Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  My whole bed is covered in these notes now. Writing takes longer than talking but I don’t mind. Some things are hard to say out loud. I know because I’ve been trying to say them for months now.

  You know what I want to write next but I’m not going to. I don’t want to put you under any obligations and I don’t want to add to your burdens. I know what trying to get over someone is like, for reasons that should be obvious to you, of all people. I know how you feel. Don’t listen to Whim, he doesn’t have a clue. His scroll says something about Deloise, and he’s still working up the guts to tell her what it is.

  As for Josh, all I can tell you for certain is that if you can’t be with her because of your scroll, then you’d only be hurting you both by staying with her. She should be able to understand that.

  I’m going to tuck this under your door and then go to bed, but if you decide to write back, there’s one thing I have to ask: Do you think I’m a horrible person because of how I’ve treated Haley?

  Okay, good night. Maybe we can continue this tomorrow night at the cabin.

  Yours,

  Winsor

  The rest of the journal was empty.

  Eighteen

  She had almost gotten him killed. She had almost gotten them all killed.

  Josh sat in history class the next day, stewing. She sat next to Louis Poston, and Will sat across the room, staring out the window at a day that had never really dawned. The sky was still dark, the fluorescent lights overhead helpless against the gloom. In the hush that filled the classroom, Camille Gothan had torn a nail while clipping it, and that Korean kid who never talked, Man-Shik, had unexpectedly produced a silk hankie to stop the bleeding. Brianna Selts had managed to take her bra off without removing her shirt, but then made the bad decision to hand it to Jay Appleton, who passed it around the classroom to be autographed.

  Josh didn’t know why she had decided to sit beside Louis. Maybe she was a glutton for punishment, sitting next to him and wishing that he had just done his damn job and delivered the pizza to her house five weeks before.

  The grass is always greener, she reminded herself. If Louis had arrived instead of Will, the problems would have been the same. Or maybe worse. After all, Louis had parents who would have found it odd when he started spending so much time at Josh’s house, doing things he couldn’t talk about.

  His parents would have been terribly upset if Josh had gotten Louis killed.

  She already had one death on her hands. She couldn’t handle another.

  That morning, she had woken up with Ian’s voice in her ears: I saw a gate beyond the arch. She had rolled right off the office futon, saying as she fell, “I don’t remember letting go of your hand.”

  And she didn’t, but she must have, because he had slipped out of her grasp and into the Dream, into that terrible, dark nightmare with the broken windows and the sound of distant explosions.

  Then she had arrived at school to find all the hallways and classrooms decorated for Valentine’s Day, which had been her and Ian’s honorary anniversary because they’d been together for so long that neither of them could remember when they’d first started dating.

  Sixth grade, Josh thought, when he punched Eddie for calling me puny. Fourth grade, when he gave me his dessert every day at lunch. Kindergarten, when he asked me to hold some flowers he was picking for his girlfriend and then ran away.

  Ian had died because of her stupid, arrogant foolhardiness. She couldn’t let the same thing happen to Will. She didn’t even want to talk to him, look at him, think about him, do anything that might lead to caring about his well-being, because she was beginning to believe that she couldn’t protect him.

  She knew she had been so upset the day before because she already cared about him too much. Far, far too much.

  She forced herself to glance at him, sitting two rows over and a seat ahead of her. Resting his chin on a propped palm, he stared out the gray-washed windows at the cloudy, drizzling day beyond.

  At she watched, he lifted his head and turned to catch her staring at him. She winced, wondering if her gaze held some weight he could sense. His look for her was so earnest, an apologetic almost-smile on his lips, but too sad for a real smile. Then he glanced at Louis, sitting beside her, right between them, and whatever vestige of a smile he had worn slipped away. Josh opened her mouth to say, “No, wait, I didn’t sit here because—”

  But, of course, she had.

