by Kit Alloway
“Do you think I can fix it?” she asked Deloise.
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It matters to me.”
Deloise smiled then. “I think you can do anything. But maybe all girls think that of their big sisters.”
Josh smiled back at her, but Will could see the anxiety in her eyes.
They walked on, Josh pulling electrodes from her hair as they went. As they reached the top edge above a small valley, they met twenty olive-skinned men in short tunics, all of whom fell into formation with spears pointed at their guests.
“Who goes here?” demanded one wearing a helmet with a crest of short red horse hair.
The Lords of Death had asked Josh and Will the same thing, and Will felt the same trepidation about answering.
“Travelers,” Josh said.
“Are you here to worship the emperor or challenge him?”
“Worship,” Will said. “Definitely worship. Please take us to him.”
“Then we bid you good welcome,” the leader of the soldiers replied, and he performed something that looked alarmingly like a Nazi salute. “Come. The emperor is always glad to see new worshippers.”
The soldiers righted their spears, turned in unison, and began marching along the path. With a shrug, Josh followed them, and everyone else fell in behind them.
“I’m wearing a vest covered in throwing knives,” she said to Will in a low voice, “and they don’t even care.”
“There’s something weird about these guys,” Will told her.
“They’re probably brainwashed,” Whim said behind them, and Josh shushed him. They didn’t need the soldiers getting offended.
They marched for an hour and then arrived at a flight of stone steps cut into the mountainside. The steps, Will noticed, appeared well-worn, the edges dangerously rounded in some places.
Either these weren’t carved recently, or Peregrine imagined them old when he staged them.
Halfway up what turned out to be a very long trek, Will glanced over his shoulder to see how Katia was doing. The girl had been mostly quiet—astonishingly quiet, actually. Apparently fear was the one thing that could shut her up.
Katia met Will’s eyes for a brief moment, her face a hard mask of determination, then focused on the steps again. He couldn’t say why, but something in Katia’s expression unnerved him. It was so serious …
They kept walking.
“Not long now,” the lead soldier said twenty minutes later. “The hardest part is behind us.”
“Josh,” Will whispered, when the soldier had turned around and started up the stairs again. “The soldiers aren’t sweating.”
“Are you sure?”
He wiped sweat from his own brow. “I’m sure. They aren’t even breathing hard.”
Josh wasn’t breathing hard, but she was sweating. Her group had begun to lag behind the soldiers, who climbed on indefatigably.
Finally, the stairs trailed off into a small grassy hill, and Will stopped short on the far side of the arch, stunned by the view.
In Phil’s satellite photos, what Peregrine had created looked like dotted rooftops of sheds or perhaps cottages, but here, so close, it looked like what it was: a city built on a plateau, complete with homes, temples, marketplaces, and an arena. On the outskirts were orchards and fields of crops, and above the structures, running down the mountain at a slight angle, was an aqueduct.
“It did not look this big in the satellite photos,” Whim said.
“Maybe it wasn’t this big,” Josh said. “Maybe he’s been building onto it.”
The lead soldier beckoned them forward. “Come, come.”
“What’s the name of this city?” Deloise asked him.
“Peregrineum, in honor of Emperor Peregrine.”
“I knew Peregrine was an egomaniac,” Will whispered to Josh, “but this is outrageous.”
He fell back to walk beside Haley as they traveled down a well-paved road toward the city. “What do you make of the soldiers?”
“They don’t have auras.”
“That doesn’t sound good. Did Peregrine suck their souls out?”
Haley shook his head. “I think they’re part of this dream.”
“What do you mean?” Josh asked.
“I think Peregrine staged them into being, just like everything else here.”
Will didn’t say it, but he grew increasingly worried as they entered the city. Peregrineum wasn’t just a set or a sketch of a city; it contained hundreds, possibly thousands of people. They might not have auras, but Will was betting their spears were real enough.
