‹ Prequel: Chasing Imagination
Sequel: Martyr's Run

Hurricane Heart

Deep Into That Darkness Peering

Arjan

By the end of the day, we were in Salzburg. We arrived at a hotel; a slightly more lavish building than the ones we’d been used to, but in reality not so different. The rain set in again with the darkness, and with the darkness and the rain I began to think once more.

When we were in the hotel room, Hurricane dug around in her bag through the clothes that Carl and Tobias had brought to us yesterday, and pulled out a device that looked similar to a touch screen mobile phone, but squarer. I knew, however, that it was something far more serious than just a good-looking gadget by the intensity with which she was watching it.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘A tracker,’ she said, her voice hushed. I waited, but there was no more information.

‘What’s a tracker?’

She glanced up, briefly showing it to me.

‘It’s to follow the Soulless,’ she explained. ‘It’s very advanced technology—something the Dreamers stole from the army about ten years ago. If you get even the tiniest shred of DNA from a Soulless—a fingerprint on you or one of your possessions; a hair; some blood; you can feed it through the tracker, and it will be able to tell you where the Soulless is, usually within about a ten mile radius. Unless they’re underground; it’s far from perfect yet.’

‘Ten mile radius?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t sound that good.’

‘It’s good enough,’ she said, almost defensively, as though the tracker was her own personal invention. ‘It will let me know whether any are in the city or not; supposing they are ones I’ve met before of course, and perhaps even more importantly, it will tell me if they are on the move, and in what direction. When you’ve got someone like Carl helping you, who can hack into every surveillance camera in Europe undetected, it makes tracking people so much easier.’

‘Are there any around?’ I asked the fateful question.

‘They’ve sensed we’re not in Estonia, Finland, Russia or Belarus—or anywhere near that, in fact,’ she replied. ‘I have a horrible feeling that they possess government trackers, which we’ve tried to steal every time we’ve raided a Soulless base, but we’ve never succeeded. They seem to be much more advanced than ours. The night I met you, that one Soulless man came not just into the right hotel, but into the completely correct room on his first attempt.’

I nodded, but suddenly all of that had gone hollow as a new and previously unheard of idea came into my head, just like the flick of a switch.

The trackers weren’t perfect; Hurricane had said so herself.

‘What if I was not the person he was looking for?’ I whispered.

Hurricane frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ I explained, ‘what if he just picked a room, at random, when in actual fact the person he was looking for could have been in any one of the rooms? What if he wanted someone in the hotel, and he just happened to choose to look in my room first, when you found him, and assumed I was the one they all wanted?’

Hurricane was silent for long enough that I began to think I was on to something.

‘You can’t go home, Arjan,’ she said abruptly.

I blinked, confused by her erratic thought patterns. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re obviously coming up with that theory so that you can go home,’ she elaborated. ‘I don’t blame you, but it’s not possible, and I can’t let you leave. He was about to kidnap you, Arjan—the Soulless aren’t nice people, but they don’t take innocent people in their sleep. I’m afraid you’re mistaken.’

‘Oh,’ I murmured. I hadn’t even been thinking about going home when I’d posed my idea; I had purely said it to help her.

My mind was split right down the middle. On the one hand, being a Dreamer would be far more thrilling than anything I could experience in the real world, and now that my mind had been opened to the possibilities of imagination, there was no way I could ever close it off again. On the other hand, though, it was dangerous, and it was scary, and I wanted nothing more than to get away from Hurricane and this insane world and go back to my family. I wanted to be normal—not the one that everyone wanted.

Evidently, the latter part of my imagination had come out in our last conversation, but I hadn’t even realised that was what I was saying. Hurricane had taken it the wrong way. I genuinely thought it was possible—I hadn’t seen this man about to kidnap me, therefore it was only an idea, but it was a believable one.

‘Oh well,’ I said, unsure even in myself whether I minded or not. ‘It was just a suggestion.’

