by Kit Alloway
Gloves came at her and they wrestled. A hundred memories of training with Ian came back to Josh. She used everything she had against him, but this wasn’t the Ian she had grown up with. Gloves barely registered pain and never gave her an instant to breathe, not even a split second to rest between attacks. He fought entirely without reserve. Josh would have expected that losing his soul would diminish his motivation to live, but it seemed just the opposite—that only an animal desire to survive remained.
When Josh began to flag, Will jumped in to distract Gloves. But he swayed on his feet, and Gloves didn’t waste any time in hand-to-hand combat. Head down, he rushed Will, not to hit him but to drive him into the wall and crush his wounded back against the concrete. Josh, on her knees a few yards away, saw Will’s eyes roll back in his head and heard him make a sound—possibly a scream—muffled by a gurgle. He collapsed.
Not a good sign.
Gloves leaned down and pulled the compact from Will’s pocket.
The sight of Will crumpled on the floor enraged Josh, and she sprang to her feet with newfound energy, but her rage only made her sloppy. When she sent a roundhouse kick toward Gloves’s head, he caught her foot and twisted it so that she sprawled facedown with her hands on the floor. Then Gloves kicked her in the gut again, forced her onto her back, and climbed on top of her.
When she tried to hit him, his fingers caught her arm with inhuman speed. He brought her elbow down on the floor, and then again, and again, until the joint shattered.
Josh felt her fingers relax almost before she felt the pain. Not just a physical pain, but a deep sense of brokenness, a crack in her foundation. Gloves’s hands closed around her throat, and she would have gasped at the fire that shot from her fingers to her shoulder, but he had cut off her airway.
Time slowed while he choked her. With her left hand she cut deep scratches in his arms, the blood growing sticky under her nails, but he didn’t respond. He was sitting on her thighs, immobilizing her legs, and because his arms were longer than hers, she couldn’t reach far enough to gouge out his eyes.
So this is how it’s going to end, Josh thought. The fact that it really was going to end shocked her, despite all the evening’s close calls. She stared into Ian’s face, Ian’s lovely face with the barren black eyes and no expression, too stunned to truly hate him.
No triumph showed on Gloves’s face.
She could hardly believe what she saw behind him: Will was climbing to his feet. After that second injury to his back, she’d been sure he wasn’t getting up, but here he was, gaining one foot and then the other. The maniacal smile on his face was one she’d never seen before, though, and it scared her. He didn’t look like himself.
He staggered as he came up behind Gloves, his chest heaving as he struggled to lift one arm above his head. In his hand, he held an icicle-shaped shard of mirror. But with a burst of strength, he reached Gloves in two long, smooth steps and brought the mirror down into Gloves’s back, the jagged, broken end cutting into his own skin as he forced the mirror between Gloves’s ribs.
“Hands off the girl, asshole!” Will shouted and, like the smile, his voice wasn’t his.
Ian? Josh thought.
Gloves grew still with shock. Then his hands actually tightened further around Josh’s neck, and he lifted her head, then slammed her down so hard that when her skull hit the floor she heard a sound like an eggshell breaking.
For a moment her mind shut down. She couldn’t hear, or see, or feel her throbbing arm or the air rushing back into her lungs as Gloves released her. For just that moment, she knew perfect inner silence, and then a thunderstorm erupted at the back of her head, and she opened her eyes.
“Oh god, J.D., I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, oh god—”
Will’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out on the floor next to Josh.
Gloves was on his knees a few feet away. He twitched, twisting and arching his torso as if he were trying to force the mirror out. The way he jerked and the lack of expression on his face made Josh think of an android. When twisting didn’t work, he searched blindly with his left hand and finally pulled the mirror out, slicing his hand and fingers. Josh couldn’t see the wound, but through his legs she saw blood begin running onto the floor in a steady stream.