No museum, no amusement park, no play had ever been so detailed. From the city dwellers haggling over prices in the market to the cats darting down the streets, everything was complete. The scent of lavender wafted from the bathhouse. A peasant fiddled for spare change.
There was some evidence, though, that not all of the people were figments of Peregrine’s imagination. Will noticed a woman wearing a sports bra under her toga, and a messenger ran past in a pair of Nikes.
“Now that’s irony,” Whim whispered.
“What?” Deloise whispered back.
“A citizen of an ancient Roman city running by in a shoe from a brand named after a Greek goddess.”
Will couldn’t bring himself to laugh. They didn’t have the manpower to take on an entire city.
“Some of these people are real,” Haley said. He pointed out a few.
“What about that one?” Will whispered, gesturing with his chin toward a man in a blue toga who was partially hidden behind a garden gate.
His eyes were narrowed, and he was staring at Will out of the corner of his eye, as if he disliked Will on sight.
“Not real,” Haley said.
The man turned to whisper to someone hidden behind the corner of a building. There was something sly about him.
“You’re sure?” Will asked.
Haley nodded.
At the very center of the city stood the palace, looming over every other building. In front of it sat a fountain in which a marble visage of a chiseled man rode a dolphin among waves, a trident in his hand. The exterior of the palace was all columns and cornices; when they went inside, the interior was all frescoes and marble.
“It’s beautiful!” Deloise said.
The walls were intricately painted, the ceilings were studded with gemstones. In the center of the palace was an open-air courtyard dominated by an enormous golden throne set on a block of marble the size of a golf cart.
The man sitting on the throne was Snitch.
Will barely recognized him without his raincoat and gas mask and empty black eyes. Now his eyes were blue, and his coloring had lost its unhealthy whiteness from years spent in a universe where it was always raining.
“It’s Peregrine,” Haley said. “I can tell by his aura.”
Somehow that was harder to remember when Will was looking at Snitch’s face.
“My lord,” the soldier with the horse-hair helmet tried to say, but Peregrine saw them and sprang out of his throne screaming.
“You!” He pointed at Josh. “No! No! I already got rid of you once today! Who let you back in here?”
“Um,” Josh said. She glanced at Will, who shrugged. “We actually just got here,” she said. “The soldiers led us here.”
“You can’t fool me! I’m not stupid! It’s Dustine, that bitch—she’s plotting against me, but she won’t get away with it. I’m the emperor! Bow down before me!”
Despite Snitch’s face, the screaming left no doubt in Will’s mind that they were talking to Peregrine. He paced back and forth on his marble block, spit flying from his mouth.
“You think you can turn my citizens against me? I know what you’re plotting, you and the Praetorian Guard!”
“We aren’t plotting anything!” Whim yelled. “We just got here!”
“What are you doing here?” Peregrine shouted at him. “I barely even know you!”
“We came to talk,” Josh said. “What you’re doing here is causing the Veil to collapse.”
“Lies!” Peregrine screamed. “You can’t defeat me, so you lie to me, to your god, your living god!”
“Um, Josh,” Will said. “I don’t think talking is going to work.”
“Every day you come here seeking to undermine me, deceive me, confuse me, but I stay STRONG! No one can defeat the living god!”
“Yeah,” Whim said. “He’s off his rocker.”
“He thinks we come here every day?” Deloise asked.
“He thinks Josh does,” Will said. “Maybe he’s been hallucinating her—”
“Back to the arena!” Peregrine screamed.
Will’s vision blurred, then misted, and he felt a momentary vertigo. When his eyes cleared, he found himself standing on the floor of the Colosseum. Around a dirt oval thirty yards across rose tiers of stands, and they were all full of cheering, jeering spectators.
Will turned around, and his friends were behind him. Apparently Peregrine had teleported them all into the center of the arena.
“Did he just teleport us here?” Whim asked. “Nobody said anything about him being able to teleport.”
“Peregrine can control the Dream because he’s in Snitch’s body,” Josh said. “But if this part of the Dream and the World have merged—” She stopped, like she didn’t want to say the words. “He might be able to control everything now.”
