EZ THE COAT CHECK GIRL, a.k.a. the Stationmaster, draws her face right up close to the glass window of her little booth and fixes me with a piercing gaze. Her fine features and short blonde hair lend her a certain elfin beauty; it’s hard to believe she’s a mass murderer. Honestly, how does a dream invader even kill people? People have bad dreams all the time. They’re just dreams. I should have asked when Packard assigned me her case.

“Do you get a lot of patients coming to your clinic with, you know, Morgan-Brooksteens parasites colonizing their organs?” she asks.

“Oh, yes.” I run my finger along the semicircular hole at the bottom of the window. The coat check booth is situated along a kind of balcony overlooking the glamorous piano bar below. They call this place the Sapphire Sunset. Soft music and voices rise up through the air, punctuated by occasional hoots of laughter.

“What happens to them?”

“Well, once a person’s organs are colonized . . .” I shake my head.

“But I thought there were promising new medications on the horizon!”

“‘Promising’ may be overstating it. Just between us, we don’t want people scared if they have symptoms.”

Ez stiffens. “People should be scared if they have symptoms?”

“No, I said we don’t want them to be scared.”

“Which implies they should be scared!” The conversation winds on like this for a while. It’s easy to frighten a hypochondriac once you understand that it’s just an adult version of monsters in the closet.

I study the booth as she describes her symptoms. Stationmaster Ez is separated from the world by two panes of glass; tokens are passed back and forth along a metal gully under the semicircular holes. To the left is a coat carousel, like a revolving door for coats. Patrons hang them on hooks and Ez spins the coats to her side. She slides a token across the gully for each coat, and then she hangs it up and rollers off lint. You’d never know it’s been her prison for three years. The curtain behind her probably hides where she sleeps and bathes.

Cut off even from touch! Otto only reserves this level of security for his most dangerous offenders; usually when he makes a force field prison, non-prisoners can pass in and out. That’s how it was when he had Packard imprisoned in the Mongolian Delites restaurant.

A new tune noodles up from below. “Muskrat Love.”

Ez lowers her voice. “Whenever he plays that, I want to shove an ice pick in my ear.”

“I bet.” I’d like nothing better than to discuss the insanity of that song, but I can’t let her get off subject. “Look, I could take your pulse and examine your skin tonus,” I say. “That would provide certain indicators.”

She points to the window. “Anti-burglar force field.”

I nod. So that’s how she explains it. Probably only the owner knows she lives here. Her eyes grow huge as I pass my hand through. I have to be touching a target to zing her.

“How’d you do that?”

I’m ready with my story: as a nurse, I have a descrambler that unknits fields just enough for me to pass through.

“I never heard of that!”

“What if you were having a heart attack? How would I treat you?” I don’t tell her the device is the chain bracelet I’m wearing; she might try to rip it right off. “Come on, let’s see.”

Cautiously she places her hand in mine and I pull it toward me, back across the gully, and pretend to inspect her skin as I stoke up the fear I’m going to zing her with. The abnormally large amount of fear I’m able to generate is the reason Packard drafted me into his psychological hit squad, and the reason he could teach me to dump it into other people just by touching them. Later, others from my squad will do the same thing to her, with different emotions. We’re like a demolition team of neurotics.

I focus on one of my triggers: the plastic hospital tray where you put your jewelry before an operation. I feel the panic thicken my throat, speed my pulse. The room goes bright.

I hate this job more every day. “Can I get one of those? A descrambler?”

“Medical professionals only. Let’s see the other one.” She extends her other hand toward mine. It occurs to me that this is probably the first time somebody has touched her in years. I feel like such a fiend.

“Can I just see the descrambler?” she asks. “I’d really like to just see it.”

“Sorry, I’m not supposed to show it around.” I concentrate on ripping the hole between our energy dimensions in the area beyond my fingers. The hole acts as a kind of siphon tube, allowing my dark, roiling emotions to rush out of me and into her. Out they flow, faster and faster. I try to maintain my composure, standing there inspecting her hand, but I feel this incredible levity as the heavy fear leaves my body, my mind, my entire being.

When it’s all gone, there’s only the sensation of wind inside my fingers, and exquisite calm. My shoulders drop. Everything’s new.

Ez’s face has gone ashen. “You see something! I know it. Shit!”

They never suspect my touch; they always think the fear is from the conversations. Which is exactly why we have the conversations.

“I have it, don’t I? The parasites are in me! They’ve colonized my body!”

Before I can answer, fingers dig into my shoulders and I’m jerked backward. My hand separates from hers, which is forced back inside the field.

I spin around. “Packard!”

He grabs my elbow and pulls me across the catwalk and down the wide, carpeted stairs, down into the sea of people.

“What are you doing?” I ask, nearly tripping down the last few steps.

He drags me into a corner below the coat check catwalk, where Ez can’t see us.

