THOMAS’S MIND flooded with images of a young boy standing innocently at the center of a brightly colored room, chin raised to the ceiling, eyes wide, mouth gaping.
Johan. And his skin was as smooth as a pool of chocolate milk. His deep-throated song suddenly thundered in the room, startling Thomas.
He rolled over in his sleep.
For a moment the night lay quiet. Then the boy began to sing again. Quietly this time, with closed eyes and raised hands. The sweet refrains drifted to the heavens like birdsong. They ascended the scale and began to distort.
Distort? No. Johan always spun a flawless song to the last note. But the sound climbed the scale and grew to more of a wail than a song. Johan was wailing.
Thomas’s eyes sprang open. The morning’s soft light flooded his vision. His ears filled with the sound of a child singing in broken tones.
He pushed himself to an elbow, gazed about, and rested his eyes on the boulder twenty paces from where he and Rachelle lay. There, facing the forest they had left behind, sitting cross-legged on the boulder with his back turned to them, Johan lifted his chin in song. A weak, halting song to be sure. Strained and off key. But a song nonetheless.
Rachelle raised to a sitting position next to him and stared at her brother. Her skin was dry and flaking. As was his own. Thomas swallowed and turned back to Johan, who wailed with his arms spread wide.
“Elyon, help us,” he sang. “Elyon, help us.”
Thomas stood up. Johan’s whole body trembled as he struggled for notes. The boy sounded as though he might be crying. Crying under the waning power of his own notes, or perhaps because he could not sing as he once did.
Beside Thomas, Rachelle rose slowly to her feet without removing her eyes from the scene. Tears wet her parched cheeks. Thomas felt his chest constrict. Johan raised his small fists in the air and wailed with greater intensity—a heartbreaking rendering of sorrow and yearning and anger and pleading for love.
For long minutes they stood facing Johan, who lamented for all who would hear. Grieving for all who would take the time to listen to the cries of an abandoned, tortured child slowly dying far from home. But who could possibly hear such a song in this desert?
If only Michal or Gabil would come and tell them what to do. If only he could speak one more time, just one last time, to the boy from the upper lake.
If only he could close his eyes and open them again to the sight of a boy standing on the rise of sand to their left. Like the boy standing there now. Like—
Thomas froze.
The boy stood there, on the rise beside the boulders, staring directly at Johan. The boy from the upper lake!
As though conducted by an unseen hand, both Johan and Rachelle ceased their sobbing. The boy took three small steps toward the boulder and stopped. His arms hung limply by his sides. His eyes were wide and green. Brilliant, breathtaking green.
The boy’s delicate lips parted slightly, as if he were about to speak, but he just stood, staring. A loose curl of hair hung between the boy’s eyes, lifting gently in the morning breeze.
The two boys gazed directly at each other, as if held by an invisible bond. Johan’s eyes were as round as saucers, and his face was wet from tears. To Thomas’s right, Rachelle took a single step toward Johan and stopped.
And then the little boy opened his mouth.
A pure, sweet tone, crystal-clear in the morning stillness, pierced Thomas’s ears and stabbed at his heart like a razor-tipped arrow. He caught his breath at the very first note. Images of a world far removed flooded his mind. Memories of an emerald resin floor, of a thundering waterfall, of a lake. The notes tumbled into a melody.
Thomas dropped to his knees and began to cry again.
The child took a step toward Johan, closed his eyes, and lifted his chin. His song drifted through the air, dancing on their heads like a teasing angel. Rachelle sat hard.
The boy opened his arms, expanded
his chest, and let loose a deep, rumbling tone that shook the
ground. Then the boy formed his first lyrics, encased in notes
rumbling gently over the dunes.
I love you.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
Thomas closed his eyes and let his
body shake under the power of the words. The tune rose through the
octave, piercing the still air with full-bodied chords.
I made you,
and I love the way I made you.
The song reached into Thomas’s heart and amplified the resonance of each chord a thousandfold so that he thought his heart might explode.
And then, with an earsplitting tone, like a concert of a hundred thousand pipe organs blowing the same chord, the air shattered with one final note and fell silent.
Thomas lifted his head slowly. The boy still gazed at Johan, who had slipped down from the boulder and stood with both arms stretched out toward the boy.
Their first steps seemed tentative, taken almost simultaneously toward each other. The two boys suddenly broke free from the ground and raced toward each other with wide arms.
