Dream

Chapter 22

The screen flickered with blocks of colour, and then, a solid image of the park appeared. The kids were all playing happily. Then, the screen split in two, and showed footage of the street with the houses. Next, it split into quarters, adding footage of the interior of the church, and then the outside, too.

Within each square was numbers.

These numbers represented people.

I could see the two boys who's amulets we had stolen in the park. 1-706-4325 and 1-706-4326. In the next window, I could see two numbers in the house that belonged to Annalise - her and her boyfriend, I assume - 1-694-2748 and 1-692-7452.

I jumped straight up, my hand tapping on the window that showed the park. As I fell to the floor again, the window fell with my finger, switching with the footage of the church's exterior. I switched the footage of the street with the footage of the interior of the church, so that I could see it more easily.

My eyes scanned the numbers, looking for patterns. Every number started with a 1. Those two boys' numbers were one apart. As were the numbers over a toddler and her mother - 1-723-9375 and 1-723-9374.

'What does it mean?' Said Daisy. I nearly forgot she was there.

'It means...' I said, an idea forming in my head. It was a rather stupid idea. But it all came down to that one thing.

'What?' Daisy prompted, when I didn't continue.

'We're inside a stimulation room,' I prompted, waiting for her to pick up on my non-scientific, very simple idea.

'So?'

'Stimulation is run on computers.'

'And?' Daisy still had no idea what I was saying.

'Do you remember when we were about ten, and we said, 'I wonder how it would feel to destroy one of the stimulation rooms,'?'

'Oh!' Said Daisy. 'But, how would we do that?'

I just rolled my eyes, and walked over to the side of the computer screen.

And I kicked.