by Kit Alloway
Josh knew that Zorie’s team was going to have a hard time closing the tear because it passed through two rooms. They’d either have to coordinate the lights from the stage and the orchestra pit, or they’d have to try to stitch it. Zorie’s people were already setting up the stitches—giant magnets attached to freestanding frames. The Veil dust on their gas masks made them look like sparkly aliens.
Josh waved to Zorie, then took a seat near the back of the theater. This far away, she didn’t need her gas mask, but it was better not to waste time in a room slowly filling with hallucinogenic dust, so she worked quickly to attach all the electrodes to her head and chest, and then carefully put the mask over the electrodes. She felt more machine than human.
She closed her eyes and turned on the VHAG by memory. The pattern of pulsations against her skin felt hypnotic, and despite the discomfort of the mask and the sound of Zorie’s team members shouting to each other, she relaxed against the velvet-upholstered chair.
She adjusted the VHAG, then again, then again. The pattern grew faster and more intense, but Josh seemed to have reached a plateau. She could barely feel her body, and yet she couldn’t escape it.
It’s like there’s nowhere to go, she thought.
Something crashed onstage—probably one of the frames. One of Zorie’s guys cursed. Instinctively, Josh opened her eyes.
Both frames onstage had crashed. Far worse, the tear had widened dramatically in the time Josh had her eyes closed. It was at least seven feet wide now, and a blizzard of Veil dust gushed from it.
That’s where I need to go, Josh thought.
With a shout that was half laugh, half shocked exclamation, she sprang out of her seat and dashed down the center aisle. She vaulted onto the stage before any of Zorie’s people noticed, and they barely had time to shout before she leapt through the tear into the Dream.
The moment she crossed between universes was glorious. For just an instant, she was surrounded by silver light, as though she were inside a firework or a star. She had to close her eyes against the intensity of the light, but she could feel the Veil dust through her clothes, a cool twinkling on her skin.
She landed on her feet in a pharmacy, and the mundane calm of the place startled her. A Muzak version of “MacArthur Park” was playing over the intercom. At the pharmacy counter, a man in a white coat was saying emphatically, “I need your insurance card. This is a library card. I can’t use this.”
“But it’s a government-issued ID,” a little old lady was saying. “Doesn’t that prove who I am?”
“I know who you are,” the pharmacist told her. “I need to see your insurance card.”
“What about this one?”
“No! This entitles you to a free muffin after you’ve bought twelve!”
Smiling, Josh sat down at the blood pressure monitoring machine. This was a perfect nightmare in which to try the VHAG. Closing her eyes, she started the machine again, and this time she’d barely gone through the sequence twice when she burst out of her body as though her soul had been shot from a cannon.
Despite her newfound insubstantiality, Josh slammed into the pharmacy ceiling and bounced back into midair. The pharmacist and the old lady both looked up at her, and Josh held a hand in front of her face. It was gossamer, but it was there.
She began to laugh. “I did it!” she called to the pharmacist.
“That’s nice,” he muttered, and took the old woman’s wallet out of her hands.
How does this work? Josh wondered, exhilaration making her shiver. She could see her body slumped over the blood pressure machine. It looked all right.
I bet my thoughts determine everything.
She tried swimming through the air, and she moved just like she would have in water. Then she held her arms out in front of her like Superman and shot through the pharmacy at breakneck speed, before deciding that swimming felt safer. A few strokes carried her back to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist was now going through the old woman’s wallet for himself.
A few yards behind him, amid the shelves of medication bottles, hung the tear. It had already swallowed the back of the store, and it was wide enough that Josh could see a couple of people in gas masks on the other side.
Seal, she thought.
And the tear sealed.
Her success felt anticlimactic. She thought a thought, and the Veil tear closed. It was so simple, and so quick, and only the knowledge that she had just permanently changed Veil repair forever filled Josh with excitement.
Then she realized something else. She could control everything in the Dream, just like she’d been trying to do for so many months.
She turned her attention to the pharmacist—the dreamer. Closing her astral eyes, she imagined her stone walls—
They were gone. No more struggling to connect to the dreamer, no more risk of losing herself in the dreamer’s fear. The shape—the meaning—of the nightmare was obvious to Josh. That pharmacist felt like no one in his life worked at anything as hard as he worked at everything. This nightmare was a reflection of that frustration.
Let’s give him what he needs, Josh thought.
With Josh instructing her mentally, the old woman put her hand on the pharmacist’s arm and said, “I want you to know how grateful I am to you for being so patient with me. You make my life easier.”
The pharmacist’s scowl softened. “Thank you, ma’am. I do my best.” He held up a piece of white paper. “I think this is your insurance card.”
The nightmare resolved and Josh, buzzing with happiness, jumped back into her body. As the blood pressure station dissolved, she opened her eyes to find them wet with tears, and she thrust her hand out and opened an archway halfway between nightmares.
She opened the archway to her own basement. She’d have to get Deloise to drive her to her car later, but this way she avoided Zorie questioning how she made it out of the Dream.
