When Mom finally prompts us to leave the Factory, it's just before dawn. I step outside, hand-in-hand with Lucinda, reflecting on how wonderful it is to be out of that massive, horrendous building. It's funny, in a way—when I started out as a Dream Worker, I never thought it would be possible to grow to hate this place.

I guess I don't hate the building itself. All my hatred is concentrated on Dr. Grantley, who caused me this torture in the first place.

The three of us wait outside for a few minutes while Mom makes sure that Dr. Grantley is properly secured in one of the cells. When she finally comes out, her face looks both satisfied and troubled at the same time. "Well," she says, "he's finally locked up and guarded well. There will be no more trouble from him for now..."

I swallow, uncertain that assigning guards to look after the cell is a wise idea. "What if the guards are secretly still being loyal to that guy?" I ask.

To my surprise, Mom scoffs. "They wouldn't betray me, ever," she says as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Lucinda evidently shares my concern. "It might be better to take him back to my world, and lock him up there. He's too familiar with this place for comfort." I nod in silent agreement. He built this place himself—including the cells.

"That would probably be best, but it would be dangerous for him to just...go with you. Without anyone there for security."

The Oriel side of me would've laughed and suggested, why not just send some guards from here? But the Omar side of me—which I consider to be my dominant side since the incident—knows that it's out of the question in this scenario. I can move across realities now, but these guards can't.

They aren't real to that world, only to this one.

And that's the very thing that troubled me when I first met Lucinda—I couldn't be real to her. I just couldn't. But now, everything has changed. It had better never revert back to the way it was, because I want to be Lucinda's for the rest of my life.

Mom clears her throat, shattering my train of thought. "Can I talk to you for a minute?" She asks me. "Over there, on that bench?"

Agreeing, I follow her to the Factory garden while the two girls stay behind. From the look on Olivia's face, it's plain to see that she's already gotten over the trauma of the shooting enough to relay the story to her friend dramatically.

"I'm so glad you're okay," Mom begins. Her eyes are weary and glossy, but the tears are of joy.

"We're okay because of you." I smile, reaching out to wipe a tear from her cheek. "Hey, why did you even come? How did you know..."

"Dr. Grantley was my fiance, once."

"What?"

"I almost married him." She has a faraway look in her eyes. "He came here for the first time about three years before you were born. He had the adventurous look of a traveler—an explorer from head to toe, he was. I was the first person from this world he came across. I fell in love with his spirit, which was one of a true explorer, and it was mutual. He fell in love with my girlish, yet nerdy intelligence. We were engaged not more than a month later.

"One day shortly after our engagement, he sat down with me and told me his dreams. He worked for a huge interplanetary society on his planet at the time, but he wanted to do something bigger. He wanted to start a dream revolution, changing the way dreams worked on his earth. And so I helped him build and establish the Dream Factory. I knew all the controls like the back of my hand. The best part was that we were going to do this together. We were going to revolutionize the world—not only his, but mine, too."

I'm not sure how to take this information at first. "You mean, this awful, cruel man was almost my father?"

Mom gulped, and I hated the sound of it. "He is your father."

No.

"No! Mom, why didn't you tell me? Why—how could I be related to this—"

"Please let me finish my story, son," she begs. I raise a hand to cover my mouth, because it seems like the only way to keep my writhing emotions inside for the time being. "Let's move forward a little, to about a week or two before our scheduled wedding. We'd been engaged for maybe 4 months by then, and the Dream Factory was well underway. We were more eager than anything else in the world to try it out for the first time. In fact, as soon as the first branch of Dream Rooms was complete, we decided to try it out. So Dr. Grantley flies back to his reality, telling me he's going to "prepare" someone for dreaming."

From the tone of Mom's voice, I could detect that the "preparing" wasn't something good.

"It was a baby. And when it flickered into sight before us in that first Dream Room, it was magical for only a second. That's when I noticed: there was so much wrong with that." She sighs, taking a moment to rid herself of her quivering voice. "I soon found out that the man who I'd called my fiance had tortured the baby, injecting a great deal of a certain chemical into its bloodstream. Apparently, it transferred its dreams to the Factory. He was proud of himself, because anyone who touched the baby from then on would inherit the same chemical. It would unknowingly spread through his planet, giving him pretty much complete control over the world's population and their dreams.

"The torture wasn't the worst part, though. Turns out the baby was his son. Yes, he was already married in his own reality. Already had a happy family! When I found out, I ran, hoping to never find him again—and I took the child with me. You were that child, Omar. And he didn't even try to stop me. I wondered why, because I had his own son—"

"He didn't try to stop you, because he extracted half of me and brought me with him to his earth," I say quietly. "His wife would've never even noticed that a part of him was gone."

Mom looks shocked. Embarrassed, I remember she isn't yet aware of the fact that there was two of me this whole time. I take a moment to fill her in on the happenings of my lifetime.

"He cloned you." Her face rests in her hands once I'm done telling the story. "Just another horrible, inhumane deed to add to my list of why I never ended up marrying that man."

We sit in silence for a few minutes, each reflecting on the dump of information we've just received. There's no more room for words. I'm still utterly disgusted at the fact that Dr. Grantley is my dad. No wonder he decided to be my manager at the Factory. He didn't do it out of love for a long-lost son, either. No—he just wanted to admire the work of cloning performed many years earlier in his greedy hands.

Careful not to disturb my mother's thoughts, I drape my arm around her shoulders. There's no need to ask how—she got us out of an eternal sentence, and put the true criminal into it. Both sides of me are overwhelmed by one thought: what a heroine.

<><><><><>

A/N:

Wow, only one more chapter left!

As usual, pointing out any discontinuities or plot holes would be very helpful. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a small handful of them in this chapter alone.