by Kit Alloway
“It’s about the girl,” Haley said. “Her name isn’t Nan. It’s Amyrischka Rousellario.” To Will, he added, “She’s the lost dream-walker princess.”
“What?!” Josh nearly shouted. “Are you serious?”
Haley nodded.
“Wait, the princess from the old monarchy?” Will asked.
“Yeah,” Josh said. “The one my grandfather overthrew. The king and queen had a baby daughter who either died or went into hiding after the revolution, and no one’s seen her since. Until now, apparently.”
Josh—who had never cared about princesses—knew this only because Deloise had several books on the monarchy. As the years had passed, a certain romantic nostalgia for the old regime had developed, as is wont to happen with royals who die tragically—and leave behind princesses who may or may not have died.
“What was the princess doing wandering around in the Dream?” Will asked.
Haley explained the situation—that Mirren lived in a pocket dimension for her own “safety” but had eventually found an archway leading to the Dream and jumped through it, only to get lost in the Dream.
“You’re telling us she ran away from home?” Josh summarized.
Haley considered. “Yes.”
“Great. So her aunt and uncle are probably going to be pissed at us. Please tell me she’s not here because of the Accordance Conclave.”
After twenty years in power, the dream-walker junta was finally going to hand over power to a permanent government. At the Accordance Conclave, the dream-walker population of North America would be allowed to vote for the form of government they wanted.
Josh was a conservative, a member of the Troth Party. Her grandfather, on the other hand, was the head of the Lodestone Party and was running on a platform of dream-walking reform. Radical reform.
“I don’t think she knows about the Conclave,” Haley said, answering Josh’s question. “I think … she was very sheltered.”
“So you didn’t want to tell us who she was because you think she’ll be in danger if people find out she’s a member of the old monarchy?” Will asked. “Does anyone still care?”
“Yes,” Haley and Josh said in unison.
“There’s still a party trying to have the monarchy restored,” Josh explained. “It’s led by some distant cousin. My grandfather tolerates them because they don’t have much real power, but technically what they’re advocating is illegal under the junta. Part of why they have so little power is that the cousin was twenty-sixth from the throne or something, but if they actually had the legitimate Rousellario heir, they might come up in the ranks real quickly, and I’m pretty sure Peregrine would have them all arrested. But you said Mirren’s not here about the Conclave, right, Haley?”
“Right.”
“So, she just has the worst timing in the world. And apparently the worst luck, too, since she’s now her worst enemy’s granddaughter’s houseguest.” Josh ran a hand through her hair, feeling how tangled and dirty it was. She wanted a shower. “If she’s not here for the Conclave, then what’s her plan?”
Haley shrugged. “She said she wants to go to college, swim in the ocean, and eat fast food.”
None of those things sounded very princessy to Josh. “There wasn’t a McDonald’s in her pocket dimension?”
“No. Her aunt is a health nut.”
“That would explain why she didn’t know how to open a can of Coke,” Will remarked.
“Wait a sec,” Josh said. “Couldn’t she have just imagined a McDonald’s and her pocket universe would have created it?”
“Feodor could only do that because he was lucid dreaming,” Will reminded Josh. “His physical body was asleep, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that.”
But as soon as Will brought it up, her mind filled with the image of Feodor’s time-ravaged body, each limb and digit wrapped in a cobweblike sheath. Only his toenails and fingernails, grown hideously long and curved, had protruded from the shroud. Even worse, she remembered what it had been like to be inside the sheath, an uncomfortably hot, stiff cocoon.
“If nobody in Mirren’s pocket universe could lucid dream, then the place where they lived probably never changed from what Feodor created it to be,” Will said.
“What?” Josh asked, looking at Will and wondering if she had heard Feodor’s name only because she’d been thinking of him.
“Come on,” Will said, “who else would have built a pocket universe where the royal family could hide out? Who else could? In the 1950s, everybody knew that Feodor was secretly working for the king and queen. Half the stuff he invented ended up in the royal family’s hands before his bosses at Willis-Audretch could even get a patent on it.”
“Oh,” Josh said hollowly. She’d known all of that before, of course, she just hadn’t realized that Will knew.
Will’s eyes were alight with an anger that had become all too familiar recently. Josh always saw it when he talked about Feodor, which was part of why she avoided the topic. She was afraid of his anger, especially afraid of what would happen if he turned his rage on her.
Will didn’t know it, but he had so many reasons to be angry at her.
* * *
Josh knew that things between her and Will weren’t right, but she didn’t know how to fix them. Since Feodor and Gloves had tried to kill them, a tension had grown inside Will, and it never really went away. He always seemed to be on high alert, and the smallest things startled him. He’d begun trying to train again so soon after he got released from the hospital that he’d torn the stitches out of his hand. And there was his obsession with guns, too.
Not that Josh felt she was in a position to judge him. On a good week, she slept through the night twice. But the problem with the nightmares wasn’t just that they terrified her; far worse was how she had become Feodor’s unconscious conspirator.
