by Kit Alloway
Mirren wrapped her hand around Haley’s. “Feodor will need your help. And Katia’s, unfortunately. I’ll need you to look after … her.”
Haley didn’t know what the strange pause before “her” had meant, but of course he would keep an eye out for Mirren’s cousin.
“I don’t want to go,” he admitted. “I just got back.”
“And I just got you back. But duty calls.”
Duty. It all came down to duty for Mirren, and he wondered if that made this easier for her. Haley didn’t have a duty, just a feeling that he couldn’t explain and a sick fear in his gut.
She went to her jewelry box and removed a brooch—a silver-wrought star tetrahedron set in a circle of fire opals, one missing. “Do you remember this?”
He nodded again. Her family had sent it to her to prove a note was from them. It was part of the Rousellario royal jewels.
“Take it,” Mirren said.
“I can’t…”
“Take it,” she repeated, and she closed his hand around it. “If I don’t get it back, I’ll already have lost something far more precious.”
* * *
Haley drove Mirren and Katia to a big box store, then a hardware store, then a new age shop that he and Mirren had visited once before, on the way out to Iph National Forest. Mirren bought magnets, tape, copper wire, a soldering iron, mirrors, crystals, two inflatable kiddie pools, and petroleum jelly. As he watched, a knot of worry formed in Haley’s stomach. He knew the sorts of things Feodor did with such items.
The expression on Feodor’s face when he saw Haley was almost worth everything, having spent five days in Death.
“Hi, Feodor,” Haley said, like they saw each other every day.
“How are you here?” Feodor asked, unable to hide his surprise.
Haley shrugged. Feodor’s confusion felt very satisfying.
Mirren and Katia followed Haley into the chair factory, carrying large shopping bags. Mirren set them down before going to deactivate the security system, the code to which Josh had given her before leaving town.
“Is this where you live?” Katia asked. “This place is awesome.”
“Yes,” Feodor said hastily.
Haley sat on the edge of one of the tables and looked Feodor over. His aura was no longer the crazed mishmash of zigzagging colors it had been when they first met. It still swirled with dark eddies, but all his chakras were back in their proper locations, and the colors were steadier, brighter.
“You look good,” Haley told him.
Feodor gave him a withering look. “Please take off your shoes and socks, Katia.”
“Why?” she asked.
“You did not tell her?” Feodor asked Mirren.
“It’s your plan,” Mirren said. “You convince her.”
Feodor sighed. “We’re wasting time.”
Mirren didn’t bat an eyelash.
“Very well. Josh has already discovered where Peregrine is hiding. She’ll leave tomorrow to go after him, probably with her gaggle of friends. But she’s already proven that she lacks the will to kill Peregrine. Consequently, the task falls to me. I doubt she’ll allow me to accompany her, so I’ll need to follow her to his location, then strike. But I need a way to get close to Peregrine without him realizing I’m a threat, and I need to strike before Josh realizes what I’m going to do.”
It was at that moment that Haley realized what Feodor was proposing, and why Mirren had brought Katia with them.
No, Haley thought. No …
“You need an invisibility cloak,” Katia said, obliviously friendly.
Feodor nodded. “Exactly.”
Thirty−five
Josh planned to go after Peregrine the next day, but in the morning, before she had even started packing, she called the chair factory and got no answer.
Feodor always answers, she thought. She hung up and tried again, hoping she’d misdialed the number.
No answer.
Cursing, she grabbed Will and dragged him to the car.
“Maybe he’s sleeping,” Will said. “Like I was ten minutes ago.”
“He always answers the phone. Always.”
Will yawned. “Can we stop for coffee?”
“After.”
She drove at breakneck speed to the chair factory. No one noticed—there were stranger things on the streets these days than a twitchy driver.
“Feodor?” she called as she unlocked the door. “Feodor?”
“Hey, Feodor, wake up!” Will called.
No answer.
Josh felt short of breath as she typed her code into the security system. Afterward, she checked the small bathroom while Will ran up the stairs to the bedroom loft.
They had both walked right past the note Feodor had left in plain sight on the table nearest to the door, which Josh noticed when she ran out of the bathroom in a panic. On a sheet of white printer paper, in Feodor’s elaborate scrawl, was a single word:
Apologies.
Beneath the word, in a small puddle of blood that had soaked into the paper and caused it to wrinkle, sat the microchip he’d dug out of his shoulder.
* * *
This isn’t happening, Josh thought, as Will coaxed her into her car. I thought I was being so careful. Now he’s on the loose … He could be anywhere.
Doing anything.
All they’d found was a blood-soaked washcloth in the bathroom and a freshly cleaned paring knife in the dish drainer.
Apologies, she thought. What are your apologies worth, Feodor? Nothing. Just like your soul. I was so stupid not to realize you’d use all the chaos to slip away. I was stupid to think you’d want to help save the World.
She felt embarrassed then, ashamed of having let him trick her, even more ashamed of having had such high hopes for his ability to change. She’d wanted to believe that he was redeemable.
“You talked to him yesterday, didn’t you?” Will asked as he got behind the wheel. “How long ago could he have left? Should we drive around the block?”
