Skye is the Limit by Phenomenal Pen (detective books to read TXT) 📗

To no one in particular, he said: “I can live with that.”

Mr. Chase stared at the company president, shocked.

“You heard me,” Mr. Patel said, now with both arms on his desk and looking the inventor in the eye. “Since you first opened my eyes to the possibility of oneirography, I have watched you from a distance, Alex. I was giving you enough leeway, you see, as much as I could afford because that was usually how your creative genius worked. But don’t mistake that for macromanagement. I’ve never once taken my eye off you and I continued to influence you indirectly through Jim and our own project reviews and negotiations.

“Jim was relaying my sentiments when he said that a fall from the grand height of SKYE won’t kill us but it’ll be enough to maim us. I trusted Jim to make sure to cover our backsides for when things go south. We knew Jayla Griffiths was a blatant liability to our company right from the start.

“And so, without telling you, we made her parents sign a non-standard Release of Liability. Jayla was so excited about the opportunity to be a part of SKYE that she went ahead against the deep misgivings of her doctors. Long story short, SKYE was a sort of last request for Jayla. Omni Sys was a very generous benefactor who granted her wish.”

Mr. Chase opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. His face looked even more shut and inscrutable, as though his body was there but his entire being was somewhere else. Not unlike the Imagineers, in fact.

“You’re wrong about one thing, Fred,” the inventor finally spoke. “No one – not me, Jayla or her parents – encouraged her inclusion in SKYE although we worried she wasn’t going to survive the trip. On the contrary, we saw SKYE as a new procedure that could work where modern medicine had failed. We believed that positive dream imageries could bring about mental and even physiological changes.”

“And look where that got her,” Mr. Patel said, rather contemptuously.

“You don’t understand,” Mr. Chase insisted. “In the story of the Two Wolves…”

“Stop filling your head with fairy tales!” Mr. Patel shouted, startling both Mr. Chase and himself. He rarely raised his voice at Mr. Chase or anyone else for that matter. He added gently: “That’s the exact reason we’re in this mess.”  

“You still need to listen to what I’m saying,” Mr. Chase continued after getting over his surprise. Although Mr. Patel’s outburst had been strategically timed to have a deep impact on the inventor, he failed to notice it because his mind was overtaken by something else entirely. “Positivity is literally the only thing that can help all of us right now.”

Mr. Patel stopped to pay attention because the look on Mr. Chase’s face was pure, nail-biting anxiety.

“The projection I made of our available options was conservative,” Mr. Chase continued explaining in a frail voice. “Jayla coming out of SKYE with physical anomalies might just be our best-case.

“If worse comes to worst – and believe me, SKYE will drop the bottom out of all our hopes – if Jayla suffers another negative dream imagery, be it a death, further injury or even just the clock running out on her, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that she will die physically. If that happens while she’s still inside SKYE, that’s it. That’s going to be your Doomsday scenario, for all of us whether in or out of SKYE. She’ll never surface and, because she’s the Nightcrawler, she will trap all the other Imagineers with her in an eternal sleep. Because a body cannot exist without its consciousness.”   

****

The entrance to the Nest was a hole in the mountainside. It was nothing but a crevice, really, with some runic symbols engraved in the granite above it. They were similar to the writings on their map but somehow thinner, more closely-packed and serpentine.

“What does it say?” the Count asked Mage. “‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here?’”

The Count had sardonically quoted the line from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

“No,” Mage answered. “This is a rear access therefore the particular sign you cited would be found above the front entrance to the West. These runes simply state Cave Canem, which translates to: Beware of the Dog.”

“Oh,” the Count said, unsure whether Mage, with his customary poker face, had just made a joke.

“This was formerly a trillepede’s hole,” Mage explained. “Presently it serves as a private passage for smugglers and grave-robbers like our new acquaintance Hordo the Innkeeper.”

“A trillepede?” Nethril echoed, feeling a shiver run up and down her spine.

The hole was too small for comfort and they would have to go down on all fours to crawl in and yet for a bug, it was awfully big.

“Your attention please,” Mage said officially, rather like a tour guide. “Now that we are all set, I will commence to instruct you on how to activate your night vision.”

“We have night vision?” Man-At-Arms asked. “Cool! Tell us!”

“Technically, you are employing it at this very moment. Since your real forms are asleep in a darkened room, everything you see here, every wave of light up to 1,000 nanometers long, exists only within your minds. That your avatar eyes have skipped millennia of evolution to detect infrared is not an overstatement.”