This sort of rough treatment would make me a lot angrier if I hadn’t just zinged out all my negative emotions. All the same, I shake him off, and I do my best to fix him with a good glare. “Don’t ever do that again,” I say.

His green eyes burn into mine. “Or what?”

I have nothing to say to that, unfortunately.

“You zinged her!” he says. “I told you to wait for me.”

“You were an hour late,” I say.

“What have you done?” Packard’s handsomeness doesn’t come from being pretty and finely sculpted; he has a more brutal handsomeness, with big rough-hewn features that look as if they were carved with caveman tools. Tonight, his shortish cinnamon curls are a bit wilder than usual. He glares at his hands, then at me.

I should probably be more concerned at this point, but after you zing out all your fear and darkness, life seems pretty great. Glory hour, we call it. Most people think happiness is about gaining something, but it’s not. It’s all about getting rid of the darkness you accumulate.

It’s here I notice spots of blood on his white shirtfront and cuffs. His fine black jacket is darker in spots, too. “Oh my God, what happened, Packard? Are you okay?”

“How long did you touch her?”

“Just enough to zing her.”

“How did you get through?”

“Otto made me a descrambler.” I hold up my arm with the bracelet. “What’s going on?”

“I’m the one to hand out the descramblers if and when people need them.”
“Well, Otto gave me one.”

“She’s a dream invader.”

“I know,” I say.

Packard frowns. His roguish allure appealed to me at one time, but that was before I realized he’d tricked me into being his minion for life.

I cross my arms and look away, struggling to maintain my usual grudge against him. Everything and everyone is way too enchanting during glory hour. And if a person was alluring to you before glory hour, their allure in creases a millionfold. Hell, even breathing is a wonderful, sensual experience during glory hour.

He says, “Once she touches you, she has you.”

“How was I supposed to zing her without touching her?”

Packard pulls a pair of long silver gloves from his pocket.

I take them. No wonder he wanted me to wear my silver dress. “They’re lovely.” I run a palm along the smooth cool silk. Everything is so wonderful during glory hour!

I look up to find him staring at me strangely. Packard is the most intense person I know. Even when he’s just stirring his coffee or adding up columns of numbers, he has this intensity to him. Like white-hot lava churns in- side him, 24/7.

“Let me put this in a way that even your glorying mind can understand. I touched you while you were touching an extremely dangerous dream invader. She’s probably linked to us both now.”

“Packard, why do you have blood on you?”

He stares at my shiny shoes. I grab his sleeve. “Packard. The blood. What happened?”

Silence. Then, in a whisper: “Rickie and Francis were shot.”

“No! Are they . . .”

“They’re both alive. Rickie needs a lot of surgery. Francis was just hit in the shoulder.”

“Shit!” Now I’m focused. Rickie’s a telekinetic Packard took under his wing; Francis is a regular human and Packard’s right-hand man.

“Three figures. Hooded gray sweatshirts,” he adds.

“The Dorks.”

He nods gravely. The trio of serial killers known as the Dorks has been terrorizing Midcity for two weeks. Five shootings and eight dead. Regular people think it’s random. It’s not.

Packard gives me the details of Rickie’s condition. It’s bad.

“So they shot Francis? They’re going after us humans, too?” Up until now, the Dorks have only targeted those with highcap powers.

“No. They were specifically targeting Rickie,” Packard explains. “It was only when Francis shot back that he became a target.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Even DNA testing can’t identify you guys.”

“Somehow the Dorks can tell,” Packard says grimly. “They see us. I don’t know how, but there’s no other explanation. Eight dead. Six injured. All highcaps except Francis.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I say.

“A highcap is a one-in-a-thousand mutation. You don’t get coincidences like that.”

“Could the Dorks have a list of you guys?”

“A few of the dead were so secretive, even the highcap community didn’t know they were highcap until after.” He bites his lip. “They can tell.”

It means they can tell Packard’s a highcap. And Otto, too. Otto would never have been elected mayor if people knew he was a highcap.

Midcity’s mainstream media rarely cover the local highcap phenomenon unless they’re making it into a Bigfoot or UFO type of infotainment feature. Nevertheless, a growing number of Midcitians suspect that high- caps are real, or at least they suspect it enough to fear and loathe them.

Packard pulls me closer to the wall as a squadron of fancy revelers squeezes past. “It gets worse. Before Rickie was shot a second time, she tried to send loose rocks and gravel at them, but as soon as her projectiles neared them, they dropped out of the air. As if the Dorks are shielded somehow, or possess a kind of counterpower. A personal dampening field . . .”

Across the room, the piano player starts up a rendition of “The Look of Love” and gathered people start singing along.

