Dreamfever (23 page)

“I was trying to bring in some of the good press you got after the Feodor thing. You know, unpopular girl dates a popular boy, and then she's popular, too?”

Through his teeth, Haley said,
“I'm not popular.”
He held up the tablet. “
Pouter40242
thinks I'm a deaf-mute!”

Josh struggled not to crack up. She felt terrible for Haley and Mirren, and she was proud of Haley for laying into Whim, but that deaf-mute rumor had been going around since they were in middle school.

“Well, now he knows you're not,” Whim said. “Look, somebody was going to write this article eventually. People have noticed that you're glued to Mirren's side. Better that I choose the tone for the story.”

Haley's lips were pursed so tightly, they were almost white. “You didn't do this for Mirren. You did it for yourself.”

“Haley,” Whim said, clutching the hilt of an imaginary knife in his chest, “you wound me.”

“Stop writing about her!” Haley demanded.

“I can't do that,” Whim said. He turned faintly green. “Do you know how much traffic I'm getting these days? The website is finally paying for itself.”

Haley turned and stormed out of the room.

“At least close the comments section,” Josh told Whim before following Haley.

She found him on the balcony off the living room, leaning against the railing and glaring at the lawn. “I'm sorry about Whim,” she said. “He's—”

“I know who Whim is,” Haley said curtly. “He's a fundamentally selfish person.”

Josh gawked at him, and he ducked his head, his momentary confidence fled.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“No apology necessary. I mean, you aren't wrong. Just … you reminded me of Ian for a second. In a good way.”

For a moment, Josh wondered what Ian would have thought of Haley and Mirren together, then decided she didn't want to know. But Haley's thoughts must have taken a similar course, because he said, “Next week is the Fourth of July.”

The holiday would mark one year since Ian's death. Or rather, one year since they'd thought he had died. One year since Feodor had turned Ian's body into his puppet. Josh had been trying not to think about the approaching anniversary, but the flags and holiday sales had made it impossible.

“We could go put flowers on his grave or something,” Josh said.

“I'm not—” Haley stuttered, and then in a familiar half whisper finished, “I might not be around.”

Before Josh could ask what he meant, he retreated into the house, his shoulders drawn up to his ears.

That was weird,
she thought. She hadn't seen Haley panic like that in a long time. And his phrasing had been so ominous.…

She set aside the urge to question him further—he'd tell her when he was ready—and went upstairs, unsure what else to do. Will had said they'd talk the next day; did that mean he didn't want to see her tonight? It wasn't even eight yet.

She sat on her bed, digging her big toe into the carpet and trying to figure out what she could have done to upset him. Had he found her notes or her workshop in the attic? He couldn't have been too angry, or he wouldn't have punched that lady who crushed the egg in Josh's eye.

The apartment phone rang, and since no one else was around, Josh answered it.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this Josh, please?”

“It is.”

“Hi, Josh, this is Bash Mirrettsio calling.”

Suddenly she was glad she had been the one to answer.

“I hope it's all right, me calling you at home like this,” he said. “I realized after you left that I'd forgotten to get your phone number.”

“I don't have one. But it's all right.” She closed her bedroom door firmly.

“Good. Well, I won't beat around the bush. I was inspired by our meeting the other day, and I've done nothing since except try to figure out how we could make your inventions work. Honestly, Bayla is going to kill me if I don't pay her some attention, but I simply can't focus on anything else. And I think—I
think
—I may have found a way to attach our cell phone towers to the sea.”

Josh sat quietly for the next ten minutes and listened to Bash describe what he had done. He'd taken her idea of reversing the polarity of the particles and run with it, and he talked so fast that Josh had a hard time following the science behind his explanation.

“Wait a sec,” Josh burst out. “How did you do this without a particle accelerator?”

“Willis-Audretch has a particle accelerator.”

He went on, but Josh couldn't keep up with all his jargon and his peculiar use of analogies. She'd have to ask Bash to explain everything again when they had a pad and pen in front of them.

“I suppose there is one other question,” Bash continued, “which is simply this: Do we want to keep moving forward? Up until now, this conversation has been purely theoretical. But if we place these towers in the Dream, we'll have taken a very large step into the actual.”

