Dreamstrider (12 page)

And like all dreams, it dissolves at last, without resolution. I awaken tangled in sweat-slicked sheets with nothing but broken questions and the throb of dread in the back of my mind.

Chapter Nine

Over the next several days, Brandt infiltrates a half dozen temples, and Vera attends endless tea parties and formal dinners in search of leads on Twyne’s associates, but they turn up nothing further. Minister Durst, Marez, and Kriza are busy readying the city’s defenses and coaching the Barstadt navy on the Commandant’s plans we had found in the Citadel. They’re stymied, however, by a rash of tunneler protests, calling for the Writ to pass; one group even manages to break into the Imperial Palace through the tunnels before the palace guards subdue them and order those tunnels sealed. I know they just want their citizenship—access to respectable work and living quarters, not the indentured servitude of tunnel life—but I worry for the tunnelers. For how the aristocrats might lash out in fear.

No such excitement for me. I dig through the archives with Edina, play Stacks with Sora, and wait—for there’s nothing more I can do, even as my dreams taunt me with the horrible possibility that Nightmare is returning to life. But there’s not much I can do in Oneiros without a hint of whom I could use to gain the knowledge we need. I dream of returning to the archives at night, searching for answers, but in dreams and in the waking world, I have no proof. I have no clues. Finally, when I can take it no longer, I decide to try Professor Hesse once more, despite how our last conversation went.

As I wind the interminable stairs of the Theosophy Tower, I wrack my mind for a new joke to tell Professor Hesse—anything to ease the bad blood between us after our last conversation. The cheesier, the better. Brandt had found one for me on a recent mission—what was it? A corrupt constable and the Dreamer’s High Priest walk into an ale house …

Hesse’s office door on the twelfth floor is shut. I’d already checked the lab, but it was locked. Perhaps he’s deep in a fresh thesis. I test the handle: unlocked, but the door fights me as I lean into it. “Professor Hesse?” I call timidly, once more feeling very much the na
ï
ve little girl I’d been when Hesse and I first met. “I’ve brought more honeycakes from Kruger’s.”

The office floods me with the stink of mildew and sweat as soon as I open the door, as if I’ve unsealed a tomb. Tears spring to my eyes, and I bury my nose and mouth in the crook of my arm as I enter, leaving the door open to air out the room.

“I told you I don’t want any cleaning,” Hesse growls from somewhere behind a pulpit of manuscripts, books, scrolls. Then I see one eye flicker toward me. “Oh. Livia. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

I scramble over the stacked trays of half-eaten bread crusts and chicken bones buzzing with flies that guard the doorway like a moat. “Dreamer bless, what’s happened to you?”

Hesse is swaddled in a patchy blanket on the window seat, staring down at the main plaza. The closer I draw toward him, the more overpowering his stench becomes. An overflowing chamber pot languishes beside him; his usually shiny white hair hangs in clumps about his face. I pull a kerchief from my sleeve and press it to my nose. When we spoke just a few weeks past, yes, I’d noticed a fog of weariness around him—a tremor in his voice and a world-weary scent. But this is extreme. Has he even bathed since we last spoke?

I throw open the window; the sunlight bursts free into the room, no longer suppressed by the grimy diamond-patterned windows. Professor Hesse flinches and leans away from the light. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says, but his voice is thinner than a tunneler’s broth, and I can barely hear him.

“What’s the matter with you?” I ask, once I’ve taken a deep gulp of the outside air. Even after his wife’s death, Hesse never stopped teaching, never halted his research. I scan the mad scribbles of paper he has accumulated on his desk, like he was searching for something.

Professor Hesse tilts his head back against the stone wall. “It’s all my fault. I should have destroyed it. No lock is good enough. Shouldn’t have researched it in the first place.”

A shudder tears through me as I wipe the dust and grime away from his bookshelves. Surely he doesn’t mean the dreamstriding theorem. Me. My nails dig into the rag in my palm, and I scrub furiously. He gave me a new life when he unlocked the secret to dreamstriding. How can he regret that?

I dig through his reams of papers. I’m still cleaning for him—I will probably spend my life cleaning up after this man, tunneler or no—but I’ll make damned sure he knows how unhappy I am about it. Great clouds of dust swirl around me as I sort, shake, stack.

