Dreamfever

by Kit Alloway

“What’s in the boxes?”

  Bash grinned and opened one up. “Your towers.”

  Josh picked up one of the metal devices. Once they’d started calling them “towers,” she had begun mentally picturing a tiny cell phone tower, but what Bash had created looked more like an aerosol can with a glass button on top.

  The idea was to plant towers at intervals within the Dream. The circlet and vambrace would relay Josh’s thought to the towers, and the towers would broadcast a signal to the Dream, telling it what Josh wanted it to do.

  “I still don’t completely understand how you stabilized the polarity of the Dream particles,” she told Bash as she examined one of the towers.

  “Like I said on the phone, I took them down to nearly absolute zero…”

  His explanation made even less sense to Josh than it had on the phone the day before, partly because he kept using unfamiliar acronyms like “ARN” and “UH” and then throwing in abbreviations like “Z-tat” and “fro.” For the first time, Josh became aware of how much progress dream theory had made after Feodor’s exile. Except for his own research, he’d been out of touch with the field for fifty years, and Josh felt like an idiot when she had to stop Bash over and over to ask him to explain.

  When she asked him to explain why the type of radiation he’d used wouldn’t fry her brain as soon as she put the circlet on, a fleeting expression crossed Bash’s face, so quickly that Josh wasn’t able to fully grasp it. Anger? Irritation?

  But the expression was gone when he said, “No one has to worry about that since the invention of simo pulsation.”

  “Simo pulsation?” Josh repeated.

  “Yes, but that led to a larger issue with the polarity of Z-tat in relation to the ARN…”

  And he was off again.

  Bash does this for a living, she told herself. And he isn’t half a century behind. I’m sure all of this makes sense if you know the lingo.

  “Let’s give it a try,” she said.

  Bash grinned again. “Excellent.”

  Josh had hidden the circlet and vambrace under a pile of towels in the archroom. When she produced them, Bash admired the construction.

  “This is a hell of a job,” Bash said, running his fingers over the wires in the vambrace. “Show me how it goes on.”

  “These three wire bundles have to align precisely with the veins in my arm, especially the tips here.” Josh winced as she clamped the vambrace shut around her left forearm. This was the first time she’d had the nerve to do so. “They actually cut into my skin at the wrist.”

  The pain was curiously momentary. After the initial bite of the wire tips, Josh’s arm began to feel warm and relaxed—just as it had in her nightmares. She experienced the same thing when she put on the circlet, only the pain occurred at the base of her skull.

  “How do they feel?” Bash asked. This time she recognized his expression—envy. He wanted to be the one wearing the devices. Josh didn’t blame him.

  “They feel good. I think I’m ready.”

  She placed her free hand on the looking stone and watched the Veil come to life inside the archway. After several minutes of flipping through nightmares, she found one with kids playing basketball. “This one might work.”

  Bash pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at the archway. “Yes, that’s good.”

  He picked up one of the boxes and jumped through the archway, and Josh grabbed the other and followed him. To her surprise, the box felt much less heavy than it had earlier, and she wondered if the vambrace provided increased strength in her left arm.

  The nightmare they jumped into featured a nighttime basketball court lit by streetlamps so bright that they turned the sky beyond them pitch-black. A number of races were represented on the team, but there was only one Korean kid, and Josh touched his fear just long enough to know that he considered this chance to impress his friends a matter of life and death.

  Josh was carrying the box with one arm by then—no question that the vambrace increased her strength.

  Standing near the corner of the court, Bash pulled a tower from one of the boxes. “Attaching them is straightforward. Decide where you want to put it. Set it down, and then push the button on the top as firmly as you can. It takes a little force. You’ll hear a snap when it attaches.” He demonstrated, pressing the button down until Josh heard a sound like a pencil snapping, and the glass button glowed white.

  “If the button is glowing, it’s attached,” Bash said, sounding pleased with himself. “But we can double-check by trying to pull it up.”

