by Kit Alloway
“Josh and Will are here,” Haley said, “and we brought someone new. Her name is Mirren.”
“Hello,” Mirren said, only a little awkwardly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Haley crouched down to look Winsor in the face. He knelt there for several seconds before rummaging around in the nightstand drawer and removing a tube of lip balm.
“Winsor is Whim’s sister,” Will said. “She’s in a stage three coma; she goes through cycles of waking and sleeping, but she’s never fully conscious.”
“That’s so sad,” Mirren said.
“Her brain can hear us, though,” Haley said as he carefully applied balm to Winsor’s lips.
Will shrugged. “There’s no proof of that, but if Haley says it, I believe it.”
All Josh could think was how Haley had said “her brain” instead of “she.” Because Winsor’s soul didn’t occupy her body; that was trapped in a canister at Willis-Audretch.
“She’s been like this for four months?” Mirren asked. “I read about the attacks in the papers, but the reports were vague. They didn’t say anything about what happened to the victims later on.”
“They’re all like this, or worse,” Will said. “Except the three who died.”
“Four,” Josh muttered from her seat at the window.
“What?” Will asked.
“The little girl died last week,” she said, casting a guilty glance at Will.
Will ground his teeth.
“What is their diagnosis?” Mirren asked.
Still angry, Will said, “Persistent vegetative states due to frontal lobe damage. The CDC called it catatonic sinoatrial dysfunction, but they’ve stopped investigating since new cases stopped appearing. But most vegetative patients make sounds, some even scream or cry. Some of them will follow objects with their eyes. CSAD patients never do. They never move on their own, either, not even in response to pain.”
“Do we know why not?”
Will shrugged. “Ask Haley.”
Josh shut her eyes. She didn’t know if she was upset because they were talking about Winsor like she was an interesting species of fish or because Josh didn’t want to talk about her at all.
“She’s not really here,” Haley explained. “Her soul is still in the canister. Without her soul, her body … it doesn’t care.”
“We have the canister,” Will said. “It’s at Willis-Audretch being studied, but they haven’t raised any hope that they can free Winsor’s soul from it.”
“It’s wired to explode if they mess with it,” Josh added, staring out the window again.
“Even if they could open it,” Will continued, “we don’t know if her soul could just fly back into her body or if we’d need to do something to help it. But Winsor is lucky in some ways—the majority of the other victims’ souls were in Feodor’s universe when it collapsed.”
“What happened to them?” Mirren asked.
“They’re lost in the Dream,” Haley said.
Josh twisted her fingers together, bending her joints in uncomfortable ways. If all those souls really were lost in the Dream—probably sixty or more—then Josh and Will and Haley were to blame. They were the ones who had killed Feodor, collapsing his universe and forcing the souls into the Dream.
“You want to see something really creepy, though?” Will asked. “Look at Winsor’s eyes.”
The tone of Will’s voice disturbed Josh. He sounded bitter, but a sort of pleasure underlined his rage, as if it felt good to him to be angry.
He turned on the bedside lamp. “Look,” he repeated to Mirren, but Josh couldn’t stop herself from obeying as well. Will turned Winsor’s face—gently, but not as gently as Haley would have. Haley himself stood pressed up against the bedside table, as if unwilling to leave Winsor’s side.
“What am I looking at?” Mirren asked.
“Her eyes used to be blue,” Will said.
A bold, bright blue, Josh remembered. Like lapis lazuli.
Now they were a charcoal color, a single shade away from black. A fine black web, as thin and sharp as iron shavings, stretched across the surface of Winsor’s eyes. The whites were tinted gray, as though a fine layer of ash had settled over them.
“Feodor’s zombies had eyes that were completely black,” Will said. “It seems to be slowly happening to all their victims. The doctors don’t know what it is.”
Her eyes were so beautiful, Josh thought. Now they were damaged, just like the rest of her—the frail, thin limbs; the skeletal face; the shiny luster gone from her black hair.
