by Kit Alloway
“No.”
He couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t say the words. If he told them that Ian’s soul was corrupted, Winsor would blame Josh. So would Josh. Deloise would be horrified that she couldn’t do anything to help. Whim would try to lighten the mood and end up offending everyone.
Better just to lie.
Twenty−six
Josh was so happy to see Haley that she was reluctant to let him out of her sight. When he went to the bathroom, she had to stop herself from asking Whim to supervise, just to make sure Haley didn’t go poof!
Even after everyone else had gone back to their lives, Josh couldn’t bring herself to leave the guys’ apartment. She watched TV with Whim and Mirren and Will while Haley took a shower and changed into clean clothes, and she convinced—or rather, made an offhand suggestion to—Whim to order pizza, just as an excuse to keep hanging around.
“You look like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders,” Will told her.
“I feel like it,” Josh admitted. “I didn’t know how scared I was that we wouldn’t get him back until I saw him.”
“I feel the same way,” Mirren said. “Like I didn’t realize I was holding my breath for three months.”
At that moment, Haley emerged from his bedroom in a pair of jeans, a worn T-shirt, and a red-and-purple cardigan. “Pizza!” he said happily.
“Eat up, man,” Whim said. “I ordered mushroom and green olive just for you.”
Haley sat down in the recliner next to Mirren and gave her temple a kiss before digging into his pizza.
“So, what did you eat while you were there?” Whim asked.
Haley swallowed. “I didn’t. No eating, no drinking, none of that.”
“You went three months without eating?” Whim’s face was a mask of horror.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to come back if I did, like Persephone. But I didn’t really get hungry or thirsty. And time moves differently there, so it only felt like five days.”
“So you feel like you saw us last week,” Will said.
“Yeah. It’s kinda weird. When I left it was summer, and now it’s fall. Kerstel had the baby. Everybody’s hair is longer.”
“I need to cut mine,” Josh said.
“I like it long,” Will told her, and she couldn’t hold his eyes.
It would have been so easy to fall into his arms then. With Haley home, she felt like everything would be okay, like she could trust that Peregrine would turn up, and Feodor would go willingly back to Death, and she could take a chance on love and not get hurt.
Feeling brave, she scooted closer to Will. “Put your arm around me.”
He smiled and did as she asked, and the pressure of his arm felt good, like the weight of a heavy, protective coat.
“That’s what I like to see,” Whim said. “See? Now that Haley’s home, everything can go back to normal.”
They hung out for a couple of hours, and then Whim got distracted and wandered off, taking the last of the pizza with him. Josh noticed Haley’s eyes following him until the bedroom door closed.
“I need to tell you something, Josh,” Haley said.
Ian, Josh thought. It has to be about Ian.
She didn’t know how Haley could have entered Death and not seen him. Where else could Ian be?
She was caught completely off guard when Haley said, “I saw your grandmother.”
Josh blinked. “Grandma?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she—okay?”
He smiled. “Yeah. She’s an angel now. And she sent you a message.”
“Whoa,” Will said.
Josh could hardly believe what she was hearing. For months after her grandmother’s death, Josh had longed to speak to her, to apologize, to explain. She’d never thought to give her message to Haley.
“What did she say?”
“We didn’t have much time. I asked her about you being the True Dream Walker. She said to tell you, ‘You’ll find the answers where the three universes overlap.’”
Somehow, Josh had expected the message to be I forgive you. Or at least I love you.
“I don’t know what that means. That’s all she said?”
Haley nodded.
“It sounds like she was talking about the Cradle,” Mirren said.
Josh told Haley, briefly, about the vision of the Cradle she’d had. As she spoke, Haley began to nod, and as she continued, the nodding became faster and more emphatic. “Did you already know all this?” Josh asked.
“No,” he said. “But it … explains a lot about you. About … the way I see you.”
When Josh stared at him, he added, “You’re all purple and silvery.”
Well, that clears it up.
Aloud, she said, “But if Grandma meant for me to go to the Cradle, that’s a problem, because I don’t know how to get there, except to be almost dead,” Josh said.
“Maybe you have to wait until the next time you almost die to figure out what she meant,” Will suggested, and he didn’t sound pleased.
“No,” Haley said. “That doesn’t … feel right. It has to be somewhere more … literal. A place Dustine could have gone when she was alive.”
“The cabin?” Josh suggested. “I don’t know how the three universes would overlap there, though.”
Haley was shaking his head. “It feels like … less like a place than a thing.”
A thing. Something Dustine had touched.
Dustine made that quilt … No, I’m sure she made it.
Josh’s head snapped up. “The quilt!” she cried, and ran into Will’s room. The others followed.
On the wall opposite Will’s bed, in a large frame behind protective glass, hung the lap quilt Dustine had given Will. It displayed the three universes as overlapping circles full of spirits and nightmares and angels.
A single triangle of peacock-green fabric represented the place where the three universes overlapped.
