Chapter Four
The Tour Begins
“This is the entrance. This is where all who slip into magical sleeps step through, need saving. Many do not know how they arrived here, only what happened before they did. Their subconscious slips through the door when whatever happens causes the sleep, and a few days later, their physical being appears where the subconscious sees fit. Most in the magical sleep come here.” Cat said, looking back after we had stepped through the huge oak doorway at the end of a hall.
I was lost. “Catalina, what is this ‘magical’ sleep?” I asked, worried for her sanity. The black clouds were glowing with lightning. The tall lush grass we stood in swayed and rippled, like green water.
“Blaire…it happens when your physical—,” she choked on a sob. “When your physical being cannot handle being in the old world.”
Silent tears ran down her face.
“Cat, no, do not cry! This place is safe for us, we are protected!” I exclaimed, resting my hand on her shoulder.
“But you come without your family. And you stay as long as your body needs to heal. Some of us fear our physical being is dead. That is why we have spent so many years here. Sometimes when I get shy, or scared, or the days I feel clumsy, I look at the ground and it looks like I am walking on a still picture of above my family’s head. It’s a bird’s eye view. I miss them much. So very much…” Cat admitted.
I felt my eyebrows knit together.
“How long have you been here…?” I asked, my voice cracking just at the end.
“I am twelve. I have been here since my sixth birthday. All I remember is big fires and a huge black thing tipping over on me. I think it is a train. It had many links.”
Cat was a year younger than me. So…how long would I stay here?
“Have you visited this entrance any other time between when your subconscious dragged you here and you showing me today?” I inquired.
“Yes—every day. And each time, the shouts get louder, and it feels as if my physical world is coming closer again, as if it is almost time for me to go home, but it never is.”
She stepped back toward the doorway. “Come here, follow me. I will show you all of the camp.”
I nodded warily. Was I dreaming? Would I ever get to see my family again? Was this real?
It couldn’t be real.
There was no such thing.
But it felt strange, and I almost found comfort in Catalina’s explanation for a possible reason why I was at this—this base. I had trouble accepting that as a truth, but it felt good to have a semi-believable reason for being separated from my family, why I was here, why I knew nothing. Why it was so unclear if I was in the past, present or future.
Some things were for sure, though—I knew three things of which I was absolutely positive.
I had taken the place of a real girl named Blaire. My clothes did not fit, my name was I, and I had to get out of here.
***
I sat on the steps with a few other girls, friends of Cat’s. I told them stories of the ‘physical world’ I had just left, and slowly started to realize how different we were in quite a few ways.
Although I had mostly adapted to their way of speaking, I noticed how the seven other girls had many different accents, that some used ‘art’ and ‘thou’ and some used ‘shall’ and ‘forevermore’, words much less used in America, where I was from.
I began to really believe that maybe what Cat had told me was true, but that there might be a flaw. That while we were here, we aged by appearance—looks, height, but that somehow we all came to the base, which seemed to sustain a common time for all of us, that night and day came but that days did not really pass, that all of our subconsciouses had dragged us here in an act of survival, while doctors worked on us at home, or while a prince fought a dragon to get to our glass coffin, that a spy was warring an evil mastermind while we were under a chemical induced coma, sleeping somewhere deep in a laboratory…
***
The next weeks passed without issues, I helped the younger ones and absolutely flew through the classes, of which material I had already learned. Each day Catalina, her friends—Villareal, Clarissa, Antonia, Lisa, Mono, and Marie—and I sat at the stairs and discussed what we thought of our past lives, theories what had brought us here, and the interesting lack of boys. How many people could honestly be at war? Or dead? Something was up, or someone was lying to us. Catalina had specifically told me she had been told that most boys were at war and that many had died.
