Hurricane Heart

Hurricane

It seemed insane that, after all this searching and all this fear and all this bloodshed, I was so desperate to leave the moment I had found him. But I had to go. Yes, I did have to find Carl and the other people he’d hopefully brought, and yes, I had to fully explain the situation, but there was so much more going on right now.

One of the reasons I had to get away was because the secret I had revealed to Arjan; the secret that would make me a monster in his eyes forevermore, had left a gaping wound in my heart. Tonight, just tonight, I had let a little bit of emotion into my soul. But, with the story, the dam had burst, and a whole river of emotion was flooding in as I ran, crushing all in its path, destroying everything that stood in its way, my iron disguise included.

I was afraid I was going to break down completely. I had to be alone for a little while.

But there was one other reason. I’d been listening to Elize for a while; longer than Arjan had realised. And I had heard one short phrase that suddenly made every rampant thought in my mind fall into place. ‘I will prowl into every thought and every memory and every dream that riddles your brain.’

‘Every dream.’

Arjan dreamt.

And we were to have no secrets anymore; we had agreed that. But there was another that I had never gotten round to telling him.

The fact that, contrary to what he thought, other people did not dream.

Not anymore.

Of course, back in the past, when people read, and watched movies, and wrote, and drew, and painted, and listened to music, and played with toys, and so many more activities; where their imaginations were fuelled; then they dreamt. That was self-explanatory. And Dreamers dreamt. That made sense: Dreamers, like the people of the past, had opened up their minds to imagination and creativity. They understood what dreaming was all about.

But normal people; non-Dreamers, also known as betrayers; people like Arjan, did not dream.
Before I had become a Dreamer, I’d had maybe three or four dreams a year. And even then, they were such boring, mundane dreams. On the rare occasion that I did dream, it would be distant and foggy, leaving me unable to recall very much at all, and the bits that I could remember were hardly creative works of fiction; they were just my mind imagining me in really ordinary, day-to-day situations. Non-Dreamers’ imaginations simply weren’t fuelled enough these days for the unconscious mind to produce anything creative. Maybe somewhere deep down, the dreams were there, but they were forgotten every morning with awakening, to the point where it seemed as if they had disappeared from the human mind almost completely.

Of course, dreams in the real world were a complete taboo subject. No one dared discuss them, so no non-Dreamer knew whether the amount they dreamt—if at all—was normal or not. Until I joined the Dreamers, I had no idea either. As it happened, four times a year wasn’t bad. Some people were more like once a year. Some people had only ever dreamt once or twice in their lives. And some had no dreams that they could distinctly recall whatsoever.

And then there was Arjan. And Arjan had had a minimum of three dreams in the last week alone. Maybe he had had more; the only ones he had mentioned were the ones that involved me and the Soulless and potentially useful symbols.

And then I realised.

Arjan was anything but a false alarm.

Because I now knew. The dreams he had been having were trying to tell me, and I’d been too blind and close-minded to notice.

What the Soulless wanted from Arjan was not a memory like the Master originally thought; not something that happened in the past. He had never even met the police or the Soulless or the Dreamers.

No. What Arjan had was an idea.

An idea: the most powerful weapon known to mankind; imagination, but imagination used to progress; to advance; to create; to change.

I suddenly knew, with more conviction than anything else in my life, that Arjan was going to change the world. The dreams he was having were not mere dreams; they were telling him something.

And yet, he had told me. He had told me his dreams, and hoped for me to make sense of them.

He had told me. Me, who had contacts, had ideas, had fighting skills, and possibly even had a little bit of power.

And only now could I see what they meant.

Three dreams. Three stages for a Dreamer revolution.

The first one; the one with all the Soulless in a circle was, quite simply, about bringing down the Soulless. We’d always known that it was a necessary thing to do in order to bring back our freedom, but Arjan’s dream went further than that. In his dream, we’d been standing in the centre of the circle. This implied that we needed to take out the Soulless from the inside.

For years now, the Dreamers had picked off Soulless workers one by one, whenever they could. But we needed to do more than that. We needed to get right to the very heart of the Soulless, and take them out from the centre; from their very source. We needed to bring down their leaders. We needed to bring down their bases. We needed to get to the centre, and work our way outwards. Only then would a defeat actually be possible.

Oh my god.

And that wasn’t it, either. Then came the second dream. That was simple now I looked at it too; it told me that we needed to bring down the government. But of course, that was obvious. Everyone knew that, in order to create a new government, the previous one had to, in some way, be removed from power. Liberation could only be achieved once the current government was taken out of the equation.

But, once again, Arjan’s dream went further. It proved something that I, for one, had always doubted: that it really was only the government that needed to be taken down.

I, along with all the other Dreamers, had assumed that, for a Dreamer revolution to happen, we would have to get rid of every government supporter in the world. We would have to take down every politician; every soldier; every police officer. And where did it end? Would we have to take out the doctors who had learnt how to perform the Operation? What about the scientists who had made the Operation possible? What about the businessmen and women who sold the amnesia-inducing drugs to the Institutions? What about the builders who helped build the Institutions? Once we started, where did it end? We would have to practically tear the whole world down, and of course that was impossible.

But Arjan’s dream told me the contrary. It showed only too clearly something that had been veiled from my mind for far too long: that once the dictators were brought to justice, everything else would fall apart of its own accord. It was like taking the battery out of a machine. As the dream showed, the government were the machine. Without them, all the soldiers, and officers, and workers, were nothing.

This was exciting. This was really, really exciting.

And then there was the third dream. Initially, I had seen that as the most confusing: screens and rain. But only now did it seem so simple.

The screens were representing a transmission. The third dream was showing me the third rule of having a revolution: get the public on your side. If we could broadcast the Dreamers’ message on airwaves across the world, then we had won. Once the public knew the truth, they could not possibly justify following the government.

And that was where the rain came in. The rain washed away all the darkness; cleansed everything; purified everyone; made things better again. Just like a transmission would do to the public.

Just like that, everything had fallen into place.

Arjan was not merely telling me that a revolution was necessary. After all, we all knew that a revolution was necessary.

He was telling me that a revolution was possible.

And that was an idea I had never previously been able to comprehend.

So I was going to do it, on behalf of Arjan, and on behalf of the rest of this unfree world.

I was going to start the Dreamers’ Revolution.

The Soulless knew this; the Dreamers did not. And all the time that they had this in mind, I was actually in as much danger as Arjan was. It was now up to me and me alone to save both him and myself before it was too late and the dream was dead once and for all.

Arjan

I was conscious that Elize wouldn’t be knocked out for much longer, but I didn’t have the courage to go back and shoot her again. So I left the park and wandered awkwardly round the low wall that separated the edge of the park from the pavement and the offices on the opposite side. By now, sometime around midnight, the area was virtually deserted; the office blocks closed up for the night, and any person with half a brain cell at home and in bed.

I couldn’t get everything that Hurricane had said out of my head. She was a monster. She had killed her own father.

But what if she’d had no choice?

There was always another choice.

I kept on arguing with myself—was she a monster, or was she just a tormented girl with way too many demons to fight?

And why had she told me?

I knew what she said about friends, but I also knew that she was close to Carl and Jonas, so if she hadn’t even told them this story, then why had she told me? Was it really proof of her trust and friendship—and if so, then what did it mean for the two of us? Or did she have another motive altogether?

I kept on deliberating as I wandered back to the entrance I had taken into the park, realising that about five minutes had passed. Hurricane had another five before I expected her to have returned. It seemed a little harsh, but desperate situations meant desperate measures.