Dreamfire (46 page)

The pain changed as Josh and Haley dragged the heavy thing off of Will's back. The pressure moved from his spine to his left shoulder, and then he saw a giant hunk of concrete hit the street beside him with a crack. The size of it shocked him—no wonder Josh had cursed. After a moment of relief, the pain returned, not as loud but still too loud. But at least he could breathe.

Will managed to climb to his knees. Moving made him want to throw up, and he was afraid that if he made one wrong turn, his spinal cord would snap—but if they stayed much longer, it wouldn't matter if he could move below the waist or not. Behind them, Warsaw was on its last legs. Block by block, the streetlights and building fires blinked out, and a sound like a ferocious waterfall grew nearer and louder, white noise turning black.

“Where's Gloves?” Josh shouted. Their guide was nowhere in sight.

Haley pointed to a corner. “He turned left there.”

“Shit!” Josh shouted again. “Get Will's other side!”

Taking Will by the arms, they lifted him to his feet. The pain shifted and resettled like a jostled pile of bone fragments; Will hoped that wasn't really what he was feeling.

Before he could adjust to the pain, they were running again, and Will stumbled along, aware that he couldn't feel the fingers on his right hand. That had to be a bad sign.

Then they turned where Gloves had, and they saw the gate.

At the end of a wide boulevard, the world ended with a two-story iron gate painted dark green. Beyond it, the city simply stopped, as though a black canvas had been erected behind the bars. Gloves was trying to drag the enormous gate open, but it weighed too much for even his strength.

Will slumped against the bars a few feet away from Gloves and watched Josh and Haley throw their weight behind his. If Gloves was surprised by their help, he didn't show it.

We came all the way here for this guy,
Will thought, trying to rub feeling into his hand again.
All this, and he's not even a person anymore.

The three of them managed to create an eighteen-inch opening. Strangely, no light or mirror was required for the space to fill with glittering Veil. Gloves vanished through it, then Haley, but when Josh turned to help Will, her eyes lingered in the direction from which they had come.

In the distance, blackness swallowed Warsaw. Even the fires couldn't stand up to the rising tide of nothingness.

“Feodor would have loved to see this,” Josh said.

The nostalgia in her voice freaked Will out.

But then she looped one of Will's arms around her neck and helped him stand, and they followed Haley through the gate and into the Dream, leaving Warsaw to meet its final destruction alone.

Through a Veil Darkly

Emergency! Help Needed NOW!

At this very moment, three dream walkers have entered the pocket universe where Feodor Kajażkołski has been housed since 1962 and are facing off with the madman over the issues of the TCM and CSAD. Just before they entered his universe, they told me that they'd found evidence that the TCM are not nightmares, but are actually two dream walkers: Geoff Simbarticolsi and Ian Micharainosa. Both were believed to have been lost in the Dream, when in fact, they had been taken hostage in Feodor's dimension and either brainwashed or otherwise compelled to do his will. He has been sending them into the Dream in order to attack dreamers, and it is these attacks that have resulted in CSAD.

The junta knows all of this, but so far nothing has been done. The three dream walkers who are confronting Kajażkołski are only teenagers, and if no one steps up to help them, they could easily wind up in trench coats themselves.

Please, call your local representative or a member of the junta (phone numbers below) and demand that action be taken to save our young people! Time is short! Spread the word!

 

Thirty-six

They stepped out
of Feodor's universe and into a quiet hallway in the Dream. The change disoriented Josh. No more soot in the air, no more bombs lighting the sky, no more rumbling streets. Just silence and pile carpeting. The hallway looked familiar to Josh, but maybe everything would look familiar after the foreignness of Feodor's Warsaw.

Josh turned to Will and said, “Let me see how bad it is.” All three of them were banged up. Josh wasn't sure why, but bruises rose all over her arms and her entire body hurt terribly. Blood dripped from a cut on the side of Haley's neck, but Will was the one she was worried about.

