CHAPTER 1
A murderer was saving Isis’s life.
She could feel her feet pounding against the marble sidewalk as she ran away, side by side with a man who had terminated a life but was saving hers. Isis could taste sweat dripping onto her lips and blood brushing against her teeth. She could hear sirens blaring behind her, bright red, high pitched and flashing. Isis could see death waving on the dark horizon, beckoning her forward.
But it wasn’t real.
Was it?
Was it a dream, an image in her mind as she slept safely in her bed?
Or was this her life, today in that moment, right then and there?
It wasn’t and it was.
Only one thought could differentiate reality from fantasy, life from dream, and it was this: While asleep, Isis never dreamed.
The instant her mind recognized the fact, she realized a fraction of what was happening.
Isis was Dreaming.
She had been since the time had come to break out of the prison that was soon to be her execution home, when fear had collided with adrenaline and a fierce desire to live. The product of such a concoction was simple and almost always equivalent in each occurrence—Isis had plunged into a Dream, the other part of her taking over to force her survival.
While Isis was aware of what was happening, while she could see the murderer running beside her, the blood underneath her nails and the thick stench of sweat in the frigid air, Isis was not in control. Her neurons were not hers but another’s and no matter how hard she tried, she could not order her muscles to obey her pleas. Isis could not demand her legs to run faster, nor could she push herself to survive.
Survival simply wasn’t Isis’s job. It was the other part of hers, the part that only ascended through her in moments where Isis’s soft heart and innocent mind couldn’t save her. Though Isis desperately tried to suppress the darker part of her, in raising frequency of occasion lately, she merely couldn’t.When the world was full of darkness, it was instinct to blend in.
But no over-complication explanation could overrule the actuality of reality, the one thing that Isis wished wasn’t true.
This was happening. This was real.
“Come on!” he said, leading her towards the city gates. It was strange how a person’s voice did not change after they committed a crime; they were the same, in appearance and stance. Despite having committed murder, the man beside Isis seemed impossibly ordinary.
Whatever happened next was a blur of leading the cops away and hiding.
All Isis could register when it was over was this: she was safe.
The moment the adrenaline subsided and safety fell, Isis snapped awake, taking in quick gulps of air as if she hadn’t breathed in years.
Immediately after the shock of the Dream was gone, Isis recited the occurrences of the Dream, going over each major event so she wouldn’t forget. Once this was done, peace folded Isis into an embrace.
