A headful of skye, p.22
A Headful of Skye, page 22
“Stop, she doesn’t understand.”
“She does, or someone’s going to pay.”
“Rupert…”
The man sighed, and Mayu took a deep breath, registering the room as she looked around in slow blinks. A blank wall, a metal door, a generator. Everything went silent. Recognising the blurred shapes in front of her, Mayu stopped trying to make sense of the voices on the other side of the bed and let her eyelids droop heavily again.
“Is she awake?” the woman whispered, quieter than before.
A chair squeaked, clothes shuffling. They meant Mayu. A puzzle piece clicked into place and her foggy stupor lifted just enough to tell her: the voices belonged to Skye’s parents. She did her best to look peaceful as she felt their gaze studying her.
“No,” said Mr. Mansfield. “She’s not.”
Sighs passed between them like Morse Code, a series of statements Mayu could only guess at. She fought to pay attention, to push away the sleepy haze still blanketing her.
“Skye’s just…staring at nothing.” Mr. Mansfield’s voice was gruff. “How long did they say we have to wait until she improves?”
“They don’t know.”
“For God’s sake. I thought this was supposed to be better than normal therapy.”
“What if she’s never going to come back?” croaked Mrs. Mansfield. “What will we do with her?”
Mayu clenched her teeth.
“If she doesn’t come back, I can’t… I want her back.” Skye’s mother sounded like a foot-pump that was upset about being trodden on—huffing, like she wanted to cry but didn’t know how. “Oh! Oh, she looked at me! For a second, her eyes… Did you see? Yes, darling, look at Mummy. I’m here for you.”
“Or you can look at me,” said Mr. Mansfield. “I’m here for you too.”
A song cut the air, the James Bond “Diamonds are Forever” chorus. It died a few seconds in, followed by Mr. Mansfield saying “hello?” and Mayu realised that it was his ringtone. In the peaceful room, the voice on the other end of the phone was just about loud enough for Mayu to distinguish; deep and gravelly, the voice of a middle-aged man, who measured the clout of every word.
“Ah, hello, Fabio. How are you?”
Fabio said something Mayu couldn’t make out, before he mentioned Skye’s name.
“She’s…” Mr. Mansfield shuffled in his chair. “They said she’s awake.”
An awkward pause stifled the room.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Mayu heard Fabio say.
“Her eyes are open, but she’s not…responding or moving. The dream therapy was supposed to reduce recovery time—to restore her to how she was. I’ll get more answers. But, so far, no one’s said anything conclusive.” Panic edged Mr. Mansfield’s voice with every sentence. Despite his impatience and demand for an instant cure, Mayu couldn’t begrudge him that.
“That is worrying,” Fabio concurred. “Has she said anything?”
“Nothing. It’s like…she’s not here.”
But Mayu knew otherwise. Skye was there. Listening. Recovery started with consciousness and comprehension. Even if it seemed like her body was empty, Skye was probably aware—begging her lips to let her reply.
“Keep me updated. Maybe she’ll improve in a few days.”
“What if it takes longer? What if…” Mr. Mansfield couldn’t finish.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Hang in there.”
They said their goodbyes, and Mrs. Mansfield whispered, “Let’s go. I can’t take it.”
Mayu knew she should pretend to wake up, intercept them and convince them to stay by Skye’s bedside and talk to her. Coming out of a coma and being immobile was frustrating, terrifying. Maybe Skye wouldn’t remember this stage as she regained full consciousness and independence, but company would speed recovery. And yet, Mayu stayed quiet. After what she’d seen of them in dreams, she wasn’t motivated to ease their worries.
They stood and headed to the door in broken, back-and-forth steps.
Shame grew heavier in Mayu’s chest with every second she stayed still.
“Get off,” Mrs. Mansfield hissed at her husband, a small rebuff.
“We’ll figure this out,” he replied.
The woman finally charged at the door, her heels clopping, her husband close behind.
“Wait,” Mayu said, just as they shut the door behind them.
A flutter of fabric made her look over at Skye. The girl had turned her head, staring at the door. Her gaze slid to Mayu.
