Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  Josh, safely crouched in the bushes, touched the Dream’s fear just enough to test it—a simple old “running late” dream.

  Winsor would have stopped to resolve this one, she thought, recalling her friend’s odd compassion for humiliation nightmares. Dejected, she got to her feet and began trudging after the cavalry.

  “Josh!” a familiar voice shouted behind her.

  Impossible, she thought. There was no way Will could have reached her once she’d broken ligamus.

  But she turned to look, and he had. Not only that, but he had brought Haley and Whim along. They were trekking through the woods toward her.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, more frustrated than angry. But a small part of her was glad to see them, especially Will. She’d gotten used to having him around in-Dream.

  But she was still planning to knock him unconscious at the first opportunity.

  “I found you!” Will said, looking pleased with himself.

  “How?” Josh asked.

  He held up his left hand.

  It took Josh a moment to understand. “You used the looking stone?” she asked. “That’s not even possible.”

  “That’s what I said,” Whim replied.

  They met in a small clearing. Josh crossed her arms.

  “You’re not going to stop me,” she told them all. Whim and Will exchanged glances.

  “Here’s the thing,” Whim said. “Haley and I have spent the last seven months drinking piña coladas on the beach, gorging on French pastries, and avoiding physical exercise; and Will’s still in training—”

  “We aren’t sure we can take you,” Will summarized. “And we don’t want to tire you out before you face Feodor. So we agreed that the best chance of keeping you alive is to back you up.”

  Josh softened. She had already begun to feel ashamed of how she had spoken to her friends in the car, and now she felt like a royal jerk. She couldn’t deny that some of Will’s concerns had merit, but she still felt honor bound to save Ian.

  “Do you understand why I have to do this?” she asked.

  “Because every second Ian’s body is walking around doing Feodor’s work is an insult to the person he once was?” Will suggested lightly.

  She blinked, astonished to realize that Will did, in fact, understand.

  “I get it, Josh,” he told her. “But I still think it’s a bad idea.”

  “That’s why you’re the apprentice,” she said, and started walking deeper into the woods.

  Thirty-four

  They worked their way across the Dream, waiting for a nightmare to resolve and drop them into another, creating a porthole there to see if it opened to the cabin in Charle, finding that it did not, and waiting out another nightmare. After an hour, Josh finally poked her head through the Veil and saw the fire-gutted basement of the cabin.

  “Go,” she ordered, and they all went.

  Josh climbed through and landed on a concrete floor. Around her stood the half-demolished remains of her mother’s burned cabin—everything black and smelling faintly of woodsmoke even now, the stairs to the second floor impassable, the ceiling burned away to reveal a half-moon.

  “Do you have a plan?” Whim asked. “Because truthfully, I was sort of hoping the Gendarmerie would get here before we did.”

  “Find Feodor. If he’ll give himself up to the Gendarmerie, we take him to the house and call Peregrine.” She wasn’t thrilled by the idea of involving her grandfather, but she doubted Feodor would give himself up anyway. “If he won’t give up, we kill him.”

  “Do you think you’re capable of killing a real person?” Will asked.

  “If I have to,” she said, although she wasn’t certain. She’d killed nightmares before; she hoped that would serve as enough experience to give her the nerve to kill a real person.

  “What about Ian?” Whim asked.

  “You mean Ian’s body,” Will corrected.

  Josh thought hard, avoiding Will’s gaze. “Haley?” she asked. “Can we save him?”

  In a small voice, Haley said, “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll deal with Ian when we find him,” Josh said with forced nonchalance. “The first thing we have to do is make sure that Feodor can’t keep creating … whatever he’s creating.”

  “Zombies,” Will said pointedly.

  Josh’s palms flushed and she gritted her teeth to keep from telling Will that she would be fine; that whatever Feodor threw at her, she could handle; that she knew the difference between Ian’s body and his soul. But she couldn’t say that for certain. Whim had been right in the car when he said that she didn’t really know what she would do when she saw Ian.

  But she wanted to find out.