  The bell rang. “See you, Josh,” Louis said, and Josh mumbled some appropriate reply while shoving her book into her backpack. She fumbled with her crutches, hoping she could catch Will before he left the classroom. But Jay Appleton pushed past her, and she saw Will reach the front of the row. Before he could get away, she let her crutches clatter to the floor, dumped her backpack on the nearest desk, and hopped forward so that she could grab Will’s arm too hard, her fingers digging into his sleeve.

  “Sorry,” she told him. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

  Then she hugged him.

  Her apology was inelegant, she knew. She probably sounded like a third-grader being forced to make up after a playground mishap, but maybe Will didn’t care, or maybe he knew that however plain her words, she meant them, because he didn’t hesitate at all before hugging her back. He hugged her completely, his arms wrapped all the way around her back, and she was so relieved by his response that she pressed her face to his shoulder so he wouldn’t see her expression.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “No, I was terrible to you.”

  “You were scared.”

  Oh god, did he see through her so easily?

  “I was scared,” she admitted, and for an instant, just a fleeting half thought, she considered telling him about all her fears and all her failures. But no—no, no, no—he would lose whatever faith he had left in her.

  Reluctantly, she let go of Will and stepped back, one hand on a desk to steady herself. “I’ll listen next time,” he said, and he laughed ruefully. “I swear, one of these days I’m going to learn to listen to you.”

  Josh laughed with him. Despite her relief, though, she felt mystified by how easily their conflict had been resolved. Why did he always make things so easy for her? And how?

  He swung her backpack onto his right shoulder, his own bag hanging from his left. He was smiling at her again, a real smile. He said, as if she had asked, “It’s going to be fine, Josh.”

  She felt herself smile back. She wasn’t sure she believed him, but she wanted to.

  * * *

  Josh had an idea during sixth period, but she had to wait until she and Will were alone at home in the library to bring it up.

  “I was thinking,” she said, “about the man in the trench coat.”

  “Which one of them?”

  “The first guy we saw, that taller one, without gloves. Let’s call him something.”

  “How about Snitch, since he’s willing to talk? At least, relative to the other guy.”

  “Good. Snitch. I’ve been thinking of the other guy as Gloves. Anyway,” she hesitated an instant before going on, “I don’t think there’s any doubt now that the two of them can alter the Dream.”

  She felt relieved when Will immediately said, “I think you’re right. Which shouldn’t be possible unless they’re dreamers.” Then he hesitated, just as she had. “Or, according to Whim, the True Dream Walker.”

  “The True Dream Walker is a legend. Did Whim get to that part?”

  “Winsor made it pretty clear.” Will rubbed the back of his neck; Josh had thought for a while that he had a disc problem before realizing it was a nervous gesture. “Whim also said that the True Dream Walker is your guiding light and that’s why you wear his symbol.”

  Josh laughed. “He’s not my guiding light. He’s a legend. I wear his symbol because I believe in what his legend stands for, and I like to be reminded every time I go into the Dream.”

  She held the pendant out for Will to examine. “Suppos
edly, the True Dream Walker built the first archway to the Dream, and when he did, he gave the original dream walkers five charges: compassion, commitment, courage, modesty, and might. The plumeria has one petal for each charge, and because the petals form a spiral, it’s also a symbol for the Dream.”

  Will peered at the pendant, then smiled. “That’s nice.”

  Josh tucked the necklace back under her shirt. “Supposedly, someday the True Dream Walker will return and fix whatever causes the universes to slide out of balance. I don’t know quite how he’ll do that, but a lot of people think that our job will basically end when he returns.”

  “So, if Gloves is the True Dream Walker, he was trying to kill us because the World doesn’t need us anymore?”

  Josh heard surprising fervor in her own voice when she said, “That thing was not the True Dream Walker. I don’t know what he was, but he wasn’t the Dream Walker.”

  Will backed off. “You’d know better than I would.”

  “I don’t know who those people were,” she said. “I don’t know why they can do what they do. But I don’t think their ability is natural. Snitch mentioned a name: Feodor.”

  “You recognize it?” Will asked.