“Don’t worry,” Mayu said, “you’ll be doing cartwheels soon.” But her smile weakened.
Skye looked miserable, she couldn’t help but look that way with minimal muscle control but it tugged at Mayu all the same. So she told her a story about a girl who defeated a dragon god at the bottom of the ocean, and then another, as many folk tales as she could remember, until her voice rasped on every word and Mayu fell asleep mid-sentence.
*
After propping Mayu into a sitting position, Richard told her the news late that evening while Skye slept. He removed his tie and held it in both hands, as if seeking a distraction or a piece of normality.
“They declared him comatose five minutes after you woke up,” he said.
Mayu went rigid as the words settled in.
“Whatever he did, he managed to stabilise the connection between you and Skye, right before having a seizure. It weakened him too much.”
“Tomoya…” Mayu bit down on her finger, hand clenched against her mouth.
“I’ve never seen anyone work so fast,” Richard whispered. “He drew out the calculations for a third PDE connection in minutes. I mean, he said he’d been sitting on the work for ages now. Maybe if he’d had time to refine it…”
“You shouldn’t have let him.”
“And then we would have lost you when we had a potential solution.” His grey eyes shone. “‘She’ll die,’ he said, ‘and we’ll always wonder if my theory might have worked.’ We couldn’t live with ourselves, he couldn’t live with himself, if we didn’t at least try.”
Mayu drooped forward and cupped her face in her hands.
“It’s not your fault,” said Richard. “You should have seen Skye’s PDE readings, I’m amazed you managed to save her at all—she practically drowned you. Your mind kept trying to protect itself by shutting down any unnecessary processes. We had a hard time keeping the electro-magnetic pulses at the right frequency, you both required constant vigilance. That girl could be a potential recruit when she’s older.”
“Don’t talk to me about work,” she snapped.
“I know, I’m sorry, I just meant…”
A fuzzy ringing filled her head, her skin tingling with pins and needles and her eyes glazed over as if she and the hospital existed in two different time paradoxes. Indeed, Richard could have been talking from behind a pane of glass.
“We’re worried that he’s…vegetative.”
Mayu coughed to clear the tightness in her throat. “He seems as good as dead?”
“He might not be gone.”
“Then hook him up to Morpheus immediately and find out!” she snapped.
Richard shook his head, looking pained. “Do you remember a loud bang as you woke up? The motherboard fried—it got so hot that wires were melting. With the storm going on, the lights were flickering, the walls were groaning and the generators only just held out. You woke up just after the lights came back on, thank God, because a minute later the voltage surged and the generators overloaded.”
A familiar emptiness drained her of energy. Richard sat down next to her and looped an arm around her shoulders. Taking deep breaths to calm herself, Mayu looked across at Skye, her thoughts churning into meaningless noise. The floor between their beds looked as if it was moving, she squinted at it but it only made the floor look more liquid, the tiles sliding together like the surface of the sea. Mayu stared at the water, focused on its soothing slosh and spray melody. She swayed with the waves, vaguely aware it was Richard jostling her shoulders. As she tried to pull her mind away from the haze blanketing everything, tiny, multicoloured handprints seemed to float on the surface of the waves, surfacing and submerging, like leaves falling into a river.
“I need to talk to you about Skye’s parents,” she said.
He gave her an odd, inquisitive look, searching her eyes and perhaps making a private assessment. The question probably seemed out of context, but she needed something to latch onto.
“What about? I don’t think they’ll press charges, the treatment worked, and they can damn well wait a week or two for Skye to get better.”
“No.” Mayu pushed his arm away. She sounded weak and tired already as she denied any feelings of grief about Tomoya. The internal strain made her throat tight and her voice tremulous. “Something else.”
“There’s something else I need to tell you first.” Richard looked sombre. It shot nerves through Mayu’s stomach, squeezing tighter when he placed a reassuring hand on her arm. “Our labs are gone.”
Mayu stared at him. Not daring to question it, waiting for further explanation.
“A magnitude 9 earthquake hit Tokyo, half the Bay area has been washed away.”
