by Kit Alloway
Then he saw another figure move, and he realized Katia was going for the Omphalos. She actually jumped over Will as she ran, and he was relieved that Katia was closer to the pillar than either Ian or Peregrine.
Haley slammed into Ian like a linebacker, their faces so similar and yet so different. Ian released an enraged scream, and he bit into Haley’s neck, tearing out the flesh in a single terrible chomp.
Blood sprayed so far that Will felt it settle like a fine dust over his face. Horrified, Josh hesitated just a step, perhaps tempted to go to Haley, and that was all the time Katia needed to take the lead.
She snatched the Omphalos off its pillar.
Time stopped. Quite literally—for a moment, Will felt himself freeze just the way he had when Bash had found him in the Dream. His lungs stopped breathing, his heart stopped beating, every neurotransmitter in the brain stopped firing.
And then release.
Deloise tackled Peregrine. She didn’t take him down, but he had to stop running to try to get her off his back. He scowled when he saw that Katia had the Omphalos.
Ian hit his unconscious brother in face, and Whim went to stop him.
Josh skidded to a stop a few feet from Katia. “Nice work,” she said, panting.
Katia laughed at her.
All day, Will had sensed that something was off about Katia, but it wasn’t until that moment that he realized what it was. Her quietness, her odd forms of speech, the strange expressions on her face—she wasn’t Katia at all.
She gave a shake of her head, and her body changed as though she were shaking off a dress. From beneath emerged a pale man with white-blond hair wearing pleated slacks and a white button-down shirt. And he was holding the Omphalos.
“No,” Josh whispered.
“Tak,” Feodor said, and he looked at her with what Will thought must be his true face, a hateful, jeering, ugly face.
Feodor laughed at them. He laughed when Peregrine shouted at him, and then Peregrine was standing in a glass cell, so soundproof that not even the beating of his fists on the sides could be heard beyond it. Ian threw Whim off and tried to rush Feodor, and an instant later, he was stuck in a cell of his own.
A few feet away, Haley was bleeding to death just like Josh had, and it occurred to Will that he might not come back if Feodor didn’t want him to.
“Feodor,” Josh said. She was holding her hands up, plaintively, and she spoke softly.
“Be still,” Feodor said. “I’m not your prisoner anymore.”
“You were never my prisoner. We worked together, remember?”
“Of course. That’s why you microchipped me like a dog. Because we’re colleagues.”
“Feodor, please don’t do this,” Deloise said. “Remember all those times I took you to the grocery store? We were nice to each other. You were nice to me.”
Feodor laughed. “Stupid American children. You worship freedom but what you really want is to tell everyone else how to live.”
“I don’t,” Will said, getting up from the ground. He brushed his shirt off.
Feodor looked at him spitefully.
“I’m not going to pretend to be your friend, and I’m not going to bow down before you,” Will said.
“I am not Peregrine,” Feodor snapped. “I’m not so stupid and power-besotted that I would believe your pledges of loyalty.”
“I’m not going to make one. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you. I don’t like how much time you spend with my girlfriend, and I hate it when you talk to her in Polish.”
Feodor laughed again. “Shall I applaud your honesty?”
“I don’t expect you to applaud me at all. I actually don’t need the illusion of your approval. I think you’re a psycho, you think I’m an ant, and that’s fine by me.”
Feodor said nothing, but he tilted his head ever so slightly, and Will could tell he had confused the man.
“So, with the understanding that neither of us likes the other, let’s just talk for a minute.” Will leaned back against the block of marble that supported Peregrine’s throne, deliberately moving away from Feodor.
“What do you think of this place?” Will asked. “This Peregrineum?”
Feodor again said nothing.
“I think it’s fascinating. I mean, it tells you more about Peregrine than any psychological test I’ve ever heard of. A hundred hours of therapy wouldn’t reveal this much about his mental state. Obviously, he’s an egomaniac, and a phenomenal narcissist, but we knew that already, didn’t we? The fact that his father was an abusive asshole is no surprise either. I could have guessed that much. I’m not even that surprised that he’s incapable of controlling Jaco. Subconsciously, he believes he’s unable to. But what I think is most interesting is the people who live here with him.”
Every few seconds, Feodor glanced around to make sure no one was moving toward him. Will didn’t worry about that. He didn’t expect to distract Feodor, and the only person who moved was Dustine, who went to sit beside Haley’s still form.
“I don’t know if you overheard, but as we were walking into the city, Haley told me that most of the people here aren’t real. He said they don’t have any auras. They’re the ones without anachronisms, the ones who aren’t wearing watches or glasses or brightly colored boxers, like that guy.” He pointed at one of the dozen guards assembled in each corner of the courtyard. This particular guard’s orange boxers were visible through the white linen of his toga.
“See, that guy looks like a soldier, right? His chin is raised high—he’s proud to serve the emperor. Aren’t you, sir?”
The soldier said nothing until Feodor said, “You may speak.”
“Serving Emperor Peregrine is the greatest honor of my life!” the guard shouted. “If I could move more than my lips, I would be tearing your throat out, traitor!”
“I think he means you,” Will told Feodor.
