by Kit Alloway
One of Zorie’s guys was futilely trying to corral the sheep, and he was directly in front of the Veil tear. Josh sprinted, dodging stray sheep, and grabbed him by the cuff of his shirt, dragging him away from the tear just as the wolf emerged.
Josh felt its shadow pass over her back as it leapt, and she turned to see it land on the ground beyond the sheep pile. The wolf was a giant, mangy thing with wiry black fur tinged with silver, its jaws dripping with strings of saliva. Its legs didn’t break, or even falter, as it landed. Without an instant lost to disorientation, the wolf turned around and drove its muzzle into the sheep pile, snatching the animals up like appetizers. The gas mask Josh wore barely muted the sounds of the shrieking sheep and the snap of their bones as the wolf bit into them. Its muzzle flung ropes of blood across the white fur of the other sheep, and Josh was about to run toward it—to do what, she couldn’t have said—when a shotgun blast filled the air.
The wolf fell to its side atop the sheep, and it whimpered in a way that was almost endearing, as if the pain had rendered it a puppy again. Blood gushed from its chest. Josh watched the farmer she’d spoken to when she arrived pump his shotgun, aim, and fire again. This time the wolf went limp.
Beside her, Zorie swore. She had finally turned off the Veil dust pump, but there was plenty left in the air. Josh went up to the farmer and took her mask off.
“Wear this,” she said. “The gas isn’t safe.”
“Gas my ass,” he retorted. “Gas doesn’t—whatever the hell I just saw. I gotta put those sheep out of their misery.”
“Wear the mask,” Josh insisted. If only to keep the blood off your face.
The farmer accepted the mask, but he hesitated before putting it on. “You think anyone owns those sheep?”
“They’re all yours,” Josh assured him.
Five
The next morning, in the familiar chaos of the kitchen, Will ate a bowl of cereal and eavesdropped on his parents.
“We can’t have people calling at all hours of the night,” Kerstel told Lauren. “Not even Zorie. And especially not after the baby comes.”
“Josh promised me she’d get a cell phone,” Lauren said, ladling eggs onto his wife’s plate.
Who is Zorie, and why is she calling Josh in the middle of the night? Will wondered, stirring his cereal with his spoon. Behind him, Deloise was trying to teach Whim’s father, Alex, how to use the espresso maker. Again. Whim was examining the custard he’d made as homework for culinary school. Winsor was using a special, thick-handled spoon to eat her oatmeal, but most of it was ending up on the table.
Deloise’s phone beeped, and she glanced at it, frowned, and then held it up for Whim to see. “Did you do this?” she demanded.
Whim smiled broadly. “It’s awesome, right? I paid a guy in game credits to make an emoji of you.”
“Whim! Why, why did you do that?”
His smile softened. “Because I love you. It’s cute, right?”
“I want to see,” Winsor said, and Deloise handed her the phone. “Why are there flames coming out of her head?”
“Oh, well, Carlos’s English isn’t that great, and I think he got confused when I said she was more beautiful than the sunrise—”
“Change it back!” Deloise demanded. “And don’t ever hack into my account again.”
“I didn’t hack into it,” Whim protested. “You had me set it up for you!”
“Well, now I’m telling you to stay out of it!”
“Boundaries,” Will said to Whim. “Remember our whole talk about respecting her boundaries?”
Whim scrunched his face up. “What were we eating at the time?”
“Pizza,” Winsor guessed.
Whim stared at her for a moment, and then said, “Can somebody take Winsor to PT this afternoon? I have to tutor this girl who doesn’t know the difference between baking soda and baking powder.”
“Just your type,” Deloise snipped.
“Uh, she is not my type, and she’s also the most irritating person I’ve ever met. She thinks cream of tartar goes in tartar sauce.”
“I can take Winsor,” Alex offered.
“Thanks, Dad. I’ve gotta go. Text me if you need anything, Winny.”
Winsor scowled at him, then waited until he’d gone out the back door with the tray of custards to ask, “What’s cream of tartar?”