Ice trickled down her arms. It couldn’t be true. Equipment they had taken years to design would be gone if it was. They didn’t have the money to rebuild. They didn’t have anything. Did they even have homes anymore?
“Are you serious?”
Richard’s frown deepened. He nodded.
People suffered every day. She’d already lost Yūta and the fact that any one of them could die at any instant, from almost any cause, left her breathless. But without their equipment they couldn’t do anything to help Tomoya. If only she had been the Dream Guide from the start, maybe Tomoya wouldn’t have been injured, he may have been able to save Mayu and Skye and still been able to live to tell the tale.
To think, he’d followed her throughout her life, and now he was gone. No longer there to cheer for everyone, to bring them coffee during the late shifts, to leave passive-aggressive sticky-notes when someone ate his rice balls, to chew on pencils he didn’t own and to make a mess of the filing cabinet, or to share parallel dreams with Mayu…
“What about Keiji?” she managed, staring at the floor again as the waves thrashed harder against her bedposts. Maybe she hadn’t woken up at all, maybe this was her new reality—she was the one in a coma and these hallucinations were all part of a bigger dream. “The others? Are they safe?”
“I don’t know.”
Dread scooped out every other feeling as the terrible news mounted. Her breath grew heavier as the world grew wider in her imagination; no home, no job, no person to hold the walls in place. There would be tsunamis along the coast, severe flooding, and fires. How many were dead already?
The door handle to the room clicked open.
Richard glanced over his shoulder, got to his feet, and folded his arms, trying to avoid eye-contact with someone.
Glancing over, Mayu saw Momo slip inside. By the ugly twist of Momo’s mouth, her gaze fixed on Richard, a gut reaction told her there was something else she hadn’t been told. Her friend looked petite and smart in a snug, grey vest-jacket, and as sharp as the creases ironed into the front of her trousers. Neither of them acknowledged each other properly, just a mumbled hello. Mayu clenched a fistful of sheets in each hand as Momo strode to her bedside as if the water reaching up to her knees wasn’t really there, her voice airy as she made formal inquiries after her health.
Richard pushed his shirt sleeves further up his elbows. “I’ll give you two some space.”
As he left, a flicker of feeling revealed Momo wasn’t just upset. Her lashes framed betrayal in her eyes. No matter how sharply dressed she was, how flicky her pink-tipped hair, or how pretty her eyes—none of it hid Momo’s exhaustion in that one look.
“Do you want to talk about what just happened?” Mayu asked.
Momo covered her eyes with one hand, the other clutching Mayu’s shoulder. “It’s not important.”
“Liar.”
She smiled. “You remember Halcyon offered me a full time job? I told Richard. He said I should have taken it. Except he started talking to their lab scientist—you know Klaus, right? Started setting things up for me as if I was going to accept. He even told Fukushima—who’s hacked off with you as well, by the way, for not telling him I might be leaving and that he might need to find a new bio engineer.”
After Richard’s devastating news about Tomoya and their labs, Mayu struggled to feel the indignation her friend needed to hear. “He shouldn’t have done that.” It sounded as lame as she felt. “But maybe it’s for the best. We’ve lost everything.”
Perhaps her apartment was still standing. Maybe she had a home, at least. Her heart clenched to think of the black tea set from her grandmother, given as a wedding present, shattered and lost within a city-wide river of devastation.
“What are we going to do?” Momo whispered.
Feeling heavy, Mayu sank into the pillows, staring at the wall without seeing it. “I don’t know.” They wouldn’t be able to monitor Skye for more than a week, by which time Mayu should have regained stable autonomy.
The prospect of half her life’s work being lost sent a sick jolt from Mayu’s head to her feet. A dull throbbing hit her temple. She draped her arm off the bed and trailed her fingers back and forth through the water, surprised at how warm it felt.
“What are you doing?” asked Momo.
“The floor is covered in water…” To confirm it, Mayu held her hand against the waves, watching water pool over her fingers, but frowned when she didn’t actually feel any resistance.
With a firm push, Momo rolled her back onto the pillow and gripped the hand Mayu had dipped into the sea. Her friend stroked her forehead, feeling for a temperature, and then gently pulled Mayu’s lower eyelid down. “You’re hallucinating,” she said, her tone as soft as her touch. “You know you’re not dreaming anymore, right?”
