Hurricane Heart

Arjan

Hurricane didn’t surface from behind the closed door for nearly an hour, so I knew she must be in a really bad way. I didn’t dare go anywhere near her bag in case she caught me and accused me of something, but after all that time I assumed she had gone to sleep or wasn’t planning on coming out until morning, so I was just in the process of draping my jacket over myself on the sofa when she appeared.

‘I think that’s the only bedroom in there,’ she said. ‘You sleep in there.’

‘I’m fine out here,’ I insisted. I was tired, but she looked shattered. She deserved a proper bed on occasion.

Why was I saying this? She had kidnapped me, chained me up and held a gun up to me, but I was still offering her the better bed.

‘Use that room,’ she said stubbornly. I knew I couldn’t move her; someone like Hurricane really did never change, so I shuffled round her and into the bedroom. I thought I was only tired, but it had also been a long day with the dreadful night before and the early start and the Soulless in the morning and then Carl and Jonas’s visit just now, and I seemed to be asleep before I was even fully lying down.

It was dark. There were far fewer lights than before. The ones that were still there, however, seemed closer. Now, they were less like stars, and more like man-made electric lights. Perhaps I was in a city then, and the lights were shining down from windows. Or maybe it was just a big room.

It was far too dark to make out any walls or boundaries though, so I just turned on the spot, glancing around me for any signs of life. Usually Hurricane was here. I had never been alone in this strange place before. What did that mean?

Before I could even properly contemplate my loneliness, however, the room—for I discovered that it was, indeed, something resembling a room—was bathed in artificial light from all directions. Glancing up, I saw that I was surrounded by walls that rose far higher than my head; many storeys up.

And the source of the artificial light was the walls themselves. Because the walls weren’t just walls; they were screens. Hundreds and hundreds of screens. And now that each one had burst into life at the same time, every single screen showed Hurricane’s face. It reminded me of a television shop; each screen showing the exact same picture, moving at the exact same time.

‘This is the truth,’ Hurricane said. Every screen spoke at the same time; hundreds of Hurricanes all saying the same words at the same time; an entire chorus made up of just one person; over and over again.

‘This is not a free world,’ she said from on the screen. ‘This is nothing more than a world in fear.' A world in fear...where had I heard that before? The words stirred a memory buried deep within me.

‘This is not a life,’ she continued, ‘this is a survival. You are surviving with mere fragments of the life that you could otherwise be leading.’

And then, every pair of Hurricane’s eyes; every pair the same; every pair a delicate yet piercing, fire-coloured hazel, infused with a million different flecks of colour; looked straight at me. It was as if they were burning right into my mind.

And then the fire-eyes were doused as a torrent of rain poured down, totally unprecedented, washing away everything; washing away the screens and the lights and then even the walls surrounding me, until there was nothing. The rain soaked me, so cold it was purifying, but did not wash me away as it did with everything else. It was like the entire world was being swept away in a torrent of raging water, and I was the only one left standing. But I was not afraid. If there was one thing that I wasn’t, it was afraid. Contrarily, I felt content. I felt so content that I was happy to just watch the rain falling, turning my light world dark, turning the walls to rubble so that, all of a sudden, I was free from their bounds.

Unusually, I woke up naturally in the morning, opening my eyes in a relaxed fashion. I hadn’t been jolted awake by a shout or a firm nudge like every other morning, and I couldn’t hear any impatient knocks on the door or frustrated calls of my name through the wall. It seemed that whatever happened to Hurricane during a day, the following morning I was always woken up in exactly the same manner as every other time.

After lying awake in bed for about ten minutes, although I didn’t have a clock to measure it by, I could hear footsteps outside, so I guessed it probably wasn’t the middle of the night anymore, and I should get up before she started shouting at me.

Pushing the door open, I saw Hurricane seated at the computer desk on the far side of the room. If she noticed me, she hadn’t responded, but I could see she was busy anyway. Like every other morning, she was already washed, dressed, had brushed her teeth and straightened her hair. Well, she didn’t straighten her hair every day—not when we had to leave early or things were a little more spontaneous, and I actually thought it looked prettier wavy, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

‘Morning,’ I murmured after standing for the best part of a minute without her replying.

‘Morning,’ she replied back, not looking up as she typed something into the computer.

I took a few steps forward. ‘What are you doing?’ She looked deep in concentration, but something entirely different caught my eye.

The clock on the computer read that it was a quarter to nine. It seemed that every other morning we had left by about half eight at the latest, and she always woke me up a minimum of half an hour before we were due to go, if not more. Yesterday morning, we’d been in such a rush to get ahead of the Soulless—not that that had exactly worked out—that we were gone by half seven.

