by Kit Alloway
Even worse, she was grateful to him for the knowledge he had given her. She loved what her mind could do now, how it could put together ideas and create new ones, and how the realization of those possibilities was no longer beyond her reach. She and Feodor could talk for hours about Dream theory, about physics and evolution and genetics, and sometimes she felt them sliding dangerously into the territory of being friends. For obvious reasons, that wouldn’t do.
Luckily, Josh could see his faults most clearly when they talked science, the lack of boundaries in his thinking, the faulted morality that allowed him to contemplate doing things she never would. While she found some of his proposals repugnant, part of her longed to be as pure a scientist as he was, as willing to sacrifice all else to the search for knowledge.
Feodor’s warehouse wasn’t especially large, but it was still a warehouse. He had done little to change that aside from adding a stove to the break area and converting the loft—once the manager’s office—into a bedroom. Morning light shone in through the glass windows that made up the walls, diminished by the years of filth on the glass, which was so thick it provided a measure of privacy from the street outside. The cement floor was clean swept, and metal desks sat in various places around the room. Feodor had only been alive again for two months, and somehow he had already managed to acquire over a hundred books, which were loaded onto the wooden shelves that partitioned the kitchen from the rest of the factory. Josh couldn’t resist wandering over to look at the new titles.
“Would you care for coffee?” Feodor asked.
“Dziękuję,” Josh said with a shake of her head, slipping into Polish as she always did with Feodor. “Any news?”
Ostensibly, Feodor was still around because he was collecting souls to return to the Death dimension. But he was doing it very slowly, and in the meantime, Josh had every intention of taking advantage of his intellect. In addition to the Dream-universe protections they were working on, he was also heading the real-World search for Peregrine—making flyers for Whim and Deloise to hang, putting notices in local newspapers, monitoring the e-mail tip line. He’d even gotten Peregrine’s story featured on the Unsolved Mysteries website.
“A woman in California wrote to tell me that she believes Peregrine is working for a small circus as a trapeze artist.”
“A one-armed trapeze artist?” Josh asked with a grin.
“Apparently. She referred to him as a ‘carny,’ which I gather is derogatory.” Feodor glanced up from his book at Josh, then frowned. “What is this outfit you’ve assembled? I find it … disconcerting.”
With no clean laundry, Josh had borrowed one of Deloise’s tops: a pale lavender T-shirt with a heart outlined in lace. But Deloise was taller than Josh, so the shirt was too big, and she’d had to pair it with green running shorts. She knew she looked ridiculous, she just didn’t care. She had more important things to spend energy on these days.
“This coming from the man who owns twelve copies of a single outfit,” Josh told Feodor. “Any other tips?”
“Perhaps brushing your hair—”
“I meant the tip line.”
“Oh,” Feodor said, although Josh had no doubt he’d understood her perfectly. “I also received a report that Peregrine is living in a trailer in North Carolina, cooking and selling methamphetamine.”
“That seems likely,” Josh said.
“The forensic accountant you hired says there is evidence that Peregrine was diverting funds to an offshore account, but that she was unable to determine the destination.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Josh said, and tossed herself into the other armchair, deflated. “You realize we screwed ourselves by preventing him from entering the Dream, right? If he were still able to dream, we might have been able to convince Will to use his crazy looking-glass skills to find Peregrine’s soul in the Dream, which might have given us something. Instead, we’re spinning our wheels and wasting time building…” She didn’t know the word in Polish and had to settle for “gizmos that don’t even work.”
“Gizmos?” asked Feodor, who apparently didn’t know the word in English.
“Small, crappy devices that say they’ll do something awesome but usually break the second time you use them.”
“Did the VHAG break?” Feodor asked with concern.
“No, it just didn’t work. I don’t know what we’re doing wrong. It should work.”
“Perhaps the sequence needs to be adjusted…”
“We’ve adjusted the sequence two dozen times.” Josh shook her head, staring up at the ceiling. “What does it matter, anyway? The VHAG won’t help us find Peregrine or help me access my abilities.”
“Actually,” Feodor said, rising, “I have found something interesting as relates to your abilities.”
He fetched a worn hardback book covered in brown fabric. The title had been rubbed away, leaving only a smattering of gold dust on the cover, and the marbled endpaper in the front had torn, leaving the binding exposed.
Feodor turned to the title page. Ptolemaic Prophesy. The publisher listed was Dashiel Winters Press, which published nothing but limited editions written by dream walkers for dream walkers.
“Where did you get this?” Josh asked.
“EBay!” Feodor gave Josh a rare smile, one that was neither condescending nor mocking. “Truly, I am not surprised that the Internet began as an academic file sharing system. It has facilitated the exchange of information on a level that not even Gutenberg could have imagined.”
“I wonder how this ended up online,” Josh mused, turning a few pages.
Her eyes landed on a chapter titled “The Hilathic Dream Walker Prophesies.”