“I’m very sorry for your friend,” Mirren said. “I understand now why knowing as much as you can about Kajażkołski is important.”
Josh stopped herself from laughing. No matter how much they learned about Feodor, they would never be able to fix Winsor. Josh had half his memories, and even she couldn’t figure out what he’d done.
“There are seventeen—sixteen, I mean, other people just like her,” Will said.
“Sixteen,” Mirren repeated. She shook her head. “Kajażkołski was working at the cutting edge of dream theory, and scientists are still trying to analyze his theories. My understanding of dream theory is good, but if no one at Willis-Audretch can help you, then what you’re fighting against may be something only Feodor could comprehend.”
“All I’m asking is that you help however you can,” Will said in a way that made Josh think he had just ignored every word Mirren had spoken.
“I will,” she promised. She placed a comforting hand on one of Winsor’s fists. “How old is she?”
“She just turned eighteen,” Haley said. He’d insisted that the whole household go to the hospital and sing to her and eat cake.
Mirren marveled. “I never would have guessed.”
They left a few minutes later. Haley kissed Winsor’s forehead and promised he’d be back in a day or two; Mirren said a polite good-bye; Will ignored the girl in the bed and started down the hallway. As she followed them out, Josh heard Haley admit to Mirren, “Winsor and I used to date.”
“Oh,” Mirren said.
Josh had no idea why Haley had told Mirren that. Now that she thought about it, she had no idea why they’d brought Mirren here in the first place. Will had said it was to show her how much Winsor needed her help, but Mirren hadn’t met Winsor before this happened. She couldn’t know that the small, shrunken body in the bed had once been vibrant and beautiful, that the mind that barely registered on an EKG had been clever and sharp-witted, that those eyes clouded by the veil of Death had been capable of seeing through everyone around her.
All Mirren saw was a sick child in a bed. She couldn’t know the friend Winsor had been to Josh or understand all that Winsor had lost.
* * *
The guilt Josh felt after seeing Winsor led her to begin work constructing the vambrace and circlet. Not because the devices could help Winsor, but because Josh kept recalling how the devices had filled her with complete confidence and power in her dreams. She wanted to feel like that. She needed to feel like that. She needed to save the next Winsor.
Sitting in the first-floor office a few days later, she was clicking through the online database of dream-walking-related articles for anything that might help her build the network the devices required, when her eyes caught upon “Possibilities for Continual Dream Monitoring” by Bashuriel Mirrettsio.
The name looked familiar, but it took her a minute to connect it to the man Will had told her about from the Grey Circle meeting.
Will said he won the Nicastro Prize, she recalled. Let’s just see what he won it for.
She printed the paper out.
Although today the trimidion is considered the gold standard in Dream monitoring, at the time of its invention, many considered it a mere first step toward observation of turbulence within the Dream, the paper began. Inventors of the trimidion lamented its inability to pinpoint specific areas of turbulence and its vulnerability to cosmological events. It is the author’s purpo
se to propose a next step in the evolution of turbulence monitoring through the creation of an in-Dream trimidion broadcaster.
Josh read on with interest. The trimidion was a very old dream-walker tool—so old that she was surprised a record of its invention existed. A scale with three corners, it measured the amount of emotional turmoil with the Dream, the World, and Death at any given moment. Dream walkers used it as an early alert system that would inform them before the negativity in the Dream reached the point where it could rip the Veil between universes and cause nightmares to come pouring into the World.
Bash’s paper proposed that trimidions be placed within the Dream. Each one would be monitored by a small computer that would broadcast—via radio waves—the degrees of balance or imbalance to a central computer near an archway. All a dream walker had to do was consult the central computer to determine which areas of the Dream contained the most emotional turbulence, then follow the radio signal toward the trimidion in the area where the most dream walking was needed.
