Chapter 3

I woke up in a random lab at the university, sure I was having a hell of a nightmare. Panting, I realized I was laying on a not so comfortable gurney, wires coming out of my forearms, hooking me to a computer next to the bed. I was in pain and everything in my body hurted. It scared me when I heard noises coming from other computers, just like mine, and I quickly got myself up to check on the other people there. I could make the shattering pain in my muscles vanish away later.

Moaning for every joint hurting inside my body, I got up taking deep breaths and looked around. Almost everybody that had participated in my dream was there, sleeping. The screens of their computers showed an error message named “Station woke up. Rebooting the system in 30 seconds.”

In front of my metal bed, there was a computer with three big screens. The middle one was constantly repeating the last ten seconds of the dream in fullscreen — me, turning back from a woman’s body to my original one, summoning my Light and blacking out everything. The left screen was some sort of software with a code trying to recharge, but the bar displayed “Error 507. Rebooting the system in 23 seconds.” The right one had a bunch of squares with our names and heartbeats. At the bottom corner it had a date “December 22nd, 2020”.

I flinched my eyes back to the one with the code and realized it was written on C. The optional classes I took back in the first year were paying off, at last. I read the first block of the code and it held identification of the project: “The Fuck Club, by Ethan Andrich and Carl Greene”. It was the virtual reality game they were working on as a final project for them to graduate in Computer Science.

Well, I gotta give it to them. With a little help from my magic they managed to accomplish it and fuck everything up along the process. My brown hardcover notebook of spells was tossed on the chair in front of the computer with post-its coming out of its border top. The screen beeped, indicating it would reboot the system in 5 seconds, but I clicked to cancel it. God no!

I opened my notebook on the first post-it mark; it led me directly to the rune I researched to temporarily channel a portion of my power into another person. It was a drawing of one square linked by the bottom left corner to a circle. The second pagemark was in the page containing steps to perform the Reality Spell, of course. I didn’t even pull it off myself and these crazy motherfuckers got it to work on their first try? They weren’t even powerful. I closed it and made it disappear in thin air. It wasn’t even supposed to be here. The last time I used it, I locked it inside my vault in New York.

I turned back to my friends sleeping in their gurneys. Mine and its computer had the number “7”. Carl, Jeff, Ethan, Jim, Chris and Leon, in this order, were still sound asleep hooked on. I reached for my brothers, first Chris and then Leon, unhooking the wires and checking their actual vitals with two of my fingers at the side of their necks. Their bodies were alive, for what I could tell. I was afraid to get inside their minds and discover that their brains were damaged by the magic. Believe me when I say I didn't know how to control all of my powers.

When Chris woke up coughing like he was drowning at the beach, I helped him to sit up while he screamed my name between his deep breaths. He was hyperventilating and I had to do something fast to stop it. I held his face with both my hands and made him turn to look at me.

“Chris! That’s me. You’re ok. That’s me - Michael, your brother. Everything's alright!” His pupils got smaller as he concentrated his gaze on my face, taking down his breathing to a normal pace. “There you go! I’m here. I’m your brother.”

He reached my hands and rashly took them off his face, like I was burning him with something.

“What the hell?!” He was startled and checking out every corner inside the lab. “I thought that—”

He got interrupted by Leon, at his left, waking up coughing and panting like he did seconds ago. I circled Chris’ bed and got to my older brother. He didn’t wake up screaming for me, but the hyperventilation thing was about to happen again.

“Leon, breathe calmly! Easy, easy!” I said, holding his face. “Look at me! You’re ok! You’re with me now. Remember me?” I smiled at him when his pupils fixated on my face.

He leaned forward and started to cry, hugging me. My reaction was just to pat his back and brush my hand up and down. We don’t get to see our straight older brother crying too much since ever.

“It’s ok now.” I reassured him.

“I thought I would never see both of you again.” He said on my shoulder.

“What are you talking about, Leon? We’re here.” I said.

He regained his composure and leaned back on his bed.

“Michael, when I got here like two hours ago and saw you all in the coffins, I—” He held his tears. “I checked the code, Michael. Carl was trying to either forever live under this or kill everybody if it didn’t work.”

“What are you talking about?! I remember him showing up in my dorm with some beers and inviting me to check his final project.” I recalled the past Thursday evening. I didn’t even know how many days we were under. “We came down here, I drank at least half of my beer on the way and I think it made me… lightheaded.”

“He did the same to me. He lured me here saying you had to talk to me about something serious.” Chris admitted, behind me.

I noticed his voice was a little weird and that maybe he had to fill up a gap, but it was all still fresh for me to think straight.

“Why didn’t you shut the whole thing off?” I asked Leon.

“I got scared it would lead everybody into an induced coma.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Michael.”

“No, that’s not your fault. Once again, you’re saving the ass of your two young brothers.” I held his right shoulder and squeezed it. “It was a smart decision.”

“Oh, fuck!” He laughed, looking at the ceiling, red eyes from crying. “I thought I was going to kill myself trying to go under with you, guys.”

“That’s why you didn’t show up until class started in the dream? How did you find us here?” I asked him.

“Thursday I tried to text you to meet me at the bar, but you didn’t answer. You never fail to answer your snaps so I tried tracking your phone, but both of your locations were blocked to me. I tried going to an Apple Store, but they said they would release information just for the cops. Since I know you both could be messing with something out of this world, I took a plane back to New York that night, invaded dad’s law firm, in the middle of the Friday dawn, and broke into your iCloud. Flight back and find you all here.” He finished explaining his mission to locate us.

“Why won’t you accept my rune? It all could be easily over on day one!” I complained to him.

Even though he liked to travel around using me and Chris to open him a portal, Leon never wanted to mess with our magic. I could make him the sexiest-most-powerful-straight-motherfucker alive, but he didn’t want it. He lowered his gaze, thinking about what I said and I instantly felt bad at myself. As much as my powers had given, they had taken from me. Leon watched it all happen closely since I was eighteen years old and awakened them. I knew he never wanted to be like me and I couldn’t him to.