Did I spend all these months writing on sketch pads and walls and my own body parts just to stop now?
Josh wondered. She recalled last night's dream again, not the red sky, but the feeling of quiet peace that had filled her when all the monsters were dead and the fighting was over. She wanted that peace.

She wanted that power.

“Let's do it,” she said.

“I was hoping you'd say that. Excellent. Do you want to come see the particle accelerator?”

Of
course
she wanted to see the particle accelerator. But how would she explain another trip to Braxton without Will?

“I'd love to, but things are kind of a mess around here at the moment. I might not be able to get away.”

“Oh, yes, I saw the news reports. They said your princess made a poor mermaid, despite the long red hair.”

Josh laughed, even though the joke was a little lighthearted for a near-death experience.

“I'm just glad they passed her.”

“Any chance she'll turn over the Karawar?”

“A pretty good one, I think,” Josh admitted, and she knew she probably shouldn't be telling Bash any such thing, but it felt nice to talk lightheartedly with someone, and he was sort of a friend. “Listen, can you come by tomorrow night around eight? I'm scheduled to dream walk. We could try attaching the towers then.”

Bash's voice brightened. “Splendid!”

“Come to the back door, all right? Don't ring the bell out front.”

“Are we playing cloak-and-dagger?”

More than I'd like,
Josh thought, but she told Bash, “Just a bit. I'll see you tomorrow—have fun with your particle accelerator.”

*   *   *

By the time she woke up the next day—well after noon—Will had already left the house. He'd taken off to the mall with Whim and Deloise, which left Josh confused because he hated the mall.

Is he just trying to get away from me?
she wondered. For the first time ever, she wished he had a cell phone she could call.

Since he didn't, she spent a couple of hours scrubbing the spray paint off the house and the rest of the afternoon training. The doctor had told her to leave the eye patch on until the next day, but she thought she'd be safer training with it off. Her eye didn't hurt unless she rubbed it.

When Will, Deloise, and Whim didn't return for dinner, she helped Kerstel cook and then put herself through three rounds of a Romanian circuit-training video that left her gasping for air.

Afterward, she sat on the back porch and waited for Bash, watching the security guards wander around the yard. One of them was texting. While Josh glared at him, Haley and Mirren walked out the back door. They were holding hands.

“You guys going out?” Josh asked, concerned about their safety.

“We're going back to the Hidden Kingdom,” Mirren said. “I've decided to give the Karawar to the junta.”

“Oh,” Josh said, and then realized how unsupportive she sounded.

“I just want all this to be over,” Mirren admitted.

“Do you want me to come? We could wait until early morning, like last time.”

“Thank you, but I think we'll be fine. My aunt and uncle are usually in bed by ten, and if we bump into my cousin, she'll likely just ask to come back with us.”

“Be safe,” Josh told them as they climbed into Haley's truck.

Alone, listening to the security guard argue with his son's mother on his phone, Josh wondered if Haley's cryptic comment the night before might have meant he would be in the Hidden Kingdom on the Fourth of July. That was a less frightening thought than others she'd had.

The security guard was threatening to sue for custody by the time Bash drove up the driveway and around the back. He parked and exited his car, at which point the security guard called from twenty yards away, “Is he okay?”

“Who's that?” Bash asked, squinting into the darkness.

Josh raised her hand and gave the okay. “He's the world's worst security guard. He might be tied, though, with the guard in the front yard, who I'm guessing didn't stop you.”

“No one stopped me. I did notice a man taking a smoke on your porch swing, though.”

Josh swore to call the security company and give them hell.
After
she and Bash tried out his invention.

“Are you wearing an eye patch?” Bash asked.

“Yeah. It's a long story.”

“I heard you were in a fight.”

“All right, it's not that long a story. Do you need help with these boxes?”

“Sure,” Bash said, smiling, and they each grabbed a large cardboard box from the backseat of his car.

Luckily, Saidy was at work, Alex had retired to his apartment for the evening, and Haley and Mirren were out, so no one saw Bash as Josh led him down to the basement.

“Nice setup,” Bash said, watching Josh type her code into the bank-vault door that protected the archway.

“It works,” Josh agreed. Only then did she realize that he had likely memorized her code, and she made a mental note to change it after he left. Not that she didn't trust Bash, she just … Well, it seemed prudent.

“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.