The Children of Hypnos

Chapter 24: Research

The second half of October settled over the Sleeping City in a blanket of dark clouds and cold winds. The sun crept late over the skyline in the mornings, and at night the ever-burning lights of the city seemed far away in the gloom, despite the skyscrapers surrounding the campus on all sides. The great glowing sign—FIND HOME HERE, CHILDREN OF HYPNOS—that overlooked the city became a great white will-o'-the-wisp in the sky, unreadable and untethered from the earth.

In the days following the visit to the Sandman, the hairs on the back of Emery's neck prickled for every possible reason. Small sounds behind her. Movements in the corner of her eyes. The heater beneath her dorm room window turning off suddenly in the middle of the night, just as it always had. Most of the time she could tell herself she was paranoid, that her doppelgänger—if it was even actually active—would not yet be outside the Dream. But even when she knew that beyond a doubt, she still hurried a little faster to somewhere that she could press her back in a corner.

If her doppelgänger wasn't active now, it would be after all this. When she wasn't paranoid, she was wondering if this was part of the reason the Insanity Prime began so soon: because so many dreamhunters feared it. Because they'd grown up fearing it, and it wore on them until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wes, on the other hand, had gone about his days as if nothing had changed. He'd always been stone-faced, but this was a new level. He faced their classes, their classmates, and their teachers with the same frown he always had. He had no reason to be paranoid about a doppelgänger, but it was like he wasn't worried about the other things Klaus had said, either, and whether or not those were true. The dreamkiller coup. The cover-ups. The withholding of information they should be learning. He sat with her and Edgar during breakfast, sometimes joined her and Joel and Jacqueline for lunch, but at dinner she caught him always walking back to Kirkland from the Crossing with a boxed dinner, watching his feet instead of the path ahead, eyebrows furrowed together.

Marcia had returned to teaching classes. She was angrier than ever, and was taking it out on the students by running them into the ground during fitness training and yelling in their ears during weapons work. Emery tried to catch her after class like she had before, to ask how many of Klaus's claims she believed was real, but Marcia disappeared before Emery had a chance, and every other time Emery saw her, she was in the Crossing, surrounded by too many people to get her alone or to speak privately.

Emery was extra glad now that she'd pushed to include Joel, Jacqueline, Kris, and Lewis in on the research. They were the only ones she could talk to about it now. She hadn't told Edgar anything new they'd found out; he didn't need to know, he wouldn't be able to help, and there was a chance—much bigger now than Emery would have guessed a month or two ago—that he would spill everything to Grandpa Al. The others didn't have the same allegiance to Grandpa Al, not more than any other student on campus, and all of them knew it was important enough not to tell anyone else.

"We still don't know how much of what he said is true." Emery sat on her bed, back in the corner, hugging her pillow, while Joel sat close enough to hold her ankles. Kris sat in her desk chair, Lewis leaned on the desk beside her, and Jacqueline paced the room.

"He sounds like a conspiracy theorist," Jacqueline said. She was in full Vice President mode, which meant zero nonsense taken and her complete focus set on solving the problem at hand.

"So you don't believe him?" Lewis said.

"Oh, no." Jacqueline snapped to a stop, hand raised. "I completely believe him. The dreamkillers lied and feared the possibility of their own powerlessness so much they overthrew an efficient dreamseeker government? Seems legit to me. I have no idea what the dreamseekers might have known about doppelgängers that caused all of this, but I believe it one hundred percent."