Free Immortal Twilight by James Axler Page B

total control of how long a dreamer dreamed, allowing them to charge as much per session as the market could sustain. There wasn’t a lot of money in Hope, but addicts always found a way.
    However, the system had never been designed to handle an attack from within. No one could foresee a way for an insurrectionist to get into the traum wirklichkeit and still be aware that they were dreaming. For a while, Brigid had been lost in the traum wirklichkeit. But she had something that most users didn’t have—a trick she’d learned back in her childhood and had employed ever since—her eidetic memory. With that, it was hard to fool Brigid for long; take away her memory of recent events and she cast back and recalled them, piecing things together with untold swiftness. She had been lost here for a time, caught up in the dream story she was being sold, the one she had paid credits to participate in, a new world painted on the canvas of computerized simulations developed for the military over two hundred years before. But she had come here with a mission, and recalling who she was and where she was was the first step in fulfilling that mission.
    As the shadow of the Deathbird played across the ruined window by the skyway, Brigid stepped away from the car and addressed the gray-suited worker who had offered to help. “Roof access,” she demanded breathlessly. “I need to get up to the roof.”
    Startled, the worker stuttered something, but Brigid grabbed him by both shoulders. “Now,” she insisted.
    * * *
    P AIN .
    That was the first thing Kane felt. A pain in his side, almost like a bite. It seemed to kick in before he had even woken up, like an alarm chron. He was sitting on a hard chair with his arms wrenched behind his back, hands tied at the wrists, the coolness of a breeze playing against the warm skin of his chest and arms and legs.
    “We are the dreamers of the dream,” a man was explaining, his voice close by.
    With his eyes still closed, Kane surveyed his surroundings to the best of his abilities. It was a room, small room, the echoes of shoe heels against the hard stone floor told him that much. And there were two people here, one of them real close, looming over him and breathing into his face. The breath smelled sweet and strong, like four-day-old tangerine.
    Kane opened his eyes, saw the man looking right at him, a desk lamp turned on its swivel arm to blaze at him with sun-bright intensity. The man had dark red skin, or maybe it was just a bad reaction to the sun.
    “You have a magistrate’s gun,” the man began, his face close to Kane’s. “Are you a magistrate?”
    “Wh-what?” Kane muttered. His mouth felt raw, as if he’d been asleep with it wide-open. He realized why he could feel the breeze now, too—he’d been stripped naked before being tied to the chair, his jacket, pants, shadow suit and boots slung in one corner of the little room. There was a bruise on his left side where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, in line with his bottommost rib. The shadow suit had dulled the impact, deflecting the bullet before it penetrated, but it had still hit like a locomotive. Without the shadow suit, he’d be leaking blood right now.
    The room looked like an office, and it was almost big enough to hold the half-length desk that had been crammed against its longest wall, although it was probably a bastard of a thing to get a chair in here to sit at it. The desk was smothered in paperwork, credits tossed casually amid it all like eclectic bookmarks, bags of powder that looked like sea salt. There were pictures over the desk, too. Pictures of ants and locusts with women’s bodies—poor renderings done by hand, tacked to the wall.
    “A mag’s gun,” the man repeated, lifting the weapon so that Kane could see it. “Tell me where you got it.”
    Kane fixed the man with his steely gray stare. “Get bent.”
    The man’s black brows rose in surprise, and then he drew back and slapped Kane across the