Josh landed on her feet, as softly as she ever had. The deafening silence in the archroom was anticlimactic, too, but Josh knew what she had just done, what she had accomplished, and that she had changed dream walking forever. She yanked off her gas mask, sat down on the floor, and cried.
Twelve
Will had been down this hallway more times than he could count. Once, as a small child, and then a hundred times in his nightmares. This long, white hallway with the steel doors running along either side, where the slit windows were crisscrossed with embedded wires, where the doors were always locked, was Detox.
The calm silence of the hallway contrasted with the chaos he saw through the windows into each room. In one, a tornado blew through his childhood bedroom, tossing stuffed animals and train pajamas and bottles of booze through the air. In another, Winsor lay still in her coma, a shriveled husk of a moon-white body, her new glasses still perched on her mummified face.
Will tried the door, but it was locked. He didn’t know what he could have done to help Winsor anyway.
The next door, too, was locked, but he saw a familiar face inside: Josh.
She sat in the far corner of the room, turned so that only one side of her face was visible. A strange darkness clung to her, obscuring most of her body, but Will could see that her hair was clean and brushed, and she was wearing a maroon sweater that he’d always thought flattered her. He could only see one side of her face, but her cheek was flushed and full, the shadows banished from beneath her eyes, and there was an ease in her expression that told him he’d have no trouble making her laugh. He’d never seen her so happy.
“You look beautiful,” he said, and she met his eyes with her one visible eye, such a soft, gentle green.
The doorknob turned beneath his hand.
Josh smiled as he entered the room, but she didn’t move from her peculiar half-visible position. A line seemed to run down the center of her face, hiding half of it in darkness.
She held out a hand to him, and he took it. “I thought you were mad at me,” he said.
Her hands were softer t
han they’d been the last time he touched them—the calluses were gone, but the strength remained.
“I was just scared,” she said. “You know that when I’m angry, it’s because I’m secretly scared.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know that.”
He tried to recall the reasons they’d broken up, but all the memories flittered away from him. All that remained was how much he cared about her.
“I love you,” he said, and he reached into the darkness to touch her cheek, turn her face so he could kiss her.
“I love you back,” Josh said, but her voice was mixed with another voice, deeper, softly accented.
As her face entered the light, Will screamed.
The right half of her face was Josh’s, the right half of her body was Josh’s, but the left …
The left was Feodor’s.
The cheek Will had touched was Feodor’s. Beside Josh’s gentle green eye, Feodor’s gray one—as chilly as a winter drizzle—stared back at Will. His thin, crisp lips—attached to Josh’s softer ones. His flat chest sat beside the small curve of Josh’s right breast.
“What’s wrong?” Josh/Feodor asked, speaking in two voices.
Will scrambled backward across the floor, but the door blew shut behind him.
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
Josh/Feodor stood up and stalked toward Will, and the Feodor half was wearing an inky black cape that swirled around him like darkness. From the canine tooth on his side of the mouth, a fang extended.
“Don’t touch me!” Will shrieked, because they were both reaching for him. As they bent forward, Josh’s plumeria pendant dangled from their neck.
“Will,” said a voice behind him.
Will spun on his knees, holding out his fists against this new threat, but it was Josh he saw standing in the doorway, real Josh in a pair of stained gray yoga pants and a blue T-shirt with a wrung-out neckline, looking hassled and confused.
“You’re asleep,” she told him.
“I am?”
“He is?” asked the amalgamous monster behind him.
The nightmare began to dissolve, and Will reflexively stopped it. Steady, he thought. Steady, steady, steady.
“Sit,” he told the nightmare.
The Josh/Feodor monster sat back down on its stool, quietly, like an obedient child.
The real Josh stared at it as Will got to his feet.
“Thank you for coming in to get me,” he said.
As if she hadn’t heard him, she said, “Is that how you see me?”
“No,” Will said reflexively. “I mean … no.”
Josh gave him a look that made it clear she didn’t believe him.
“Well, apparently that’s how your subconscious sees me.”
The Feodor-half smirked.
“No,” Will said helplessly. He didn’t know what to say to make her feel better, and he was afraid that his nightmare depiction of her had already said too much.
“You think I’m a monster,” she said, and her voice was tight.
“No, I don’t,” Will told her. He took her hand, trying to distract her from the freak in front of them, but she tugged it away. “I’m just afraid that you’re losing who you are because of him.”
“But this isn’t who I am.” Josh lifted Feodor’s cape and used it to cover his half of the face, leaving only hers visible. “This doesn’t even look like me.”
The disparity was even more obvious now that she and Will’s dream version of her were side by side. The real Josh was wiry and hard, muscles constantly coiled in readiness, pale from too many hours spent in the Dream, her eyes perpetually narrowed. The dream-Josh was beautiful—relaxed, enthusiastic, comfortable in her own skin.
“That’s how I see you,” Will said. “When you’re at your best, that’s how I see you.”
Josh didn’t say anything for such a long time that Will turned to look at her, and he was shocked to see tears in her eyes.