  She pulled out her lighter and compact and sent a beam of light toward the air she had stepped through moments before. The archways here had no stone frames, no edge markings, but she knew approximately where they should be.

  The Dream opened back onto the nightmare they’d come out of. “Haley, try your keys while I keep this archway open,” Josh said. Haley shone another light in the same direction, and a second archway appeared.

  Twin images floated side by side—one for each eye, a soundtrack for each ear. Josh saw the Dream through one Veil, and through the other, she saw Feodor’s universe and the same dark room she had walked into eight months before, where one high dormer window let in a few rays of light.

  “Last time, Feodor attacked as soon as we entered,” she said. “So stay close to—”

  She broke off as the scene through the archway changed. The view slid, like a camera zooming and panning, then stopped high above a narrow, rubble-filled street with crumbling concrete buildings on either side and chimneys shooting into the smoky sky. Burning wreckage reflected orange light off the dark clouds and the glittering, diamondlike raindrops falling on the city.

  Close to them, only a few feet below the archway, Feodor stood on a rooftop. He wore a white shirt with brown pinstripe slacks and a matching vest, all drenched with water, and he held a golden watch attached by a chain to his pocket.

  “Every nine seconds,” he declared, his eyes on the city below. A squadron of planes flew overhead. Josh couldn’t see them against the utterly black sky, but she heard them. Feodor raised his voice. “That is how often a bomb hits Warsaw during these air raids. Every nine seconds.”

  Though he must have already been aware of them, he slid his watch back into his pocket and looked up at the archway as if surprised.

  “Hello again, children. Ah, you’ve brought friends—oh!” Feodor smiled, suddenly near laughter. “How much one of your friends looks like a friend of mine!”

  His amusement stole some of Josh’s confidence. She’d expected to fight with him, but she’d hoped to do it with her fists. Feodor’s joke reminded her that he was mad in addition to being dangerous. In fact, his insanity almost certainly made him more dangerous. Josh met Will’s eyes, and he gave a little shake of his head. We don’t have to go in, he seemed to say.

  “Are you going to come and visit this time?” Feodor asked. “Or just stare through my window like vagrants again?”

  He backed up a few feet to give them room to climb onto the roof, bowing his head graciously as he moved. Josh placed herself in front of the ragged archway and then gave a little jump the way she usually did at home, and her cross-trainers landed solidly on the rooftop.

  Once inside, she heard far-off sounds that had previously been masked by the rain: bombs exploding, buildings crumbling, an air-raid siren. The rain stank of stomach bile and each drop bit her skin where it landed, like a mosquito. Josh drew her arms close to her body and ducked her head down.

  Feodor smiled, his gray eyes large and round, his eyelashes sparkling with rainwater. He made her a little bow. “Welcome to Warsaw,” he said. “Of course, your friend is welcome also, since we are already acquaintances. And your other friend, he must come as well, to meet his doppelgänger. But who is this stranger you have brought wi
th you?”

  “His name is Whim,” Josh said flatly as Will and then Haley joined her on the rooftop. “You sucked his sister’s soul out.”

  Feodor took the accusation in stride, merely giving an admissive nod. “Even so, I think that perhaps our party is large enough.” He called toward the archway, “It was a pleasure to meet you! Please give my regards to your sister!”

  “Wha—?” Whim cried, but the archway closed and cut him off.

  That’s not good, Josh thought. Feodor could control who entered his universe, which meant he could probably also control who left it. Before she could figure out what to do about that, Feodor turned and called, “Kapuścisko!”

  Josh didn’t know what that meant—he might have been calling out “Abracadabra!” in Polish for all she knew.

  But then she saw the man she had called Gloves. He walked across the roof to Feodor, who threw an arm jocularly around Gloves’s shoulder. Rainwater shone on his green-black trench coat, and mud he hadn’t bothered to scrape off clung to his boots.

  Now that Josh knew who he was, she could see Ian in him—the right height, the right build, even a black curl sneaking out from under the brim of his black-banded fedora.