“I gathered,” Feodor said dryly. “Is there a point to this blathering?”
“See the guard next to him, the one who looks like a Roman soldier from head to toe? I saw another soldier pass him a note. Why don’t you ask to read it?”
Feodor hesitated, then scowled and said, “Bring it here.” The soldier delivered the note to him and then returned to his post.
“What’s it say?” Will asked.
“‘Tonight at dusk in the hallway outside the scriptorium.’”
Perfect, Will thought, and he let out a secret breath of relief.
Feodor frowned. “What is the meaning of this? Tell me the truth.”
“Two other soldiers and I were planning to assassinate the emperor tonight at dusk,” the soldier admitted.
“Why?” Whim said. “I thought you loved him.”
“The emperor is a murderer and a tyrant. Thank you for imprisoning him.”
Feodor ignored the compliment and looked back at Will, and for the first time, he appeared uncertain. “Why?” he asked simply.
Will shrugged. “You know Peregrine better than I do. Would you say he’s a deeply paranoid personality who’s always worrying that people are secretly plotting against him?” He let the question hang in the air for a moment, even though he didn’t expect Feodor to answer. “I think he’s incapable to creating a world where the things he believes are no longer true. I doubt he even consciously realizes what he’s doing. But eventually, the people he created would have risen up and killed him, because that’s what he expects.”
Will dared to glance at Josh, who was trying not to smile. She couldn’t help beaming at him, though.
Will looked back at Feodor before he broke into a smile. “And see, my concern here is that if you hang onto the Omphalos, whatever you create will turn out the same way. Not that you’ll accidentally create a mutiny—no, I think it will probably be another world war. That’s what you ended up doing the last time you had complete control over a universe, right? You could have created a nice little apartment for yourself, imagined Alice to come keep you company, spent your
days reading and writing and doing your experiments. But instead, you recreated the Warsaw ghetto and lived there. For sixty years.”
Feodor was staring at Will with an intensity that made them both tremble. Will forced himself to go on, knowing that he was playing with something far worse than fire.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why you did that?” he asked. “Why you stayed there? Why you made it so hard for yourself? It’s not your fault. It’s something we all do, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We all think that if we only had control, everything would be fine, but there are parts of our minds we can’t control. We create the same problems for ourselves over and over because we create what we expect. We walk into the same situations thinking that we’ll be able to change the outcome, that this time will be different. You’re probably telling yourself right now that you’re not the same man you were when we met, that your mind is healthy, that you’re in a different place now. I’m sure Peregrine thought the same thing when he created Peregrineum.”
“You think you know me—” Feodor began, and Will interrupted.
“I do know you. I spent months researching you. But you don’t have to trust me. Trust the one person who literally knows you as well as you know yourself.”
He looked at Josh, and Feodor followed his gaze.
Her almost-smile was gone. Nor did she look hopeful, or smug, or even anxious. She looked like Will had just asked her to do something very, very hard.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s hard for me to tell your memories and mine apart. It’s like there’s a piece of me that’s yours now, and I don’t even realize it’s not mine. I can’t tell us apart. The worst part is, I know you too well to hate you. I know exactly why you became who you are and why you did what you did, and I can’t hold any of it against you because I probably would have done the same thing in your position. When I look at it from your point of view, I don’t know how we—I mean, you, could have done anything differently.
“And that’s what worries me. With what you’ve gone through, I don’t think you could have done it differently. And if you keep the Omphalos, that programming is going to drive you to do things the way you always have. I know you’re thinking that I don’t have any of your memories from your second life, and you’re right. I don’t. But I’m counting on that new, healthy part of you. Because the one thing I can say with complete certainty, knowing your old self so well, is that the Feodor who tortured me would never, ever, have handed over that egg. The old Feodor was incapable of trust. He didn’t even trust Alice, and before you try to tell me I’m wrong, remember who you’re talking to.”
She ran a hand through her hair, a gesture so purely Josh that it made Will smile. “It’s not the old Feodor I’m thinking about. It’s the new one. It’s the Feodor you are today. And I’m trusting you, right now, to know that you aren’t the best person to make decisions for the entire universe.”
“And you are?” Feodor asked, but his voice came out weaker than Will imagined he had intended.
Josh smiled. “Probably not. I’m a stupid American child, remember? I’m no one special, as it turns out. I’m not the True Dream Walker, I’m probably not even the False Dream Walker. I’m a very new, stupid soul. I’m awkward and I have no self-confidence and I’m thoughtless about other people. All I’ve got going for me is that, since I’m such a new soul, I’ve got a lot less karma than the rest of you. But if I were in your place, I wouldn’t give the Omphalos to me.” She inclined her head toward her sister. “I’d give it to Del.”
Will could almost see the war being waged inside Feodor.
“I am as worthy as anyone to wield this,” he said.
Josh walked toward him, slowly, but without trying to hide the motion. “Yeah, you are,” she said. “It’s just that this isn’t about you. It’s about all of us.”
She stopped a few feet from him and waited. Feodor shook his head.
“I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” Feodor warned Josh, who grinned.
“Add it to the list,” she said. And then, somehow, they were both laughing.
