The dreams were getting odder.
Some were set in a giant cave, empty but for the two of them. It was vast, lit by torches flaming high above them, lava pools bubbling about them, stalactites and stalagmites supporting natural bays, alcoves, balconies and passages. They were barefoot, the rock warm beneath their feet, the limestone walls forming a giant natural cathedral overhead. It was beautiful, a natural wonder of the world; the kind of place the National Geographic would dedicate endless issues to, if it even existed. Which, when awake, Mackenzie very much doubted.
It looked utterly unlike anywhere she'd ever seen, but she was showing Tom around, clearly very familiar with the place. He wasn't - he was stunned, impressed, eyes wide with awe, asking endless questions. And he was a different man in every way - in fact, he was more like a boy. Innocent, trusting. Much skinnier. Paler. His hair so short, he was almost bald.
And he wasn't called Tom, in her dreams. His name, in this netherworld, was Neo.
The conversations never made a lick of sense, either.
"A temple to whom?"
"Hmm?"
"Allah? Jesus? Buddha? Who're they worshipping, if it's a temple?"
She'd look at him.
"What? What is it?"
"Neo..." her voice would trail away as she bit her lip, amused, apologetic.
"What?" he said, looking at her. She looked away. "Oh God. Please tell me they're not Scientologists."
"You'll wish they were."
"Come on, how bad can it be?"
"Worse."
"You saying I'm not imaginative?"
"No. Just not an egomaniac."
"Huh?"
"They're praying for the return of the One," she said.
He took an abrupt step away from the balcony, as if afraid an audience would materialize from thin air. "Fuck me."
"If you wanted, they would."
"That's not funny," he said at once.
"I'm not joking."
There was a silence. Then he looked at her.
"So what do they think the One can do?"
"Do?"
"Yeah. I mean, make liquor from Evian, grant three wishes, find the hidden entrance to Narnia, what?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Flying not enough for you?"
"That doesn't count. It's not real. They can't be impressed by video game heroics."
"I'm impressed - it's amazing. Don't ever underestimate it. Nobody else will."
"But you said these people aren't even on the fleet, so how the hell would they know? It must be more than Matrix stuff - so what?"
"You sure you want to hear this?"
"No," he said. He was rather whiter than usual. "But better you than anyone else."
"Watch over them," she said. "Save them. Not just save Zion - but save them, individually. Redeem them."
"What?"
"Ignore it. Their expectations are their problem."
He sighed, his eyes vulnerable, tired. "Great."
"Neo..."
He wrapped his arms around her; buried his nose in her neck. "They can all fuck off," he said, voice muffled.
"The religious?"
"Everyone. Anyone. The whole damn lot of them. Everyone but you."
She'd always wake from that dream feeling calm. Secure, contented. The dream-Mackenzie, it seemed, wanted nothing more than to have the dream-Tom profess eternal devotion, even amidst complete gobbledygook. A vulnerable, childlike, innocent version of the man under another name, who earnestly adored a tenderly protective Mackenzie.
All it needed was a unicorn.
It was the oddest dream, but not the most confusing. No, that accolade went to one of the ones - for there were many - set in a submarine. She'd wake, alone, in a large bunk in a small cabin. Steel everywhere - rusty, dirty, old. She'd pull on a sweater - his, she'd know in this dream, just as she knew that they shared the cabin, and that bed - and go in search of him. The dream terrain was absolutely familiar; she'd trace confident steps along hallways, through arches, round corners, then swing a heavy, rusty wheel at the center of a door, and enter some kind of bizarre dining room - porridgey-looking drinks hung in vats overhead. And Tom/Neo, sitting at the table, would look as depressed and remote as she'd see him at work. The same age, too. Hair the same as now, sadness the same as now. World-weary, a man who'd seen much too much suffering, the dream-innocence quite gone. He'd glance at her and then away, down at his own hands, and then they'd have a surreal conversation about his being afraid of something, and her trying, vainly, to reassure him. To hold him together with her own certainty, her own belief in him. And then some guy she'd never seen in her life before would appear and say they were late. That they had to go. Though to do what, she never discovered.
Because it was then, always, that she woke up.
In this dream, as in all the rest, they'd loved one another. They'd loved one another completely. And even when she woke, she couldn't shake it. The sense that, impossible as the dreams were, they were hiding a reality. Some truth that could only reveal itself in this oblique, sidelong way. Yet the more she fumbled for it through the mist, the more nebulous and unreachable it became. It felt as if she were chasing someone just out of sight, almost reaching them, only to find they'd turned another corner and her path was mistaken. None of it made any sense... but it felt true, just the same.
The most frightening one was a common enough anxiety dream - not dissimilar to one she'd had as an adolescent, in fact. She was falling. Falling from a skyscraper so high the cars below looked like toys, plummeting to the ground at deadly, annihilatory speed. But in this version, a man jumped after her - an obsessed murderer, his face oddly inhuman, shooting for her heart as if the sidewalk below were somehow survivable. As though its embrace were pillow-soft. And one bullet found its way home - the pain as it entered her body was indescribable, and she knew she was about to die. But the dream would end, always, the same way. Tom (Neo) would catch her - because Tom (Neo) could fly. And despite the pain and the shock and the fear, that moment when he cradled her against him - the world crashing away from them, as he moved at some impossible speed - that moment would always be one where she felt wholly safe. The panic and horror would drain away completely, and she'd relax. It was an anxiety dream like no other, because his arrival would resolve it, in that same second. She'd always wake up feeling at peace.
The dream that disturbed her most of all was simplicity itself - nothing happened. He wasn't even conscious. She'd lie awake in their bed, next to his warm, sleeping body. Her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, his hand resting on her hip. His other hand always lay in her own, meeting on his stomach, their fingers intertwined. She'd watch the steady rise and fall of his chest and she'd be bursting with it - how happy he made her, how contented she felt, how completely and unutterably she loved him. She'd lie there, marveling at her own good fortune. And when she woke from that dream - into her own bed, her real life - she'd be devastated, every time. Crazily, irrationally heartbroken by his absence; by the reality of her life. By a life without him.
That dream unsettled her so horribly, she'd more than once contemplated seeing a shrink after it. She was frightened it meant something, something very troubling, that a fantasy could make her so happy it instantly rendered her real life bleak and empty. But it was far, far too personal to share with anyone, because of something even more disturbing. Something that made it increasingly hard for her to sleep at all.
She hadn't been exaggerating, when she told Ghost she feared she was going crazy. And she'd not been able to confide it to him - even to him - the grounds for that fear. The truth was, the dreams had begun to feel much more real than her memories did. The lines were blurring, and one day soon, she might not be able to discriminate at all.