by Kit Alloway
“Kansas,” Will supplied.
“Kansas,” Bayla repeated, as if the name tasted sour.
Bash enthusiastically shook Whim’s hand, but he dropped it when he heard Will’s name. “Will Kansas! Well, this is quite a thrill!”
He shook Will’s hand like he wanted to take it home as a souvenir. “I’m Bashuriel Mirrettsio. Call me Bash. You’re a nominee for the Nicastro Prize this year, aren’t you? I won six years ago. My own experiment never went anywhere, I’m afraid.”
“Oh,” Will said, relaxing. “Congratulations. Yeah, Josh and I are nominated.”
“You’re a shoo-in,” Bash said. “I read your paper. I read all the Nicastro finalist papers. I’m hoping that one day they’ll put me on the selection committee.” He was so excited that he was completely ignoring the glares Whim and Bayla were exchanging. “I think your experiment could have terrific applications for making archway creation safer. I’d love to talk to you about your paper. Both of you, I mean.”
That was the first time a dream walker had ever remembered Will in an invitation while forgetting Josh, instead of the other way around. Will felt vaguely charmed in spite of himself.
“Sure,” he said. “That would be fun.”
“Darling,” Bayla said, “I think we should go find seats before the presentation starts.”
“Oh.” Bash looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there and wasn’t thrilled to have been reminded. “Yes, of course.” He pulled a business card out of his pocket. “Please, feel free to give me a call anytime. And give my compliments to Josh.”
Will accepted the card and said, “I will.”
Bayla was practically dragging Bash away by then. Will glanced at the business card.
Bash Mirrettsio
Associate in Applied Physics
Willis-Audretch
Willis-Audretch, Will thought, recognizing the name of the shady dream-walker think tank and invention corporation. I should have known.
“What a loser,” Whim said. “I can’t believe she’s with such a dork.”
Will gave him a withering look until he said, “What?”
Will sighed.
* * *
He tried to pay attention to the presentation, but he had too much on his mind. Partly Whim and Bayla, but mostly the way he’d responded to Bayla’s offer of wine. He knew he’d overreacted, and although he could justify himself by saying that no one should ever have to turn a drink down twice, he knew exactly why he’d gotten upset: he’d been scared he would accept the glass Bayla had held out to him.
Before he’d become Josh’s apprentice, he’d gotten drunk a few times. The anxiety he’d felt had outweighed the fun, though; he’d found himself constantly evaluating his behavior for signs of addiction. Finally he’d decided that drinking wasn’t worth the stress or the risk that it would get out of control.
But since that night spent in Feodor’s nightmare Warsaw, he’d found himself thinking about alcohol. About how it made everything lighter, how it made pleasure easy and trust easier. He never drank it, just thought about it.
But he thought about it a lot.
* * *
Finally, the lecture caught Will’s attention. He’d found that the content of the presentations fell into two categories—romantic rehashes of Feodor’s troubled life and hard-core scientific lectures. Tonight’s presentation was the latter, with a hint of the former thrown in: Feodor’s last book.
Sometime after Feodor had vanished from public life, he had apparently mailed to his editor a partial copy of a manuscript for a new book. The editor, although well versed in dream theory, had been unable to make sense of the manuscript, and he wrote back to Feodor saying that his work was the incomprehensible excrement of a troubled mind and that he should consider checking himself into a hospital. Shortly afterward, Feodor had been arrested for dream staging, and the editor had burned the manuscript.
Or, at least, he had claimed to. But for half a century, supposed fragments of the manuscript had floated around the dream-walker underground.
The presenter that night had gathered the pieces of the manuscript available and was attempting to put them together into some sort of cohesive idea.
The word that had grabbed Will’s attention was “magnets.”
“Magnets are a vital part of Kajażkołski’s theory of light harmonics,” the presenter was saying when Will turned his attention completely to the lecture. “He understood the relationship between energy and magnets and that there is more than one energy field surrounding the human body. According to him, the first energy field is esoteric, the so-called spiritual body. The second energy field is the body itself, and its energy is made up of the subatomic particles from which matter is formed.
