DRAUMRS - Dreamweavers - Book Two

19 - Divided We Fall

"It won't be easy to pick out just one dream. There are probably hundreds of people all over the resort dreaming at this moment. You are asking us to pick out a snowflake in a snowstorm."

Philip was responding to Snow's urgent demand that they find only the one dream that the Red Clan Draumrs were controlling. The fighters had come out of their first dreamscape, both angry and engaged. Snow had come directly to Philip, with a flurry of questions, that sounded a lot like orders.

He was trying to explain. "Who is having the dream, and where they are, will be difficult to parse out from the noise, unless there is a distinctive push from one of the opponents that can be felt by our attuned senses. We have no problem picking up sudden terror or real injury, as the dreamer's brainwave response goes off the scale. But, there were lots of scary things going on in many dreams, so the task isn't as simple as watching for one head to pop up above the crowd."

"If we don't catch them in the act, it will probably be too late." Snow was disconsolate. "Xana as much as said not to bother as it was already too late."

Lulu was catching up with Snow's thinking quickly. "But, she didn't say that it was over. She just said that we were late. They must need to complete something tonight or why would they still be here?"

Even though the fall season meant a longer night, dawn was now just a few hours away. Early risers might already be stirring. Whatever was going to happen, it would be happening right now.

Jack and Emma had been listening in on the discussion.

Emma asked, "Can't we narrow our monitoring targets to just the most prominent politicians? Most of the staff and helpers aren't likely to be a target for Oksana. Countries with no real foes, like Canada, wouldn't be of much use to them. The list of potential enemies is probably quite short."

Philip turned his hands over in exasperation. "I wish that we could. Unfortunately, short of assigning each potential target an active keeper, we can only locate Draumr activity once it starts. From past experience, this would mean that we would come in later in the dream."

He continued, without much enthusiasm, "This approach would spread us thin, but it may be the best that we can do."

Jack was looking at Will. They both wished that Water were here for advice, as he would probably have a solution involving birds in flight or windless smoke patterns.

Jack quipped, "Too bad that our talisman didn't come with a bad actor detector."

Will smiled at the thought and turned the real talisman around in his hand a few times. So far, he had learned that he at least he could use it to take over control of a dreamscape. It could be their key advantage when push came to shove in the final act. But, it might all be too late to prevent a tragedy.

"Just a minute." Philip caught Jack's thought, but turned it around.

"We don't need the talisman to be the detector. We need it to be detected." He laughed out loud.

No-one else was following his thinking or knew why he was suddenly elated, but they all grinned at the apparent revelation of their team member.

Philip continued, "The talisman is part of an ancient set that was created all together, but pieces were then customized by each of the ancient Clans, back when they were into magic and stuff. We know that the Reds have picked up parts of their set somewhere, but probably not many pieces. Our hope is that the misfit of the pieces and breaks in their hand-to-hand passage will make their artefacts less effective."

"But, any use of any artefact will create a much different pattern of brainwaves from both the Draumr and the sleeper. If we can calibrate for that, we should be able to pick the pattern out the moment something happens."