  “I call him Kapuścisko,” Feodor said, “since he never told me his name. It means ‘little cabbage.’ The French use it as a term of endearment.”

  Josh didn’t care what the French did. She knew from Feodor’s smile exactly why he’d chosen the name.

  Because cabbage was all Feodor had left of Ian.

  Ian was a vegetable.

  Josh walked straight over to Gloves. He didn’t move; she wasn’t even certain he was looking at her. She stood helplessly before him, trying to reconcile Ian’s hazel eyes with the black ones she saw now—endless void eyes, literally soulless. His eyes held nothing when he looked at Josh.

  “Take off your mask,” Josh said.

  “And your gloves,” Feodor added.

  Gloves obeyed. He loosened the mask and let it swing from a strap around his neck, then pulled off his gloves and put them in his pocket.

  Ian’s face—so like Haley’s, and yet so different—no longer resembled either one of them. The features were slack, disinterested, and so pale that Josh wondered if the sun ever rose in Warsaw. A rough pink outline of the gas mask ran from under his chin to the bridge of his nose and back again.

  Feodor reached out and lifted Gloves’s left hand—Josh still could not think of him as Ian—to show her his palm. An oval-shaped scar, like a burn, marked his skin.

  “Are you the one who pulled him back?” Feodor asked Josh in a low, intimate tone. “An astonishing act, to hold so tightly to another that you tear him from his skin. Your passion quite inspired me.”

  Josh wanted to touch Ian’s hand, but her own hands refused to move. She recognized his fingers; the shape of his thumb; his nails, though they had grown strangely long; the tiny scar on his inner wrist where his watch buckle had cut him.

  Earlier, she’d thought that there was no way to predict how she would react when she saw Ian. If asked, she might have listed any number of possibilities.

  Disappointment would not have been among them.

  She’d come here to save Ian, but Ian wasn’t here. The trench-coat-clad boy wore Ian’s face beneath strands of Ian’s curling black hair and held out Ian’s hand to her, but he wasn’t Ian. He might have recognized her intellectually, but he didn’t look at her with love.

  Feodor had done this to Ian. Anger flooded Josh like a torrent of black fire running through her body.

  “What did you do to him?” she asked Feodor.

  Feodor shrugged. “Very little. You were the one who tore out his soul. Such things are possible, in the moment one moves between universes. But you left me his body, which has been most obedient and helpful. I hope that seeing him this way doesn’t make you sad.” He circled her, his steps even and graceful.

  Haley hesitantly approached Gloves, looking at his twin brother as if afraid of what he would see. Gloves’s eyes flicked toward Haley.

  Feodor spoke to Gloves. “Kapuścisko, meet Kapuścisko.” Then to Haley: “Kapuś—”

  Haley exploded.

  “Don’t call him that!” he shouted at Feodor. “Don’t you ever call him that! His name is Hianselian Micharainosa! He is not your little cabbage!”

  Will and Josh both grabbed Haley’s arms to keep him from a full-on assault.

  Feodor laughed and leaned his head on Gloves’s shoulder, which only made Josh and Will’s job harder. Then he slowly straightened, examining Haley with the first sign of seriousness Josh had seen in him.

  “Or was it you who held on to little Hianselian’s soul?” Feodor asked. “For I see his duch, his spirit, all around you.”

  Haley inched behind Will, as if he could hide Ian’s spirit from Feodor’s sight.

  “But he has changed, I think,” Feodor continued. “I think he is your anioł stróż now, your…”

  “My guardian angel,” Haley whispered, and Feodor smiled, delighted.

  “Just so. Who says American children are stupid?” He gave Gloves a slap on the back and said, “Come, smart American children, let me show you my work.”

  “We aren’t here to see your work,” Josh snapped. “We’re here to bring Ian home, and arrest you and take you back to the World to stand trial.”

  “You cannot remove me from this universe without causing its collapse,” Feodor told her. He smiled with just one corner of his mouth. “And I suspect there are things here that you would like to see preserved.”