“Remember the precog who was killed last week?” Packard says. I’d thought that was strange, because if there’s anything a precog will pick up, it’s killers coming after him. Can the Dorks shield themselves even from a precog? Maybe operate in a slice of future a precog can’t pick up? And, obviously, the telepath they shot last week didn’t hear their thoughts. Everybody said they took her by surprise. You don’t take a telepath by surprise with something like that, I don’t care how much you’re skunking your thoughts. How do they see us, and make it so we can’t see or affect them?”

I suck in a breath. “Any leads?”

He shakes his head. The killers are called the Dorks because one of Otto’s decrees, in the week he took office as mayor, was that the city papers can’t give serial killers cool names anymore. The names are pre-chosen, like hurricane names, and kept in a vault to be selected randomly. Privately, Otto told me other D names include Doofus, Dolt, and Dickweed.

“You won’t need those gloves for Ez anymore. The damage is done. She’s in, and there’s no getting her out until she wants out.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you.”

Slowly Packard turns to me. “It’ll almost be worth it, just to see the look on Otto’s face when he finds out. You and me, conferenced into each other in dreams.”

“Why should Otto care? So she screws around in our dreams.”

“Dreams that she creates from our memories. She uses memories as her raw material.”

“So what?”

“Do you have any memories that you’d prefer not to revisit—with Ez and me along for the ride, experiencing everything from your point of view? Think of the experiences you’d most prefer to keep private. Those are the ones she’ll grab. Ez is like a collage artist, and the easiest memories for her to use are the ones with the highest emotional charge. The ones you work hardest to suppress. The ones you avoid, yet return to over and over. It’s those we’ll relive together. Along with what you felt and thought.”

It’s here I get nervous.

He looks into my eyes. “That is the one silver lining in all this. I’m thinking of certain moments at Mongolian Delites.” He places a finger on my throat, trails it down my chest. “The way you felt with me. The way anything was possible.”

I grab his finger. “Don’t.” He hasn’t touched me like that since last summer. The way I’m bending his finger has to hurt, but he doesn’t show it. Naturally.

I say, “How do you know it won’t be the playback of your most secret memories?”

“Because,” he says, “it won’t.” His hesitation tells me he’s not so sure. That he’s maybe even worried.

I let go. “As if it would even be that memory. A couple of stupid kisses.”

“That’s what you call it?” Packard laughs. “No, no, Otto’s not going to like this one bit, when he hears.”

“Can we get to the part where she’s actually a threat in some way?”

“With every dream, she increases her hold on you,” Packard says. “She gets deeper into your mental content and gains power, then starts you sleepwalking. Eventually she gets you committing crimes in your sleep. By the time Otto sealed her up, Ez had gangs of sleepwalkers rampaging on her behalf. Remember the Krini Militia three years back?”

“The cannibals? The ones who’d . . .”

“Break their victims’ arms and legs? Then tear into their stomachs with their teeth and eat them? Yes. Those.”

“I thought that was a Satanic cult.”

“That was the official explanation. Unofficially? They were sleepwalkers under the control of Stationmaster Ez up there. As her hold deepened, she’d merely plant suggestions during the day that she’d activate at night. She’d make them file their teeth to get them sharp, then go out and kill.”

“Shit.” I touch my tongue to my teeth.

“Poor devils would wake up in the morning with bloody faces, and think they were having nightmares, along with a tooth-grinding problem that involved bleeding gums. They had no idea they were roaming and cannibalizing as they slept.”

The pianist starts up a rendition of the Everly Brothers’ “Dream.” I can see from a quirk of Packard’s lips that he caught it. He gives me a look; he sees that I caught it, too. No discussion necessary. It’s amazing how unhealthily well we’ve gotten to read each other in the past year.

“Dentists helped Otto’s men break the case,” he adds.

“And now she’ll enter our heads through our dreams and command us?”

Packard tilts his head in the way he does that means yes.

“As we sleep?”

“With some influence while we’re awake, but not much,” he says.

“What are we going to do?” I’m coming out of glory hour hard.

“Disillusion her. Fast.” He heads over to the bar and I follow. He orders a bottle of ginger ale and hands it to me.

“Thanks.” I sip. It’s like cool velvet fire on my tongue.

“We have a while until she gains that level of control,” he tells me. “At first she’ll just construct dreams out of our charged memories.” He straightens. “The Station- master is officially fast tracked. After you get her fully obsessed with her mortality, Vesuvius will destroy her considerable pride in her accomplishments. Then Carter will crank up her rage and self-loathing.” He looks up at Ez; from where we stand, you can see her head and torso framed by the window. “The Stationmaster lives in a vicarious state, which makes her psyche fragile.”

He’s reading her psychology; I can tell by the trance- like tone of his voice. He can’t see thoughts, but with the power to read psychology, he sees what’s behind thought.