They collided there on the desert floor, two small boys about the same height, like two long-lost twins reunited. They all heard the slap of bare chest against bare flesh followed by grunts as the boys tumbled to the sand, giggling hysterically.
Rachelle began to laugh out loud. She clapped excitedly, and although Thomas assumed she’d never met the young boy, she knew his name. “Elyon!” She said the name like an ecstatic child. “Elyon!” She wept and laughed as she clapped.
The boys sprang to their feet and chased each other around the boulder, tagging each other in play, still giggling like schoolchildren passing a secret.
And then the boy turned toward Thomas.
Still kneeling, Thomas saw the boy run directly for him. His eyes flashed like emeralds, a twisted grin lifted his cheeks. The boy sprinted right up to Thomas, slid to a stop, put an arm around his neck, and placed his soft, warm cheek against Thomas’s. His hot breath brushed Thomas’s ear. “I love you,” the boy whispered.
A roaring tornado rushed through his mind. Forceful winds blasted against his heart with pure, raw, unrefined love. He heard a feeble grunt fall from his mouth.
Then the boy was on to Rachelle. He repeated the embrace and Rachelle shook with sobs. The boy turned and sprinted from the camp. He stopped a dozen paces to the east and twirled around, eyes sparkling mischievously.
“Follow me,” he said, then turned back to the dune and ran up its slope.
Johan raced past Thomas and Rachelle, panting.
Thomas struggled to his feet, eyes fixed on the boy now cresting the dune. He tugged Rachelle to her feet. They followed the boy like that— Johan leading, Thomas and Rachelle running behind.
No one spoke as they ran through the barren desert. Thomas’s mind was still numb from the boy’s touch. Sweat soon drenched Thomas’s clothes. His breathing came in gasps as he clambered up the sandy dunes, following this little boy who ran as though he owned this sandbox. But I’d follow him anywhere. I’d follow him over a cliff, believing that after leaping I’d be able to fly. I’d follow him into the sea, knowing I could breathe underwater. It was the boy’s song. It was his song, his eyes, his tender feet, the way his breath had rushed through Thomas’s ears.
They ran on in silence, keeping their eyes fixed on the boy’s naked back, glistening with sweat. He loped steadily into the desert—slowing up the face of sandy slopes and then bounding down the other side. Not fast enough to lose them, not slow enough to allow them any rest.
The sun stood high when Thomas staggered over a crest marked by the boy’s footprints. He pulled himself up not ten feet from where Johan had stopped. The boy stood just ahead of Johan. Thomas followed their gaze.
What he saw took his breath away.
Below them, in the middle of this desolate white desert, lay a huge valley. And in this valley grew a vast green forest.
Thomas stared, mouth hanging open dumbly. It had to be several miles across, maybe more. Maybe twenty miles. But in the far distance where the trees ended, the valley floor rose in a mountain of sand. The desert continued. The forest wasn’t colored. Green. Only green. Like the forests in his dreams of Bangkok.
“Look!” Rachelle extended her arm. Her pointing finger quivered. Then Thomas saw it.
A lake.
To the east, several miles inside the forest, the sun glinted off a small lake.
The boy whooped, thrust his fists into the air, and tore down the sandy slope. He tumbled once and came to his feet, flying fast.
Johan ran after him, whooping in kind. Then Thomas and Rachelle, together. Whooping.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the edge of the forest, where they slid to a stop. The trees stood tall, like sentinels intent on keeping the sand from encroaching. Brown bark. Large, leafy branches. A flock of red-and-blue parrots took flight and squawked overhead.
“Birds!” Johan cried.
The boy looked back at them from the forest’s edge. Then, without a word, he stepped between two trees and ran in.
Thomas ran after him. “Come on!”
They came, running behind.
The canopy rose overhead, shading the sun. They passed between the same two trees the boy had slipped through.
“Come on, hurry!”
The sound of their feet brushing through sand changed to a soft crunch when they hit the first undergrowth.
Thomas strained for glimpses of the boy’s back between the trees. There, and there. He raced on, hardly aware of the forest now. Behind him, Rachelle and Johan had the easier task of following him.
Thomas glanced up at the canopy. It all looked vaguely familiar. For a moment it seemed as if he were rushing into the jungles of Thailand. To rescue Monique.