“Help me get this down,” Josh said, and she and Mirren lifted the framed quilt from Will’s bedroom wall and set it facedown on his bed. Haley followed Josh’s lead and helped her bend back the metal tabs that kept the frame in place so they could remove the quilt.
“Um, let’s be careful with that, okay?” Will said nervously. “Because I really like it.”
With the quilt facedown, Josh carefully pressed it with her fingertips. The fabric was old, the threads too supple and loose, and Josh was reluctant to ball it up in her fist. Looking at it now, she was more certain than ever that she was right. “I think we need to cut into it.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Will said. “I’m not cool with that.”
Mirren, who had never seen the quilt before, came closer to examine it. “If you’re right, what we’re looking for should be right behind this green patch. It’s appliqued on, so if we’re careful not to damage the fabric, it could be sewn back in place afterward. Katia’s a wonder with a needle.”
Josh was sold, but she left the final decision to Will. “It’s your quilt, so it’s your call.”
“You’re sure there’s something there?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I’m sure. But I could be wrong.”
He let out a long breath. “Okay. But let’s damage it as little as possible.”
They borrowed a pair of Deloise’s cuticle scissors that had small, very sharp blades. Haley held Will’s desk lamp close to the quilt so that Mirren could painstakingly pick the golden threads out one by one. The process took nearly ten minutes, but when she was finished, the green fabric came away unharmed.
And revealed pages of onion paper hidden behind the quilt top.
Josh cursed. Mirren set the quilt down on the desk and very carefully slid the pages out. After unfolding them, she glanced at the top page and then held the packet out. “They’re addressed to you, Josh.”
The onion paper was yellow and semitranslucent. Dustine had folded the pages once lengthwise, making them just narrow enough to slide into
the quilt.
Josh read the letter aloud.
Dear Joshlyn,
There’s no way for me to anticipate the circumstances that might have led you to discover this letter. I left as many clues as I could, but it’s impossible for me to know, so many years in advance, when or why you might need this information, or even what relationship you and I will have.
As I write this, you are only a year old, but already you are showing signs of exceptional ability. You can do forward and backward rolls, you can play catch with a soft ball, and yesterday you slid down the stairs on your belly. (Your father had a fit.) Though you don’t talk much, your hearing is exceptional, and you always know who is in a room with you and where. I have never seen a child so alert, so aware of what is happening around her.
Your baby sister is nothing like you. She smiles and coos and giggles and makes complete strangers smile back at her, but at six months old she’s still learning to sit up on her own. You took your first steps at her age.
But the most telling thing is how you will stand for hours at a time in front of the archway, watching nightmares as they pass. I have to keep one hand on the looking stone and use the other to hold the waist of your pants, because if I let go for one moment, I have no doubt you would rush right in. You get so excited, watching the nightmares. You stomp your feet and clap your hands, and point to things and shout. You never seem afraid.
By the time you read this, you might be fifteen or thirty or even fifty. If enough years have passed, I have no doubt that you will have started to wonder about your own uniqueness. This letter is my way of telling you.
It would take too long to explain everything, so I’ll start by saying this: Your mother and I, and a good friend of mine whose name I will not write, came to a place in life where we began to fear for the future of the World. The Cold War is over, but its dangers are not. After WWII, humanity swore that we would never again allow genocide, but fifty years later we have already forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust. First Pol Pot in Cambodia, marching entire cities into concentration camps to starve. Then a million killed in Rwanda in three months, men slaughtering their neighbors with machetes in church. Now a year later—just one year—all the television shows is seven thousand Muslim boys lying in mass graves in Bosnia.
Do you understand, Josh? Will they still bother to teach history in schools when you are ready to learn? By then, World War II may be just a footnote at the end of a chapter relating far worse horrors.
We thought, after ’45, that we had learned something. That our collective memory of so many deaths—the Jews in the camps, the Russians in the snow, the American boys on French beaches—would be enough. We had finally had enough of violence. But we hadn’t. Five years after the war ended, Truman sent boys to fight in Korea. Then the lunacy of Vietnam, and whatever the hell we did in Kuwait. It just goes on and on.
What I have learned is this: We cannot count on humanity to save itself. We will all die waiting.
My breaking point was Peregrine’s coup. (I almost wrote “your grandfather.” But by now you probably know the truth. Count that among your blessings.) What he did to the Rousellarios—and what he finally admitted to doing to me for decades—ruined my last hope for this world. If his obsession with staging destroys dream walking, he will upend the balance of the three universes, and I cannot risk that.
I knew a man, some years ago, whose heart died in Poland during the war. Maybe you will find his name, if you search long enough through the records of the dream walkers. He was so haunted by what he saw that he tried to end the World, and although he has been gone for many years, I find myself thinking of him more and more often, and wondering if he was somehow right that we need help if we want to become what we could be.
This is where you come in. Your mother has had a difficult life, which is as much my fault as Peregrine’s. I should have taken her out of his house when she was still small, before he could damage her the way he did. She understands what he is capable of better than anyone. Except me, I suppose. Jona and I, and a dear friend, began to wonder what we could do, how we could lead the World toward peace and at the same time create a countermeasure to Peregrine’s evil. We came to a single idea; that idea was you.