“Right… Momo, I really need to talk to someone about Skye’s parents.”
Momo replaced Mayu’s arm on the bed and pressed her hand into the mattress, as if to state what was real. “Those idiots? What about?”
Glancing at Skye, to be sure she was still sleeping, Mayu whispered, “I’ve been trying to remember details from my dreams but, you know, parts are unclear. Something I saw… I don’t think they’re good parents.”
Momo looked over at the girl, as if trying to see parental issues written across her forehead. “You know, I’m trying to be surprised, but I’m not. Mr. and Mrs. Mansfield are cold. They live in another world of ‘my life is so difficult.’ Richard had to spend two hours with Mrs. Mansfield because she had a breakdown about how stressful it is being a mother and that she can’t cope.”
“Stressful?” scoffed Mayu. “Skye only goes home two months of the year.”
“That’s what I said, sort of.” Momo’s shoes tapped against the linoleum as she went to Skye’s bedside and carefully took hold of the girl’s fingers. Her gaze wandered to the readings on the monitors. “She has such a beautiful neural network,” Momo whispered. “You’ll love the charts.” Then she sighed and returned to Mayu. “Anyway, there’s not much we can do about her parents. Some parents are just shit.”
Despite shaking her head and the unsettled feeling deep in her gut, Mayu had nothing substantial to go on. “I guess you’re right.”
26
Some parts of their parallel dreams were so vivid; it was hard for Mayu to accept they weren’t true memories. Whenever she wasn’t retraining her leg muscles or trying to shake off the effects of the drug that had induced her coma, she lay in bed near Skye, recalling their dreams.
“And you were skating round the ice rink like a professional, do you remember?”
Skye smiled, lop-sided.
“You got to see thousands of lights at nighttime. And your dress was blue and glittery. Oh, and you turned into a tiger!”
A gurgling sort of laugh escaped the girl. She tried to form words. “Weh—weh…” It ended in a low, lulling sound. It took a few more attempts before Mayu guessed it.
“Whales? Yes, the flying whales. And we rode them into space.”
Sometimes, when Mayu thought she was speaking, she’d stare right at Momo or Fukushima or even Skye, the walls alive with lichen behind them and the ceiling rippling with music—aquatic life swimming against the surface—only to find that no one understood her. Fukushima told her she wasn’t recovering as well as her previous coma excursions, which he deduced from her preoccupation with the giant koi carp above his head.
Glorious images of nebulas sometimes filled Mayu’s imagination. If she concentrated, she could see one painted on the ceiling in shimmering purples, blues and yellows. But then the imagery snapped to a dark black well, a man clambering up to crush her face and squeeze her neck. She pushed past it, to Skye diving into her arms and holding her tight like a living star.
For this reason, as the hallucinations grew less frequent, Mayu wondered about discussing what had happened in the dream-museum. She couldn’t remember all of it—only Skye as a rag doll and the mannequin room. For a few days, she held off bringing it up, questions squirming inside, afraid it was better forgotten. Mayu feared it would upset Skye but, more than that, she also feared it might make Skye withdraw from her. She didn’t want to risk that.
Bad news greeted her every morning. Keiji still hadn’t contacted them and the earthquake in Tokyo had triggered tsunamis along the south-east coast of Japan as she had feared. As the death toll kept rising, so did the nausea in Mayu’s stomach. The loss of their labs seemed meaningless with the possibility that their families and friends were amongst the dead.
On the fourth day of their recovery, as the two of them rested in the afternoon, Skye spoke her first clear word.
“Mayu.”
It rang in Mayu’s ears and made her jump. She stared, dumbfounded, the nausea shoved aside by a blazing beam of joy. “Yes?”
“Ma… Ma… Mayu.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Mayu focused on recalling the part of their dream at the museum. Paintings had paved the floor, she’d walked on them and found Skye behind a tapestry at the end. But what was in the paintings? All Mayu could grasp were shadows and shades of red and brown that filled the hospital room and left her cowering into her pillow.