“No,” Deloise said softly. “That can’t be what’s happening.”
“I don’t have another explanation,” Josh told her.
In his peripheral vision, Will noticed Katia watching Josh with an expression of … admiration? For a girl who’d been too terrified to speak all day, she certainly didn’t look frightened now.
“But what did he mean about already sending you away today?” Deloise asked.
Josh shook her head. “I don’t know. And I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
Katia laughed a weird, wry chuckle. “Of course you do.”
“What?” Will asked.
“Think about it,” Katia said, and there was something oddly condescending in her voice. “Where are we? What did people do here?”
Katia’s tone was all wrong. She didn’t sound like herself, but someone older, and jaded. Whim, though, played along, saying, “We’re in the Colosseum, we’re … gladiators! Oh my God, we’re gladiators!” He grabbed Josh by the shoulders. “I don’t want to be a gladiator, Josh! I saw that movie—it didn’t end well!”
“Calm down, Whim!” Deloise said. “We aren’t gladiators.”
“Then what are we doing here?” Whim cried, but the end of his question was drowned by a tsunami of cheers arising from the crowd.
A group of men in togas using four poles to hold up a sunshade entered the stands. Beneath the sunshade walked Snitch—no, Peregrine, waving to the crowd. A scantily clad, top-heavy woman cooled him with a fan of feathers. He was smiling a twisted, satisfied smile.
We are in very deep trouble, Will thought.
Peregrine sat down in a cloth-covered chair. Another buxom woman fed him a grape. He lifted his hand and the crowd quieted. “Let the games begin!”
Thirty−seven
“Oh, God,” Whim was muttering. “Oh, God.”
“Weapons out,” Josh said. “Stay calm. Remember your training.”
They dumped their backpacks on the ground and retrieved weapons. Josh pulled her machete out of its back holster. Will had a hatchet. Whim held a Taser in one hand and can of pepper spray in the other.
“What, are you walking home alone in the dark?” Will asked him.
“Shut up,” Whim said tightly.
They gave Katia one of the spare weapons, a hammer, the claw end of which had been sharpened into vampire fangs. Haley held a hunting knife in either hand. And Deloise …
“Where the hell did that come from?” Whim asked.
Deloise swung the mace—a ten-pound spiked iron ball attached to a two-foot-long club. “I found it in the basement.”
Josh wanted to ask if Deloise knew how to use that thing without killing herself, but she was more concerned about Katia who, as far as Josh knew, had never been in so much as a slap fight. Before she could inquire about either situation, the doors at each end of the arena floor opened. Out of the dark maw beyond, Josh saw a flicker of movement, a flash of light on fur. Something tall.
“Stay together,” she ordered. “Watch your backs and each other’s backs. Try not to panic.”
Even as she spoke, she wondered if she was instructing the others or herself. It’s just another nightmare, she thought, but in truth, she was as afraid as she’d been since she’d entered Feodor’s universe. This wasn’t just a nightmare, because a nightmare was a subconscious manifestation of fear. This was a creation specifically designed to kill them all.
“Everyone watch out for Katia, too,” she added, but her sentence trailed off as kangaroos bounded into the arena.
Josh had never seen a kangaroo in person; still, she was pretty sure this wasn’t what they normally looked like. Each stood eight, nine feet tall. Beneath their bloodred coats, thick knots of muscle rippled. Fangs, curved like the claws of sloths, hung over their chins, and when they jumped, Josh guessed they cleared fifteen feet.
And they were fast. They bounded toward their dinner at what must have been forty, fifty miles an hour.
Whim began cursing. “What are they?” Katia asked.
“You’ve never seen a kangaroo?” Josh asked, distracted by her own confusion.
“They’re what?” Katia asked.
“They’re blood-sucking, flesh-eating, steroid-popping kangaroos!” Whim shouted, his voice tinged with panic.