I fight to keep my voice contained, like the meek, silent servant I once was. “You know what my life was like when I met you. Before you dared to give me a chance. Would you have me surrender everything we’ve discovered and the far better life I live now?”

“What? No, no. But I shouldn’t have forced you into this life. Maybe I saved you from far worse, but my motives were…” He cracks. “Impure.”

A chill down my spine momentarily slows my frenzy. He can’t possibly mean that. That word brings to mind what happened to some of the other maids my age when they were assigned to cleaning professor’s offices. Professor Hesse never closed the office door, never reached for me, never even bore a dark sliver in his eye that I’ve seen in other professors. He gave me a new life—what could possibly be impure about that?

“You told me you dreamed so strongly. How could I resist that? The perfect test subject for my greatest theorem yet. And you were so tiny … no one would miss you if my experiments went wrong.”

Professor Hesse collapses into a dry sob. It sounds like the air rushing from a corpse’s lungs as its body constricts. But I am frozen in place. Not by what he has said—for it’s true, all of it. My father disappeared into the Dreamless dens, or so I’m told; my mother had energy only for tunneler work and crumpled into her pallet each night long before my siblings or half-siblings were fed. No one to miss me, indeed. No one but those endless hungry mouths, with no one to hear their cries.

No, it’s his tone that troubles me. I was only a scrawny little wisp who loved to help him dissect dreams; I’d assumed I was his very first test subject for dreamstriding. But his description of me sounds too much like the Hesse who turned me over to the Ministry so long ago, like he was presenting them with a new toy. I’d forgotten how cold Hesse could sound—the detached scientist Hesse, who’d attack an experiment from every possible direction until it yielded a result.

“Professor.” My throat clenches tight. “What are you saying?”

“I’ve done terrible things, Livia. Why do you bother with me? I never should have created those formulas, never hunted for a dreamstrider … I could have spared so many deaths. I fear now even more deaths will come.”

“Deaths?” I cry, panic rising in me like a tide. Surely he isn’t speaking about the Incident. “What do you mean? I’m here—I’m alive.”

“No, Livia. You’re the only one to
survive.
”

The room spins around me. “No.” My hands had been tidying, unconscious, a bone-deep reflex, but I drop the stack of papers I’d been about to move. “No. What do you mean?”

He keeps staring out the window. “You know what the Wastes are capable of.”

They say it was easy to get lost in your dreams in the days before Nightmare was destroyed—that you could slip too far into Oneiros in your sleep and get devoured by the Wastes. It’s why the priests forbade anyone but themselves and a few professors like Hesse from entering Oneiros. So many died. They succumbed to their deepest fears and darkest regrets, and Nightmare’s minions preyed on their pain until their souls were devoured. But it’s safer now—the only real danger comes from severing that tie to your body, like I do when I dreamstride.

“They—they died trying to dreamstride?” Even now I can hear the chatter of the Nightmare Wastes, snaring like hooks into my skin. “But you—but you never told me—” I swallow down the bile that burns in the back of my throat. “You sent them to their deaths!”

His fingers trace the lead lining his window panes. “Most did quit after the first hint of danger from the Nightmare Wastes. A few others accused me of trying to resurrect Nightmare himself—that another theorem I was working on…” He stops himself, finger trembling against the glass, then hangs his head. “But those who pushed on, who took that leap from their bodies … Every last one of them … dead.”

I ball my hands into fists. Rage is useless to me; there’s nowhere for it to go. “Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why let me think no one had ever reached that stage?”

“Because I didn’t want you to be afraid.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and rocks back and forth on the sill for a few moments; I fear that I’ve lost him. I’d always feared that age would claim him before he could help me escape the tunneler life, but guilt looks to have a head start, crushing him slowly like the heavy slabs of stone the people of the northern islands once used to crush their criminals. Finally, he rears up his head.

The great Albrecht Hesse, esteemed professor of theosophy, renowned scholar of dream interpretation and manipulation, and for those initiated into the Ministry of Affairs, creator of dreamstriding. Dreamstriding had been nothing but a formula on a page before he met me, a jumble of variables boiled down from decades of study—not with the reverent hands-off fervor of the Dreamer’s priests, but the relentless prodding and scraping and measuring of a scientist. He knew, mathematically, it could be done, and didn’t give a damn what the priests said.

