Chasing Imagination

Casper

I glanced around at the others, wondering if they had any input, but there wasn’t a lot else to say.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I don’t think so. What about here though—you lot are so much bigger; you always have a lot more going on.’

Nightshade sighed. ‘It’s been quiet recently, Casper, I’m afraid to say. As much as I want to attack and want to fight and want to start a war, it’s simply impossible. It seemed the other night some of the men went out on a bit of a wild night—they had a bit of alcohol and I reckon they also discovered some weed too, but they went and covered half of south London in graffiti—there were about eight of them. By some miracle, none of them got caught, but they managed to get the name and the logo everywhere they possibly could.’

A smile spread across my face, and Felix began to chuckle. ‘Excellent,’ he muttered.

‘I think I saw a bit about that on the local news,’ Imogen added, growing more and more excited. ‘It’s all been cleaned up now, but it gave a few old ladies a bit of a shock.’

We all laughed again, even Amy—perhaps she had seen it on the news when she was living back up above. I could imagine it: her sitting in a little clone house, as I liked to call those modern townhouses that all looked the same. She would have watched it with her pretty, light brown eyes all wide and innocent—she would have asked ‘how could people do such things?’ She would have sighed and tutted disapprovingly, and thought very lowly of these terrorists, but she would have then moved on as the next news story did, and probably never have thought of the situation again.

Funny now, how she was on the opposite side. Whatever she had done before, she was no longer disapproving and angry and naive. She knew things now; things that about ninety-nine per cent of the population didn’t, and that would be power.

The tension had been released with Imogen’s light-hearted comment, but the way Nightshade leaned forward, her thinly plucked and finely arched eyebrows raised delicately up into her forehead, made me think something more serious was at work.

‘You want to know what I think?’ she asked.

We all glanced around at one another, none of us sure what she was getting at.

‘About what?’ asked Felix.

‘About this,’ she said, gesturing theatrically with her hands around in vague circles, indicating not just us and herself, but the whole Dreamer world.

‘What?’ I asked, my voice lowered to a whisper as she leaned in further still.

‘You can tell Markus this:’ she said. ‘If he wants an update, this is what I have to give him: I think a war is brewing.’ She paused just long enough for us to comprehend what she’d just said and reply with the appropriate reactions.

‘A war?’ Matt repeated in astonishment.

‘Yes,’ she said, as though we might not have heard correctly. ‘A war. I reckon that war is coming, and it will be upon us sooner than any of us can expect. The Dreamer world is about to shatter. It could go one way or another. Maybe it will bring us into the public eye; convince more people to join us; let us come out into the open as opposed to hiding down here; and ultimately bring us the freedom we all wish for.

‘Or it might go the opposite way. They might come down upon us, full force; invading our bases; capturing people and throwing them into the Institutions; ridding us of all hope. I don’t know. There’s no need to even bother saying which option I want. We all desire the same things. But that’s just what I think. All I can say is: be prepared.’

We were left in a stunned silence.

‘You really think that?’ I finally asked, voicing what we all agreed on. ‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I am not sure, Casper,’ she said, her face growing typically mysterious. ‘It’s just my idea.’

She left us with that, giving no more away. We plunged back into silence, but it grew increasingly thoughtful—six Dreamers standing alone in a room together was always going to produce something unexpected. But no one could have foreseen this.

‘Have you got these ideas from anywhere, though?’ Matt asked, wording what I’d said in a more specific way.

‘Not as such,’ she said, ‘but you know how things have been working, don’t you? They’re clamping down on us as we grow. All contact with the US fell only a month ago, and that makes me wonder...’ she trailed off.

‘Wonder what?’ I asked eagerly.

‘What the hell is happening over there?’ she mused. ‘The loss of communication could be very good, or it could be very bad. As a Dreamer, of course I hope for the best. I’d love to believe that liberation has been achieved and the dictator has been overthrown. I’m not an idealist though, and I know it might be nothing like that.

‘And then there was the police invasion of the base in Bilbao less than a month ago,' she continued, 'even though there was minimal amounts of trouble caused, and that was followed shortly by Marauders across Europe raiding the colonies in Rome; in Krakow; in Bucharest. Once again, the damage was little, but it still tells you something doesn’t it? Either, they’re cracking down on us, and eventually we’re going to have a mass uprising, or we’re growing faster than they could have predicted, and they’re scared of us.’

Once again, Nightshade’s rather extreme predictions were greeted with contemplative silence.

‘You really think the government’s scared?’ Matt asked sceptically.

‘You don’t know they’re not,’ I retorted, the phrase coming out a little harsher than I’d intended. Ever since I met Matt, scepticism had been one of his faults. It was so unlike a Dreamer to be so pessimistic and realistic, but he managed it with ease.

‘Thank you, Casper,’ said Nightshade, as if to prove a point. Amy looked at me with curiosity and an intense intrigue. ‘We don’t know how many Dreamers there are in this world, but I suspect that there are more than the government openly know of. Either way, whatever causes it, there’s going to be a war. I can feel it; tensions brewing beneath the surface. It’s a volcano ready to erupt, just waiting for the right moment. It won’t be long before something sets it off, and then it’s war all the way.’

I remembered back to demolishing the train station, and the graffiti on the wall: this is war. Maybe such an idea wasn’t quite so unrealistic. After all, anything was possible.

Nightshade raised her eyebrows mystically, glancing at us with her glittering emerald eyes one last time. I prepared to leave.

‘Just a little thought to leave you with,’ she said mysteriously.