Gasping like a fish on the floor, she watched him toss the mirror away and inhale deeply. If he had been capable of emotion, she would have said that he was frightened, but maybe she only thought that because his whole body was trembling violently. He crawled to one wall, sat painfully back on his heels, and stared at the wall for a long, long time while blood ran down his back and pooled around his knees. Finally, he lifted the compact and lighter, and a blue door appeared in the middle of the wall, the sort of door one might find on the front of a home.
He’s going to leave us, Josh thought, and the Dream will shift, and whatever nightmare we fall into, we won’t be able to fight it.
But Gloves didn’t leave. He started to rise, and then he swayed like a charmed snake and collapsed sideways, making no movement to soften his landing against the concrete floor. So much blood had collected around him on the floor that it splashed when he fell into it; Josh felt the spray on the side of her face.
Oh my god, she thought. I think he’s dead.
Ian had killed himself. He’d had to borrow Will’s body to do it, but he’d managed.
He saved my life. Her heart sang with a strange, astonished joy. Ian saved my life.
If that wasn’t forgiveness, she didn’t know what was.
Then she thought, I have to get us out of here.
But try as she might, she couldn’t rise. She couldn’t even roll over. Each time she moved her head more than an inch, the vertigo was so intense that her stomach rose in her throat, and she knew that if she vomited now, she would choke to death.
“Josh,” Will whispered. She turned her head that one inch to look at him, and the pain shifted toward her temples, easing a little near the back of her neck. His cornflower-blue eyes were dark, and the skin around one was swelling.
My apprentice. Look what I let happen to you. I tried to tell them I wasn’t ready, that I’d be a terrible teacher, but no one listened, and now look what I’ve done.
“You can change this,” he told her. His voice was weak, but she felt comforted to hear it, even if his words were absurd.
He had never gotten what he deserved from life: not from his parents, not from the county, and certainly not from her. She hated herself for not having been strong enough to be the teacher and friend he needed. She hated herself for hurting him again and again.
“You have the power, Josh,” he said. “Please, please believe it.”
She didn’t have any power. She had fallen for Feodor’s tricks, and for Gloves’s, too.
Around them, the walls and ceiling began to slowly fade, becoming pale and misty.
“Josh,” Will whispered. He was pleading now, tears in his eyes. “Just this once, don’t be afraid of your power.”
She felt his hand close around hers and realized how cold her skin was. The ceiling above her looked like a cloud, and she imagined that behind it she’d find a beautiful spring sky, not another nightmare.
“In the limo, you said that no one ever sees you, that they let you get away with everything because you’re special. You said they would let you off the hook no matter what you did. Well, I see you, Josh. I don’t know all your secrets and I haven’t been around all your life, but I saw you when you were mad at me in the school lobby, and when you were scared and falling into Haley’s arms, and when you were kissing me in the kitchen. I know you, and I know what kind of power you have because I’ve seen you in the Dream, too. And I am the one person who is not going to let you off the hook.”
He stopped speaking for a moment to catch his breath, which rasped each time he inhaled. Then he said, “I don’t want to die tonight. Neither do you, but you’ll give up this fight because you’re too afraid to trust yourself. You’d
rather believe you’re a screwup who always gets let off the hook than admit how amazing you are and take responsibility for being so strong. If we die tonight, I’ll know the truth—that we died because you were afraid of being special. That’s your dreamfire, Josh, admitting how strong and smart and great you are. It’s easier for you to stay small. But I know you, Josh, and I don’t think you’re small, not a bit, so don’t you dare just lay there while the Dream shifts and drops us into God knows what nightmare to die.”
His hand tightened around hers, and she realized she was crying again. Her eyes were so sore, she thought she must have been crying for days now. Behind Will, the blurry white walls looked like feathered wings extending from his busted back.
“Go on,” Will whispered. “The Dream is shifting, but you can stop it. Hurry.”
Haley believed. Young Ben believed.
But if Will believed …
“How do I…?” she asked, the words half-formed.
“You know how,” Will whispered, so fervently that in that instant she did know.