“Some attempts have been made to manipulate the physical body with magnets. For example, ultrasound therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation. Even knee braces with magnets in them. But Feodor believed that magnets could be used to manipulate the subtle body as well.”
Will grabbed Whim’s arm. “That’s it!” he whispered. “That’s what he did to Winsor!”
Unfortunately, the proposal seemed to be as far as Feodor had taken the idea before his exile, and the rest of the lecture dealt with other, more complex issues of light harmonics theory that Will could hardly follow. He made a point, though, of taking the handouts the lecturer offered, which contained copies of all the known manuscript fragments.
* * *
Afterward, during the coffee hour, Will noticed a number of people drifting upstairs in twos and threes.
“Where do you suppose they’re going?” he asked Whim.
Bayla’s voice came from behind them, causing Whim to jump theatrically.
“They’re doing Veil dust,” Bayla said, sidling up next to Will. She turned her lower lip down in a pout and ran the tip of her finger along it, as if to indicate something.
“Doing Veil dust?” Will repeated. “Doesn’t Veil dust drive people insane?”
Veil dust was a substance emitted when a person crossed between the World and the Dream. It was literally made up of atomic bits of the Veil.
“Only in large doses, and only if you breathe it,” Bayla said. “If you take small doses through a mucus membrane, you don’t get high. You get deep.”
“Deep into trouble,” Whim muttered.
“No,” Bayla said irritably. “Deep into everything. Veil dust helps you make connections you couldn’t see before. Scientists have amazing breakthroughs on Veil dust. Artists find inspiration. If your heart is broken, Veil dust can help you heal it.”
“It sounds like a drug,” Will said, thinking that someone had once told him similar things about ecstasy. That guy had ended up hospitalized for depression because he’d burned through all the serotonin in his brain.
“It’s not a drug, it’s a mystical substance,” Bayla said. “It shows you the truth.” She lifted a plucked eyebrow at Will. “And if you want to understand the mind of a madman, Veil dust might just help you see through his eyes.” She stepped closer and said softly, “I can get you upstairs. If I vouch for you, they’ll let you in.”
Her breath—or maybe her lip gloss?—smelled like chocolate cherries. The scent was enticing, as was how close she stood and the sly promise in her eyes.
“Hey, I’m right here,” Whim pointed out, but Bayla ignored him.
For a moment, Will was tempted—by the Veil dust, not by Bayla. He was pretty sure she was only flirting with him to make Whim jealous. But the chance for a scientific breakthrough was hard to pass up, and he could admit to himself that Veil dust—regardless of whether or not it was a drug—intrigued him.
He forced himself to say, “Thank you, but I think I’ll pass.”
“Too bad,” Bayla said, batting her dark eyes. “That’s where the real meeting begins.” As she walked away, she added, “If you ever change your mind, give me a call. I’ll hold your hand.”
* * *
On the drive home, Wi
ll asked about Veil dust.
“Yeah, I’ve tried it,” Whim said. “Ian and I used to do it once in a while.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s like … things look different. You hallucinate a lot, but you feel like what you’re seeing is everything revealing itself, like you’re seeing everything’s true form. And sometimes you’re like, Man, the World is so beautiful. And other times, you just freak out because everything you’re afraid of is true.”
“So it’s all just hallucinations,” Will tried to clarify.
“Yeah…” Whim didn’t sound certain. “The thing is, sometimes I would come out of it and know things I hadn’t known before. Crazy stuff people would never have told me. But it was like I could see inside them.”
Will pondered this. Veil dust was a drug, but it wasn’t a drug. It made a person hallucinate, but it also showed them the truth, or it showed them what they were afraid of.
“Why would the Grey Circle be using it?”