Josh laughed grimly. She could just picture Feodor, walking down the street, the back of his shirt drenched in blood.
“I guess we can try,” Will said.
“No,” Josh told him. “He isn’t stupid. He didn’t go on foot.”
“But he doesn’t have a car. Does he even have money for a cab?”
He had all the money he needed and more.
It doesn’t matter, Josh thought. He’s gone.
She didn’t have the time or the manpower to look for Feodor. Peregrine was still her first priority.
“How did he dig that chip out?” Will wondered aloud. “It was in the back of his shoulder. Did he have help? I mean, that’s a hard place to reach. But I don’t know who would have helped him.”
“Will,” Josh said. “Don’t bother … It doesn’t matter. He’s gone.”
Wherever Feodor had gone, he was the World’s problem now.
* * *
Josh and Will were in the basement, packing weapons, when Haley brought Katia downstairs.
“She wants to come along,” he said.
“That’s not a good idea,” Josh said.
“I’m coming,” Katia told her, walking down the stairs. “I’m young and healthy. I can fight nightmares.”
“That’s not the criteria.”
Katia stood awkwardly for a moment, thinking. Then she put up her fists. “Try to hit me,” she told Will. “I’m fast.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” Josh said. “It isn’t about being fast or fit.”
“Then what are—what’s it about?”
Josh zipped up the backpack she’d been filling. “It’s about being part of a team I can rely on, whose actions I can anticipate, who I don’t have to worry about.”
Katia thought some more. Josh wondered why Haley had brought her down here, if it was a favor he was doing for Mirren, and whether or not he’d promised her a particular outcome. If so, which outcome had he promised?
Josh sighed. She didn’t have the energy to fight. “I feel for you, but you can’t come.”
Katia opened her mouth to argue, but stopped when she noticed that Haley was already walking back up the stairs. With a frustrated huff, she followed him.
Haley knew there was no point in arguing with Josh.
Thirty−six
They drove all night, keeping to country roads whenever possible. The hope was that they would encounter fewer nightmares in less populated areas, but the Veil had torn in so many places that avoidance was impossible. Will could tell that Josh was itching to get out of the van and go back to closing tears, but she got out only once—to stop an ogre from eating children.
About an hour later, as the sun was beginning to come up, Whim reached under his seat in the last row and began screaming.
“Pull over! Weapons out! Josh, kill it! Kill it!”
“It’s only me,” Katia said, sticking her head out from under the seat.
Deloise pulled over, and they extricated Katia from beneath the seat.
“How did you get under there?” Will asked, although truthfully, what he wanted to know was how Katia had managed to refrain from talking for eight hours and if she could be made to do so again.
“I snuck in while you guys were packing the van.”
“The hell you did,” Josh said. She was glaring at Haley. “I assume you did this as some sort of favor to Mirren.”
Haley shrugged.
“Well, it’s done now. But if Katia gets killed, you’re the one who gets to explain it to her family.”
Haley nodded and got back in the van. Whim took over the driving and they got back on the road, but Will’s mind kept coming back to what Josh had said: Some sort of favor to Mirren.
Why would Mirren have wanted Katia to come along with them? Knowing that Katia had no nightmare fighting training to speak of, wouldn’t she have wanted to keep Katia home?
Finally, they passed through the dumpy, backwoods town of Scleron. The trailer from which Peregrine had been e-mailing Trembuline was abandoned, although it appeared that people had been camping out on the ground around it. On a piece of plywood nailed to a tree, someone had spray painted an arrow and the words TO PEREGRINEUM.
Josh went into the trailer and returned with a box of papers. “Feodor’s?” Will asked, and she nodded.
“We should burn them before we go,” she said, and they spent half an hour sitting around one of the fire pits dug into the ground, feeding Feodor’s notes into the flames and eating sandwiches Whim had packed. Will wondered if it would be the last meal he ever ate; he didn’t even like pastrami that much.
“All right, back to the van,” Josh said.
The road ended at the trailer, but a trail had been blazed into the forest that grew over the mountain. It was wider than a single car, but Will saw no tire tracks, which made him think it had been created by the trampling of feet.
“He must have an army,” Will told Josh.
She gave him a small, tight nod.
They followed the trail up into the mountains. More than once, all but Whim had to get out so they could get the van up a steep incline. Finally, though, they arrived at an impasse where Peregrine’s people must have climbed over a rocky outcropping.
“We’ll go on foot from here,” Josh said.
“Let’s turn the van around first,” Whim said, “in case we need to make a fast getaway.”
“I like your thinking,” Josh told him.
Afterward, with the van parked toward Scleron and the parking brake supported by logs wedged under the tires, everyone pulled on their packs and began hiking. The packs had been Deloise’s idea; they contained food, water, medical supplies, gas masks, and weapons.
They’d hiked approximately half a mile when they spotted a wall of Veil dust ahead. The forest was too thick to allow sunlight to reach the ground, but the tear illuminated the trees and plants with silver light.
“Masks on,” Josh said, and this time Will didn’t mind the smell of plastic.
“Is it a tear?” Whim asked.