Her eyes closed, and she let the Dream come to her, this Dream that had been her second home, her escape, her playground. She broke Stellanor’s First Rule like she’d never broken it before, allowing not just the fear within the Dream to come to her, but the joy, the sweetness, the sorrows and delights and memories and wicked fun. She opened herself to secrets and dark corners and swore to set the twisted roads straight and turn the sky right-side up again. She reached out to the edges of this universe, this reflection of the World rippling on the surface of a pond, and gave herself up to the voices of the dreaming.
Her father had always told her not to give in to the dreamer’s fear, but tonight the dreamfire was her own and greater than that in any nightmare, greater than the terror Feodor had forced into her. This fear swirled around her like dark, icy water, and she knew that the Dream felt it. Tonight the Dream quit speaking and listened to her, to what she needed to tell it.
My name is Joshlyn Dustine Hazel Weavaros. I have walked your lands all my life and calmed as many storms as I was able. I have risked my life and the lives of those I love to heal you. Now I am seventeen years old, I am claiming my own, and it’s time to return the favor.
A ripple moved through the Dream, as if it had been waiting generations to hear her voice and was amused by her unnecessary forcefulness. Josh’s hands filled with sand and cloud and someone, maybe Will, said, “Go on, then. You know what to do.”
She was the floor, she was the walls, she was the shards of broken mirror. Her arms stretched across the ceiling and beyond into other dreams. Her heartbeats were the seconds of time; her breath was change.
She held out her hands, and the Dream stilled. She, Will, and Haley were suspended in a melting white room, but she made the walls and floors hard again, put everything back in place.
“Josh,” Will whispered, but he used a different voice this time, a voice that was awe and pleading combined.
She opened an archway to the familiar archroom in her basement at home, but no one was there, so she opened another archway—a new one, which took only a thought—to the living room, where Deloise was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea in her hands, her beautiful face aged by worry.
When the archway opened three feet in front of her, she jumped up so fast she forgot about her teacup and let it roll off her thigh, spilling tea down the leg of her lavender jeans. For three seconds she stared through the archway, her mouth agape, and then she shouted, “Saidy! Whim! Get in here! Hurry!”
Josh’s mind drifted, only half-conscious of what was happening, until she felt the night air on her skin. Out in the World, rain was falling, and the stretcher Josh rode bounced up and down as Saidy rushed her toward an ambulance. Cold water splashed her face, reminding her of the rain in Warsaw—but this was only World rain, only the ocean running in circles. Josh saw her bloodied arms sparkling with fairy dust.
The metal bars of the stretcher clanged as they loaded her into the ambulance. The doors closed and the vehicle tore onto the road with its siren wailing. The pain in Josh’s head and her elbow came back, along with the overwhelming sense of weakness, but she opened her eyes and saw Will looking at her from the stretcher beside hers.
She reached out with her good hand and found his under the white sheet that had been thrown over him. His gaze was detached and serene, and Josh hid nothing from him when she gazed back. She felt his pulse slowing under the skin of his palm and squeezed tighter.
“Stay,” she whispered. Her throat burned, but she said it again. “Stay.”
A sort of smile came onto Will’s face and his fingers closed around hers, but his heart skipped one beat, then another. Josh remembered holding on to Ian’s hand when they went through the archway into Feodor’s universe for the first time, remembered how hard she had held on, so hard she had dragged his spirit back into the World.
She thought she would hold on to Will twice as hard.
Through a Veil Darkly
Feodor Kajażkołski Is Dead (No Thanks to the Junta)
By now many of you have heard the news—news that even the junta couldn’t cover up. Three teenagers—Josh Weavaros, Haley Micharainosa, and Will Kansas—faced off with legendary madman Feodor Kajażkołski in the pocket universe to which he was exiled in 1962.
And they won.