On the pages enclosed, you will find a record of the things we did, before you were conceived, and after. Though they may seem cold, cruel even, keep in mind that we did them for love, and for the hope that you will make your World better than we made ours.
With Love,
Dustine
The rest of the pages were shaking so hard in Josh’s hand she could barely read them. Awkwardly, she pressed them flat against the carpet and tried to make sense of the diagrams and formulae.
The first thing she saw were lines written in Dustine’s practiced loops and a scrawl Josh recognized as her own mother’s. A third hand she didn’t recognize, but she didn’t have to guess to whom it belonged; Dustine and Jona could only have gotten this information from Alice, and Alice could only have gotten it from Feodor’s papers.
She really didn’t burn them, Josh thought with despair.
She traced the formulae with one finger as she read them, tapped the diagrams as she parsed them out. The longer she read, the more hollow she felt.
They modified my aura. They differentiated my harmonics. They changed me.
“Is this all I am?” she asked. “Just another one of Feodor’s science experiments? No wonder I can’t control the Dream. I’m not the True Dream Walker—I’m not anything!”
Will set the note down and put his arm around Josh. “That’s not what this means.”
“It means I’m no different from Snitch and Gloves.”
“Feodor told you that all those prophesies said something would bring about your arrival.”
“Yeah,” Josh said bitterly. “Mom and Grandma playing God. No wonder Alice looked at me like I was Frankenstein’s monster.”
Haley picked up the note again, and Josh watched him run his hands over the pages without reading them. “Nothing comes from nothing,” he said softly. “We all came from somewhere. Your somewhere is just different from ours.”
“My somewhere is literally a copper bathtub they bombarded with magnetic rays and ionized Veil dust.”
“No,” Haley said. “That’s just the how, not the where.”
“They didn’t have the right to do this to me,” Josh told him, but with less fire.
He smiled at her. When had his smile grown so serene?
“There’s a lot I didn’t tell you about Death,” he said.
Josh didn’t especially want to hear about Death right then, but she knew Haley was getting at something, so she shrugged and let him talk.
“When we die, we leave our bodies, but our souls carry who we were—our minds, our identities—with us to Death. We spend our time there letting go of who we were. I watched people release pain and anger, trauma and fear, release all the distractions of their lives. They came to understand the ways in which their experiences have brought their souls closer to perfection, and then they let go of those experiences. They only took the lessons and the joy with them.”
“Where did they go?” Will asked.
“Back to the Dream. It’s all possibility there. They picked up whatever they needed for their next life, whatever they were ready to learn next, and then they were reborn.”
“They were reincarnated,” Josh said.
“Of course. All the souls cycling through are trying to grow. They go around and around, and each time they cycle through, they vibrate a little higher, they find it a little easier.”
“Easier to what?” Will asked.
“To remember. We remember and forget, and remember and forget that we are part of one another.” He hesitated, then touched the back of Josh’s hand. “Except you.”
Maybe if Josh hadn’t seen the cycle of reincarnation for herself while she was holding the Omphalos, she wouldn’t have believed him. But she remembered the individual
paths of light each soul had followed, and how her line had come from nowhere.
“I’m not part of the cycle,” she said.
“This is your first incarnation,” Haley agreed. “You came from here.”
He held out the triangle of green fabric Mirren had cut from the quilt.
“What does that mean?” Will asked.
“Is that bad?” Josh asked.
“No,” Haley said. “It’s a miracle.”
“That’s what Mom and Grandma did? They, I don’t know, summoned me from the Cradle?”
Haley thought, and Josh wished his thoughts showed more on his face. Will squeezed her shoulder as they waited, and she let herself lean against him.
“The three universes weren’t always separate,” Haley said finally. “We…” He frowned, the way he used to do all the time when he couldn’t find the words. “We used to go through all the cycles in just one place. We were all one—all the energy, not just the people and the animals, but everything. And then…”
“The Big Bang?” Will asked.
Haley nodded again.
“But why?” Josh asked.
“We had … we had evolved as far as we could in that form. The same way we die when we’ve evolved as much as we can in this life, we had to die from that form. So the Big Bang separated the three universes, and we began to cycle. But one place was left the way it had been, and that’s the Cradle. The Omphalos is … the last piece of what was before. And you’re part of that.”
“Why?” Josh asked again.
“Because Jona and Dustine prayed for something new. They said that they had given up hope for humanity, but really they were recognizing that we are stagnating. This form, like our form before the Big Bang, has taught us almost everything it can. What Dustine and Jona wanted was to move us to the next form, although they didn’t realize it.”
“And that new form is supposed to be me?” Josh asked.
“No. You’re just the catalyst for the change.”
Josh felt like a tiger, pacing in a cage. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“You don’t have to.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! Am I just supposed to go about my life, hoping that someday I’ll have a flash of—”
