me, albeit one permanently residing on Earth, Felix calls himself a technomancer. He can make silicon-based technology do his bidding, a power he wastes on feats that any human with in-depth computer knowledge could pull off.
“Dreamwalking won’t help you escape human prison,” he replies. “Or survive it, for that matter.”
“That’s arguable.” I decide against telling him about the time I gleaned one of his wet dreams, specifically the one where he fancied himself a guard getting attacked by suspiciously attractive female convicts. “But if you’ve done your job properly, I won’t end up in prison.”
“I can only take care of the smart alarm. If this Bernard guy is paranoid enough, he might have the older, dumb alarm set up as well, and it’ll blare as soon as you get inside. Or he might have a dog. Or he might even be awake.”
I sneak a guilty peek at my wrist, where most people would see a furry bracelet. But he’s actually a creature called a looft. Normally, his kind live on cow-like moofts, but Pom, as he calls himself, has adopted me as his host. Right now, he’s sleeping, as usual, but the pitch-black shade of his fur reflects my inner turmoil. If I die, Pomsie dies with me; that’s how our relationship works.
So I’ll have to not die. Simple.
Turning my attention back to the heavy wooden door, I stroke Pom to calm myself down. When my hands have steadied and his fur has turned a more neutral shade of blue, I pick the lock.
“Seriously, Bailey,” Felix says as I touch the doorknob, “there’ve got to be better ways to make money. With your—”
I mute the earpiece. Obviously, there are more legit ways to earn what I need, but those ways don’t pay nearly as well as my current employer. I’m already a month behind on Mom’s medical bills, and if I don’t come up with two million cc—Gomorran cryptocash—in the next two weeks, they’ll turn off her life support. No honest jobs would let me make that kind of cash in the little time I have left. As is, I’ve had to forgo sleep in order to make ends meet. In fact, I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since Mom’s accident four months ago, staying up naturally at first, then using pharmacological stimulants, and eventually resorting to vampire blood.
I reach into my pocket for one of my last two sleep grenades and twist the doorknob.
No alarm blares.
No dog barks.
No one shoots me dead with a gun.
I press the button on the grenade and toss it into the apartment.
Sleeping gas hisses as it spreads throughout the place.
“That gas goes inert in two minutes,” I whisper for Felix’s benefit. “If there’s a dog in there, or if Bernard was awake, they’re asleep now.”
I unmute in time to hear Felix grumbling something about a decent plan. What he doesn’t realize is that the most dangerous part of this job is coming up.
I tiptoe inside the penthouse. Valerian, the guy who hired me to do this, must pay Bernard well. This place is spacious, especially for New York, where real estate is nearly as pricey as on my home world of Gomorrah.
I locate the bedroom and squint through the darkness at the bed. Whew—Bernard is curled up in a fetal position, covered by a heavy blanket.
I creep toward the bed.
“Doesn’t he look like Mario?” Felix whispers.
Comparing a man to a digital plumber isn’t as crazy as it sounds. When I first met Felix, we bonded over our love of video games.
I examine the pudgy man’s mustachioed face. “More like Wario, Mario’s archrival.”
“Neither of them has a scar like that.”
He’s right. The scar on Bernard’s forehead belongs on the face of an interdimensional warrior, not an engineering executive at a VR company on Earth.
“So what now?” Felix asks.
“I have to touch him.”
Felix chuckles.
I roll my eyes. “Not in a dirty way.”
I peer at my victim’s eyelids for rapid eye movement. Nothing. Crap. I pull off my gloves and do my best to prepare for the unpleasantness that is to come—specifically, the least risky but most disgusting aspect of what I’m about to attempt.
Skin-to-skin contact.
The bead of sweat wobbling along the edge of the scar on Bernard’s forehead doesn’t help, nor does his mooft-dung breath.
“What are you waiting for?” Felix asks. “Is it your OCD again?”
“Caring about hygiene doesn’t mean I have OCD.” I touch the bottle of hand sanitizer in my pocket, my lifesaver here on Earth. “Besides, he’s not in REM sleep.”
“Which means you’ll have to do that dangerous subdream battle thing when you enter him?”
“You make it sound way too rapey. I’m not going to ‘enter him.’ I’m just visiting his dreams. But yes, if the subdream battle thing kills dream-me, real-me will go insane.”
Actually, that’s an understatement. Not long before her accident, as a way of discouraging me from using my powers, Mom showed me footage of what happened to a dreamwalker who’d died in the dream world. He went on a killing rampage like a rabid puck and cannibalized his victims. I checked on this, and even years later, he’s still being kept in restraints in a padded cell.
“So you’re going to wait until he goes into REM sleep?” Felix asks.