The boy never ran out of sight for more than a few seconds. Deeper into the jungle they ran. Straight for the lake. There were birds on almost every tree it seemed. Monkeys and possums. They passed through a meadow with a grove of smaller trees heavy with a red fruit. Not the same kind of fruit they’d eaten in the colored forest, but very similar.
Thomas snatched up a fallen apple and tasted it on the run. Sweet. Delicious. But no power. He grabbed another and tossed it back to Rachelle. “It’s good!”
A pack of dogs barked from the other end of the meadow. Wolves? Thomas picked up his pace. “Hurry!”
They hurried. Through tall trees squawking with birds, past large bushes bursting with berries, over a small creek sparkling with water, through another brightly flowered meadow and past a startled stampede of horses.
Rachelle and Johan were as frightened as the horses. Thomas was not.
And then, as suddenly as they had entered the forest, they were out. On the lip of a small valley.
A gentle slope descended to the shores of a glistening green lake. A thin blanket of haze drifted lazily above sections of the glassy surface. Trees, heavy with fruit, lined its shore. Colors of every imaginable hue splattered the trees.
Wild horses grazed on the high green grass of the valley floor. A bubbling creek meandered into the lake from the base of the cliff to their right, and then back out, down the valley.
The boy walked back to them, grinning. He wasn’t breathing hard like they were. Only a light sweat broke his brow.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
They were too stunned to respond.
“I thought you would,” he said. “I want you to take care of this forest for me.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked. “Are you going?”
The boy tilted his head slightly. “Don’t worry, Thomas. I’ll come back. Just don’t forget about me.”
“I could never forget!”
“Most of them already have. The world could get very bad very quickly. It will be easier to spill blood than water. But”—he pointed to the lake— “if you bathe in the water once a day, you’ll keep the disease away. Never allow blood to defile the water.”
Then the boy gave them a list of six simple rules to follow.
“The others lived?” Rachelle asked. “Where . . . where are they?”
The boy eyed her softly. “Most are lost, but there are others like you who will find one of seven forests like this one.” He smiled mischievously. “Don’t worry, I have an idea. My ideas are usually pretty good, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Yes, definitely good.”
“When you think it can’t get any worse, there will be a way. In one incredible blow we will destroy the heart of evil.” He walked up to Rachelle, took her hand, and kissed it. “Just remember me.”
He walked to Johan and looked into his eyes. For a moment Thomas thought he saw a dark look cross Elyon’s eyes. He leaned forward and kissed Johan on the forehead.
Then he came to Thomas and kissed his hand.
“Could you tell me one thing?” Thomas asked quietly. “I dreamed of Bangkok again last night. Is it real? Am I supposed to rescue Monique?”
“Am I a lion or a lamb? Or am I a boy? You decide, Thomas. You are very special to me. Please . . . please don’t forget me. Don’t ever, ever forget me. I have a lot riding on you.” He winked.
Then he turned around, ran down the bank, planted his foot on a rock, and launched himself into a swan dive. His body hung in the air above the lake for a moment, and then broke the surface with barely a ripple before disappearing.
He has a lot riding on me. The idea terrified him.
Johan was the first to move. He plummeted down the shore and into the lake with Thomas and Rachelle hard on his heels. They dived in together, one, two, three splashes that almost sounded as one.
The water wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm. It was clean and pure and crystalline clear, so that Thomas could immediately see the rocks on the bottom.
This lake had a bottom.
And apart from the wonderfully clean feeling it gave him, the water didn’t shake his body or tingle against his skin as in the other lake. He knew immediately that he couldn’t breathe it.
But he did drink it. And he did laugh and cry and splash around like a child in a backyard pool. And the water did change them.
Almost immediately their skin returned to normal, and their eyes . . .
A soft green replaced the gray in their eyes.
For a while.
“We will build our home here,” Thomas said, looking around at the clearing. “It’s only a stone’s throw from the lake, and there’s plenty of sunshine. Our first order of business will be to build a shelter.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Rachelle said.
He looked at her, taken aback by her tone.
“Our first order of business will be to deal with Monique,” she said.
“Come on, Rachelle.”
“I want you to tell me everything. All of your dreams.”
He spread his arms. “But they’re nothing. They’re just dreams!”
“Is that why you asked the boy about them just an hour ago? Is that why you mumble her name in your sleep? Even last night after you promised me you wouldn’t, you whispered her name as if she is the sweetest fruit in the land! I want to know it all.”
“Maybe we should bathe again.”