“I don’t know. But one thing I do know: we can not tell Josh and Del that they’re doing Veil dust here, or they’re never going to let us come back.”
Will glanced at him across the front seat. “I don’t want to keep secrets from Josh.”
“You don’t have to keep it a secret, but don’t bring it up.”
“That’s the same thing, Whim.”
“Not in my book. I’m telling you, Josh will flip out. She hated it when Ian did Veil dust. She considered it a violation of the Dream’s sacredness or something.”
Will groaned. That did sound like Josh. And he did want to keep coming to these meetings, even if “the real meeting” was upstairs. He’d just started making progress figuring out what was wrong with Winsor.
“I won’t bring it up,” he agreed.
“Thanks,” Whim said. “One other thing. Could we maybe not mention that we bumped into Bayla?”
“Okay, who is Bayla?” Will demanded. “What is the story with you two?”
Whim, pulling off the interstate, grimaced. “So, this is embarrassing, but when I was fifteen, Bayla and I tried to elope. We bought a car for four hundred dollars and we tried to drive it to Mexico because we thought we could get married there without our parents’ consent—which is not true, by the way—but the car broke down in Louisiana. I wanted to hop a bus, but … Bayla bailed. She’d pretty much been losing patience since the A/C went on the fritz outside Mobile. She called her parents and told them to come get her.”
A shade of sadness tinted Whim’s voice, which surprised Will. Whim wasn’t much for regrets, but four years had passed and he was still hurt that Bayla had given up on him. “Wow,” Will said. “That sucks, man.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what I was thinking in the first place. Bayla’s a treacherous bitch. I should have seen that from the start.”
Apparently he’s still angry, too, Will thought.
“She did look good, though,” Whim added. He smiled at the memory. “She looked amazing, actually.”
Uh-oh.
“I won’t mention that part to Deloise, either,” Will said.
Six
The French toast tasted like happiness.
After every bite Mirren took, she closed her eyes to savor the sweet, eggy goodness. The flavors made her want to write an overblown ode stuffed with words like “sultry” and “delirious” and “profane.”
Now I understand why people get fat, she thought.
Whim had woken her that morning with the announcement that they were going to brunch at Fat Mac’s Flapjacks. “They” turned out to be Whim, Deloise, Josh, Will, Haley—and Mirren. She couldn’t tell him that she’d never been to a restaurant before, but she was relieved when he and Josh ordered the breakfast bonanza for the entire table. Shortly afterward, platters of pancakes, waffles, biscuits, eggs, sausage and bacon, and six different types of syrup had arrived. Mirren was determined to try every single thing.
Katia would love this, she thought, and for the first time since she’d left the Hidden Kingdom, she felt a little homesick. But the emotion was largely drowned out by her excitement at being out in the World. She’d ridden to the restaurant in Josh’s car, which had been utterly terrifying, but during the parts when she hadn’t been screaming, she had stared out the window in awe at the buildings, the people, just the size of the World, and the space of the sky. Now she couldn’t help gazing around the restaurant’s dining room at the people assembled with their different hairstyles and clothing and constant cell phone use.
The people at her own table fascinated her as well. Haley sat to her right and had rolled up sausages in a pancake, which Mirren recognized as the classic pioneer dish “pigs in a blanket.” Josh had drenched her waffles in syrup and powdered sugar, while Will preferred bacon and eggs. Deloise was neglecting her own plate so she could hand-feed Whim strawberries with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Mirren found that endearing, although everyone else seemed to find it nauseating.
“Whim,” Josh said, “if you don’t get my little sister’s finger out of your mouth, I’m going to break your legs with a hammer.”
Whim rolled his eyes, but he did quit sucking the whipped cream off Deloise’s finger. She remained sitting in his lap, however.
“Nan,” Whim said. “What’s that short for?”
“Gertrananette,” Mirren improvised.
“Wow,” Whim said. His eyebrows shot up, but he looked down at his plate as if trying to hide his reaction. “Is that, uh … German?”
