Dreamfever (9 page)

“Don't be so American,” Deloise told him. “None of us know anything about the European hectorates. Why should they know anything about us?”

Will and Haley exchanged a glance Mirren couldn't read.

“The Accordance Conclave is a continent-wide vote on what type of government to replace the junta with,” Will explained. “The group with the most support is the Lodestone Party, which is—”

“I know the Lodestone Party,” Mirren interjected. “They—”

They killed my parents.

She folded the napkin so she wouldn't have to look at the bone any longer.

“You probably should know them,” Whim said with a laugh. “You're eating breakfast with the party leader's granddaughters.”

The happy bubble Mirren had spent the last hour inside of popped and left her feeling very full and very sick.

“Please excuse me,” she said, rising. Her napkin unfolded as it floated to the floor; the bit of bloodied bone mocked her.

You think this hurt? Just wait for what comes next.

She knew what was coming next. She could see the thought on the horizon like approaching storm clouds, and she knew she had to get out of the restaurant before the rain fell. She headed for the front door. Behind her, exclamations of Whim's confusion and Deloise's concern filled the air.

“Do you want me to come?” Will asked.

“No,” Haley said. “I've got it.”

Mirren hit the door with both hands, causing a harness of bells to ring, and ran straight into the parking lot. Tires squealed, a horn blared, and Mirren shrieked as a hulking red vehicle stopped less than two feet from her. The driver screamed obscenities at her.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Mirren cried, and dashed toward the only thing she saw that looked comforting: a large grassy area with a small creek running through it.

She didn't slow down until she reached a place where the creek ran through a channel beneath the road. A concrete slab buried next to the water protruded enough to create a little bench where she could sit without ruining her borrowed clothes.

Although she had closed her eyes, she felt Haley sit down beside her. Maybe her skin picked up his body warmth, or maybe she just sensed his presence, but she knew he was there even when he didn't speak.

Some people don't speak with words,
she thought, and she felt grateful not to be alone at that moment.

Wasn't it silly of me to think I could come here and not confront Peregrine?
she wondered bitterly.
We have been circling each other from afar, drawing slowly closer, since the day he killed my parents. We've swung around our orbits, but gravity has always been moving us toward the moment our paths would cross.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that Haley had picked a few long blades of grass and was twisting them together. “My family didn't tell me about the Accordance Conclave,” she said.

Haley nodded as if he'd already known. Maybe he had.

“Now that I look back on it, they must have been hiding things from me for years. Newspapers kept getting lost on their way to us, or a page or two would be missing. Our liaison to the World started having”—she made air quotes with her fingers—“‘computer problems' and couldn't print the blogs I was reading. There's no Internet in the Hidden Kingdom, of course.” She rubbed her eyes. “They must not have wanted me to know that support for staging was gaining so much traction.”

“Why not?” Haley asked.

“Because they knew I'd be obligated to try to stop it.”

Haley ran a blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger. “It's … Staging is very dangerous, isn't it? More dangerous than people know.”

Mirren realized then how much Haley might have seen. She'd brushed his hand while reaching for the butter in the restaurant—or perhaps before that, the time she'd hugged him, the handshake … any contact could have revealed her secrets.

“Mirren,” he said, and he touched her again then, so hesitantly, just his hand on her back. He struggled for a moment before saying, “Everyone has secrets. I don't … I don't share what isn't mine. It's like … a responsibility.” He blushed prettily and added, “It's a duty.”

Mirren knew then that gravity had brought her to Haley just as it had brought her to Peregrine. She had arrived alone in a strange land, and she could not believe that by mere chance, she could have met someone who so perfectly understood her responsibilities.

“Thank you,” she said.

Haley shrugged as if to say,
Of course
.

“No,” she said. “For being my friend.”

And he smiled.

“There's something about you,” he said, his voice even quieter than usual but his words more certain. “I can't look away.”

Her heart beat hard, twice. She wanted him to keep looking, yet she felt obligated to say, “You should get as far away from me as you can. It's entirely possible that Peregrine Borgenicht will have me assassinated as soon as he finds out I'm alive.”

Haley shook his head. He took a deep breath and straightened his back, and Mirren saw that it was hard for him to sit up straight, to take up so much room in the World. “I'll keep you alive—I mean, I'll help. If you want, I mean.”

Then he ducked down a little, as if afraid of being such a tall target, and Mirren felt inspired by his tiny act of courage.

“I feel so betrayed,” she admitted. Her voice cracked with tears, but she didn't care. “Now I have to forget about living my normal, peaceful life, because I have to stop the Lodestone Party from taking power.” She glanced around the park, which was spotted with dandelions she'd never had the chance to smell. “It would be such a shame to die now.”

“We won't let you die,” Haley promised. “The others will help. They all hate him.”

“I just want…” She reached out to touch Haley's face and then stopped herself. “I want everything, I suppose.”

She
did
want everything. She wanted to kill Peregrine and take over the government and go to college and eat sugar and kiss Haley. But somehow her life in the World was already becoming as predetermined as her life in the Hidden Kingdom had been.
Gravity,
she thought again, with less gratitude this time.

“Come inside,” Haley said. “We'll find a way.”

“All right.” Mirren climbed to her feet. “But we should come back to this park sometime.”

“Park?” he asked.

“Yeah. This is a park, right?”

He smiled like he was trying not to laugh at her. “It's an undeveloped lot with a storm drain.”

Mirren burst out laughing. “It
is
? But it's so pretty!”

Haley held out his hand, and she took it. As they walked back toward the restaurant, he said, “I'll take you to a real park.”

“Can we have a picnic?”

“Yes.”

Mirren squeezed his hand, even as she thought,
We'd better go soon
.