  He grabbed the tower and tugged, and although Josh couldn’t see anything that would be holding it in place, the object refused to move. She even tried digging away some of the earth around the can’s base, but the tower seemed to be attached to space itself.

  A cell phone tower on the sea, she thought.

  Bash grinned at her, and she smiled back.

  “How many towers do we need to attach before the circlet and vambrace will work?” she asked.

  “Just one, I assume. But they probably only have a range of about fifty feet. Maybe we should try putting one at each corner of the court?”

  Josh nodded and took two towers from the box. She walked to the nearest corner of the court, where the teenagers were attempting a Globetrotters-style ball-passing display. The demonstration wasn’t going well; the dreamer, especially, seemed to be letting his nerves get the best of him.

  She knelt at the corner where the court ended and the lawn began and set the tower on the ground. With her unencumbered hand, she pressed down on the button, hard, then harder, then so hard that she thought the can would collapse, and finally it made a snapping sound. The button on top lit up.

  “My eye!” one of the players screamed, and the guy’s teammates all turned slowly to stare at the dreamer.

  “You popped his eye!” a player accused.

  “I’m sorry! I was just throwing him the ball. I didn’t mean to—”

  “I’m blind!” the bloodied guy cried.

  A strange sensation filled Josh then, as if something had shifted subtly inside her head. In her mind, she felt a growing awareness of the towers she and Bash had just placed, and as she walked toward the kids on the court, her awareness changed based on her proximity to each tower. They had become her spatial reference points, her cardinal directions, and the warmth in her arm and head grew hotter.

  The basketball players had gathered in a circle around the dreamer. They were badgering him, calling him names, and darting forward to shove him. Josh felt the impending violence fill the air like a low-pressure front before a thunderstorm, and her heartbeat sped up to match her step as she broke into a run.

  No, wait, you don’t have to run.

  She stopped running and raised her left arm instead. Just like in her nightmares, she spread her fingers and reached, past the air, past the substance of reality, and heat shot down her arm and out her fingertips like matterless beams.

  The dreamer rose into the air and out of the reach of the bullies. He started screaming—he didn’t know what was happening, even his subconscious didn’t know what was happening—but Josh smiled as she watched the kids below jump up and down, futilely attempting to grab his feet. She caught hold of the fabric of the Dream as though it were a bedsheet, and she gave it a hard shake. The bullies fell like bowling pins.

  As Josh reveled in her power, she caught a glimpse of her own outstretched hand, with the fingers spread unnaturally far apart and the sinews beneath her skin rising, and saw how much they resembled the hands of Feodor’s zombies. At the same instant, she felt the dreamer’s fear evolve into true dreamfire, the deepest and most primordial of fears. He believed then that he was going to die.

  Unease filled Josh. Didn’t he understand that she was protecting him?

  Maybe not. Maybe he couldn’t see the situation from her point of view, from such a wide field of vision, but she was doing this for him. She knew what was best.…

  No, Jo
sh thought. Memories of the nightmare in which the piano had eaten Caleb flooded back to her. I don’t have the right to do this, she thought. I don’t have the wisdom.

  Josh let her arm drop, let the power retreat into her arm, and released her hold on the Dream. The dreamer, dangling in the air, fell and landed on two players, who began cursing him.

  I thought I wanted this. Even as the words formed in her mind, a dozen arguments against the admission were rising. She just didn’t know how to use the power yet—the dreamer didn’t appreciate her help—next time she’d make sure the dreamer knew she was on his side—

  What we’re all afraid of is having no control, she realized, in a voice louder and calmer than the others. And I can’t help someone by taking even more control away from them.

  “Josh?” Bash asked, coming to stand beside her.

  Josh tried to rub her temple, but the circlet was in the way. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait, are you done?”

  “Yeah.”

  With a thrust of her hand, she opened an archway in the middle of the court.

  “How did you do that?” Bash asked, his eyes wide, and only then did Josh remember the exact balance of how much and how little he knew. The circlet—she wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “The vambrace did it,” she lied, and walked through the archway.

