The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League by Thurston Bassett

the wall of the canyon, where the skin had a pale green tinge.
    He was sure he was in right place; it had a sour sort of smell, or the feeling that something wasn’t right, like the door to the mind was bruised.
    He walked into it as if there was nothing there and passed straight through. There was a slight tingling across his skin, and then he stood in the ruins of a collapsed building.
    Every mind was different, but most were little more than walkways with a shimmer of imagery, memory perhaps, then Athan would be standing outside in the real world.
    They were channels.
    It was the minds of the unconscious that were the most spectacular. Athan thought that it was because their conscious selves were inside remaking it, using the elements gathered by their external means of perception to build and destroy their internal landscape.
    This one was typical of the comatose mind in its appearance. It was a horrible dusty scene of destruction, probably from a traumatic experience in the owner’s life, or a manifestation of their fears.
    Now he just had to find the owner of the mind and help him get out, which was not easy.
    However, the subconscious would always leave clues; a trail of bread crumbs from the owner’s life, important objects that only he would recognize only.
    He climbed to a small vantage point among some steel where he could take in the scene.
    There was a dog.
    A Rottweiler that looked under-fed and a little mangy, maybe a little larger than natural. It was fussing over some sheets of corrugated iron stacked against a section of wall, a perfect hiding place for someone who was being chased.
    He didn’t want to charge in without a weapon of some kind, like a length of pipe. It probably wouldn’t hurt the dog, but he had to free Mr Li.
     
    He took a deep breath before gingerly climbing down to face the hound with a length of pipe.
    Athan didn’t know all the rules for these individual mind spaces, and he hadn’t had to fight anything in the subconscious either.
    He was going to learn something new this time.
    The dog didn’t move a muscle.
    It was frozen now that Athan had short-circuited the scenario. He couldn’t tell if it was about to launch itself at him at killer speed, or if it would just fade away.
    “Help me!” came a voice from behind the sheets of iron.
    A young voice.
    “Get out of it! Git you ugly bastard!” Athan called to the dog, secretly hoping that it would actually listen. But the dog responded the way a physical dog would, it began a low guttural growl and bared its teeth.
    “Awesome,” Athan said softly “I have to fight a giant dog”.
    The Rottweiler lowered its head and began to slowly pad over to where Athan stood.
    He readied the iron post to make a kind of impaling defence if the dog jumped at him.
    He had seen it in movies where the lion or something would leap through the air and land on the spear or staff or whatever the poor huntsman had ready. This dog was not doing any kind of leaping; it stalked over carefully, constantly growling.
    At last it made its move.
    It thrust forward with a gravelly bark and open jaws straight at his mid section. Athan responded quickly and brought up one end of his iron post to fend off the assault. The post cracked against the beast’s skull, and made a resounding clang and the dog yelped.
    There was some blood dripping into the dust and gravel: the swing must have been enough to actually hurt the thing. The massive dog began to skulk away along some kind of path through the ruin.
     
    The sheets of iron were stacked in a haphazard way that had formed a kind of cubby house.
    Athan pulled away a sheet that served as the door and inside he saw it was lined with wooden palings and planks so that it almost looked cosy.
    In the corner farthest from the door was young David Li, and next to him was a large shoebox that the boy was protecting.
    He was a half Chinese eight year old in a pale blue shirt and a pair of jeans and sneakers. Around the