She had a theory that when Feodor had tried to kill her with his memories, the bad memories weren’t all that got through. Somehow, everything that Feodor had ever known or experienced had been planted deep in her subconscious. At night, all sorts of memories played themselves out in her head, twisted and warped, yes, but she believed they were based on true events. How else had she known what his sister, Bryga, looked like long before Will pinned a photo of her on his stalker wall? How had she aced a chemistry quiz even after she daydreamed through all her classes? How had she understood two women in a sporting goods store when they were speaking Russian?
She couldn’t have. But Feodor had spoken Russian almost as well as he had Polish, he’d mastered chemistry before puberty, and his sister’s face had haunted him until the day he died.
Josh certainly wouldn’t have minded a free education obtained without studying, or even memories of Bryga, who had been a beautiful, brilliant child, if she hadn’t felt like a part of Feodor was living on inside her. He had died, but not before he’d downloaded himself into Josh. Almost every night, she found herself in his world, often standing beside him in the lab as he broke new ground in quantum physics and dream theory.
Upon waking, she’d scramble for a pencil and write so quickly that she didn’t know what she was recording until she examined it later. Formulas, algorithms, diagrams, explanatory notes in Polish or French that she might or might not remember how to translate the next morning, exquisite three-dimensional sketches—and she wrote everything down while switching the pencil from her right hand to her left and back again, as Feodor would have.
And that was why she hadn’t told anyone about the nightmares. Deloise might have understood, and sometimes Haley looked at Josh in a way that made her think he recognized the demon inside her, but Will would have shot her on sight.
One morning in late March, she’d realized that among her growing collection of sketchbooks were the complete plans for a wristwatch that Feodor had built when he was nine. The wristwatch performed one delightful function: it kept accurate time within the Dream.
Such an innocuous invention.
Feodor had built it when he was a mere child, before the war, before he went mad. Surely it was harmless.
That was what Josh told herself when she started building the watch—that she wasn’t crossing any line, wasn’t falling prey to Feodor’s strange charisma, that just because she had to hide her actions from everyone she cared about didn’t mean she was doing anything wrong.
The wristwatch worked as perfectly as the plans had promised it would. Just told the time, and it was always right. Josh felt reassured after she took it into the Dream for the first time. See, she thought. It’s no big deal. Just because Feodor went crazy later doesn’t mean that every single thing he invented was dangerous.
The successful completion of the wristwatch had been thrilling. In some ways, it had actually reassured Josh that she was in control, and for a few days, she had contemplated telling Will. We can turn what he created into something good, she would have said. We don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.
But the fear that Will would reject her, be horrified and sickened by what she had become, and the unsettling romantic developments in the nightmares held her back. The first time Feodor had kissed her, she’d woken up choking on her own vomit. Her waking self didn’t want that, but her sleeping self grew more and more infatuated, and eventually even her conscious mind grew sympathetic. She was reminded of something Winsor had once theorized: that no one could know another person fully and not fall in love with them, at least a little bit.
Maybe so much of Feodor’s mind lived on inside her that she couldn’t help seeing the best in him.
But she’d be damned before she fell in love with him.
* * *
That evening, when Will was out with Whim, Josh put on the wristwatch and went into the Dream alone.
The nightmare she chose belonged to a man in his forties, corporate type: clean-cut, boring hair, the kind of body that came from doing lots of cardio but no weight lifting. She stood on an elevated platform beside him. Before them stretched a mechanical gauntlet. The path over nine more platforms was obstructed by swinging axes, bursts of boiling steam, wooden logs that closed together from either side, and huge metal teeth that shut so hard, sparks flew from the incisors.
No way was Josh going in there. But she could try to help the dreamer.
“I’m going in,” he said. “I’m just going to go as fast as I can.”
“Wait a sec,” Josh told him. “We can figure out a pattern to get you through safely.”
“No, I don’t think that will work. I just have to be fast.”
Josh put her hand on his shoulder to keep him from leaping to the next platform, and he was lucky she did, because a flamethrower overhead filled the space between platforms with fire just the instant he would have been jumping through.
He cursed.
“It’s all right,” Josh told him. “There’s a pattern. We can count it out. The next time the flames appear, we’ll start counting.”
They spent the next five minutes working out the pattern. Josh had chosen this nightmare because it presented an opportunity for her to try out the wristwatch, which allowed her to accurately time the sequences. The pattern wasn’t nearly as complex as it first appeared, and Josh was almost tempted to try the gauntlet herself. If only the course had been slightly less fatal and any attempt to leave it wouldn’t have resulted in an endless plunge into darkness.
“You ready?” she asked the dreamer.
He was jogging in place. “Put me in, coach!”
“We go on four. Wait for the fire burst … One, two, three, four!”
The dreamer jumped to the second platform. Josh kept calling out numbers as the seconds passed. He waited for the ax to pass overhead twice before leaping to the third platform. From there he had less than a second to get to the fourth platform before a burst of hot steam scoured his skin.…
He made it, but just barely. Josh knew his timing was already off, and she shouted the numbers as loudly as she could, but he missed his cue.
The fifth platform broke in half every nine seconds, dumping anyone standing on it into the abyss below. The sequence shouldn’t have been a problem, but the dreamer was still standing there, looking confused.
“Above you!” Josh shouted. “Jump!”
