provide a type of balance. When life is good, dreams remind you that fear still lives out there in the world. When life is bad, dreams offer hope.
I am Mara. I am sixteen years old. And my dreams now are most often of my home, my school, my friends, past pets, objects I hold dear, and my mother and my ever-absent, ever-present father. They are dreams of loss and alienation, but not nightmares.
Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.
So, in the seconds before my eyes fluttered open, I was at my friend Suzee’s pool party for her thirteenth birthday. The sun was shining, but not hot—it seldom gets really hot in Marin County, California. The pool in the dream was overflowing, lapping around the legs of my chaise longue. My flip-flops were floating away. But in compensation the water was carrying a bag of blue corn tortilla chips toward me and in the dream I thought, Well, that’s a fair trade. I waited patiently for the flip-flops and the snacks to pass each other, indifferent to the fact that a current cannot flow in opposite directions at once.
In reality, after that pool party, after that lovely, languorous day, I had a terrible nightmare in which the water kept rising until, immobilized, I began to drown.
Now my subconscious mind goes back to that pool party as a pleasant antidote to the traumas I endure daily. The mind strives for balance, doesn’t it?
Balance has become a very important thing to me. Balance is the explanation for the indignities and cruelties I must inflict on the Messenger’s targets. I justify myself with that concept, hoping it is not an illusion or a lie, hoping that I am doing good and not evil.
I no longer live in the land of suburban pool parties, I live in . . . well, it’s hard to summarize the nature of my existence for the simple reason that I do not yet fully understand it myself.
What I do understand is that there are things at work in this dull world that are more vivid, more bizarre, and more awful than rational people can easily accept. Everything about this life I now lead spells dream, and yet it is terribly real.
I have moved through solid objects.
Understand this: I do not mean that I have imagined doing so, or that we’re still in dreamland, or that some spectral projection of me has done this. I mean that I have moved through solid objects.
I have been transported effortlessly through time and space. I’ve been to a past I never experienced and to a future that is not mine.
I have caused the world to rewind, to advance at half speed, to accelerate as though reality itself was just Netflix on my laptop.
I have dived deep into the tortured unconscious minds of people I did not previously know.
These are not my powers, but power granted to me by gods older than any known to mortal man. It is the gods who labor to keep the world balanced on the edge of nonexistence so that it should not fall into oblivion.
Balance, you see, always balance.
Yes, it is the gods who right the wobbly balance of justice, and their instruments are Messengers of Fear. And I, as punishment for my own terrible sins, have been made the apprentice of one such messenger.
I know him only by that name: Messenger. And I know the day is coming when my name, too, shall be only, Messenger.
He was in the kitchen when I woke and stumbled in in search of coffee and breakfast. Please note that I do not say “my” kitchen. There is nothing about this place I inhabit that is truly mine. It is a place, or perhaps just a cunning and convincing illusion of a place, where I sleep and eat and recuperate in between following Messenger on his duties.
But were I to open the front door I would not see the suburban neighborhood that should be this abode’s native habitat. Rather I would see the mist, the soul-crushing yellow mist that surrounds this place. And yet through the kitchen window I could see the sun-blanched leaves of a tree. A real tree? I very much doubt it, but whoever or whatever created this space had some concern for my well-being and must have known I’d go slowly mad if I never saw sunlight.
“Did you rest well?” Messenger asked.
“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory of trading flip-flops for corn chips.
“I took the liberty of making coffee.”
I could smell it. I poured myself a cup and took a sip. I’d always taken coffee sweetened and with milk before. I took it black now. The bitterness no longer seemed significant to me. Indeed there was something reassuring about it.
“Are we traveling?” I asked him.
“Yes. We have a complex situation.”
I don’t think he’d ever referred to one of our missions in quite that way before. I might have asked him what he meant, but the Messenger of Fear is not easily questioned. He speaks or does not, as he chooses.
He is a boy, not yet a man, though as with everything now I’m never sure if what I’m seeing is really him. He is tall, thin, and has long very dark hair and eyes the blue of sunlit tropical ocean.
He is beautiful, Messenger is. I am perhaps pretty, or maybe just cute, but Messenger is beautiful.
He wears the same thing each time I see him: a long black coat that goes down to midcalf. A steel-gray shirt, black pants, and tall black boots. Yes, that almost completes the outfit. I say almost, because there are details, like the buttons of his coat, which are small, silver skulls. And the two rings he wears.
The ring on his right hand is Isthil, goddess of wickedness and justice. She is stern, magisterial, and shown on the ring carrying a sword.
The other ring is a face. It’s a young face, contorted by unendurable terror.
“Let me get dressed,” I said. I popped a strudel in the toaster and went to shower and dress. There’s a closet with several rather dull outfits, all perfectly sized, none really mine.
When I got back Messenger was sitting on a stool and doing nothing at all. He’s good at that. In a world where no one who owns a phone can ever be without some diversion, he is diversion free. He is patient, and that patience is slowly beginning to be mine as well, simply because there is no point in impatience.
By the time I was ready, the toaster strudel was cooked and cooling in the toaster. I wrapped it in a paper towel and began to take careful bites even as we were out of the house and—without a flash, a sound, or even a sense of movement—instantly somewhere else.
We stood on gravel and loose stone beside a road that had once been paved but had since fallen into disrepair, so that the gray of pavement was like a series of scabs over the richer soil beneath. Grass poked up here and there but seemed to lack sufficient moisture to thrive.
Across the road were cultivated, irrigated fields, and there the crop grew. It was a rich green, neat rows of what looked like tall grass that bent over at the top. Beyond that, in the distance, a vast field of pink flowers. This field was being worked by men bent low with bags slung from their shoulders. Other men with automatic rifles patrolled the edges of the field and appeared to be supervising or protecting or controlling, or some combination of the three.
Beyond the lovely but sinister flowers the land rose into terraced hills and, still farther, far off in the distance, the