None of them knew, and the back door had hardly closed before it was opening again. Josh walked into the kitchen and stopped short, as if confused by the sight of people. “Oh,” she said.
“Have you been out all night?” Kerstel asked, and before Josh could answer, her father said, “Is that blood on your clothes?”
Josh did appear to have blood on her clothes, and her face, and her neck. Her North Face jacket and her running pants were covered in dirt the length of her left side. Not only that, but her hair was standing out in stiff clumps all over her head.
“What happened?” Deloise asked. “And what’s going on with your hair?”
“I have medical glue in it, and this is sheep’s blood,” Josh said. “Maybe some wolf. I’m fine.”
“You were wrestling animals?” Lauren asked.
“No, of course not. Who wrestles animals? I was out with Zorie.”
Kerstel cast an exasperated glance at the ceiling. Will—who wanted to say something and knew he shouldn’t—wondered what the hell Josh could have been doing all night. Experimenting on sheep? Carving mutton—and whatever wolf meat was called?
Josh opened the fridge and pulled out a roll of summer sausage. As she walked away, she ripped one end open and took a big bite. She’d made it almost to the hallway when Winsor said, “Josh, what’s cream of tartar?”
Josh blinked at her. “It’s a natural byproduct of winemaking used as a stabilizer in egg dishes.”
And then she left.
* * *
After school, instead of driving home, Deloise and Will got on the highway. He knew Malina had suggested he spend less time worrying about Peregrine, but that had been before Snitch escaped, and Will couldn’t help but think that Peregrine was somehow involved. That morning, Will had called the prison Snitch had escaped from and arranged to see his cell. He’d made sure to introduce himself as Josh Weaver’s apprentice, and from there, all doors flew open to him.
This was the first time he’d done something dream walker related without Josh. He was taking Deloise with him instead, and he was nervous as hell, but he also felt like he was taking a positive step forward.
“Who’s Zorie?” Will asked Deloise on the drive.
“Oh, Zorie Abernaughton. She’s the director of the southeast Veil repair team. She runs around closing Veil tears.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“Um … I’m gonna say yes? And Zorie’s—she’s a cowboy. Reckless. I guess Josh is helping her team.” Deloise shook her blond hair back over her shoulders. “It’s like Josh has gone back to being completely oblivious to everything but dream walking.”
Will felt an irritating worry in the back of his mind. If Josh was running around all hours of the night with this Zorie person, how close an eye was she keeping on Feodor?
Then Deloise started ranting about Whim and the emoji. She and Will had promised to be one another’s breakup buddies, meaning that they could search each other out and vent as often as necessary and trust that the other wouldn’t repeat any of it.
“Because,” Deloise reiterated, as she wound down, “I am a smart, kind, interesting person who doesn’t have to lower herself to being with someone who puts their relationship woes out on the Internet and cheats on me with two-faced Bs.”
“That is all true,” Will agreed.
Warden Skotrez met them in the lobby and—despite her disappointment that Josh hadn’t been able to come along—insisted on giving them a forty-five-minute tour of the facilities. Deloise had to keep manually closing her jaw as they walked from one luxurious room to another.
“After Versailles, this
is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been,” she whispered to Will.
The Pryliss Sanitarium was neither a prison nor a mental hospital. It was actually a dozen beautiful condos, each with a private bathroom, a kitchenette, and a unique decorating scheme. The prisoners ate in a dining room with linen napkins and real silverware and enjoyed a hot tub and steam room after working out in the state-of-the-art gymnasium. Unlike most prison inmates, they received weekly counseling, and their families and friends were encouraged to visit as often as they liked.
“So, I’m guessing not a lot of people get shanked here,” Will said as they walked through the hall where weekly culture enrichment programs were hosted.
Warden Skotrez, a petite woman of Cuban descent with curly black hair, laughed. “We did have two guests quit speaking to each other for a month last year. But no, there’s no violence here to speak of. We’re truly an establishment that works to rehabilitate, not to punish.”
