Chasing Imagination

Amy

At that moment, Markus appeared, storming into the centre of the commotion.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, causing everything to fall silent around him. Eventually, Matt began to talk, followed by Felix, both of them sounding ever so slightly sheepish in the presence of authority.

Casper took the opportunity to try and slink through the small crowd unnoticed with me.

‘Casper?’ The tone was foreboding. We both turned to see Markus looking at us with hawk eyes as though we were two naughty schoolchildren.

‘Really?’ Casper asked despairingly. I was practically dead on my feet. Whatever I had told Casper, I really did want to sleep.

‘I want to talk to you,’ Markus insisted. ‘It’s important.’

Linzy looked at him and sighed.

‘Seriously, Markus, we’ll sort this out.’ She looked back at the two of us. ‘You two go sleep.’
And just like that, we were walking off again down the dim tunnel that felt so weirdly like home.

As I lay down on my bed, I pulled Casper down with me. I didn’t even bother to get changed; just kicked off my shoes and shut the door.

‘Stay in here tonight, please?’ I asked.

He nodded slightly. ‘Of course.’ Our hands kept contact the whole time as he pulled off his shoes and lifted up the corner of the quilt for me. I rolled in, enjoying the warmth and safety of it. He remained sitting, the ever-present sadness clouding his face as he traced gentle lines up my arm.

Despite my tiredness, I knew we had to talk, so I stubbornly forced my eyes to remain open and watched him sitting there like a statue.

‘What happened when I left?’ I asked. ‘Why did you disappear?’

‘There were five of them,’ he said. ‘I knew they’d overpower us if we weren’t careful. And I wanted to give you a chance—there was no way I was letting you get caught by the authorities having only joined us so recently.’

My eyes widened. ‘You’d do that for me? You’d risk the Institution for me?’

‘The Institution isn’t the end, Amy,’ Casper explained. ‘It’s not nice, but it’s not going to destroy you. So yes, of course I would risk it to keep you safe. Isn’t that what love is all about?’

Love.

He said love.

Did that mean he loved me?

‘Wow,’ I whispered, unsure of anything better to say. ‘And then what happened?’

‘Well, two of them came after me,’ he explained, ‘but the rest saw that there had been more than one of us a moment ago, and went after you. In hindsight, I realise that it was so stupid of me to let you go alone. You were very, very lucky.
‘I ran half way into London, or that’s what it felt like,’ he continued, ‘but after what could have been forever I managed to lose them. I tried to shoot them, but aiming isn’t my strong point, and they were always so close behind. And then, just as I staggered back in the vague direction of the underground, I came across three Marauders.’

I gasped. ‘Marauders?’

‘Yes,’ he said, not treating this as such huge news. ‘Two men and a woman. They all had guns. I was in shit.’

‘What did you do?’

He began to laugh. ‘I honestly don’t know. But one of them had the biggest ego you could ever imagine, and I managed to talk him into submission. He seemed to be the leader; hugely full of himself, and the other two complied. There was a bit of a fight, but they weren’t exactly practiced at the art, and I had them all on the floor within five minutes.’

‘Wow,’ I breathed. ‘And then what?’

‘I made it back here,’ he said. ‘Only to find that you weren’t here. That wasn’t long before Jay came to say that you were back though. I basically got into the base, told Markus I was leaving again, had a pretty heated argument about it with him, and left the study to find Jay running up to me saying that you were back and you were ill.’

‘I’m not ill,’ I said, ‘I’m just tired. And I shot three policemen.’

Casper did a double take.

‘You? You shot someone?’

He wasn’t surprised about the actual action; people here had done far, far worse than stunning policemen. He simply seemed far more surprised about the simple fact that I did it. I shot someone. It may have only been a stun gun, but I had had the courage to do it.

I shouldn’t be letting myself enjoy this moment so much.

No. Of course I wasn’t enjoying it. To say that I was seemed despicable. They weren’t seriously injured, but I had still hurt them, and multiple times too, as if once wasn’t bad enough.

‘It was only a stun gun,’ I mumbled meekly.

‘Wow,’ Casper said. He looked genuinely impressed. I hoped that I looked remorseful. ‘I didn’t know that you were that sort of girl.’

‘I’m not that sort of girl!’ I cried indignantly, sitting upright. His smile faded.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, ‘but I didn’t mean it in a bad way. In fact, it was sort of intended as a compliment.’

A compliment? Shooting someone? I may now belong with the Dreamers, but there was no way I was ever going to understand them.

‘How is that a compliment?’ I asked, now a little softer, my sudden burst of anger having passed. ‘I didn’t realise you had the courage,’ he said.

I pulled a face. ‘I didn’t feel good about it. I felt really, really sick.’

‘That’s not a bad thing either though,’ he said. ‘That just shows that you’re human.’

‘I don’t see how shooting someone is courageous, though,’ I argued feebly.

‘Trust me, it’s not easy,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen people completely break down after doing it, even if its just been a stun gun.’