  The moment she landed in the archroom, she began unlatching the vambrace. Bash landed behind her as she pulled the device from her arm, and she gasped at the sight of the damage the vambrace had done. Not only had the wires that bit into her skin created bloody marks like leech bites, but the magnets had left quarter-sized burns.

  “Shit,” she said, and let the vambrace fall to the floor. Her arm looked shriveled, too, like a salted snail, and her veins pulsed bright blue beneath her skin. Quickly, she pulled the circlet off, taking more than a few strands of hair with it.

  She touched her temple and her fingers came away bloody. “I need—” she began, and then the back of her head exploded.

  She was on the floor before she realized what had happened—that Bash had hit her with the folding chair. Even then, her primary concern wasn’t to fight back but to avoid passing out. Because she’d fractured her skull and had a serious concussion four months before, she had to be especially careful about not hitting her head again, and she felt somehow that if she could remain conscious, that would lessen the damage done to her brain.

  The archroom door opened and closed. She heard it; she couldn’t open her eyes.

  I’m awake, she thought. I’m awake. As long as I’m thinking, I’m awake.

  The door opened and closed again. She felt Bash roll her onto her stomach, and she tried to ask him not to hit her head again, but the words just came out, “Ddddaaaaa.”

  He didn’t hit her head. Instead he tied her up with a rope, ankles and wrists together so that she was unable to stand.

  Josh heard him gather up the vambrace and circlet and realized for the first time what he had been after. That’s probably not good, she thought.

  “Nice working with you,” Bash said.

  The archway door opened and closed one last time.

  Through a Veil Darkly

  Message board: Princess Mirren: She’s just like all the other Roussellarios

  Trashprotractor says: Didn’t her mom start out the same way? Everyone thought she was so lovely and elegant, and she told us all that she would be open in a way the Rousellarios had never been, and then she turned out to be just as elitist as the rest of them.

  scorpio_666 says: Uh, her mom was not lovely and elegant. Have you forgotten those satin dresses she always wore? I don’t think the woman even owned pants.

  JillKramer says: Oh my God! I DID forget those dresses! They were so hideous.

  wingnut24the says: I had a nightmare about her where she was wearing one of those dresses, and she had a crown on. She told me that the Gendarmerie is planning to overthrow the junta.

  jshg_hammer says: Dude, I had the same dream! Sort of. I mean, she was wearing the dress and the crown, but she was showing me around her secret hiding place. It was like the Bat Cave, and it was full of weapons and armored tanks and stuff.

  Worchester_RWatson says: I had a dream she was my French teacher, and she wouldn’t stop giving us more homework.

  copenite says: Trashprotractor is right. Maybe she wasn’t raised by her parents, but she still has their money and their priorities. For every single thing she said at the Learning, I bet there are five secrets she knows but won’t tell.

  markamBCGI says: That would be a ridiculous number of secrets.

  pashtofrank says: Being educated and being elitist are not the same thing.

  gilandsons says: I hope she dies in the next trial. I want to see blood in that red hair.

  JillKramer says: That’s so sick!

  prancingpony says: HAIR BLOOD! HAIR BLOOD! HAIR BLOOD!

  Twenty

  When Will had woken up that morning, he’d known one thing: he couldn’t face Josh.

  So he went to the mall.

  He usually relished emotional disclosure; Josh was the one who was afraid of expressing her feelings. But today the thought of telling Josh what he’d seen made him want to cut out his tongue. As he followed Whim and Deloise from store to store, he wondered if he wasn’t less afraid of asking Josh about her nightmare than he was of hearing her answer. Maybe he just didn’t want to know.

  So he stayed at the mall. He bought Deloise a pair of shoes to replace the ones she’d lost the day before. He choked down a plateful of greasy bourbon chicken in the food court. He helped Whim pick out a new cell phone case.

