by Kit Alloway
“No!” the boy was screaming. “You can’t make me do this!”
“Stop fighting!” his mother admonished.
At the kitchen table sat on older man, smoking a pipe and perusing a newspaper. “Listen to your mother, Caleb,” he said.
Outside the glass house, Feodor chuckled. “The unquestionable wisdom of parents,” he mused.
The acid in the cauldron bubbled and spit, and its droplets burned tiny wormholes into the white granite countertop.
Caleb’s mother had bound his wrists with cooking string and was pushing him closer to the cauldron. “Afterward you can have a big bowl of ice cream,” she promised.
Caleb’s fear hit Josh like a chaotic crash of musical notes played all at once—too loud, too fast, too urgent.
“I have to save him,” she said. She attacked the exterior wall of the house with a sharp side kick, but the glass barely reverberated.
“Do you?” Feodor asked.
His placid, amused expression confused her. “Of course I do.”
“You’re certain?”
She couldn’t figure out what he was asking. How could she not save this boy from having his hands burned off? How was that even an option?
“But how will I play the piano with no hands?” Caleb wailed.
“You won’t,” his mother replied. “Won’t that be a relief? No more arpeggios.”
“No more paying for lessons,” Caleb’s father added. “No more paying to get the damn thing tuned every six weeks. No more Bach.”
“Amen to that,” Caleb’s mother agreed.
Feodor continued to look at Josh as if waiting for an answer. Holding her eyes, he gestured silently to a wooden table sitting outside the house. A black velvet cloth had been spread over the tabletop, showcasing the harsh metal forms of the circlet and vambrace.
“I thought you said I shouldn’t use them,” Josh told him.
“Did I?” Feodor pondered.
Caleb’s mother had succeeded in forcing him close enough to the cauldron that splashes of acid were nipping at his skin. “It burns!” he wailed.
Josh stroked the circlet. The metal felt unnaturally cold to her, and the idea of pressing such frigidity against her skin made her hesitate to put on the devices.
But Caleb screamed as the acid burned his fingertips, and the terror in his voice gave Josh the courage she needed to clamp the vambrace around her forearm. Immediately, the metal warmed against her skin. When she slipped the circlet around her head, a sensation of relief ran down her scalp. She aimed her arm at the glass house, and the power streamed into her hand like molten pleasure. Her mind expanded, beyond her skull, beyond the Dream, beyond space and time. From there, from God’s point of view, she knew everything.
“It feels good, no?” Feodor asked, tracing the metal hinges with his fingertips. “So very, very good.”
Josh couldn’t deny that it did. With a thought, she slammed a lid over the cauldron, sealing it tight against the acid.
“No!” cried Caleb’s mother, staring at Josh through the glass wall. “You don’t understand!”
But Josh knew everything. She felt everything. Her wisdom swept through her, unimpeachable. She would sit in judgment of the whole world.
With dancing fingers, she manifested a long strip of duct tape over the mother’s mouth.
Caleb tore away from the woman with a gleeful shout and ran to the piano in the living room as the strings that bound his wrists fell away.
“You know what is best for them,” Feodor assured Josh. “Your field of vision is so much wider than theirs.”
“Yes,” Josh whispered as her thoughts bound Caleb’s parents in splendid, weblike shrouds.
Caleb flung open the piano cover and began playing even before he sat down. “Poland has not yet perished!” he sang.
Josh barely recognized the tune. Caleb had rearranged it, changed its pace and key so that instead of the strident, honorable anthem Josh knew so well, what emerged from the piano was a mocking two-step fit only for a honky-tonk bar.
Feodor hissed through his teeth, and the piano lid slammed down on Caleb’s wrists. Josh heard bones break beneath Caleb’s rending scream, and she shook her vambraced arm at the house, but nothing happened. She thrust again, slamming her hand against the glass wall, directing her thoughts … nothing.
The devices had abandoned her.
The piano lid flew back up and sucked in Caleb’s arms up to the elbows, the black and white keys chomping at his flesh.
With a desperate cry, Josh resorted to beating on the glass exterior of the house. Caleb screamed as the piano pulled him in, rivulets of blood running down the keyboard, and from the kitchen, his bound and helpless parents watched as the instrument devoured their child.
And Feodor laughed and laughed.
Josh turned on him, but before she could summon the power of her thoughts, he kissed the tip of her nose.
“Your wisdom,” he said. “All yours.”
* * *
In the morning, Josh called Bash Mirrettsio. She was anxious—anxious and hiding in the garage, where no one was likely to overhear her—but Bash sounded delighted to hear from her and not at all surprised. When she said she was hoping to discuss his Nicastro paper, he was even more delighted and invited her to his office the next day.
Josh had only been planning a phone call, but his office at Willis-Audretch was in downtown Braxton, and coincidentally, Mirren would be in Braxton at the same time, meeting with Anivay la Grue. The only difficulty lay in finding an excuse to go without taking Will. Finally, she told him that the elbow she had broken in February had been bothering her recently, and she was going to Braxton to see her orthopedist. Will offered to come along anyway—him being a good boyfriend—but she assured him that the trip would be boring and not worth his time.