“Calm down, Whim,” Deloise said. “Remember the time we fought the yeti? That was way worse than this.”
“Yeah, but there was just one of those.”
Josh holstered her machete and pulled three knives from her vest. Each was about seven inches long including the handles, the blades sharpened on either edge like swords. She had three kangaroos coming from each end of the arena, and as soon as they were in range, she began throwing.
The first knife missed entirely. Josh could hit a moving target, but she’d never hit a bouncing target. The second she got in the chest, right between the kangaroo’s bodybuilder arms. It didn’t miss a beat. The third knife slipped as it left her fingers, and it was only by luck that it caught one of the kangaroos in the shin, which slowed it down but didn’t hobble it.
“Katia, Haley, Del, take those three. Whim, Will, with me. Don’t let them surround us!”
As the kangaroos grew nearer, speeding up at the scent of their prey, Josh ran out to meet them.
As much as she wanted to look over her shoulder and make sure everyone was following her lead, she kept her eyes trained on the kangaroo closest to her. I trust my people, she told herself.
Except Katia, who shouldn’t even be here.
Then the kangaroo was so close she could smell it, a strange odor like dung and curry. She ran straight into its arms, plunging her machete into its chest just below where her throwing knife had hit. The kangaroo embraced her with its iron arms and pulled her tightly against its chest, digging its claws into the backs of her shoulders. Josh lost her grip on the machete, and the handle caught her in the chest just below her breastbone. But as the kangaroo pulled her closer, the pressure on her sternum forced the machete deeper into the kangaroo’s own body. Josh felt the rib she’d broken pop painfully, and she scrabbled at her vest to pull another knife free.
Then the kangaroo bit her. The pain struck in two places—a crushing sensation on top of her collarbone where its upper teeth landed, and a stabbing sensation four inches below where its lower teeth tore into her. Josh shouted, her face buried in the animal’s chest. The machete handle was jammed so hard in her cartilage that she thought it would impale her if the kangaroo hugged her any tighter. She couldn’t breathe.
&nbs
p; Shit, she thought. Shit. I have to—
Despite the pain in her shoulder when she moved her arm, she managed to wrench a throwing knife free, cutting the vest as she did so. From far away, she heard an animal screaming and the crowd cheering hysterically. The chest against hers felt like stone with a layer of dirty fur stretched over it.
She stabbed the kangaroo’s side as high as she could. The jaws around her shoulder tightened, and something inside her tore, but it only made her angry. She dragged the knife downward; it felt like trying to cut through leather with a paring knife. Damage, she thought. I have to inflict maximum damage.
She kept dragging, and the kangaroo released her shoulder to scream in a guttural, almost human voice. Josh took the opportunity to twist sideways, allowing the handle of the machete to slip out of the hollow beneath her breastbone, a blessed relief. She threw her weight behind the knife in her right hand and wiggled it up and down, forcing the blade in deeper. Getting stabbed was one thing, but the real damage came when the blade was removed. As long as a knife was in place, it acted as a temporary seal against the cuts it made, but once it was pulled out, the open wounds were free to bleed. With that in mind, Josh yanked at the machete handle, working it up and down like the end of a seesaw. Inside, beyond the pivot point of the animal’s muscles, she knew it was cutting through internal organs.
The kangaroo vomited blood all over her.
I’m getting kangaroo blood in my shoulder wound, Josh thought, and that upset her more than the physical pain.
Suddenly the kangaroo jumped vertically. It couldn’t keep its hold on Josh, but its claws tore up her shoulder blades as it lost its hold on her. Josh managed to keep her grip on the machete long enough for the blade to slice through eight inches of chest flesh, stopping when it reached the top of the kangaroo’s pouch, and then she was fumbling to catch the knife by the handle as she fell to the ground on her back.
She landed so hard that the rushing in her ears stopped for an instant, leaving her in complete silence and darkness. Then she opened her eyes and the screaming of the crowd, the grunts and gasps of her friends, and the snarling of the kangaroos thundered back to her.