The dreamer leapt straight up just as the platform broke apart beneath him. He grabbed the metal bar overhead and hung there, squirming, as the platform came back together.
“Drop!” Josh yelled, but she’d lost the count. Between the fifth and sixth platforms were the chompers—a five-foot-wide metal jaw that snapped shut every two or three seconds. Josh knew the sequence, and she told the dreamer to wait while she sorted out what part of it the chompers were currently in, but he either couldn’t hear her or was too panicked to listen. He saw the chompers close, then reopen, and he dove headfirst through them.
The metal jaw closed.
“No!” Josh screamed as the teeth bit into the dreamer’s chest. Over the bursts of fire and steam, she heard his ribs crack. The jaw opened, but not far enough for him to escape, and then a tongue appeared, and a hollow metal throat, and the teeth were chewing the dreamer up and swallowing him.
Josh stood alone on the platform, cursing wildly. She knew that she could jump through the chompers and follow the dreamer into whatever horror his subconscious had in store for him next, but instead she furiously thrust her hand out and opened an archway back to her basement.
Back in the archroom, she grabbed a white towel off the table and wiped the Veil dust from her face. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered. If she’d been able to access her power, she could have saved the dreamer. He would be sleeping peacefully right now; instead he was probably being digested.
She pulled off the wristwatch and hurled it across the room. “What use were you?” she yelled at it.
No use, she thought. It was no use. I was no use.
Her nightmare came back to her—the war, the devices, the comfort of being able to put everything to rights.
She wanted that power.
Five
Whim drove a monstrous 1981 baby-blue Lincoln Town Car with matching leather interior that he called Liberace. It was the only car Will had ever felt embarrassed to be seen in. He didn’t care much for Whim’s driving, either. Josh drove too fast and with too much confidence; Whim just drove badly—he’d once clipped a city bus.
The Grey Circle—or Feodor Fan Club, as Josh called it—met once a month, and members rotated hosting duties. Tonight the front door of the Fosperaida mansion had been propped open with a geode the size of a basketball, so Will and Whim let themselves inside. They crossed the foyer’s parquet floor into a living room so large that it contained three different seating areas.
Will was still getting his bearings when a feminine voice as smooth and slick as hot oil said, “Well, if it isn’t the Pied Piper of conspiracy rats. Hello, Whimarian.”
The young woman stood taller than Will, almost as tall as Whim, but she walked with the stealthy sway of a panther, gouging the carpet with her stiletto heels. Although Will couldn’t say why, he thought her short blue-and-white kimono looked expensive, and she wore a silver bracelet with diamonds running all the way around it, too.
Will noticed her beauty at the same moment he noticed her expression, which was somehow both seductive and mocking. She looked up at Whim from beneath long brown lashes, like she was peeking at him through a hedge, but the corners of her painted lips pulled back in the faintest of smiles, as though someone had gently pricked her there with the end of a dagger. “Here for the free food?” she asked.
Whim’s eyes were so large, his eyelids had vanished into his brow. His voice shook as he hissed, “What the hell are you doing here?”
The girl shrugged, holding her shoulders at the top of their range of motion as if she were posing briefly. “I could ask you the same thing,” she said. She sounded unfazed by Whim’s anger. “I’ve been coming here for two years. Then I go away to college for a couple of m
onths and when I come back they’re letting anyone in.”
“I was invited,” Whim said sharply, which wasn’t technically true. Will and Josh had been invited, and Will had brought Whim.
The girl released a puff of air with a pffff sound. “Whatever you say, Whim.”
Whim gritted his teeth, but when he spoke this time, his voice carried a determined casualness. “Will, this is Ozbeilia Sokkravotaine.”
She held out a cool, fine-boned hand and Will shook it. “Call me Bayla.”
“This is Will Kansas,” Whim said. “Josh’s apprentice.”
“Oh,” Bayla said, and she laughed. “You’ve cleaned up very nicely, I’m sure.”
Will didn’t know how to respond to that. “So have you,” was all he could think to say.
Bayla laughed again. She lifted two glasses from a nearby table and held them out. “The wine is superb. Have a glass.”
“No, thank you,” Will said, but Whim accepted one of the glasses she held out.
According to dream-walker tradition, seventeen years of age made one an adult, and it was more or less the dream-walker drinking age as well. But Will had a genetic predisposition for alcoholism that ran back at least three generations.
“Oh, come on,” Bayla said, nudging him with a sharp elbow. “We’re all dream walkers here. No one’s going to yell at you for having a glass of wine.”
“Seriously, no,” Will said. “Stop asking.” The words came out more firmly than he’d meant them to, and a little too loudly as well.
Bayla laughed and looked to Whim, as if she thought he would join her in her bemusement. Instead, he set his own glass of wine pointedly back down.
Bayla rolled her eyes. “Have a nice evening, children.”
Just as she turned to walk away, a young man joined them. He slipped an arm around Bayla’s waist and smiled. Straight-nosed and bespectacled, he carried an air of aristocratic intelligence at odds with his friendly smile and wrinkled clothing.
“Friends of yours?” he asked.
Bayla leaned against him and said dryly, “I suppose. Bash, this is Whim Avishara and Will…”
