Dreamworms Book 1: The Advent of Dreamtech by Isaac Petrov (drm ebook reader TXT) 📕

“Piet!” Edda shouts at him. He looks at her, eyes blinking. “What you are feeling right now, that chaos… Remember, remember!”

“What?” He stares at her, his frown deepening.

Gotthard rolls his eyes. “No fish biting, eh, rat boy?”

“Shut up, Gotthard,” Edda says, and then to Pieter, “Remember, Piet. That feeling—your head spinning—associate it with the question.”

He blinks again, and then scans his surroundings, his wide blue eyes stopping a second on Aline’s. “The question,” he mutters. And then, as if following an impulse, he sinks his head to inspect the palm of his hands.”

“Excellent!” Edda claps.

“The lines,” he raises his head at Edda, “they move!”

“Yeah, they do, huh?” Edda exchanges a satisfied glance with Aline.

Pieter then covers his nose and mouth with the hand and breathes in.

“Excellent, Piet. You remembered!” Edda says.

Pieter looks back at Edda and his lips stretch to a hesitant smile. “Whoa, this is a dream!”

“It is, yeah?” Edda claps again. Aline joins her, and Janson cheers loudly.

“Oh, everything is coming back.” Pieter joins in the laughter.

“That’s the first step at work, mensa,” Edda says. “You remember.”

“Thanks, Edda,” he says, a warm smile on his lips. “Your techniques—they really work!”

“You almost lost it there, Ledeboer,” Gotthard says. “And that was just medium intensity.”

“You think you can do better?” Pieter asks.

Gotthard laughs. “Some of us need no fancy tricks, rat boy.”

“Who’s a rat boy?” Janson walks towards Gotthard, his green eyes glowering.

“You and your brother,” he snorts, “and your two dead fathers. No place for women on your fishing boat, correct?”

Janson cringes and charges forward, pushing Gotthard hard on the chest, who falls back on his buttocks, laughing hard.

“Jans, no!” Pieter grabs one of his arms. “It’s not worth it.”

“Always a pleasure debating with you, Elder Ledeboer,” Gotthard says, like the name is an insult. Without losing his smirk, he stands and dusts off his tunic, as if there was dirt on the staging permascape. “Who can compete with such persuasive arguments?”

While this little piece of drama unfolds, Ximena notices that not everybody is looking at Janson.

Luuk Smook is staring fixedly at Edda.

And his look sends a shudder up Ximena’s spine.

The auditorium’s point of view follows Edda as she paces to her assigned spot at the edge of the arena.

The trial of the Second Step is finally here.

It is all or nothing once more, twelve will stay in the race, twelve will be gone forever. The fate of her father is in the balance, and yet, with a pull of brutal willpower, Edda puts the nervous twitching of her hands firmly under control. Ximena nods in admiration at her mental discipline—it is incredible how far she has come.

Edda stops at the rim of the arena and looks down at the perfectly circular depression the size of a small lake carved on the infinite flatness and filled with fog to the brim—concealing the inside from her dream eyes.

“Do ready yourself in position, human candidates.” Yog’s soft female voice reverberates mentally across the amphitheater as if whispered in every ear simultaneously.

Edda steps directly onto the top of a giant metallic slope that plummets steeply down into the mist and loses itself in the mysteries below. Except for the scale, the slope is not unlike those playground slides Ximena loved to throw herself down as a little, unruly girl.

She looks around the edge of the round lake-like arena, where the other twenty-three candidates have taken positions on equidistant slopes, identical to hers. The slopes are numbered sequentially. Hers is slope number one—the number emanates telepathically from that spot like her ranking did after she nailed the trial of the First Step. Next to her, on the right, number two is manned by Elder Luuk Smook, who gives her a cool side glance, and then exchanges a grin with his sister, next around the rim on slider number three. Aline and Gotthard are standing beyond, number four and five respectively, their faces too far to see. And so, each candidate is placed along the perfect circumference of fog, ordered by the rank they achieved in the first trial. The last one, on Edda’s left, is a nervous-looking Valentijn van Kley. Although also from Lunteren, she doesn’t know him well, but exchanges a nod of support.

“Do sit,” Yog says.

Edda sits in place, on the top platform of the slide, legs stretched down towards the mist and the arena hidden beneath, hands on railings, ready to push. She turns her head expectantly to the right, where a mare is standing exactly between her and Luuk Smook. There is another mare between Luuk’s sister and Aline, and another one between Gotthard and whoever is next, and so on; twelve in total—Rew, her eight walkers, and Yog’s three bodies—around the arena, each between every two humans.

“So shall you be trialed,” Yog says. “At the count of six you shall push yourself into the pit.” The fog glows briefly as Yog speaks the word pit. “You shall propel yourself into descent, at which point your assigned marai shall remove your awareness applying middle intensity—the same applied in your instruction. You shall then regain awareness by your own skill and proceed to the exit, a hole in the ground in the exact center of the pit.” A brief, intense flash of light under the disc of fog pinpoints the location. Pretty far! “The first twelve humans that exit shall be initiated in the last step of the Path of Light. The rest shall return to their short, meaningless lives.”

Ouch! But Edda doesn’t let the words affect her. Good girl, Ximena thinks. It is a surprisingly simple test. As soon as the candidates recover their lucidity—which should happen quickly enough from what Ximena has seen in training—they will all run for the exit like their lives depend on it. Looks more like a race than like a dreamtech-awareness trial. Ximena is about to ask Mark, but a side glance at him convinces her to let it be. He is staring at Edda like he himself