  When his friends were done shopping, he convinced them to go to the movies. He swore that a new action flick was awesome, when in fact he had heard the exact opposite. Then he sat in the theater, hands clenched around the armrests, revolted by the scent of popcorn butter.

  Unbelievably, the movie contained a scene in which the hero’s girlfriend tried to seduce the villain.

  I can’t stay here, Will thought. I can’t watch this. I’m going to lose my mind.

  “Can I borrow your phone?” he whispered to Whim.

  Whim looked surprised but offered up the phone.

  Will carried the phone into the mall. He figured out Whim’s contact list but didn’t find the name he was looking for. Then he opened up the call log and saw a lot of recent calls to and from someone named Mike. He dialed the number.

  “Hello, sexy,” a female voice said.

  “This is Will Kansas.”

  After an instant of silence, Bayla gushed, “Will! What a nice surprise!”

  “Remember what you and I talked about after the last Grey Circle meeting?”

  “Mmm, of course. Have you changed your mind?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. How soon do you think we could do that?”

  “Whenever you want, love.”

  “How about tonight? You, me, and Whim?”

  “Sounds heavenly. I’ll come by around nine?”

  “Fine. And, ah, thanks.”

  “See you in a few.”

  * * *

  Whim was startled but not displeased by Will’s arrangements. “Haley and Mirren are going to go get the Karawar, so we don’t even have to get them out of the apartment,” he mused. Then he set about manically cleaning up the living room. He even changed the sheets on his mattress, which Will tried not to think about.

  At eight thirty, Bayla texted that she was on her way, but the news seemed to worry Whim. He began rubbing his mouth and chin like a contemplative villain, and maybe the reference was subconsciously intentional because Will had noticed he did it only when feeling guilty.

  “Suddenly I’m worried this isn’t a good idea,” Whim said.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you have trouble with drugs?”

  “Not exactly, and according to Bayla, Veil dust isn’t a drug; it’s a mystical substance.”

  “True. But i
t can still be misused.” He clapped Will’s shoulder. “What the hell, right? If you say you’re cool, that’s enough for me.”

  Will felt strangely disappointed that Whim hadn’t pushed him harder to find a different solution to his anxiety problems. Maybe with a little help, he could have found one; instead, he was using Veil dust as a stopgap to keep himself from drinking. Even if he wasn’t technically an alcoholic and wasn’t technically working at staying sober, he felt like he would still be giving something up by using Veil dust.

  Just pride and the future opportunity to feel self-righteous, he told himself. What do I need pride for, anyway?

  What made the decision for him was the fact that he had no idea how else to go on. Something had to change, and quickly, some pressure had to be relieved, and if this was what it took to unclench his stomach and calm his mind, so be it.

  Bayla arrived half an hour later dressed in very tight gray jeans and a wispy purple top. She’d painted her eyes a smoky purple, but she must not have been wearing any lipstick, because Will was pretty sure that if she had been, it would have been all over Whim’s face after their ardent kiss hello.

  Oh, man, Will thought. I don’t know if I can watch this all evening.

  He closed the apartment door behind her, even though the house was basically deserted—only Whim’s dad and Josh were around; Alex was watching his game shows, Josh had taken a double shift in the archroom, and Deloise had gone to her school friend Nate’s birthday party. Still, Will couldn’t shake the feeling that they could get caught at any moment.

  “So,” Bayla said, plopping onto the couch. “Whim, what have you got to crush this up with?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Bayla pulled a ring box from her purse. Inside was a tiny plastic bag.

  Will held out his hand. “Do you mind?”

  She passed him the bag and he held it up to the light. Inside sat about a tablespoon of sparkling, iridescent dust. When he shook it, he caught glimpses of rainbows.

  Josh is right, he thought. There’s something magical about this.

  Despite the feeling that he was violating something sacred, he handed the bag over without comment when Whim returned with a mortar and pestle. “How much Veil dust have you been doing?” Bayla asked at the sight of the tools.