He stood hunched over, leaning on his left shoulder against the wall, but he twisted a bit to show her his back. His white-and-blue flannel shirt bore a red wash of blood down the back. Josh used her fingertips to carefully pull the torn fabric away.

She cursed again. No wonder he couldn't stand up straight—his whole back was turning purple. A ragged wound ran between his shoulder blades; not an incision but a wound the size of two palms where so much flesh had been rubbed away that she could see muscle and bone.

From the time since she'd woken up in the white room until she saw the boulder land on Will, she hadn't felt afraid. She'd known Warsaw was collapsing, but she'd known it through a numb haze. She hadn't needed to feel afraid to know that she had to run.

But seeing that chunk of concrete fall out of the sky and slam Will to the ground, and now—seeing him hurt so badly—scared her. There was a real chance that Will wouldn't be all right.

“Josh,” Haley said.

This was her fault. She should never have let them follow her. She should never have gone herself—Will and Whim had been right.

“Josh,” Haley repeated.

“What?” she snapped, and Haley shrank back. “Sorry.”

“We're at the cabin,” he said.

Before she could ask what he meant, she understood. That flowery wallpaper—she did recognize it.

Thanks to Feodor's experiments, Gloves had the power to alter the Dream at will, and for reasons Josh couldn't fathom, he'd chosen to re-create her mother's cabin. The last time she'd seen this wallpaper and this hallway had been the night Ian died and the cabin burned.

“Why are we here?” Haley whispered, as if afraid the walls would overhear.

Cautiously, Josh broke Stellanor's First Rule and felt … nothing. “There's no dreamer here.”

“I thought that wasn't possible,” Will said.

“It shouldn't be possible. Gloves must be manipulating the Dream somehow.” Josh shook herself. “It doesn't matter. We have to get you out of here.” She dug in her pockets before remembering that Feodor had taken her compact and lighter. “Who else has keys?”

Haley produced his compact but had lost his lighter. Will's pocket produced nothing but greasy shards of mirror and plastic. “I must have fallen on it.”

“So we have no lighter,” Josh said. Now a new, different sort of fear filled her.

She cursed again. She had no idea how many times she had cursed that day. It was beginning to feel like a normal addendum to any sentence.

“Gloves might have a lighter,” Will said. “He and Snitch opened an exit. One of them must have been carrying.”

Josh's hope flared and then died out completely as she realized that there was no way to get Will on his way to a hospital before she faced Gloves. And she knew she wouldn't be fighting her best if she was worrying about Will at the same time.

They had only one option. So she took it.

“Here's the plan,” she said. “We go after Gloves. We get his keys. Will, you hang on to Haley's compact in case you get a lighter first. Haley, help Will open an exit and get him out. It doesn't matter if the archway opens to China, just get him out. Toss me the keys before you go. I'm going to stay and…”

She didn't know how to finish the sentence. Was there still any hope of reuniting Ian's soul with his body, or had that possibility died with Feodor?

“Maybe I can knock him out…” she began, and then that statement, too, fizzled. Whatever Feodor had done to Ian's body, Gloves had a fierce survival instinct.

“I'll help,” Haley offered. He took her hand the way he had in Feodor's laboratory. “I'm with you,” he said, and she realized he was looking at her with an expression of purest trust. “We can bring him home.”

“I hope so,” she said.

“Gloves is afraid of you. He knows who you are.”

Why did Haley feel the need to bring up this delusion about her being the True Dream Walker again? “Haley, no—”

“
You
know who you are.”

She remembered the hours and hours of training she had gone through, days filled with combat lessons and mud runs, nights filled with every terror imaginable. She thought of the sore muscles and the broken bones and the chipped teeth. She had sweated and burned and cried and bled through the last seventeen years. She was no magical creature—just a girl who had made a thousand mistakes and kept going.

“I'm not,” she told Haley. “The True Dream Walker wouldn't have screwed things up the way I have.”

Haley gave her a kind half smile and stepped closer to her. “It's okay if you can't believe it yet. But you know I'm not crazy. I'm not mean. I wouldn't lie to you about this. So, if you can't believe it yet, believe me, okay? Believe me when I say that you are the True Dream Walker.”