Will had never seen Feodor laugh before.
“Come on,” Josh said. “Prove you aren’t who the history books say you are.”
Deloise held out a nervous hand, and Feodor put the Omphalos in it.
“Happy?” he asked Josh, the bitterness back in his voice.
She hugged him.
And for once, Will wasn’t jealous.
Forty−one
Deloise gave the Omphalos to Josh.
“No,” Josh said, feeling like she’d somehow wandered back into the path of a bullet she’d just dodged. “You should be the one—”
“Josh,” Deloise said. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
“And I do?”
Deloise smiled. “If you give it to me, I’ll just fill the World with babies and rainbows. And I think we both know things aren’t meant to be that simple.”
“No,” Josh said, but she was already using it, without even thinking, to heal Haley.
“I don’t know what to do,” she told Will desperately.
Haley sat up with a gasp and touched his healing throat. He lifted one finger, asking Josh to wait until he could speak again, and once his vocal cords had grown back, he said, “Yes, you do.”
“I can think of a couple of things,” Whim said.
“No,” Deloise told him sternly. “You can’t.”
The egg felt like an anvil in Josh’s hands. Haley coughed as skin covered his throat again, and Will and Dustine helped him up.
“Please,” Josh said, her heart beating too hard. “Please, help me. I don’t know what to do.”
Her friends gathered around her—except Feodor, who remained standing beside the black basalt pillar, looking cranky.
“Should I put everything back the way it was?” Josh asked. “Should I leave the universes merged? If—If I’m not the True Dream Walker, but the False one—”
“Josh,” Will said, “forget about that.”
“But the prophesies said—”
This time Feodor was the one who interrupted her. “I believe we are beyond the scope of prophesies,” he said, his voice clipped.
“Haley?” Josh asked desperately.
He smiled at her, his beautiful, gentle, Haley smile. “Not everything can be predicted.”
“So what do I do?” Josh asked.
“Do what you think is best,” her sister told her.
The moment was growing more and more surreal. “Why are you guys letting me make this decision? I’m the worst possible person to do this. I have terrible judgment.”
“No, you don’t,” Will said firmly. “It’s no better or worse than any of ours.”
The Omphalos weighed more and more, dragging her hands down.
“Will, please,” she begged. “You’re smarter than me. Can’t you—”
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
He was using his grown-up voice again, his father’s voice, the one he hardly ever used, and only when he really wanted her to hear him. But then his face softened and he touched her shoulder.
“Josh, I would love to tell you what to do now. Believe me, I’ve never wanted to tell somebody what to do more than I want to now. But … the thing is, it turns out I do trust you. I believe that, whatever else might have been written in a prophesy or a scroll or whatever, you are meant to make this decision. And I trust you to make it.”
“But I’m just—I’m not anybody special.”
He smiled then, and he leaned forward and kissed her. “You are to me.”
Then he stepped back, away from her, leaving her with the egg. He’s abandoning me, she thought. He’s leaving me.
She wanted to feel angry, but he kept smiling at her, and his cornflower-blue eyes were as steady as they had ever been. I love you, he told her silently.
“I’m with Will,” Deloise said, and she leaned forward and kissed Josh’s cheek. “You can do it,
sis.”
Whim sighed. “Okay, look, I’m obviously going to side with Will and Del, I just want to suggest that maybe you take care of the puppy mill situation, okay?” He hugged Josh briefly, but as he was walking away couldn’t help adding, “And maybe just think about—”
“Whim,” Deloise said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m shutting up.”
That left Haley and Feodor, and Feodor was unamused. “Haley,” Josh said hopefully.
He put one of his hands over hers and thought, and she wondered what he saw when he touched her. “Maybe you aren’t the True Dream Walker,” he said. “Maybe I was wrong. I guess … I knew you were special, and maybe I assumed you were the True Dream Walker because that was the most special thing I could think of. But I wasn’t wrong about the special thing. And I know you’re the right person to have the egg. I know that.”
“But can’t you … at least give me a clue?”
Haley laughed. “But I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I just know that you’re the one who’s supposed to do it.”
He kissed her cheek then, and left her.
Feodor had a sour look on his face that made Josh want to apologize to him. But to her surprise, he said, “I will defer to the wisdom of your friends in this. Perhaps you and they are right and I’m not the one to make these decisions for the World.” His shoulders slumped. “No, I suppose I know I’m not. What is the expression? Old habits die hard? So I will just tell you what you have told me so many times over the last few months.”
He didn’t kiss her, but leaned close to whisper in her ear. “You have to follow it.”
And that was that. Haley and Whim went to the glass cube in which Ian was trapped, and Josh created holes in it so they could speak to him. Deloise went to talk to her grandmother. Feodor studied Peregrine. And Will just sat down at the foot of the throne and watched Josh with that kind, soft look in his eye, and waited.
They were all just going to wait while she figured out what to do.
Josh felt helpless and helplessly confused. Angry tears pricked her eyes. I don’t know what to do, she thought. I can’t make decisions for everybody else. I don’t want to be a dictator. I don’t want to turn into Peregrine.