  “I’ve never heard it before. I’m not even sure how to spell it. But there’s a dream-walker database we could run the name Feodor through, at least to see if anything pops up.”

  Will nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  They met up in the office after Will made a trip back to the kitchen for Oreos. “This place is starting to look like your bedroom,” Will noted, sitting down on the messy, unmade futon.

  “Kerstel brought down a bunch of my clothes. But I might have to send her up for some more, since I’m about to run out.”

  And since my knee is back to being nearly broken after yesterday, Josh added in her head. I don’t think I’ll be moving back upstairs for quite a while.

  “I can get you some stuff,” Will said.

  Right, like she was going to ask him to fetch her clean panties and a bra. Josh made a noncommittal sound and logged onto the website for Dashiel Winters Consulting.

  The website was a front for another very exclusive, very encrypted website for dream walkers. Josh typed her username and password, and then submitted a retinal scan.

  The database searched official historical documents, declassified monarchy documents, the diaries of dead dream walkers that had been typed up (a project only recently begun), and a number of academic databases. After consulting the Internet on how to spell Feodor, twenty-six entries—and fourteen different spellings of six variations—popped up. Next to the title of each entry was a brief description, and Josh scrolled through them, removing the obvious misses from her list.

  “Here’s one,” she said. She pointed to an entry labeled Feodorik Jambulira Bronisławorin Kajażkołskiocsi.

  A grainy photograph of a small, intense man appeared beneath the biography. Will squinted at the photo as if he thought he was missing something. Josh felt the same way.

  “What do the other files say about him?”

  Josh read off the titles. “Awarded the Shotts Fellowship in 1949. Won the Hume Award for Dream Theory in 1952. Received the Star of Ha’azelle in 1955. These are like, the biggest awards a dream theorist can get. These are a huge deal. The Star of Ha’azelle was a medal that the queen gave out for special service to the Crown. Here’s a list of stuff he published.”

  “That’s a long list,” Will noted.

  “No kidding—oh my god! I’ve read War and Rumors of War: A Compendium of Medieval Prophesies! Well, I read part of it. It’s, like, five hundred pages long, and it’s really boring. But I didn’t realize this guy wrote it.” She read down the list of publications again, more carefully this time, wondering what other titles she might recognize if she were better read in dream theory. Although she couldn’t say, what she did notice was that there wasn’t an area of dream work to which Feodor hadn’t contributed. From Implications of Planck’s Law on Archway Creation to The Dream and Modern Theories of Evolution to Translations of Etruscan Dream Walking Records, he appeared to have worked in every academic field.

  But he returned to one topic over and over. “He wrote a lot about dream-walker ethics,” Josh said.

  Will pointed to an article title, “Why Staging Will Destroy Us.” “Sounds like he agreed with the monarchy on staging.”

  “Look, there’s no death date. It just says he was ‘exiled by order of the monarchy.’ I don’t even know what that means. Outside of the monarchy’s lands? There are dream walkers all over the world. So where did they exile him to, the moon?”

  “Why would Snitch have mentioned him?”

  Dustine walked down the hall, past the office door. “Grandma!” Josh called, and the old woman stopped.

  “Yes, my dear, demanding child?”

  “Do you know anything about a Polish dream walker named Feodor, uh, ka-jazz-kol-skee?”

  “Kajażkołski,” Dustine corrected. She pronounced it ka-yazh-kow-skee. “What about him?”

  “His database bio says he was exiled. What does that mean?”

  Dustine turned her walker, entered the office, and closed the door behind her. Will jumped up to offer her his seat, but she ignored it. “What do you want to know about him for, Joshlyn?”

  Josh was not a good liar. She knew this, and she also knew that, even had she been an excellent liar, Dustine would have been the last person she could have fooled.

  “I think he’s related to the men in the trench coats. One of them said his name.”

  Dustine sucked in such a deep, sharp breath, arching her back as she did so, that Josh was afraid she was having a heart attack.