“I was not previously aware of this volume,” Feodor said. “I believe this may be the only extant copy. It contains a version of the primary dream-walker prophesies that conflicts with the better-known translations. I’ve written them out for comparison.”
He pointed to his chalkboard; he thought dry-erase was a chemical abomination. Josh read the first translation, the one she had grown up hearing.
In the age of excess, before expected,
the True Dream Walker will arrive,
whose every thought will be reflected.
The Dream to please him will contrive.
He’ll strike down the unbelievers,
return the Dream to its pure state
put the archways to the cleaver
and sentence us to rightful fates.
“It’s Pellok’s translation,” Josh said. “1873.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, Pellok’s translation was based on Merwin’s from 1515. Merwin was not only a seer, but a Catholic priest, and his translations were unduly influenced by his religious views. He insisted upon believing that the return of the True Dream Walker and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ were the same event. He was also overly concerned with making the prophesy rhyme. Every modern translation I have found is based on Merwin’s work, Pellok’s included—except for this one.” He held up the book, then pointed to a second set of lines on the chalkboard.
In the age of imbalance, unexpectedly
the summoned Dream Walker will come into being
who can control the Dream
by opening Heaven.
He whose heart is enveloped in flame
He whose heart beats in time with the dreamer’s
He whose heart tears down separations.
He will be struck down
as the universes return to their original state.
The boundaries will be put to ruin.
The World will end in light.
A chill went through Josh as she read. “I’m going to be struck down?”
“Perhaps all life will be struck down, if the Dream returns to its original state. If you strip the Judeo-Christian nonsense from Pellok’s version, the two translations are not so far apart. But the section that interests me is the three lines that discuss the Dream Walker’s arrival.”
“The sectio
n where I die doesn’t interest you?” Josh asked, forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t one of her friends, that he didn’t care if she died or not.
Was it weird that she wanted him to care?
“You assume too much,” Feodor said calmly. “‘Struck down’ does not necessarily mean you will die. You may merely be knocked unconscious or gravely injured.”
“Skippy,” Josh said in English.
“Skippy?”
“It means you’ve laid all my fears to rest,” she told him.
Feodor smiled smugly; he had a keen ear for sarcasm.
“What do the lines about his heart mean?” she asked.
He whose heart is enveloped in flame
He whose heart beats in time with the dreamer’s
He whose heart tears down separations.
“My suspicion is that it refers to breaking Stellanor’s First Rule.”
That made a sort of sense, Josh supposed. She had felt very close to the dreamers whose fear she had shared.
“Do you find it at all weird that these prophesies refer to a man?” she asked.
“No. Recall, Merwin believed he was writing about Christ.”
“I guess he found it unthinkable that Jesus could come back as a woman,” Josh said, remembering how Will had once told her that everybody in old writing is “he.”
Maybe Merwin got confused in his vision when everybody called me Josh, she thought, and the idea actually made her smile.
Leaning against the edge of the table, Feodor said, “Tell me what you know about your birth.”
“Nothing. I mean, everything was normal.”
“And you are certain that your parents are your biological parents?”
Josh kind of wanted to hit him. “I’m completely sure.”
“Hmm. May I read your mother’s diary?”
“She didn’t keep a diary, just a log where she tracked how many nightmares she resolved.”
“And your father’s?”
“My dad isn’t going to let you read his diary.”
“Perhaps you could … borrow it.”
Josh ignored his suggestion. “I don’t know what it is you think you’re going to find. We should be figuring out how to keep me alive.”
“Look at the descriptions in these prophesies. They contain one common theme—something happens that precipitates your appearance. You are summoned, or you arrive. Nowhere does it say you are born. Nowhere does it say you live and then are discovered. Both of these prophesies contain the suggestion that something happened to cause you to be here.”
He wasn’t wrong, Josh could admit—at least to herself.
“Maybe it’s your fault,” she said.
Feodor blinked. “Pardon?”
“You tried to destabilize the Dream so that the True Dream Walker would show up and save the World. Maybe you succeeded.”
He laughed a little then. “You flatter me.”
“Really? That was literally your plan, wasn’t it?”
“At the time, yes. However, I no longer believe I would have succeeded in accomplishing anything besides the collapse of the three universes.”
“You don’t think the True Dream Walker would have appeared to save us?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not?” Josh repeated. “You’ve done kind of a one-eighty on that, haven’t you?”
“A one-eighty?”
“You’ve completely reversed your opinion.”
“Ah. Yes, I have.”
The topic didn’t seem to interest him, but it interested Josh. “What changed your mind?”
“It was not so much a change of mind as … a change of brain. It is my suspicion that, when the Lords of Death returned me, my reconstituted body was created in a state of perfect neurological health.”
“Wait, you’re admitting that you were mentally ill?”
He shrugged. “In the parlance of the modern age.”