Will couldn’t help but wonder, as they spoke with the world-class chef, whether or not being treated in a place like this would have saved his mother from alcoholism. The weekend jail stays for drunk-and-disorderly and the revolving-door trips to rehab certainly hadn’t.
“And it’s very rare that our guests are sent here for violent offenses. Most have been referred for dream staging, secrecy violations, or Veil dust abuse. That’s why the situation with Mr. Simbar was so far beyond our ability to handle.”
Trying to butter up the warden, Will said, “You know, I’m one of the only people who has dealt with Geoff Simbar besides you and the Gendarmerie. I’m shocked that anyone thought this was the appropriate place for him.”
Warden Skotrez nodded.
“Obviously, you’re doing subtle, intensive rehabilitation work here. Geoff Simbar wasn’t going to respond to that. He needed a cage.”
The warden loosened up some then. “I told the captain of the Gendarmerie and Peregrine Borgenicht himself that this wasn’t the place for Mr. Simbar. I told them both that he was causing problems with the staff and with the other guests. No one would listen. Here, I’ll show you what he did to his room.”
Although Will had exaggerated, he hadn’t exaggerated much. He’d fought Snitch, watched him try to murder a dreamer, seen Kerstel in the hospital after Snitch and Gloves nearly killed her. The man fought like an animal—literally, if what Feodor had said about giving him the soul of a bee was true. A stay in a luxury hotel wasn’t going to change him.
Warden Skotrez led them to the third floor and then to the very end of the hallway. “Most of this floor is empty. He was less disruptive here.”
She opened the door to a room entirely different from the others they had seen. Instead of a Western or New Orleans decorative theme, this room had been stripped down to the bare walls. A partially shredded mattress lay amid a heap of ripped blankets. The carpet had been torn up to reveal steal plate beneath, and some of the wallboard had been removed to the same effect.
“You replaced the walls with sheet metal?” Deloise asked.
“We had no choice,” the warden said. “He literally tried to dig his way out of his first room. He injured his hands horribly. The kitchenette, the bathroom—he destroyed everything. He even yanked the pipes from the wall. He was a danger to himself.”
Will glanced up through the hole in the roof at the blue tarp used to cover it. “But you didn’t reinforce the ceiling.”
The warden sighed. “It never occurred to us that he could escape that way. The ceilings are twelve feet high. We don’t even know how he reached them.”
“It looks like he jumped up and bashed them with his head,” Will said. Silently, he added, Just like in Super Mario Bros.
“Give me a boost,” Deloise told him, and he got down on one knee so she could climb onto his shoulders. When he rose carefully, she grabbed the edges of the hole in the ceiling to steady herself.
“See anything?” he asked.
“The ceiling plaster is broken off, but … hold on.” She removed a lighter from her pocket—every dream walker Will knew carried a lighter, just out of habit—and lit it. “I can’t believe he had the hand strength to tear shingles, but I don’t see any cut marks.”
As she spoke, Will noticed that the flame of her lighter was reflecting off the steel plate revealed by the ravaged carpet. Just for an instant, he though he saw …
“Del, come down.” She climbed—with impressive grace—back to the floor, and Will pulled his own compact and lighter from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” the warden asked.
“I thought I saw…” Will opened the compact and lit the lighter, bouncing its light against the compact’s mirror and around the room. He spent a moment adjusting the beam and casting its light across the far wall, and then, just as he was beginning to think he’d imagined whatever he saw, the Veil shimmered into view.
Warden Skotrez gasped. “It’s an archway!”
Although its boundaries hadn’t been marked in stone as they usually were, there was no mistaking the soap bubble–like sight of the Veil.
“How is this possible?” the warden asked.
“He built an archway in the middle of his cell?” Deloise asked.
“He couldn’t have! We never gave him access to fire or mirrors.”
“I don’t think he built the archway,” Will told her. “I think somebody else built it, and used it to break him out. All this business with the ceiling was just to make it look like he escaped on his own. Try putting your hand through it, Del.”
Deloise reached out, but her hand passed through the Veil and out the other side as if the archway didn’t exist. “I can’t reach into the Dream. It must not open in this direction.”