The idea contained the hallmark of a Nicastro paper: innovation. Instead of expecting young dream walkers to be on the cutting edge of dream theory, the prize committee looked for ideas using available technology—often even technology considered out-of-date. Josh had never read anything that suggested using radio waves; she wasn’t even certain they would act normally within the Dream.
The problem with the idea was that Bash lacked a method for anchoring the trimidion stations within with Dream. In fact, it was the same problem Josh had run into—
“Holy shit,” Josh whispered.
Bash’s trimidion station problem and Josh’s cell network problem were nearly the same. She wondered if, in the years since he’d written this paper, he had come up with a solution.
She needed to talk to Bash.
Ten
Ten days after Mirren’s arrival in the World, Davita called her and said to plan for a dinner meeting that night. Davita discouraged her from letting Haley join them, but since Davita was bringing a mystery guest, Mirren felt justified in bringing a familiar one.
Besides, she was all awash in adoration for Haley. She supposed she should have felt threatened by seeing how tender he was with his ex-girlfriend—and she did plan to ask him his feelings about Winsor at some point—but mostly what she felt was admiration. When Winsor’s own friends had treated her like a plague victim, Haley hadn’t hesitated to touch her or talk to her, which Mirren found endearing.
The restaurant was cozy, everything covered in green velvet and gold trim, and the maître d’ led them to a private horseshoe booth near the back, hidden from the view of other patrons by two curtains.
Davita and another woman were already seated when Haley and Mirren arrived. They couldn’t easily get out of the booth to say hello, but the stranger offered her hand for Mirren to shake.
“I’m Anivay la Grue,” she said. Mirren realized she should have recognized Minister La Grue as the leader of the Troth Party and a member of the junta, but the woman no longer looked like she had in the photographs Mirren had seen. She appeared frail and desperately thin, yet at the same time her face was puffy. Her copper skin had darkened, and when Mirren shook her hand, that also felt swollen.
“How do you do?” Mirren asked as she sat down, careful not to show her surprise at the minister’s condition.
They made small talk for a while. Minister la Grue—who insisted that Mirren and Haley call her Anivay—asked Mirren a bit about her life, which made her realize that Davita hadn’t revealed her other-universe origins. Then they discussed the Accordance Conclave and staging and Peregrine Borgenicht. Anivay was still a sharp mind, and she had a warm, easy laugh. She criticized Peregrine’s politics but not him personally, which Mirren liked.
The third time Anivay had to stop speaking to catch her breath, though, Mirren felt she needed to say something. “Are you unwell?” she asked gently, putting her hand over Anivay’s.
While the older woman struggled to breathe, Davita said, “Anivay suffers from polycystic kidney disease. In the last several years, it has rapidly worsened into end-stage renal failure. She has difficulty breathing due to the buildup of fluid around her lungs.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mirren said, genuinely saddened.
Anivay held up a hand, as if to block Mirren’s pity. “I’m seventy-two,” she said. “I’ve lived longer than expected already.”
“Anivay asked for this meeting,” Davita said, “because she feels that her declining health has reduced support for the Troth Party. No one wants to elect a president who might—” Davita stopped short.
“Die,” Anivay said firmly, finishing Davita’s thought. “That’s why I want you, Mirren, to take over for me.”
“Me?” Mirren asked, astonished.
Anivay took a few shallow breaths before explaining. “You’re young and beautiful. Davita says you’re well-spoken, well-educated. And you’re against staging.”
“But I’ve never been involved in the Troth Party.”
“We believe you can win them over,” Davita said. “And we believe that we’ll lose fewer people than we’ll gain when the Monarchist Party joins us.”
“The Monarchist Party wants a monarchy,” Mirren pointed out, “not a republic.”
“We’ll change our proposal to a constitutional monarchy,” Anivay said. “That way, the Troth Party will still get its republic and the monarchists will still get their queen.”
Mirren glanced at Haley, but he appeared to be thinking.
“So I’d be a figurehead,” Mirren said. “Would I have any real power?”