It was easily the biggest lie she had ever told him.
* * *
When Josh walked into the lobby of Willis-Audretch, the World’s only dream-walker think tank and research center, her knees weakened.
Feodor’s memories bloomed in her mind, like a gray tint coloring everything she saw. Yes, the décor had changed, the reception desk was in a different place, and a metal detector had been installed, but she recognized this place and the bones of the building.
Not me, Josh thought. Feodor.
“Ma’am?” the man at the receptionist’s desk asked. “May I help you?”
She gave her name at the desk, then paced the waiting area, and only a few minutes later, Bash appeared. He was both nerdier and better-looking than Josh had expected. His blue pants clashed with his red-and-brown shirt, and they all clashed with his orange tie, which he’d obviously yanked on a few times, but none of that distracted from his crow-black hair or the bright smile that revealed tidy square teeth. Despite his classic good looks, Josh couldn’t get past his white Velcro sneakers.
As they headed up to his office, Bash made small talk without Josh’s help, which worked well since she was too overwhelmed to carry on a conversation. Everywhere she looked, she saw not only the modern reality, but the past superimposed over it: doors painted two colors, floors with two different carpets, even two different series of creaks in the elevator.
Josh began to feel a sort of dread as they passed through the door labeled “Applied Physics Department.” Her shoulders sagged when they entered Bash’s office without disturbing the door to room 327, which Feodor had unlocked every morning when he came into work. Josh didn’t know if she felt relieved or disappointed.
“Help yourself,” Bash said. “I’m sure there’s a pot in the break room.”
Josh blinked at him. “What?”
“You said you wanted coffee, right?”
No, she had turned over her shoulder and barked, “Cree, where’s my coffee?” just like Feodor had done every single time he’d come in to work.
This confusion resulted in Josh ending up sitting in front of Bash’s desk with a large mug of coffee, which sh
e didn’t drink and had doctored into a warm milkshake.
“So, as I mentioned, I loved your paper,” Bash told her. “Particularly the part where you performed your experiment without any sort of supervision or permission. Sometimes I think that the Nicastro encourages young people to get into trouble.”
Bash laughed. Josh made herself smile again.
“I’ll be frank,” he said. “You look anxious. What did you want to talk about?”
Josh swallowed; the drink did nothing to relieve the bitter taste in her mouth. Reluctantly, she opened the manila envelope she’d brought along and drew out a handful of pages. “I was reading your paper, and you talked about using trimidions to monitor the state of the Dream at various points, then sending radio signals back to a central location.”
Bash nodded, apparently unsurprised that she had followed the paper.
“I’ve—” She struggled with the first word, since it wasn’t quite a truthful one. “I’ve been working on sort of the opposite idea, that a central device could broadcast signals to various points within the Dream.”
His aristocratic brow furrowed. “To what purpose?”
“Well,” Josh stumbled again. Somehow she had been hoping to avoid telling him why she wanted to do this. “I’ve been … I mean, it might be possible to … The central problem is how to create fixed broadcasting points on the surface of the Dream, since it’s constantly expanding and contracting.”
Bash didn’t protest the leap in topics. “Which is exactly why nothing in my original paper has proven applicable. We’d need to place trimidions throughout the Dream at fixed locations, so that we’d be able to know exactly where the signals were coming from. But the Dream is always changing shape, like…”
“The sea,” Josh suggested.
“A sea without a bottom. How can you fix something to the surface of the sea?”
Josh fiddled with the papers, not sure which ones to show him. “What if … we could change the polarization of Dream particles to prevent them from shifting?”
For the first time, Bash seemed surprised.
“That would be quite an accomplishment. That isn’t actually what you’re working on, is it?”
Josh pushed forward one of the pages she’d torn from her sketchbook. Bash immediately drew it toward himself.
“What is this?” he asked, but then he began reading and stopped asking questions. Josh anxiously checked over the calculations again, once grabbing a pen to scratch out a couple of words in Polish, hopefully before Bash noticed them.
“Where’s the rest of this?” Bash asked, the lighthearted tone in his voice gone.
Josh showed him the next page.
For the next forty minutes, he read, sometimes tapping the equations with a capped pen as he worked through them in his mind. Finally, he sat back in his chair and blew out a long, marathon-runner breath.
“This is mind-blowing,” he said. His voice was very serious. “You wrote this?”
Josh hesitated before nodding.
“How? I mean no offense, but your Nicastro paper wasn’t anywhere near this. Who have you been studying with?”
Josh squirmed in her chair. “I haven’t been studying with anyone. I’ve just been reading a lot.”
Bash wasn’t buying it. “I find that impossible to believe.”
She was going to have to tell him something. “You probably heard that I had a run-in with Feodor Kajażkołski a few months ago.”
“Yes, I did hear that. You’re telling me that this is his work?”
That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? Josh thought.
She’d considered telling Bash at least part of the truth. The problem was, if she admitted she had gotten her ideas from Feodor, how would she explain when she kept coming up with new ones?
