An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(58)

I hated Peter Petrawicki and the Defenders, and I was going to do everything in my power to defeat their message with the truth, which I believed we were close to figuring out.



Giving up because people were harassing me would have been letting them win.



I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.





I did promise you honesty.

I’ve gotten off topic. I was sitting at my computer in the second bedroom in my apartment. No one was there. It was 8:03 P.M. I had, earlier that day, texted Maya to ask if we could Skype. She said sure, 8 P.M. would work for her. I had now been just sitting there with my mouse hovering over the button for three minutes.

Of course, she just went ahead and called me. I answered.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound normal.

“Hi, April. How are you?” It was so good to see her.

“I don’t know, honestly it’s very hard to check in with myself these days,” I answered, way too truthfully.

She nodded with a mix of concern and frustration. “Yeah, that’s . . . Yeah, that’s not surprising. I’m really sorry about what happened in Ann Arbor, that sounds terrible.”

“I’m getting used to it,” I lied. The only thing I was getting used to was pretending like I was getting used to it. Since I knew Maya knew I was lying, and she knew I knew she knew, we just gave it a pass.

“Look,” I continued, “something else weird happened in Ann Arbor and it’s stuck with me. You know more than anyone else about the Dream, so I wanted to run it by you.”

“Shoot.”

“Every time I walk out of the city and into the grass, I can hear and see an airplane landing somewhere nearby. I can only track it until it goes below the buildings, but it’s definitely landing. I mentioned that and everyone in the audience seemed to think I was making stuff up.”

Maya sat there still as a stone, head crooked very, very slightly to the side, lips open, eyebrows just a little bit furrowed. There was something in her face that made me think that maybe she felt just a tiny bit like throwing up.

“Maya?”

“Nothing in the Dream moves unless you move it,” she said.

“The receptionist moves,” I said.

“Yes, OK, aside from that.” She brushed it aside. “This is a well-known thing. There’s fabric in the Dream . . . flags hanging on flagpoles, but the wind never stirs them. There are plants, but they never get bigger or lose their blossoms. This is a well-accepted and known thing. Nothing moves in the Dream.”

“Well, it’s happened to me every time I’ve been to the edge of the city. The airplane comes in and lands somewhere.”

Maya groaned a long, low, quiet groan. She leaned her head forward and her locs fell over her face.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. Not defensive, but concerned. I was getting a feeling from Maya that I screwed something up.

“April.” Maya looked up at the camera, and then her face flickered through like twenty different emotions. Frustration, fright, excitement, back to frustration, curiosity, excitement again, and then yet more frustration.

“Maya,” I said, after it seemed like she needed to be snapped out of it.

She threw her arms up in frustration and then literally facepalmed.

“OH MY GOD WHAT?!” I was actually a little scared, like I had some kind of dream cancer or something.

“Nothing moves in the Dream, April. But weirder than that, worse than that, nothing is different for anyone in the Dream. The receptionist moves, and the receptionist speaks the native tongue of the dreamer, but other than that, everything is exactly the same. EXACTLY. People have counted the number of blades of grass in a house’s front lawn. It’s exactly the same for every person. Every person on earth.

“So when you say something happens in your dream that doesn’t happen in anyone else’s, it is a mixture of extremely exciting and extremely frustrating. Exciting, because you and I are going to work on this mystery, which may very well be the last puzzle the Dream has to offer, as we’re quickly reaching 4,096. And frustrating because, good lord god almighty, I know that you are a good person, but the last thing you need is some other sign from heaven that you are special.” She sighed.

That pissed me off a little. I put on a stern face and said, “Maya, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

Maya took a long moment to think before she said, “Is it OK with you if I retract my previous statement and we keep this conversation to business?”

“That might be a good call.” I was annoyed that she was avoiding the fight, but I also didn’t want to fight. “I’m just going to be someone with an unusual Dream problem, and you are the expert who needs to help me. Let’s role-play!” I immediately regretted that joke. But Maya, courteously, laughed.

“OK, it frustrates me to no end that I cannot be in your brain to figure this out, but here’s what you are going to do. The moment you spawn, you are going to make a beeline for the edge of the city. The fastest way to get there is probably to run straight down Broadway—that’s the street that you exit the tower onto. The moment you see the plane, you’re going to run—DO NOT WALK—toward it. If you see the plane, or if you’re able to get on board, here’s what you look for.