“After you tell me. If you hadn’t noticed, there is you and there is me in the land now. One man and one woman. Or is it one man and two women? Have you chosen me, or not?”
“I did choose you. That’s why you’re here. Did I pull another woman into the Thrall to protect? No, I pulled you because I chose you, and we will marry immediately. And I want to tell you about Monique anyway.” He walked over to the boulders and sat. These dreams would be his ruin. “Where’s Johan?”
“He’s gone exploring. Tell me about your dreams.”
Thomas looked back into the forest. “You let him go? What if he gets lost? I’m worried about him. We have to keep our eyes on him.”
“Don’t change the subject. I want to hear everything.”
So Thomas told her. She sat beside him on the rock at the center of the clearing, and he told her almost everything he could remember dreaming, leaving only a few parts sketchy.
He told her about being shot at in Denver and about flying to Bangkok and about kidnapping Monique and about the Raison Strain. Then he told her about the entire world constructed in his dreams, or at least as much of it as he could remember, because when he wasn’t dreaming it seemed distant and vague.
“Do you know what this sounds like to me?” Rachelle said when he’d finished.
“No, what?”
“It sounds like you’re imagining something similar to what happened to us, here. I told you where I would like to be rescued, and so you dreamed of exactly such a place to rescue another woman. And here the black forest has threatened to destroy us and now does, and so you dream of a blackness that will destroy another world. A plague. Bangkok is a figment of your dreams that reflects what’s happening in your real life.”
“Maybe I can stop the virus where I failed to stop Tanis.”
“No, you’re not going to stop it.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, it’s a dream! Listen to you. Even now you’re talking of making a difference in a world that doesn’t even exist! It’s no wonder Michal refused to fuel your dreams with more information from the histories.”
Rachelle stood and crossed her arms. “Second, if you’re right, the only way to stop it is to find this Monique woman you seem to have grown somewhat attached to. I won’t have it.”
“Please, I hardly know her. It’s not romantic. She’s a figment of my imagination; you said so yourself.”
“I won’t have you dreaming of a beautiful woman named Monique while I’m suckling your child,” Rachelle said.
That stopped him cold.
“So you really do want to bear children?”
“Do you have a better idea?” She paused. “I don’t see another man around. And I do love you, Thomas, even if you do dream of another woman.”
“And I love you, Rachelle.” He reached for her hand and kissed it. “I would never dream of another woman. Ever.”
“Unfortunately it seems as though it’s beyond your control. If we only had the rhambutan fruit, I would feed it to you every night so that you would never dream again.”
Thomas stood.
“What?”
“The boy . . .”
“Yes? What about the boy?”
“He told me at the upper lake that I would always have the choice not to dream.”
She searched his face. “And yet you dreamed last night. Was that your choice?”
“No, but what if there is rhambutan fruit?”
“The fruits aren’t the same anymore.”
“But maybe he left this one. How else would I not dream? He made me a promise.”
Her eyes lit up. She scanned the edge of the forest.
“Okay, let’s bathe.”
They spent several hours searching for rhambutan fruit and, while they were at it, material they could use to build a shelter in the clearing.
By midday their hope of finding any rhambutan in this forest had faded, but then so had Thomas’s urgency to find it, although he didn’t share this with Rachelle. The dreams seemed distant and abstract in the face of their new surroundings. The whole notion that he was dreaming of another woman of whom Rachelle should be jealous seemed absurd.
He watched her walk ahead of him through the forest, and he knew without the smallest shred of doubt that he could never love any woman as he loved her. She had the spirit of an eagle and the heart of a mother. He even liked the way she argued with him, full of mettle.
He loved the way she walked. The way her hair fell over her shoulders. The way her lips moved when she talked. She was beautiful, even with dry skin and gray eyes, though when she first stepped from the pool with smooth skin and green eyes, laughing in the sunlight, she was breathtaking.
The idea that she had anything to fear from a dream was absurd. He suggested that she keep looking while he turned his attention to the shelter they had to build. He had some ideas on how to build one. He might even know how to make metal.
And what ideas are those, she wanted to know.
Something from my dreams, he’d made the mistake of saying.
Maybe the rhambutan was a good idea after all.
Johan had finally returned from his scouting trip and helped Thomas with the first lean-to, constructed out of saplings and leaves. Thomas knew how it should look, and he knew how to make it.