“No, the work is mine. But I hit my head while I was in his universe. I fractured my skull really badly, and since then … I’ve been thinking differently. Dream theory just sort of makes sense to me now.” She tried to give Bash a light smile, like it was no big deal. “My dad’s really confused about why my grades have improved so much.”
That part, at least, was true. She’d been accused of cheating twice in the last months of her junior year, and she’d resorted to taking proctored Saturday exams to prove herself.
“I bet,” Bash said. He flipped through the sketchbook again. “I would have been surprised if you had said this was Feodor’s work. It’s too orderly, too much hard science.”
She smiled for real then, even as she wondered what Bash’s comment might imply. Were Feodor’s ideas being filtered in some way as they passed through her brain, altered and made more orderly, possibly even less dangerous?
“I didn’t get the impression he was a super orderly person,” she said.
“What was your impression of him?” Bash asked, looking up at her.
No one had asked Josh the question that way, but the answer poured out of her mouth before she could give it a thought. “I think he was a luminary whose light was distorted by the shadow of evil.”
Where had that come from? Was that how Feodor saw himself? Josh had never said anything so poetic. She added, to break the strange tension she’d created, “What did the monarchy say before they exiled him? That his genius was matched only by his madness?”
“I hadn’t heard that one.” Bash gave himself a little shake. “Unfortunately, if we come back to this brilliant work you’ve written, we’re faced with a problem that perhaps only Feodor could have solved. How are you going to stabilize the Dream particles in their new polarity?”
“I was hoping that was where you could come in.”
“Flattering.” He tapped the pages with his capped pen and thought. “Give me a while to work on it.”
“I would be grateful if you would.”
“I’m excited, honestly. I haven’t seen anything like this since— I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. May I keep these pages?”
Josh nodded after a pause. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t show them to anyone else, though.”
Reluctantly, he said, “It’s a temptation, but I’ll respect your wishes. I wouldn’t want anyone showing my work around before it was ready.”
“Thanks.”
As she stood up, though, he added, “Josh. You must realize the implications of what you’ve created.”
Suddenly she felt his excitement, not just at the ideas she had given him, but at the thrill of this secret.
“If you could build this machine and find a way to anchor transmitters in the Dream, you could transform Dream particles in any way you wanted. You could alter the Dream.”
Josh swallowed. She knew only too well.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “One step at a time.”
By the time she reached the elevator, she was trembling.
Sixteen
Long after everyone else had gone to bed, Will remained sitting at the desk in front of his stalker wall, trying to put together the pieces of Feodor’s last manuscript.
Combining the copies from Mirren’s archive with the four copies of the manuscript the presenter at the Grey Circle meeting had given Will, he had seven total copies. None of them were complete individually, but put together they appeared to make a whole manuscript.
Except … When Will went to check a page number on the last page of one manuscript to see how much it overlaped with another, he noticed that the last words were different on what should have been identical pages.
Maybe one is a revised copy, he thought, but he lacked the knowledge of dream theory to make heads or tails of either version. Instead, he reexamined all the copies he had, page by page, to make a list of places where they diverged.
The longer the list became, the more certain Will felt that the discrepancies had nothing to do with revision. He was still poring over the pages, trying to make sense of the words, when Mirren came downstairs in a green silk pajama set.
“Oh, hello,�
� she said. “I thought everyone had gone to bed.”
“So did I. Trouble sleeping?”
“I’m nervous about tomorrow.”
The next day was her dream-walking trial.
She perched on the corner of Will’s desk. “I’d never been nervous before I came to the World. I had nothing to be nervous about. Now I’m finding that I don’t like it very much.”
“No one does,” Will agreed.
“I keep wondering what nightmares the junta will pick, and if I’ll have any idea what to do when I face them. I know that if I can just get over the hump of figuring out an approach…”
Will decided not to tell her that after six months of training with Josh, he was still learning the same thing. Instead, he said, “Why don’t we go pull up some nightmares in the archway, and we can toss ideas around about how to approach them? We can’t go into the Dream, of course, but—”
“I would be extremely grateful,” Mirren said. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all. Playing the teacher instead of the apprentice is sort of fun.” He started to rise and then realized the opportunity he was passing up. “Oh, wait, before we do that, could you take a look at these copies of Feodor’s last manuscript?”
He explained to her about the numerous versions of the text, and she pulled up a chair beside his so that she could examine the pages more closely.
“How much dream theory do you know?” Will asked.
“Quite a bit. Of course, that in no way means I’ll be able to read this. I’ve read some of Kajażkołski’s earlier work, and it always took me hours to parse it out.” She read over a page of which they had four copies. “This doesn’t even sound like his other work. And the first paragraphs on these two versions are the same, but the equation that follows them is radically different.”
“Are either of them right?” Will asked.
Mirren required a calculator and scrap paper to figure it out. “I don’t think so. This one is pure nonsense. But…” She tapped some more. “The second equation is much better, but it only fits with the explanation given on this Xeroxed copy over here.”
“So you’re saying that none of these pages make sense by themselves, but if you take parts of each one and fit them together, they start to make sense?”