‘I can see why,’ I murmured. ‘Why? Didn’t you break down?’

His face clouded with reservations. ‘Sort of.’ It was a vague answer. We fell into a prolonged silence.

‘It always seems like the coward’s way out,’ I continued. ‘I mean, if those policemen had guns, they weren’t using them. And they were trying to help me. They insisted that I was a victim of kidnap, and that they were going to reunite me with my parents.’

Casper made a laughing sound, but it was dark and without humour.

‘Don’t ever believe a word they say,’ he said. His voice was thick with resentment and even rage. What had I done wrong this time?

‘They were so convincing, though,’ I insisted. And then I realised something which, since being part of the Dreamers, I had completely overlooked. ‘They can’t lie. It would be the most hypocritical thing they could do; breaking the law whilst trying to punish another criminal. How could they have said something that wasn’t true?’

‘Think about it, Amy,’ Casper said, placing one hand tightly on my shoulder. My heart went into double time at his touch, but I wasn’t sure whether it was to do with lust or fear. ‘What exactly did they say?’

‘He said I’d be reunited with my parents. And that I would have to give a statement,’ I said.

‘When were you to be reunited with your parents?’ Casper’s eyes were intense, and his grip around my skin tightened a little more.

‘At the station.’

‘And what was to happen then?’

‘He said I could be initiated back into my old life,’ I whispered in reply.

‘When though, Amy?’ Casper demanded. ‘Did he give you a time?’

‘No,’ I said, my voice lowered. I was beginning to see what he was saying. He said ‘reunited with my parents;’ he didn’t say I was going to go home with them. Not immediately anyway.

‘He mentioned a punishment, but he said it would be smaller if I came willingly and confessed to being a Dreamer,’ I continued, now in a whisper.

‘Smaller, yes, but still a punishment,’ Casper said. ‘And he didn’t say when you would be going home?’

‘No.’ I remembered this bit. ‘He said I could be initiated back into my old life so easily. But he didn’t say when.’

Casper’s hand fell from my shoulder and his eyes were steel. ‘They were going to lock you up, Amy. Face it. This is what you have to learn. They said they were going to give you a smaller punishment; what they meant by that was four months in the Institution instead of six. You would still have been tortured. You would still have been injected. You would still have been forced to tell them our location. You would still have forgotten everything.’

My insides were growing cold. Only now could I fully comprehend how close I had come to being locked up. I’d only been a Dreamer for a couple of weeks, and I had been about to face the second greatest danger that any of us could face; the first presumably being the Operation.

I was beyond thankful that I had had the courage—yes, the courage—to make the right decision. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen Casper for a long time.

That led me to remember another thing.

‘They said that I would see you ‘soon,’’ I pointed out. ‘And then they went on to say that I would be seeing you at the police station. That’s a lie though; they hadn’t caught you.’

It took Casper a moment to come up with a response to this. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to try and make the police sound like law-abiding men. I, if anything, felt a little less guilty about shooting them if they were being hypocrites and liars.

‘They were assuming I would be there,’ he said. ‘They said ‘soon.’ They basically just meant that they intended to catch me, probably before the night was out, but if not, then hopefully in the near future. Maybe they assumed that the other two had already caught me. They assumed I would be brought back.’

‘Imagined,’ I said.

‘No, assumed,’ he told me.

‘Assumed, imagined, how different are they really?’ I said impatiently. Casper looked at me thoughtfully, his eyes lighting up. He knew I was right. I knew I was right. Tonight was just getting stranger and stranger.

‘You can’t tell me that you never assumed anything in twenty years,’ he said. ‘I, for one, know that I assumed things before becoming a Dreamer.’

‘So what?’ I asked, my voice rising, ‘you get locked up and tortured if you say ‘I imagine that I will...I don’t know, be having chicken for dinner tonight,’ but if you say ‘I assume I’ll be having chicken’ you get away scot free?’

‘That’s the world we live in,’ Casper sighed grimly.

‘That’s...messed up!’ I said. I was still not great with words; I hadn’t yet quite mastered the flowery, interesting vocabulary used by many Dreamers. Nevertheless, my point was still clear.

‘Like I say, it’s our world, Amy,’ Casper said. ‘I’m glad you’ve made that point though. It shows you’re thinking like us. It shows you’re really beginning to fit in round here.’

‘Like us,’ he had said. Less than two hours ago, I would have been disappointed with myself to hear such things. But two hours ago, I’d been comparatively naive. Two hours ago, I had trusted that policeman.

That wasn’t something I was ever going to do again.

Now, so much had changed. On a whim, I was suddenly proud of being a Dreamer. I was even being encouraged to be proud of shooting people. And, scarily enough, I had complied. But just tonight, I didn’t want to contemplate the monster I was turning into. I just wanted to indulge this new way of thinking that I had adopted, and be proud of this courage I supposedly possessed. I just wanted to belong here.