“I think it’s more than that,” Josh said.
The closer they got, the more Will understood what she had meant. The wall seemed to have no end and no beginning—it stretched as far as Will could see in every direction. Although it was hard to tell through the canopy of trees, it looked like it was taller than the forest.
About ten feet from the wall of Veil dust, they stopped to debate, their voices muffled through the gas masks. “Should we go through?” Whim asked.
“Is it safe?” Deloise wanted to know. “Won’t we end up inside the Dream?”
“I don’t know,” Josh said. Through the curtain of shimmering white-and-silver dust, Will saw what he thought were tree trunks.
“If Peregrine went through here,” Whim said, “he has to be in the Dream now. We won’t be able to find him there.”
“I’ll go through and look,” Will offered.
Everyone seemed surprised, even Katia, who had been so freaked out she’d barely spoken the entire drive.
“I’ll go,” Josh said.
“No,” Will told her. “They can’t afford to lose you. Let me go.”
He couldn’t see the expression on her face, but she reached out to tighten the straps on his gas mask. “Be careful,” she said.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed it before turning to the wall of Veil dust. As he took his first step into the wall, he felt the Veil dust slip through the weave of his clothing and twinkle all over his body—a cool, dry, dressed shower. He took another step, and another, until he was completely enclosed in the wall, and he held tight to the straps of his backpack.
His assumption that the wall was only a foot or two thick had been completely off. Without moving his feet and risking changing direction, he turned to look as far in each direction as he could. His breaths began to echo in his mask, and the sound of his panic only made it worse.
He was surrounded on all sides by fairy dust.
Keep going straight, he told himself. He checked his feet to make certain he was following a perfect line and forced them forward, counting the steps.
One, two, three. I’m okay. I am safe in this moment. Four, five, six. In this moment, nothing is trying to hurt me. Seven, eight, nine. My gas mask is protecting me. Ten, eleven—
His face broke through the wall. He sprang forward and clear of the Veil dust, and found himself in a forest that looked very much like the one from which he had just come. He actually hugged the nearest tree.
It’s just a wall of Veil dust, he thought. All they have to do is walk through.
He yanked off his pack, dug around, and pulled out a length of thin rope and a bottle of vitaminwater. After tying one end of the rope around the vitaminwater bottle, he lobbed the thing as hard as he could through the wall. He thought he heard someone shout. A moment later, the rope went taut. Will stood back a bit from the Veil dust and began to draw the rope toward him, trying not to go too quickly. In less than a minute, his friends had emerged from the wall.
All of them were covered in fairy dust. They looked like the survivors of a sparkle-apocalypse. “In the immortal words of Pete Venkman,” Whim said, “‘I feel so funky.’”
“Everybody okay?” Josh asked. After the affirmative replies came back, she put her hand on Will’s shoulder. “That was smart, with the rope. If one of us had accidentally gone sideways, we could have been lost in there for a while.”
“So are we in the Dream now?” Deloise asked.
“It looks like the same forest,” Will told her. “Except…”
He pointed to an animal he had noticed while waiting for everyone to emerge from the wall. It was a boar, and it was sitting on its butt in the brush, staring at them.
“He’s been here the whole time,” Will said. �
��He just keeps watching me. And his eyes…”
“They move like human eyes,” Katia said, as the boar’s eyes flicked toward them. “He’s waiting to see what we’ll do.”
“So we’ve entered a creepy Dream universe of animals with human intelligence?” Whim asked.
“I don’t think so,” Josh said. “I think we’re in the part of the World that has completely merged with the Dream.”
“Try the VHAG,” Katia suggested, surprising Will with her practicality.
“Once we’re farther away from the wall. I can’t take my gas mask off here.”
“Whatever this is,” Will said, “it’s expanding. If you watch the bottom of the wall long enough, you’ll see that it’s moving away from us.”
“That makes sense,” Josh said. “The place where the Dream and the World overlap is getting bigger as the Veil fails.”
The trail they had been walking still existed on this side, so they began to follow it. The forest looked the same at first glance, but when Will looked closely, he saw unmistakable signs that he was in the Dream. Once a tree moaned when Deloise stepped on its root. A creek they crossed was flowing up the mountain instead of down. The boar continued to follow them at a distance, and Will thought he caught the creature smiling when Whim cracked a joke.
When they were a good quarter of a mile from the wall, they stopped to rest and let Josh try her VHAG. After less than a minute, she shut the machine down.
“I can’t get out of my body,” she said. “I should have realized before that it wouldn’t work here. Usually my soul jumps out of my body so it can play in the Dream, but with the Dream and World merged, there’s no reason for it to leave.”
“Unfortunate,” Katia said. She was frowning in a way that Will had never seen before, the corners of her mouth tucked in.
“You can fix this, can’t you, Josh?” Deloise asked, and for once she sounded younger than her older sister.
Will turned to watch Josh answer.
He saw everything he’d ever seen in her eyes then. The awkward, uncertain girl he’d met on the night after her seventeenth birthday; the assertive, brilliant dream walker; the partner who had kissed him until he couldn’t breathe. Even Feodor’s shadow was there in her pale eyes.