“How did you know to tie those vines like that?” Johan asked when they’d finished the roof. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“This,” Thomas said, rubbing the knots lovingly, “is how they do it in the jungles of the Philippines. We’ll strap palm leaves to these—”
“Where’s the Philippines?” Johan asked.
“The Philippines? Nowhere, really. Just something I made up.”
And it was true, he thought. But with less conviction now.
Rachelle strode into camp about the time Thomas was thinking they should go looking for her.
“How are my men? My, that is a handy-looking thing you have there.” She studied the lean-to. “What on earth is it?”
“This is our first home.” Thomas beamed.
“Is it? It looks more like one wall.” She walked around it. “Or a falling roof.”
“No, no, this is more than a wall,” Thomas said. “It’s the entire structure. It’s perfect! You don’t like it?”
“Functional enough, I suppose. For a night or two, until you can build me bedrooms and a kitchen with running water.”
Thomas wasn’t sure how to respond. He rather liked the open feel of the place. She was right, of course. They would eventually have to build a house, and he had some ideas of how to do that as well. But he thought the lean-to was quite smart.
She looked at him and winked. “I think it’s very clever,” she said. “Something a great warrior would build.” Then she brought her hand from behind her back and tossed him something. “Catch.”
He caught it with one hand.
It was a rhambutan.
“You found it?”
She smiled. “Eat it.”
“Now?”
“Yes, of course now.”
He bit into the flesh. The nectar tasted like a cross between a banana and an orange but tart. Like a banana-orange-lemon.
“All of it,” she said.
“I need all of it for it to work?” he asked with the one bite stuffed in his cheek.
“No. But I want you to eat all of it.”
He ate all of it.
Rachelle watched Thomas sleep. His chest rose and fell steadily to the sound of deep breathing. A slight gray pallor covered his body, and she knew that if she could see his eyes they would be dull, like her own. But none of this concerned her. The lake would wash them both clean as soon as they bathed.
What did concern her were these dreams of his. Dreams of the histories and dreams of this woman named Monique. She told herself it was more about the histories. After all, an argument could be made that a preoccupation with the histories had gotten Tanis into trouble. But her concern was as much about the woman.
Jealousy had been an element of the Great Romance, and she made no attempt to temper it now. Thomas was her man, and she had no intention of sharing him with anyone, dream woman or not.
If Thomas was right, eating Teeleh’s fruit in the black forest before he’d lost his memory had started his dreams in the first place. Now she desperately prayed that what remained of Elyon’s fruit would wash his mind clean of them.
“Thomas.” She leaned over and kissed his lips. “Wake up, my dear.”
He moaned and rolled over. A pleasant smile crossed his face. Deep sleep? Or Monique? But he’d slept like a baby and not once mumbled her name.
Rachelle couldn’t extend her patience. She’d been awake for an hour already, waiting for him to wake.
She slapped his side and stood. “Wake up! Time to bathe.”
He sat up with a start. “What?”
“Time to bathe.”
“It’s late. I’ve been sleeping this whole time?”
“Like a rock,” she said.
He rubbed his eyes, stood up, and marched out to the fire. “Today I will begin building your house,” he announced.
“Wonderful.” She watched his face. “Did you dream?”
“Dream?” He seemed to be searching his memory.
“Yes, did you dream?”
“I don’t know. Did I?”
“Only you would know.”
“No. The fruit must have worked. That’s why I slept so well.”
“You can’t remember anything? No phantom trips to Bangkok? No rescuing the beautiful Monique?”
“The last thing I dreamed about was falling asleep in Bangkok after the meeting. That was two nights ago.” He spread his hands and grinned purposefully. “No dreams.”
She knew he was telling the truth. The fruit did as the boy had promised. “Good,” she said. “Then it works. You will eat this fruit every day.”
“Forever?”
“It’s also very healthy and makes a man fertile,” she said. “Yes, forever.”
So Thomas ate the rhambutan fruit every day and not once did he dream of Bangkok. Or of anything.
Weeks passed, then months, then years, then fifteen years, and not once did Thomas dream of Bangkok. Or of anything.
He became a mighty warrior who defended the seven forests against the desert Hoards who marched against them. But not once did he dream. Not of Bangkok, not of anything.
Perhaps Rachelle was right. Maybe he would never dream again. Maybe he would eat the rhambutan fruit every day forever and never again dream of Bangkok.
Or of anything.