But he could not do it himself. He told me it was because he was too old, and his mind too inflexible to allow him to succeed at dreamstriding. But now I wonder if it was his fear of death, a conviction that he was too important to lose. Only one damned foolish little girl managed to dreamstride—because she didn’t know enough to be terrified of what this man asked.

“How could you?” But I already know. Research was more intoxicating than any drink to him, and each of my tiny successes fed his ego like nothing else could. We both knew I should be capable of more, though—digging further into a subject’s mind and using that access more fully. It was there, in his formulas, backed by reams of published articles and sealed Ministry reports. Hesse had envisioned a whole squadron of dreamstriders, actively spotting threats to the Empire by searching others’ dreams and using their bodies to gather information. Instead, there was me and my rudimentary grasp of dreamstriding.

I’d spent my whole training wondering why I couldn’t do more with my gift. I’d never stopped to think what would have become of me had I been even an ounce weaker.

“So many lies I’ve told. To protect Barstadt—that was always my goal—but it’s too much. Lies about dreamstriding. About Nightmare’s death. About the Dreamer himself—”

“About the Dreamer?” I take a step closer to him. “What are you talking about?”

“You all put so much faith in him, but he’s powerless. It’s just a great lie, keeping Barstadt in its sway.”

“The Dreamer isn’t powerless.” My skin tingles; anger flares up inside of me. “He gave me the gift of dreamstriding. He slew Nightmare to protect us.”

But Hesse just snorts. “Sure he did. It’s all too much,” he continues, as if the dam has broken, and now the truth is gushing forth. “I never should have gone down this road, and now I’ll pay for it. I wish I could destroy it all. The theorems, the equations, the ritual. Livia.” He twitches. “You have to destroy it. Find the key and destroy my research. You know where it is, Livia.” His stare bores straight through me. “My work has to stop. No one can know the truth of what I’ve found.”

“What work has to stop? What research do you want me to destroy? Dreamstriding?” But as I move one stack of papers and clear a space on his writing desk, the question dissolves on my tongue. A hardened chunk of something wrapped up in wax paper is stuck to the desktop. Its cloying scent had been masked until now under the stench of his squalor and despair. I peel back the wrappings, but I already know what I’ll find.

Lullaby. The Dreamless resin. It’s already partially worn down.

“You have to forgive yourself,” I tell Hesse, rewrapping the sticky wad of resin. “And tell Minister Durst the truth. We need you, now especially.” I hesitate, lowering my head. “I need you.”
To protect me against Minister Durst,
I think, if nothing else.

I scurry over to the window—even with wax paper between the stuff and my skin, I don’t want to touch it for long—but as I lean over Hesse to lob it outside, he snatches my wrist. Our eyes meet. He pries my fingers apart with a strength I’ve never seen from him and takes the ball of filth from me.

I grit my teeth. Within a minute of using Lullaby, he’ll collapse into dreamless sleep, and I’ll lose him again. He’s shut me out, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

“You’re better than this,” I say. “You’ve created incredible things—the Dreamer has given you an incredible mind. Why are you throwing it away?”

“Please. Destroy my work.” He rubs the sticky mass against his gums and sinks back against the windowsill, eyes lidding as sleep reaches for him. “If you value this life I’ve given you, then make sure it ends with you.”

Chapter Ten

Marez tosses back the rest of his ale and slams it onto the tabletop with the other emptied steins. “Ahh. Just what I was thirsting for.” His elbow knocks into my ribs. “Fun. You could stand having some.”

“We’re working,” I reply, folding my arms across my chest. We’re supposed to be finding out what business the ale hall owner had with Lady Twyne, but Marez and Kriza insisted we grab a round to lend credence to our presence. My throat is rubbed raw from having to shout over the din of the ale hall, and we’re no closer to uncovering Lady Twyne’s plans. “Do you always conduct investigations while inebriated?”

For all the ales he and Kriza have downed, Marez’s gaze is as sharp as broken glass. I can feel his mind whirring like clock gears, his eyes darting about, his ears homing on every sound. His nose grazes my ear as he leans in to make himself heard. “I’m not inebriated. And as for fun and work—I always prefer to combine the two.”