The 13th Continuum (Book 1: The Continuum Trilogy)

Chapter 2: The Engineer's Daughter

The dream ended abruptly when the automatic lights flashed on. This was followed a few seconds later by the jarring and unmistakable sound of her father's yelling.

"Myra, wake up!" he bellowed from the kitchen.

Myra groaned once, then a second time, flipped over, and buried her head under the scratchy blanket with the big hole in it. The hole was already there when she claimed the blanket from the Com Store on her last shopping trip. It also smelled funny, like it clung to the memory of its past claimants even now, long after their bodies had been given to the Holy Sea. The light leaked through the fraying fibers, cajoling her tired brain into wakefulness. This made her groan for a third time. She'd meant to patch it up—really, she had, as the Oracle was her witness. But somehow, she'd never quite gotten around to it. There are just too many things that need fixing around here, she decided, and not enough time to mend them all.

Despite her many complaints (according to her father, complaining, loudly if necessary, about any given object or situation was synonymous with being sixteen years old), Myra had grown fond of that blanket, gaping hole and all. It was a raggedy and partially useless thing. Hence, it reminded her an awful lot of herself.

Not willing to surrender to waking yet, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to recall her dream, which had already dis- solved into smoke under the harsh glare of the lights.

Was it the mermaid one again?

She knew that she should have outgrown such childish dreams by now, and she had tried to harden her heart against them, for it seemed like that was what you did when you grew up. But every night, her mind rebelled against her and conjured up vivid fantasies that contrasted starkly with the drabness of her world. In the clutches of her sleep, she could be anything. Some nights, she dreamed that she was a mermaid who could swim through the saltwater, immune to the crushing pressure and the lack of oxygen, like in the fairytales of old that her mother used to tell her before bed. The stories always began the same way.

"Far out in the ocean," her mother would recite, as she lay curled up next to her daughter on the narrow bunk, weaving adventures like delicate threads out of thin air, "where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower and as clear as crystal, it is very, very, very deep."

"How blue is a cornflower?" Myra would ask.

Her mother would shake her head with a sad smile.

"I don't know, honey. Just picture the bluest blue you can possibly imagine." And that's what Myra would do, although she always suspected it paled in comparison to the real thing. But in her favorite dream, she wasn't anything except Myra Jackson—a scrawny girl with a pale face dotted by freckles and crowned with a heap of russet hair.

In this dream, it wasn't her that was different. It was everything else.

She would wake to the automatic lights the same as always, but instead of her father yelling for her to wake up, it was her mother, though Myra could scarcely remember what her voice sounded like anymore. Its exact tenor had been swallowed up by the years that had passed, one of the many things that had been stolen from her prematurely. Her mother had died while birthing her little brother.

Myra knew that it wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault. At least, that's what her father always told her. But no matter how many times she repeated that mantra, sometimes the sight of her brother still brought back the memory of his arrival into this world, when he'd emerged from their mother's womb red- faced, squalling, and baptized in a river of blood, and of how much they'd both lost right then.

But the truth of the dream didn't matter at all. In her imaginings, her mother's voice was the sweetest sound that she'd ever heard—light and sonorous and full of love. Myyyr- rrraaaaaa! Her mother had chosen Myra's name, and it only sounded right when it rolled off her lips, but that hadn't happened for going on eight years now—