“Someone opened an archway from the Dream into this room,” Will said. “Then they reached in and pulled Geoff out.”
“This is outrageous!” the warden cried.
“Who would want to free him?” Deloise asked.
Will shook his head. “I don’t know. Did he have any visitors?”
“His wife visited—once,” Warden Skotrez said. “Poor woman. She ran out of the building sobbing.”
Will remembered the expression on Josh’s face the first time she’d seen Ian after she realized Gloves had been using his body. She had been so brave, and seen so clearly that he was not the boy who had loved her. But Will wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d run screaming.
“After that,” the warden was saying, “a man came to visit him. A number of times, in fact. He wanted to write an article about Mr. Simbar.”
“A reporter?” Will asked.
“No, no, we kept all the reporters out. No, this man is a philosopher, a scholar. He’s written quite a wealth of work on dream-walker ethics. His name is Aurek Trembuline.”
The name meant nothing to Will, nor to Deloise, judging by her shrug.
“He’s a wonderful man, very warm. He was very patient with Mr. Simbar. My God, who do I call to have this archway removed?”
“Try Zorie Abernaughton,” Will suggested.
Before they left, the warden begged Will and Deloise not to share what they had learned with anyone. “Especially not the press,” she added, which made Will think she knew that Whim was behind the now infamous anti-junta dream-walker blog, Through a Veil Darkly.
“We won’t say a word to anyone,” Deloise promised her.
* * *
As soon as they were in the car, Will said, “We’ve got to tell Josh.”
“But we don’t know anything.”
“Yeah, but…”
But Josh is the one we always go to with stuff like this.
“This has to be related to Peregrine somehow, right?”
“What would Peregrine want with a guy with no soul?” Deloise asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why we should tell Josh—she always figures out things like this.”
“You saw her this morning,” Deloise said. “She’s a complete wreck. She can barely dress herself,
and she’s out all night killing sheep and closing Veil tears. She’s already under enough stress. Besides, wasn’t this about proving you don’t need her?”
“What? No. It’s about making myself more confident in my ability to face Peregrine. Or Snitch. Or whoever else might come along.”
“Then shouldn’t we figure it out ourselves instead of running to Josh at the first sign of trouble?”
Will thought about that. He did want to feel competent without Josh. And things between them were so awkward lately …
“Okay,” he agreed. “We won’t tell Josh. But I’m going to look up that guy the warden mentioned, Aurek Trembuline.”
“Now that sounds like a plan.”
Six
A week after Josh helped Zorie with the sheep nightmare, she drove to the west side of Tanith, where train tracks crossed the streets and bleak, ugly warehouses rose like square boulders on all sides. Outside of a building that still bore a faded sign reading RIVERA CHAIR FACTORY, she parked on the street. She walked up the overgrown, broken sidewalk to the front door, unlocked the door, and called out, “It’s me!” in Polish as she let herself in and turned to type her code into the security system.
When Feodor had convinced the Lords of Death to let him remain temporarily alive, Josh’s stepmother had—very reasonably, Josh thought—declared that there was no way he was going to live in her house. Although Mirren’s grandparents had confiscated Feodor’s money when they exiled him, Mirren had given it back to him, and Feodor had purchased the chair factory as his new home. But Josh hadn’t been willing to let Feodor wander where he pleased, so she’d injected him with a microchip linked to the security system. If he took two steps off the porch without deactivating the system, every person in the Avish-Weaver household would get a call.
“Good morning,” Feodor said without looking up from the book in his hand. He was sitting in one of the two battered leather armchairs that made up the sitting area.
The sight of Feodor always filled Josh with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she could never forget the deaths he had been responsible for, including her grandmother’s, or that he was the reason that Winsor was suffering so, or that Haley was still trapped in the Death universe. On the other hand, she understood Feodor in a way she had never understood anyone. Because she had his memories, she could see the World through his eyes, and despite the wrong conclusions he had drawn from his life, she couldn’t help having compassion for him. She bore him an uncomfortable sort of affection from knowing him so well.