  “Grandma!” Josh cried, springing to the old woman’s side, but Dustine ignored her concern.

  With flushed cheeks and hands clenched around her pine walker, she said, “Tell me what you know.”

  “Are you all right?” Josh demanded.

  “Tell me!” Dustine insisted. “Right now!”

  Josh glanced at Will, who looked petrified.

  With some reluctance and lingering concern for her grandmother’s well-being, Josh related what had happened the day before. She expected Dustine to be angry, but she didn’t expect Dustine to say, “Go put on your shoes,” and then pick up the library phone extension and dial from memory.

  Josh and Will looked at each other again. “Wait a sec—what?” Josh asked.

  “We’re going to see Ben,” Dustine said. Then, into the phone, she said, “It’s me. I’m bringing Josh and Will over. It’s about Feodor.”

  Nineteen

  An hour later, Josh and Will were seated on a cat-hair-coated couch in a snug, extremely cluttered living room. They were each drinking chocolate milk, which Young Ben seemed to think was all the rage among young people. Ben was sitting in a recliner that retained a perfect imprint of his body when he got out of it. Dustine sat in another chair drinking rooibos tea from a mug that read PLUTO IS TOO A PLANET!

  The ride to Young Ben’s house had been nearly silent. Will had known from the way Josh pursed her lips the whole time that her grandmother’s behavior was making her nervous. They had obviously stumbled upon something big. Either that, or they were both about to learn firsthand how someone got exiled from dream walking.

  The doorbell rang, and Young Ben got up to answer it. A gray Persian climbed into Will’s lap and looked at him expectantly. He gave in and petted her. Will had met Young Ben once before; the seer had come over to the house to welcome Will to the dream-walker community. After being somewhat intimidated by both Dustine and Davita, Will had been relieved to meet the easygoing old man.

  Young Ben returned with Davita Bach, who wore a black suit with white piping. Her red hair was twisted off her neck with a long, pearl-ended stick. She kissed Dustine’s cheek and said hello to Will and Josh, and then she looked meaningfully at the couch with its layer of cat hair, and Young Ben said, “I’ll get a towel.”

  Wh
en Davita was seated on a large, clean towel, she said lightly, “So, Josh, I hear you and Will ran into something strange in-Dream yesterday.”

  She failed to point out that they weren’t supposed to have been in-Dream, which made Will anxious. Adults only ignored what you had done wrong if something else was even worse.

  He noticed, also, that she addressed herself exclusively to Josh.

  Josh told Davita what had happened the day before, leaving out most of the fighting and that fact that Will had gone in after her against orders. The elders and Davita exchanged covert glances as Josh spoke. Will felt the tension in the room rise with a pressure like humidity.

  “All right then,” Davita said, as if coming to some decision. “We’re going to tell you about Feodor, because if we don’t I assume you’ll keep digging, and there’s a lot of wrong information about him floating around out there. Especially on the Internet.” Davita gave Josh a hard stare that left Will assuming she was referring to Whim’s blog.

  “If you want to understand Feodor, you have to understand the atrocities Feodor’d lived through,” Young Ben began. “He was born in Poland, and he was thirteen when World War II began. The Germans considered the Poles untermensch, subhuman, and planned to use them as slave labor until they died out. They killed Feodor’s entire family, his entire community, and most of Poland’s dream walkers.”

  “AB-Aktion,” Dustine said in a grim tone.

  “That’s right, that’s what they called it. Hitler wanted to destroy Poland’s identity, so he killed politicians, teachers, professors, doctors, clergy, even athletes. Most of the dream walkers were well educated and had good jobs, so a lot of them ended up in camps, or they got worked to death on the railroads. Feodor managed to survive, even fought for the resistance in the Battle of Warsaw. After the war, Poland fell to the Communists, and Feodor immigrated to England and then to the US under the royal family’s protection. He was a brilliant young man. He became a dream theorist and historian, and his interpretation of medieval prophecy is still the best around. But as time passed, I guess the memories started to get to him.”