“Josh,” he said, and he grabbed her arm as she tried to leave.
“If that’s who you want me to be,” she said, and then started over, rubbing furiously at her eyes. “I will never be that person!”
“Josh,” he said again. “You already are.”
She shook her head but stopped pulling away. “I’m nothing like that.”
“You are. When you aren’t running yourself ragged and blaming yourself for everything and too busy saving the World to take care of yourself, that’s exactly who you are.”
She kept shaking her head, but she couldn’t seem to look away from the vision of herself in the corner.
“I can’t do anything differently,” she said.
“You don’t have to. You aren’t the problem.”
“Then what is?” Josh asked, perplexed.
This wasn’t how Will had imagined having this conversation—if, in fact, they ever had it. “When we broke up, it wasn’t you I was trying to get away from. I know that now. It was them.”
Then he said something ridiculous, something that—later—he would be almost unable to believe he had said. Maybe he had been thinking about the distant future, or maybe his judgment was off because he was asleep, but he said, “When Peregrine and Feodor are dead, we can be together.”
Josh’s lips parted with astonishment. “What?”
“That came out wrong,” Will said, immediately realizing how insane his words sounded.
There was no softness left in Josh’s green eyes, no tears, just outrage.
“You want me to kill two people so you’ll get back together with me?”
“No, that’s—that’s not how I meant it.”
She pulled away from him. With a thrust of her palm, she created an archway where the door to the hallway stood.
“Josh, please, listen to me—”
“One thing I learned from Feodor,” she told Will. “If you start killing your problems, you’ll never stop.”
She jumped through the archway. Will followed, but he woke up alone in his bed.
“Dammit,” he said, and punched the pillow beside his head. “I really screwed that up.”
He lay in the dark and imagined Josh, two stories below, flying out of the basement archway.
And jumping right back in.
Thirteen
“That was pretty much the most awkward nightmare she could have dream walked in on,” Deloise agreed the next day.
“No,” Whim said. “The most awkward would have been a nightmare where you were getting it on with Deloise.”
“Whim!” Deloise cried.
“Or maybe that would be the most awkward nightmare for me to walk in on,” Whim mused. “Maybe Josh and I should walk in on it together.”
“Please shut up,” Will said.
Winsor giggled.
Despite it being a Monday morning, Will and Deloise weren’t in school because of an in-service day. Whim had decided to pretend to be sick when he heard no one else was going to classes. And Josh was gone—where, no one knew. She was probably in a garden with Feodor feeding jelly beans to puppies.
Winsor wasn’t feeling well, but she didn’t like being alone, so she was tucked beneath the covers and Whim was kicked out beside her, happily pawing at his tablet and finding funny videos to play for her.
The bedroom they were in had belonged to Dustine when Will first moved into the house. Now Winsor used it, since her own bedroom was on the second floor and she didn’t have the strength to go up the stairs yet. The room’s furnishings hadn’t changed, though: Dustine’s double bed with the blue-and-white Ohio Star quilt, Dustine’s antique dresser with the big mirror hanging over it, Dustine’s imitation-ivory crucifix on the wall.
“Anyway, we started talking,” Will said, “and then somehow I ended up saying that if she’d just kill Peregrine and Feodor, we could get back together.”
Deloise wrinkled her nose.
“Why did you say that?” Whim demanded, laughing.
“Why do you want her to kill Feodor?�
� Winsor asked.
“It came out wrong. I just meant … that I still want to be with her, but I can’t live with constant danger.”
“You probably should have said that,” Winsor told Will, her eyelids drooping.
“Is there anyone I could kill to convince you to get back together with me?” Whim asked Deloise.
“I’m not going to answer that.”
“I hate sitting here, trying to live a normal life, and waiting for Peregrine to show up,” Will said. “I want to take the fight to him.”
“That might be hard,” Deloise pointed out, “since we have no idea where he is.”
Whim said, “Let’s break into Peregrine’s house.”
“Why would we do that?” Deloise asked, outraged.
“So we can find a clue about where he went. And also so we can get some exclusive photos of the inside of his house for my blog. Because readership is way down.”
The idea appealed to Will; it was a means by which to engage with Peregrine without actually being in danger from him.
“But you have to come, Del,” Whim added.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be eaten by Peregrine’s Dobermans. And I don’t want to be arrested when the security system goes off. And I don’t want to get shot by one of the armed guards. So we’re going to need Deloise to play the distraught granddaughter and sweet-talk us in.”
Deloise groaned. “Why are you always dragging me into stuff like this?”
“Um, when have I ever dragged you into something like this?”
Before they could start arguing, Winsor said, “I want to go.”
Everyone looked at her—slumped against the mountain of pillows, hair a crow’s nest, eyes only half-open.
“And we want you to come,” Whim assured her. “But I think you need to stay home and rest today.”
“But I always have to stay home and rest,” Winsor complained, struggling to sit up. Her head rolled dangerously on her neck. “I’m tired of resting.”
None of them had the heart to tell her no.