Josh didn't even recognize him in that moment. He wasn't a bizarre impersonation of Ian and he wasn't the shy, trembling boy she had grown up with. The fragility in him had hardened.

“I failed Feodor's test,” she said, making one more weak protest.

“Maybe not,” Will said.

His face was pale and wet, and he was leaning wearily against the wall again. If Josh had never seen Haley so confident, she had never seen Will so defeated.

Seeing him in so much pain, she wished she could just take him and go. She wanted to peel that shredded shirt away and bandage his wounds, do something to help repair the damage she'd caused. She wanted to kiss his hands and beg his forgiveness.

“It wasn't a true Tempering,” Will went on, his voice somehow both weak and gruff. “It was just an excuse for Feodor to torture you. You might succeed in a real Tempering.”

She remembered having similar thoughts during the woman's nightmare just a few hours before. “No, I'd fail that, too. I know I would.”

Why did Will believe in her? Hadn't he watched her fail, not just in the white room but again and again over the last six weeks? She had been cold and careless and rash. Why did Will have this irrational faith in her? It was the only irrational thing about him.

“We need to move,” she said, tired of fighting. “Remember, our first priority is to get Will out of the Dream.”

The hallway extended in two directions. One led to the living room, the other to the basement stairwell. Josh didn't question where Gloves had intended for them to go.

Everything in the basement was just as she remembered it from eight months before. At one end of the unfinished room stood the stairs, and at the other were the furnace and fuse box. Between them, a bucket of hardened cement rested next to a pile of smooth stones for outlining the Veil and holding it open. Mirrors sent arcs of light shooting all over the room like colorless rainbows.

Gloves stood at the far end of the basement with his eyes closed. He had taken off his trench coat and gloves, and underneath he wore the same outfit he'd had on the last time Josh had seen him: black jeans and a forest-green polo shirt. He didn't look the least bit bedraggled. His clothing was tidy. His hair was dry and combed off his face.

Perhaps he had altered his appearance to confuse her, or maybe it was another facet of this bizarre reenactment. Josh stopped at the bottom of the steps and waited for Haley and Will to fall into place behind her.

Ian opened his eyes.

They were hazel and arranged into white, iris, and pupil.

Josh gasped.

Ian said, “Evening, J.D.”

His voice had inflection. It was casual and fond and a little bit nervous but determined not to let it show. His face was animated, his mouth curved in a knowing smile.

He was
Ian
again.

“Haley?” Josh said uncertainly.

“I don't know,” Haley whispered, a frantic edge to his voice. “I can't feel anything.”

“It could be a trick,” Will put in. Josh had the same fear—that Gloves still possessed Ian's memories and was putting on a grand performance.

Ian lifted his eyebrows. “I'm not trying to trick anybody,” he announced. “I…” He shook his head as if overwhelmed. “This is as much a surprise to me as it is to you.”

He shrugged, and the force of déjà vu caused the ache in Josh's chest—that wound she had carried for eight months—to open up again. He was Ian, and she needed him tonight. She had never stopped needing him.

“What happened?” she asked, already walking toward him.

“I don't know.” He took a step in her direction. “Somehow Feodor kept me—my spirit or whatever—from being able to get back into my body. But when he died, it was like my body opened up again, only I … I couldn't find my way back for a couple of minutes.” He shrugged. “I don't know how to say it.”

She almost smiled. How many times had he told her that he didn't know how to say it?

“I knew you'd find me,” he said. “I always knew.” He grinned and turned to Haley. “Hey, little brother.”

Josh realized that Haley was standing next to her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Will leaning against the wall, one arm wrapped tightly around his torso. Blood dripped from the hem of his shirt.

Ian and Haley stared at each other. “Little brother” had been a joke between them, because despite having been born first, Haley had always seemed younger.

Josh touched Haley's hand, and he dragged his gaze back to her. “What do you think?” she asked.