  With that, he took off across the rooftop, skirting piles of soot-stained rubble and collapsed chimneys. Gloves followed.

  Josh watched them with frustration for a moment. She’d had some idea that she could beat the location of the gate to the Dream out of Feodor, but now she realized how ridiculous that plan had been. Feodor would gladly die without telling her what she needed to know for the sake of his own amusement. Right now, they had no choice but to play his game.

  “Are you all right?” Josh asked Haley, concerned by his outburst. But Haley didn’t even look at her, just took off after his brother.

  “Okay, new plan?” Will asked as they followed.

  “We’ll have to take them both at once. But not yet. We need to find out where the gate to the Dream is first.”

  “It could be anywhere,” Will pointed out. “Warsaw is a big city.”

  Josh let her gaze drift across the blocks of rubble, where the fires of burning buildings illuminated columns of smoke, wrecked structures, overturned cars, and objects so thoroughly ruined that Josh couldn’t even identify them. Yes, it could take a very long time to find a single gate in all of that.

  Feodor led them across the rooftop to a rickety iron fire escape that, against all odds, had survived the every-nine-second bombings. Despite her misgivings, Josh climbed down the wet, rusty stairs, holding the railing at all times. Finally, they reached the street level of the stone-fronted building, and Feodor held open the door while ushering them inside.

  “Kapu—I’m sorry, Hianselian, the lights, if you please. Welcome to my laboratory, children.”

  Feodor’s laboratory looked like a cross between Josh’s high school chem lab and a Victorian parlor. The ashes-of-roses wallpaper clashed with the metal tables, and the Tiffany lamps shed colored light on glass beakers and broken mirrors. In one corner, Josh recognized the shrouded form of Feodor’s physical body resting on a table.

  The far wall of the laboratory was made of clear glass and looked into a room that reminded Josh of the archroom at home—white floors and walls. But it was empty inside.

  “Apologies for the mess,” Feodor said, ever the pleasant host. “When my experiments fail, I can’t bring myself to bother cleaning them up. It’s so … unjust.” He waved a hand. “Please, look around. It’s so rare I have the opportunity to share my work.”

  Despite the numerous experiments laid out, Josh felt drawn toward the room with t
he glass wall. Beside the glass wall stood a doorframe fitted with a giant funnel, as though a person could step through the doorway and be squeezed out the funnel’s tip. Josh recognized the material the funnel was made of—it was the same silver-white of the canisters Snitch and Gloves wore.

  On the wall behind the doorway, canisters were mounted from floor to ceiling, like trophies or deer heads. Tubes running from the valves at the top of each canister connected them directly to the surface of the funnel.

  “What is this?” Josh asked.

  “A way out,” Feodor said. “I’m going to free myself from this universe. The gateway to the Dream will not admit me—I must burn through the boundaries of this world.”

  Josh wasn’t surprised by his goal. He had tried to use the machine to break through the window she and Will had built. “What does the funnel do?”

  “It is not a funnel,” Feodor replied. “It is a drill. Watch.”

  He flipped a switch on the wall. A mechanical whir filled the room, although nothing appeared to be moving. Then, gradually, each canister lit up with a different-colored light: some bright and strong, others weak and pale. Josh saw dark oranges and bright purples and soft blues; the longer she looked, the more colors she saw. She felt drawn to the wall of canisters, and as she walked toward it, the soul lights grew larger and brighter. She heard sparkly sounds—music or laughter—but just as she reached out to touch a particularly beautiful peacock-green light, Feodor put his arm around her.

  “I know,” he said, guiding her away, “they’re quite hypnotic, aren’t they? But they’ll only bore you with stories of their lives, and you mustn’t encourage them. Besides, this is the truly interesting part.”

  He placed her so that she could see through the freestanding doorway and into the funnel, which shuddered as if immense power were running through it. A fog filled the funnel and then coalesced into images—a house, grass, a woman running after a child, a restaurant, the ocean, a nest full of robins’ eggs. In short, the World.