“Enough. You would have the right to propose legislation and to veto any legislation that you didn’t feel was in the best interest of the North American dream walkers,” Davita said. “Granted, the latter power is one I would recommend you use sparingly, but it would allow you to keep staging from becoming policy no matter what anyone else wanted.”
Anivay took a long drink of water and then said, “Miss Mirren, I don’t know you. But I knew your parents, briefly, and your grandparents before them. They were good people, the best sort of people. They never forgot that, whatever their titles, they were servants. They did what was best for their people, not themselves. Even dream walkers who disagreed with them never would have risen up and killed them without Peregrine Borgenicht. The spin he put on their assassinations afterward made it sound like the monarchy’s downfall was inevitable, but remember: It was a coup, not a revolution. It only took one man to set fire to the palace. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that Peregrine is your enemy, not the dream walkers.”
Mirren had to look away because of the tears in her eyes. She wanted so much to be accepted, to have a people.… She wanted to believe that Anivay was right and that the dream walkers had never lost faith in her parents. She wanted to believe even more that her inevitable confrontation with Peregrine could be as easy and civilized as running a campaign against him. But an uneasy feeling inside warned her even as it urged her forward.
“What are her other options?” Haley asked.
“The issue is time,” Davita said. “She can join the dream-walker community and go into politics from the ground up, but that will take years. She can join the Monarchist Party, but they don’t have enough votes to win the Accordance Conclave. This is the only way I could find of putting her into power immediately.”
“What if I fail?” Mirren asked.
“Then Peregrine wins,” Anivay said, “and we’re no worse off than we were before. Mark my words, if nothing changes, the Troth Party will lose this election.”
“Do you think he’ll try to kill me?”
“Depending on how well you’re received, quite possibly,” Anivay admitted.
Mirren liked Anivay, and liked her even more for not mincing words. But she didn’t want to die.
“We each have our own reasons for wanting staging stopped,” Anivay added. “You don’t know mine, and I don’t know yours. But we wa
nt the same thing. Let’s work together to get it.”
She had beautiful brown eyes, dark as just-tilled earth. When Mirren looked only at her eyes, she never would have guessed the woman was ill.
This is her last chance, Mirren thought. And maybe my only chance.
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
When they left the restaurant, the clouds that had caught the sunlight earlier had turned dark blue, not with night but with rain. Mirren’s breath caught in her throat, and she walked slowly toward Haley’s truck with her palms turned up to the sky. She jumped when the first drops hit her skin, giggling at the same time, and only when the lightning cracked above her head and lit up the parking lot as if gilding it with silver did she run for the truck.
“It’s amazing!” she cried, jumping into the front seat. “It rains where I live, but there’s no lightning, no—ahh!” The rumbling, grinding thunder hit her body with the pressure of a shock wave. “No thunder!”
Haley grinned at her from across the bench.
She fumbled with the controls on the car door but quickly discovered how to roll her window down. She laughed, giddy with the excitement of the air pressure, the sight of tree branches being lashed by wind, the abandon with which the raindrops dashed themselves against the windshield.
She stuck her arms out the window the whole ride home, letting the cold rain pour down on her and the wind whip her arms until her skin burned. Only then did she realize how much the conversation with Davita and Anivay had frightened her.
They know Peregrine will kill me, she admitted to herself. They don’t care if I’m a queen or a martyr.
The rain was still pouring when Haley pulled into the driveway. Instead of going into the house, Mirren took off into the yard and the shelter of a large willow tree, and Haley ran after her.
Beneath the tree’s spreading branches, the world was as beautiful as she had imagined. Darkness and water had turned the tree leaves a rich olive green, and she flung off her shoes so she could feel the rainwater squishing between her toes in the grass. Rain far colder than the kind that fell at home drenched her purple dress, and she threw her arms around the tree trunk like she’d seen hippies do in movies. The willow didn’t speak to her, but she did find comfort in its unyielding steadiness, especially when the lightning and thunder shook her.