“She’s likely had few meaningful experiences of her own,” he continues. “She’ll feel as though she’s never really lived—especially now that she’s trapped in there. Highly intelligent, hates authority, easily annoyed by stupidity. Odd. The cannibal bit seems extreme for her psychological structure . . .” He trails off.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

He squints, still in his reading trance. “Hmm. When I read her the other day, her structure didn’t strike me as being aberrant. At the time, I thought it was the gestalt of the moment, but here it is again. Somebody who committed that level of crime usually looks more askew. I’m rarely wrong on reread . . .”

“Maybe she’s a sociopath.”

Packard shakes his head. “Sociopaths are full of gaps. Swiss cheese.” He pauses. “She never did confess. . . .”

“She didn’t? Wait, are you saying she could be innocent?”

Packard turns to me, startled out of his zone. He regrets what he just revealed; I can see it all over his face. “No. I’m not saying that at all.”

“I think you are. Shit! If she’s innocent, that changes everything.”

He clutches my shoulders. “In very little time, she’ll have total control over our sleeping minds and bodies. Is that really acceptable to you?”

“But what if—”

“Stop. I see patterns and weaknesses, not a person’s past. There can be numerous explanations for her seeming balance.”

“Go and read her some more.”

“No. Disillusionment is the only way besides death to force her to break the link. We have to put ourselves first.”

“Even if she’s not planning on doing anything awful?”

“That’s right.” He takes the half-finished bottle from me and drinks it down. Then he wipes his wet rosy lips with the back of his hand.

I cross my arms. “Here’s my plan. I’m going to get back up there and finish for today, but then I’m going to do some research and make sure she’s guilty. And if she’s innocent, I’m going to tell Otto to let her go.”

“You’re willing to lose even more autonomy?”

“I won’t wreck somebody’s life just to save my own ass.”

“I think you will,” Packard says. “You’re saving your own ass each and every time you zing somebody. Because you don’t want to be a Jarvis.”

I picture catatonic Jarvis in his La-Z-Boy, staring vacantly at the TV, a glistening line of drool descending from his bottom lip. Jarvis is like the disillusionist bogeyman for what happens when you break away from Packard and stop zinging—one of those things I wish I’d known up front.

“Finish her,” he growls.

“We’ll see.”

He scowls, then turns and walks off, long and lean and loose, leaving a wake of fascinated onlookers. It’s not his looks, or his outfit, or the blood on his shirt—which isn’t so obvious, really—that makes people stare. It’s his presence. People notice him. They feel him. They watch him, even from across the room.

I wander out into the crowd as he climbs the stairs. At the top, he turns and strolls, cool and lanky, down the catwalk, and past the coat check window. The exit sign at the far corner makes his cinnamon curls glow fire-engine red in the instant before he pulls open the door and disappears into the darkness.

I head for the stairs and climb slowly, hoping to hell that Ez really is guilty of the cannibal thing.

She has to be guilty. Otto would never imprison an innocent person; his standards of right and wrong are far too high, and mentally maintaining these force fields costs him too much.

Ez sits behind her window, staring at her hands, stricken by my terror. Packard used to say I have so much terror, he couldn’t believe I wasn’t in a straitjacket. That was one of the things that enchanted me last summer—that he alone admired how screwed up I was.

“Hey,” I say.

She looks up. “How could you leave me hanging? You saw something, I could tell. You saw indications with my skin tonus!”

I go through more concerned-nurse charades. We have another scary disease conversation.

Ironically, there’s a photo of Otto Sanchez on the wall behind her. It shows Otto standing tall and proud at his mayoral inauguration, his medals and finery gleaming, dusky curls falling carelessly around his big brown eyes. The inauguration photo was taken from a lowish angle, making Otto—already a strong, tall bull of a man—seem even more imposing. The whole city is crazy about Mayor Otto Sanchez, including me. But I’m the only one lucky enough to have a date with him tonight. Our fourth date since our hiatus for the election. Our “do-over,” we call it. I’ll ask him about Ez. Surely Otto can give me some sort of reassurance about her guilt. But what if he can’t?

Much as I hate to admit it, Packard’s right: I don’t want her to be able to control me in my sleep, even if it’s just to send me to the 7-Eleven at two a.m. for a carton of milk.

“Don’t you think it would be good if I had a force field descrambler?” she asks. “What if I suddenly need medical attention while I’m here at work, and the force field malfunctions or something and nobody can get in . . .”

“I can’t give it to you.”

“What does it look like?” she asks. “Do you keep it in your pocket?”

“I can’t reveal details about it.”

“I’m picturing you giving the descrambler to me. You walk up, carrying it in your hand with that same silver nail polish you have on now—which, by the way, is quite hot—and you slide it through to me. I’m picturing you standing right in front of this window and you so want me to have it, and pass it through . . . I can picture it so vividly . . .” She narrates the scenario in weirdly extreme detail.

Stifling a gasp, I pull my hand away. She’s planting the idea so she can work with it later. She’s attacking me psychologically—just what I do to people!