 

Seven

Feodor's laboratory—all
scorched ashes of roses wallpaper and metal autopsy tables covered with dirty crystals and shattered beakers. Josh sat in the window seat and looked out at the ruins of Warsaw, admiring how the different columns of smoke wove together like strands of silk thread, each its own subtle shade of gray.

“You can see so much more of the sky now that the buildings have been knocked down,” she told Feodor. “They should never have been put up in the first place.”

He laughed, a sharp sound that cut her ears. Josh winced and looked back out the window just in time to see the worsening rain bring down one of the few remaining chimneys. It made a sound like the rush of a creek as it fell.

Josh loved the city. She could sit in the window seat and stare out all day, or wander through the wreckage, admiring the poetry of shattered pottery, the tenderness of one-eyed dollies, the poignancy of discolored photographs. Sometimes she liked to try on stained clothing or broken jewelry that she found, modeling ripped silk stockings and blackened wedding dresses for Feodor.

But the city just as often infuriated her. Each time she tripped on rubble, coughed on the filthy air, felt a wall she was leaning against collapse, she thought,
Something must be done about all this
.

Leaving the window seat, she went to stand beside Feodor at one of the long tables where he had laid out his experiments. She recognized the circlet and vambrace immediately.

“Show me how these work,” she said, thinking of what their power could do to rebuild the city.

“I already showed you.”

“You showed me, but I want to understand. To know them the way I know you.”

He smiled at her, and when he spoke again, his tone was intimate, so soft that she had to lean forward to hear. “And how do you know me?”

She pressed the side of her leg against his, winding her foot around his shin like a snake. “Completely.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.” He continued to fiddle with the devices, and Josh insinuated herself between him and the table until she stood in the circle of his arms. “I know you better than I know myself.”

“Benefit of hindsight, I suppose,” he murmured, before kissing her lightly. His eyes were so many shades of gray, but each of them glowed with their own light, as if they still carried a bit of the fire that had turned them to smoke.

“Very well,” Feodor said, and he cupped her face in his hands. “I'll help you understand.…”

He squeezed her head between his palms and began to lift. Josh scrambled to catch hold of his wrists, but her heels were already leaving the floor. A terrible pain spread from the base of her skull down into her neck as Feodor continued to lift her up. She clutched at his wrists, his arms, scratching, digging, then reached for his face, but her arms were too short. When her toes lost contact with the ground, the pain in her neck grew fearsome, the pain of a body's weight hanging on sinews that simply could not support it.

Feodor's eyes glowed white. “Now you know,” he said, and he shook her once, up and down, hard.

Her body fell to the floor.

Her head did not.

*   *   *

Josh actually screamed as she woke up. She had never done that before, but she did it now, and her hands came up around her neck to make sure it was still connected to her head. She tried to run from the nightmare but succeeded only in cracking her cheek on the bedroom wall, because for some reason she had woken standing on her bed.

I'm going to die,
she thought.
I'm dying. No, I'm awake. It's a trick. Where's my head?

Strangely, it was her head she felt she had lost, not her body. She choked on her own breath, ran into the bathroom to retch, and ending up only coughing into the toilet. The invasive scent of the toilet bowl cleaner nauseated her even more.

She couldn't calm down. She couldn't stop touching her throat, her neck, digging with her fingers to make out each tiny vertebra.

Damn you, Feodor. Damn you, damn you, damn you. I should have killed you myself. I should have kept you alive and made you reverse what you did to me. I should bring you back to life and make you fix this.

The door at the other end of the bathroom opened, and Deloise—wearing a matching floral tank top and lace-edged shorts—rushed to Josh's side.

“What's wrong? Are you sick? I heard you scream.” She hugged her sister close. “It's okay, Josh. It's okay. You just had a bad dream.”

Josh hugged Deloise back, letting some of the hysteria work itself out in the embrace. Slowly, though, her breath did calm, and finally she was able to release her sister and sit back against the vanity.

Deloise poured her a glass of water and sat beside her as Josh drank it. “Want to tell me about it?”

Josh shook her head. She was aware that Deloise was worried about her, that she knew enough about Josh's nightmares to be rightly concerned, but telling Deloise the details would have felt like deliberately exposing her to a deadly virus.

“Maybe you should go talk to a therapist,” Deloise ventured hesitantly. “I mean, it seems like the nightmares are getting worse instead of better.”

Josh stared into her water glass. She didn't need a therapist—she needed an exorcist.

“I thought I was dating a therapist,” she joked. Deloise didn't laugh.

“He's not a therapist yet, and he's in even worse shape than you.”

“I know, I know,” Josh said. She would have had a hard time not noticing. “I'll be all right, Del.”

She spent a few minutes reassuring her sister, then Deloise hugged her again and went back to bed. Josh washed her face and returned to her own room.

She stopped dead in the doorway.

In her blind panic, she had not noticed the walls. Josh, who had never cared much for interior decorating, hadn't painted or papered or hung posters, so until tonight the walls had been quite blank. But her subconscious—or perhaps Feodor's subconscious—had thought them too blank, blank canvases, even, and she must have climbed on the mattress in her sleep, and that was why she'd woken standing, because the walls that formed a corner around her bed were covered in writing.

Mostly the writing appeared to be mathematical formulas. Some chemical. A large number of annotated diagrams showing how wires should be arranged, where magnets and crystals should be placed. An astonishingly detailed anatomical diagram of the circulatory system in the right arm.

He did this,
she thought.

Six months before, she might have been able to grudgingly recognize
E
=
mc
2
as something Einstein had discovered. Tonight she knew it meant that an object's mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light described how much energy the object could emit.