‘Is that clock—‘ I began before she cut me off.

‘Yeah, it’s right,’ she finished for me. ‘We’re not leaving just yet.’

This seemed to go against everything Hurricane had ever done.

‘Why?’

‘I need to do some...stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of important. You see, I was on the phone to Jonas at half five this morning—‘

‘Why the hell were you up at half five in the morning?’ I groaned. ‘Seriously, Hurricane, you don’t sleep enough.’

‘I sleep as much as I need to, thanks,’ she said curtly before continuing. ‘And anyway, I was up before five as a matter of fact. And Jonas seems to be on night watch for now. But we came to a few conclusions and realised that there were a few things we had to do. So that’s what I’m doing now.’

‘Whatever,’ I said, not interested in arguing. ‘Do you want any help?’

‘No,’ she said quickly; too quickly if you asked me. ‘I’ll be fine. You go and shower or whatever.’

Hurricane

What did I tell Arjan? What did I tell anyone anymore?

I was delving deep into the internet, using my expert knowledge of hacking that I had picked up from being friends with Carl, looking for anything and everything I could about Arjan. Because I knew exactly what Jonas said on the phone this morning, but it couldn’t be right. He must have overlooked something. He couldn’t have finished yet. It just couldn’t be right. Not after all of this.

I knew the time was coming. The hour of reckoning was all too soon, and I was totally unprepared for it.

I had just one idea left, but no clue as to whether I should tell Arjan or Carl and Jonas first, or maybe just keep it entirely to myself until it was absolutely necessary. Jonas wasn’t perfect. The Dreamers weren’t perfect. Even I wasn’t perfect. We could have easily missed something so small, yet so critical.

An hour later, my search was proving fruitless, and I could see Arjan, having been ready to leave for about the last thirty minutes, growing more impatient by the second. I didn’t want him seeing what I was doing, so I’d instructed him to go to his room—treating him like a little child—but we were both growing tired now.

‘Come on,’ I eventually said, pushing his door open.

***

We were back on the autobahn, a distantly sunny day stretching ahead of us, when Arjan decided to speak.

‘I had another dream last night,’ he said.

Hope surged through me. There was still a chance. Jonas hadn’t beaten me just yet.

‘What was it about?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘I don’t know, it was so vivid, yet so...inexplicable.’

‘Just try,’ I said, kinder than usual.

He shook his head. ‘It was dark, like last time. And I was alone. But then...there were all these...screens. I don’t know how else to describe it. And you were on them, telling me about the world. And then it began raining, and you disappeared, and the screens were washed away, and even the walls were washed away.’

‘Screens, rain, darkness,’ I repeated as briefly as possible. ‘How many dreams is this now?’

‘Three like that,’ he replied.

‘In how long?’
He shrugged. ‘A few days. But I have other dreams too; they’re just not about the Dreamers, and they’re rarely as lucid as these ones.’

I was deep in thought, possibly so much so that I wasn’t really paying attention to the road, and I heard Arjan cry out, shocking me out of my mind momentarily, as I swerved a car. I heard the horn behind me blaring right into the coils of my brain, but what could I do about it?

I think Arjan hoped for an answer from me. Maybe he expected me to interpret his dream for him. I wasn’t about to do that. Because this was about so much more than him right now. I could feel the Soulless, see them on my tracker, vague though it was, closing in around us. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. I’d heard the quote used on many occasions, and normally I had no friends to use in it, but maybe Arjan filled that position now.

These dreams were everything; I knew that much. But, even if they were prophecies, or premonitions, or ideas, how was that possible? People didn’t just look into crystal balls and see what was going to happen in the future. It had never worked like that, and it never would.

I didn’t speak again until just after midday, when I pulled off the autobahn and drove until we found a place to stop. There, I told Arjan to go to the boot and choose some food for the both of us. Rather unusually, I was hungry. In all fairness, I hadn’t eaten since yesterday evening, and that had hardly been a big meal, but I still wasn’t used to the actual feeling of hunger.

He returned with some cold food—in theory, I would have to stop off at a shop soon and restock, but something told me that this journey wasn’t going to last much longer. I knew what Jonas had said on the phone at half past five this morning, and, whilst I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, I also knew that he wouldn’t take much more of this. As I had heard Casper say at one point before leaving, it was ‘now or never.’

‘You seem thoughtful,’ Arjan commented. ‘And you haven’t spoken since I mentioned my dream.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said vaguely. At least this time he couldn’t hold it against me that I didn’t answer. Whether it was precise or not was beside the point. And besides, there was so much more going on right now. We were being hunted.