“German and French. We speak both in Switzerland.”
“I think it’s pretty,” Deloise offered.
“Thank you.” Mirren personally thought it was hideous, but she liked Deloise.
She wasn’t finding it hard to lie about being from Switzerland. Her ridiculously thorough education was finally paying off.
Whim, while carefully angling a forkful of blueberry pancake into Deloise’s mouth, asked, “What do they think about staging over in Switzerland?”
Staging? Mirren wondered, and felt uneasy.
Staging was the practice of creating dreams in order to manipulate dreamers. It was banned in North America because—all too easily—it could be used to control people’s minds. The example Mirren always remembered was a first mate on a naval ship who staged dreams for the other crew members until they joined him in a mutiny.
“Much of Europe is divided into hectorates,” Mirren said. When she got blank stares, she explained, “Small, self-governing regions that are loosely affiliated. Most have agreed not to stage in hectorates other than their own, and most hectorates are either too small or too oddly shaped to allow for well-targeted staging, so it’s largely a nonissue.”
Thank heaven, she added silently.
“Staging is a big issue here,” Whim said, “what with the Accordance Conclave coming up. Looks like it will finally pass.”
Halfway through his sentence, Mirren bit into something hard in her sausage. She took care to be polite as she spit it into her napkin, but she couldn’t resist glancing down; a fragment of bone stared back at her.
Staging is a big issue here, Mirren repeated silently, and she tasted blood and realized she must have cut her gum. No wonder Collena worked so hard to keep me in the Hidden Kingdom, she thought. Out here, there are bones hidden in food and staging is about to become policy.
Haley leaned close to Mirren, his shoulder brushing hers, and whispered, “Are you okay?”
“What is the Accordance Conclave?” she asked him. Then, seeing that they had the table’s attention, she repeated the question to no one in particular, “What is the Accordance Conclave?”
“Nobody in Switzerland has heard of the AC?” Whim asked Mirren. “That’s bizarre.”
“Don’t be so American,” Deloise told him. “None of us know anything about the European hectorates. Why should they know anything about us?”
Will and Haley exchanged a glance Mirren couldn’t read.
“The Accordance
Conclave is a continent-wide vote on what type of government to replace the junta with,” Will explained. “The group with the most support is the Lodestone Party, which is—”
“I know the Lodestone Party,” Mirren interjected. “They—”
They killed my parents.
She folded the napkin so she wouldn’t have to look at the bone any longer.
“You probably should know them,” Whim said with a laugh. “You’re eating breakfast with the party leader’s granddaughters.”
The happy bubble Mirren had spent the last hour inside of popped and left her feeling very full and very sick.
“Please excuse me,” she said, rising. Her napkin unfolded as it floated to the floor; the bit of bloodied bone mocked her.
You think this hurt? Just wait for what comes next.
She knew what was coming next. She could see the thought on the horizon like approaching storm clouds, and she knew she had to get out of the restaurant before the rain fell. She headed for the front door. Behind her, exclamations of Whim’s confusion and Deloise’s concern filled the air.
“Do you want me to come?” Will asked.
“No,” Haley said. “I’ve got it.”
Mirren hit the door with both hands, causing a harness of bells to ring, and ran straight into the parking lot. Tires squealed, a horn blared, and Mirren shrieked as a hulking red vehicle stopped less than two feet from her. The driver screamed obscenities at her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mirren cried, and dashed toward the only thing she saw that looked comforting: a large grassy area with a small creek running through it.
She didn’t slow down until she reached a place where the creek ran through a channel beneath the road. A concrete slab buried next to the water protruded enough to create a little bench where she could sit without ruining her borrowed clothes.
Although she had closed her eyes, she felt Haley sit down beside her. Maybe her skin picked up his body warmth, or maybe she just sensed his presence, but she knew he was there even when he didn’t speak.
Some people don’t speak with words, she thought, and she felt grateful not to be alone at that moment.