At the time of this writing, Josh Weavaros is currently in a medically induced coma after suffering a depressed fracture to her skull and exhibiting unusual brain-wave patterns. She is so covered in bruises that she’s unrecognizable. Will Kansas required a skin graft to cover a massive wound on his back. Only Haley Micharainosa, who suffered a concussion and minor contusions, has been released from the hospital.
And where, you might ask, where were our leaders when these three teenagers were in such dire need? Nowhere to be found. Josh’s own grandfather, Peregrine Borgenitch, dismissed an eyewitness who had WATCHED the three enter Kajażkołski’s universe, and continued to insist that doing so was impossible. He was holding a press conference and was in the middle of a sentence expressing just that sentiment when Anivay la Grue received word that Josh, Haley, and Will had returned. Even if the eyewitness had been wrong, the possibility of him being right should have warranted an immediate response from the Gendarmerie.
Less than six months from now, the Accordance Conclave will be held and proposals accepted for what form the permanent North America dream-walker government should take. A lot of people have said they’d just as soon keep the current arrangement. I hope that the gravity of this incident causes them to reconsider.
Thirty-eight
Josh regained consciousness several times before truly waking up. Once to the sound of kind women’s voices telling her, “Open your eyes, honey,” and a whiny mechanical beep; a second time when she was moved from one bed to another; a third time just long enough to hear her father say, “She’s falling asleep again. Is that safe?”
In between, she returned to jagged nightmares where Feodor led her through ruined cities, through forests burned to cinders beneath smoking gray skies, to the black shores of oceans of blood where red waves rose to douse her in stinking pink froth.
When she finally roused herself from the chemical bog of sedatives and pain medications, Haley was sitting at her bedside. Everything around her—the sea-foam-green walls, waffle-knit white blankets, and rock-hard pillows—confirmed her suspicion that she was at St. Dymphna’s Hospital. Home away from home, she thought. After the chaos of her dreams, the sound of nurses’ chatter in the hallway and the hum of televisions in other rooms reassured her that she was safe and sound.
She groaned, and Haley looked up from the notebook in which he was writing. He smiled at her, a sweet little Haley smile. For the first time since he’d come back to town, he wasn’t wearing a single article of Ian’s clothing; now he’d dressed himself in very grubby jeans and a yellow turtleneck with a red-and-green Christmas sweatshirt over it.
“Hi,�
� Josh said, half choking on the word. Her throat felt like it had been scratched by a cat. She tried to move, but her body had turned to stone and a frumpy cast encased her arm all the way up to her shoulder. Light from a large window drilled into her eyes. “What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
Thursday? “What day did I get here?”
Haley smiled again. Aside from the purplish remainder of a bruise on his temple and a bandaged wound on his neck, he looked fine. Better than fine, in fact. Peaceful.
“Sunday.”
She had never managed to knock herself unconscious for four days before.
“Is Will all right?” she asked, trying to sit up. She noticed that purple and green bruises covered her arm that wasn’t in a cast. “What happened to me?”
Haley rose and found the controls on the side of the bed. Sitting was much easier with mechanical assistance. “Will’s okay, and the bruises are from thrashing around on the floor while Feodor tortured you. You have a lot of them.”
Josh winced. She never wanted to relive those memories.
“How okay is Will?” she asked.
“He went home yesterday. But he needed surgery and lots of stitches and a skin graft.”
Either all the blood was rushing from her head or else she was passing out from relief. She closed her eyes and relaxed the muscles that she had tensed upon waking.
“Your dad is mad at you, though, for going into Feodor’s universe. Will says he’s really just relieved that you’re not dead, and he’s using anger to avoid the fear he felt.”
Josh smiled, opening her eyes again. “And you’re talking.”
He blushed. “Kinda.”
“No, it’s very cool.”
Haley hesitated and then said, “When we got to the hospital, I was the first to wake up, so I had to make up a story for the doctors.”
He was so adorably pleased with himself. “Really?” Josh asked.
“I told them we were abducted by aliens. They made me talk to a psychiatrist.”
Josh laughed. “You’ll have to fill me in on all the details so I can back you up.”
