Max and Liz would sleep next to each other, taking the first turn on the bed. Maria and Michael would share a blanket on the floor, though Liz could see that things were strained between them. At least, she could see the strain on Maria's face. Michael, on the other hand, seemed unusually relaxed. That meant that Kyle and Isabel would be next to each other. Kyle looked uncomfortable, but Isabel seemed oblivious. Well, there was a little room. They wouldn't be on top of each other.
The way things looked for the near future, Liz figured they had all better get used to being close together.
Back in Roswell, she had dreamed about the day after she and Max had left home and they could spend the night together without worrying about parents. Well, she was get- ting her wish, but none of those dreams included four other people in the room. And Liz found that, at the moment, Max was not the most important thing on her mind.
By now, everyone was sitting in his or her respective sleeping area. Liz stood up and said, "I want to talk to you all about something.”
The room immediately fell silent. Everyone was looking at her. From the look in Max's eyes, Liz knew that he already knew what this was about and he was not pleased.
Max didn't wait for her to go on. "Liz, we all feel for Jimmy, but this is a police matter. We can't get involved, not right now," he insisted.
"Max, in case you weren't paying attention, the police are among the missing," Liz replied.
"Liz, we just can't. We're less than five hundred miles from Roswell. We can't do anything to call attention to ourselves," Max said. He paused and said seriously, "I'm sorry, Liz, but I can't allow it.”
Liz felt the blood rising to her face. "I'm not asking your permission." She saw the surprise on Max's face. And hurt, too. Liz hated to see him look like that, but this was too important. "As you said, you aren't making all the decisions for this group," Liz said. She softened her tone. "I'm not talking about sending up a huge alien-flare to the Special Unit, but maybe we can help… find something out and place a call to the state police. That's it," she said.
"It makes me uncomfortable," Max said.
"Everything makes you uncomfortable," Isabel chimed in, surprising Liz. She had barely spoken since they'd left Roswell. "If we never wanted to make you uncomfortable, we wouldn't have left the house since we climbed out of our pods," she added.
Smiles broke out in the room at that. To Liz's surprise, one of them on was on Max's face.
"There's something else," Liz said. "I know for a fact that if we don't do something, Jimmy's sister Jessica is going to die.”
"Did you have a…," Max asked.
"I saw it when I touched him. I saw him at her funeral. I also saw her…”
She tried to describe the room that wasn't a room and the screams, but she knew they wouldn't understand unless they saw that place, heard those screams, and felt the menace that she had felt. "Whoever has her is very dangerous," she said simply.
Michael was the first to speak. "I'm in," he said. That once might have surprised her, but less than two days ago Michael had been the one to insist they help the air force pilot's daughter she had believed was still alive and the victim of a government conspiracy.
"I don't like bullies," Kyle said. "I'm in.”
"I'll help," Isabel said.
Liz looked at Maria, who shrugged and said, "What? You already have a majority. Okay, I'll help. My grand waitressing powers are at your disposal.”
Liz looked at Max last.
"That's the problem with democracy, not everybody gets what they want," he said, a tight smile on his lips. "Okay, I'm in. What's your plan?" he asked.
When she didn't respond, he prodded questioningly: "You do have a plan?”
"Well, I assumed we would come up with something together," Liz explained.
It was true; she had been so focused on convincing the group that she hadn't thought about the next step. Reach- ing into her pocket, she pulled out one of Jimmy's flyers. She had taken it from the diner as a reminder. Now she thought of a more practical use for it. "Isabel?" she said, holding out the flyer with the picture of Jessica on it.
"I'll do it," Isabel said. "But it's a long shot. Since I don't know her, she'll have to be asleep for it to even have a chance of working. And she'll have to be dreaming some- thing useful about her surroundings, something that will tell us about where she is or who has taken her.”
Liz nodded. "A long shot it is. We know what will hap- pen if we do nothing.”
Isabel tried to clear her mind. She found that most of the usual petty thoughts and distractions weren't there. They had been replaced by a single thought, by a single pain.
Jesse.
Leaving him had pushed aside a lot of things. Cleared out the cobwebs. Now, he seemed to have taken up resi- dence in her brain as well as her stomach as a large, heavy ball. By force of will, she loosened the knot and was relieved when it began to disappear. Flashes of her pain reared up from time to time. She let them come and then bubble away.
When her mind was finally clear enough, she opened her eyes and focused on the picture. She saw a girl of some- where between sixteen and eighteen years old. She was pretty, and the picture looked posed, like a school picture.
Jessica was smiling. Isabel concentrated on that smile.
Images of Jesse and other feelings that were surpris- ingly strong rose up. The knot started to form in her stom- ach again. Isabel didn't fight it. Instead, she concentrated harder on the picture, the smile.
Jessica.
Then Isabel began to feel the girl.
There was no better word to explain what dreamwalk- ing was like. She simply concentrated until she was able to feel people. The closest analogy she could make was the feeling she had about people that lingered after she had dreamed about them when she slept herself. Dreamwalk- ing was like that feeling, but instead of dissipating as she woke up, it grew stronger and stronger until she was with them in their dream.
With certain people, the feeling lingered long after the dreamwalk. She still had flashes of Max from the time that she had dreamwalked him while he was in the Special Unit's White Room. He had been so scared and vulnerable. She had felt it all; she had also felt him more clearly than she ever had before while they were growing up.
Then there was Alex. Isabel had dreamwalked him a number of times. At first it was just to find out if he was a threat to their secret, but even then the dreamwalks had left her feeling closer to him, connected to him in a way that she had had no words for at the time.
Eventually she was able to give that closeness a name. For a very short time around the night of the dance when she and Alex had held each other and she had called the closeness by its proper name… in her head if not to him.
Then Alex was dead.
Oddly enough, thinking of Alex did not distract Isabel. It focused her concentration and her energy. It had hap- pened before, and she liked to think that he was somehow helping her. Isabel began to feel Jessica more keenly, though the girl remained just out of sight, as if she was dancing on the edge of Isabel's peripheral vision. There was a cloud between them. Isabel had no trouble giving that cloud a name. It was fear. Wherever she was, Jessica was very afraid, even while she was sleeping.
Isabel concentrated again and suddenly found herself in a bedroom. Looking at the decorations on the wall, she realized it was a little girl's bedroom. On the bed she saw a dark-haired girl of perhaps nine or ten sleeping fitfully.
It was Jessica, Isabel realized. And she was dreaming about her herself as a little girl, sleeping in her room. The room felt very familiar to Isabel, but she knew that was only because it was familiar to Jessica. There was some- thing else, too, a sense of deja vu, as if Jessica had not only been here before, but had had this dream before.