He obviously didn’t want to admit he’d been psychotic when he tried to destroy the Veil. Josh supposed it was a matter of pride. Either that, or he was trying to convince her that he was sane now so that he could plot to do terrible things without her suspecting him.
That was the closest Feodor had ever come to admitting he had been ill during his first life. It was the closest he had even come to apologizing for what he had done.
Josh wished she could trust him. Unfortunately, being mentally ill and morally bankrupt weren’t the same thing; he could be one and not the other.
Seven
“Hey, Whim, do you know a dream walker named Aurek? Like the vacuum cleaner, but not spelled the same?”
Will was sitting in the living room with the usual suspects: Deloise, who was doing Winsor’s nails; Winsor, who had made Whim put a five-pound bag of flour on the back of her hand to keep it from trembling; and Whim, who was messing with his phone.
The only one missing is Haley, Will thought. Strange how much he could miss the presence of someone who had only ever hovered at the outskirts of such scenes.
“Aurek Trembuline?” Whim asked, with raised eyebrows.
“Yeah, that’s it. Who is he?”
Whim shook his head ruefully. “He’s like a hippie dream walker. Only he’s also totally amoral. He used to be a minor dream theorist, now he writes pseudophilosophy. Everyone thinks he’s a joke.”
“Why would he be interested in Snitch?”
“Probably because he thinks Feodor is some kind of rebel folk hero. Trembuline was pretty popular until he wrote a book about how what Feodor did at Maplefax was an example of courage that all humans should follow.”
“He thought that causing a huge tear in the Veil and destroying an entire town was courageous?” Deloise asked.
“Yeah.”
“Our Feodor?” Winsor asked, who was used to seeing Feodor come around with Josh.
“He’s not ours,” Whim told her. “But it’s the same guy.”
“He destroyed a town?”
How bizarre that Winsor just thinks of Feodor as a friend of Josh’s, maybe even as a friend of her own, Will thought. She missed so much.
While Deloise explained—briefly and without detail—how Feodor had destroyed a town long before they knew him, Will said to Whim, “You think Aurek would talk to us?”
“I’m sure he’d talk to you. But what would be the point?”
Will heard the back door open and close in the kitchen, and he was surprised to see Josh cross into the hallway without Feodor in tow. They trained together almost every day now, and Feodor’s constant presence had been acting as a sort of exposure therapy to help Will get over his fear of the man.
“Hey, Josh!” Whim called as Josh passed the doorway. “Come say hi!”
Josh entered the room in a cloud of upset. She walked into the back of Deloise’s chair before even noticing that her sister was in the room. The nail polish brush in Deloise’s hand hit the bag of flour and left a dark pink streak across the paper.
“Shit, sorry,” Josh said.
“This is my friend Josh,” Whim said to no one in particular. “She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, and she’s blind.”
“You aren’t funny,” Deloise told him.
“Sometimes I am.” He held out a can of Pringles to Josh. “I apologize, friend. Please, break potatoes with us.”
Distracted, Josh took the can, peered into it, and then handed it back as if she didn’t know why she’d taken it in the first place. “What do you want?”
Deloise shook her head. She’s like one of those children raised by wild dogs, Will thought.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Josh squinted at him. “What?”
“How are you?” Whim clarified. “How are your endeavors progressing? How are your affairs?”
“What he said,” Will added.
He smiled at her.
Josh swallowed twice and then said, “Stop smiling. Don’t smile at me anymore.”
Winsor glanced up f
rom her nails. Deloise’s brush hovered in midair.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Josh said, “this weird, friendly, let’s-play-nice thing. I hate it.”
There was a long silence, and then Deloise said, “You know, there’s better light in the kitchen. Let’s go in there.”
“I think I fancy a pedicure,” Whim said.
“But I want to watch them fight,” Winsor protested as Del wheeled her toward the kitchen.
In a matter of seconds, Josh and Will were alone in the living room.
Will didn’t know what to say. He could tell from the rough way Josh was breathing that she was upset, and not just with him. She’d been upset when she walked in, and he didn’t know if it was his place to work that through with her or not.
For once, she didn’t make him dig.
“I don’t want you to smile at me anymore,” she said. “I’ve had enough of you punishing me.”
“Punishing you?” Will repeated, getting up from the couch.
“Or whatever therapy thing you want to call it. I get it already: it’s over, you’re glad, you don’t want me back. You can stop rubbing it in.”
Will had never met anyone so good at misinterpreting other people.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m genuinely not trying to punish you. I was trying to make things easier between us.”
“By shoving it in my face how great your life is without me?”
She wasn’t just upset—she was actually angry at him. Will fought the urge to feel offended and angry himself.
“I just thought that, if I was kind of casual about everything, it would be easier for us to live in the same house,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and I didn’t mean to make you think that us breaking up meant nothing to me.”
Josh had her arms crossed over her chest, but her eyes darted up for an instant to meet his. A little voice in Will’s head was saying, Careful, careful. Be careful with her.