She nodded absent-mindedly, standing up and moving silently towards the window. She gazed out at the city lights around and beneath us; those thousands of bright lights in the darkness, making it feel like the very night was alive; that every tiny pinprick was a possibility of endless proportions. The night made me dream; I’d noticed that recently. And it did the same to Hurricane. I could sense the imagination that hung in the air, a tension that could be cut with a knife. This world was teeming with possibility, yet most people were too closed-minded to notice it.

She continued to gaze out of the window with such intensity that I felt sure that she had seen something terrible, and could not tear her eyes away. Perhaps it was the very Soulless she feared; prowling the streets, lurking in the shadows, watching, waiting.

How long had they been following me before she arrived? Had they only arrived recently, or had they been there my entire life, waiting for the right moment? And if so, then what was the right moment? What did they want from me?

Hurricane said she didn’t know why they wanted me, and I believed her. She was not trying to hide that much from me; even she realised I had a right to know that much. But evidently, no one knew, and that was why the chase continued.

I wanted to ask her why she stared, but I dared not. This was one of those rare yet beautiful moments when she forgot her stresses and her coldness and the way she’d distanced herself from the rest of the world like there was a wall between us, and she became herself. For the first time, I saw true emotion in her eyes. It was not ordinary emotion, though even ordinary emotion was good for her standards. But it was real, limitless emotion. It was the emotion that came with learning to dream, and realising there was something more to life than the mundane reality of day to day oppression. It was imagination.

So instead I just watched. I watched her watch the night, and it was incredible; something intangible, unexplainable, yet also undeniable.

Deep into that darkness peering...’ she murmured, so quiet I assumed she thought I couldn't hear her.

‘What?’ I didn’t want to spoil the moment, but she was talking in words that could only be described as poetry; something I had heard of, but never truly heard spoken aloud before.

‘...long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.’

I took a small intake of air; the only sound in the intense quiet.

‘That’s...beautiful,’ I whispered.

‘It’s Edgar Allan Poe,’ she replied.

‘What’s that?’

She turned away from the window, and the emotion in her eyes quickly began to cloud, slowly being replaced by a fog-like mask. But I’d seen her without that mask, and I was possibly the first person to do so in a long time. I knew what lie behind it, and I would never let it go, even if she hid her truth for the rest of her life.

‘He was a poet, and a writer,’ she said, abruptly covering up her emotion. ‘I know many quotes like that, but that is possibly my favourite. I think a lot of the Dreamers like it; I heard one of the English girls that recently came over using it.’

She sighed deeply, and turned back towards the window. As the silence returned, the phrase hung in my mind, drifting through all the coils of my brain.

I didn’t know what it meant; I was hardly an expert in poetry, considering this was the first of it I had ever knowingly heard in my life, but it sounded good all the same.

Hurricane

I just stared. I didn’t acknowledge Arjan sitting quietly behind me, though I knew he was watching me with the same intensity that I was watching the night with. It didn’t matter. He could watch all he wanted. It didn’t change anything.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

I felt so close to the edge; as though something great was about to happen. The night showed me all that could be; all that I wanted to be, but perhaps it was up to me to make that dream a reality. All the times I’d wanted to change; all the times I said I couldn’t breathe for the suffocating of this world; all the times I’d lay awake, dreaming of something that was not. It all had to be leading up to something, or my life was a waste.

Why should we not start now? Why should we not have a revolution of our own? It would be easy. It would be incredible.

I could lead it...or could I? Really, was I a leader? I could command people, I could keep control of people, but I was not a leader. I was not the one who would take armies towards the sun.

For all the good things about the Master and all the other Dreamer leaders across the world, they were content to do nothing, at least for a while. They were content to wait in the shadows, recruiting more people when they could, but otherwise just raiding, and bombing, and protesting. But we still had to hide. And I was not good at hiding. If we were to start a revolution, why could it not be now? Because there was another quote many Dreamers liked to use, but it was one that I had discovered from a book years ago.

It went: Carpe diem. It translated as: seize the day.
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The Deep into that darkness peering... quote is by Edgar Allen Poe; from his poem The Raven.