by Kit Alloway
“They might,” Mirren said. She copied out the explanation and the equation it referenced onto a new sheet of paper, then two more paragraphs—from different copies—and another equation from yet another source. “Now this makes sense. This I could believe Kajażkołski wrote.”
“What does it say?”
“It talks about evidence of the subtle body in our DNA. The subtle body is what he called—”
“The soul, I know. The part of us that enters the Dream universe when we sleep.”
“Some people prefer to think of it as our consciousness. He says that our consciousness is present in our DNA, and he’s written an equation to measure the subtle body’s vibration based on DNA content. He compares how our souls function to our ability to see stars. When the sun sets, you can see the stars, but the stars are always there regardless of whether or not they’re visible. He thought that when the body dies, part of the soul remains in the DNA.” She frowned. “I shouldn’t have said this made sense. ‘Reads coherently’ would have been a better description.”
“You don’t believe in souls?”
“I do, but what does he mean by saying that our souls can be found in our DNA? There’s a passage here about how if your arm gets cut off, your consciousness is still attached to your arm. This equation at the bottom of the page appears internally consistent, but I have no idea what it does.” She shuffled through the pages, seeming to grow more frustrated. “Sorting all this out will take days.”
Will felt reluctant to let the subject drop, but he knew Mirren needed to focus on her dream-walking trial.
“Well, we aren’t going to manage it tonight,” Will said. “Let’s go watch some nightmares.”
Mirren nodded, the relief plain in her face.
The archroom was cold this late at night. Whim and his father were on nightmare duty, and Will fetched a second chair so that he and Mirren could sit comfortably and watch through the arch as a kitchen tried to eat their friend and his dad. Will attempted to provide some educational commentary, but most of the time he was pretty sure Whim had no sort of plan at all.
When the nightmare ended, Whim and his father left Will and Mirren alone to work the looking stone. “Less than an hour, we promise,” Will said, knowing that the middle of the night wasn’t a great time for dream walkers to go on break.
“No rush—I’m famished,” Whim said as he left.
Will pressed his hand to the looking stone and enjoyed the eerie sensation that the powdered red glass was pushing back against his palm. Touching the looking stone activated the archway and caused a section of the Dream to appear within the archway’s confines. The first nightmare to pop up within the archway involved a gunfight on a small fishing boat.
“So I guess the first thing I’d do,” Will said, “is make sure I know who the dreamer is. And then I’d try to distract the dreamer away from the guns. I’d say, ‘I found it!’ or, ‘This way!’ so they’d think I had something they needed or I’d found an escape route. But Josh says I try to influence dreamers too often.”
“That’s because you’re better at it than she is,” Mirren said, making Will glance at her.
“Am I? I guess I am.” Even though he knew Mirren was right, the comment unsettled him. “It’s not that Josh doesn’t want me to be good at things—”
“I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“It’s just, she gets anxious when I use tools she’s not sure will work.”
Perhaps because he was thinking about Josh while he had a hand on the looking stone, or perhaps just by chance, Josh appeared through the archway.
“Will,” Mirren said, her voice somehow different from before.
Josh stood on a battleground, surrounded by half-creature soldiers, and black smoke streaked the poppy-red sky above her. She wore a smoldering, blackened ball gown, something she never would have donned in real life, and she looked on as the goblin-men around her fought one another. They were not so much two armies against each other as just a sea of writhing enemies fighting only for themselves.
Feodor stood beside Josh. He was younger than he had been in his universe, but Will still recognized him. His brown pants and white shirt were the only tidy things in sight. He stood next to Josh with his hands by his side, a smile playing over his lips like sunlight.
“Is that . .?” Mirren asked.
Feodor stepped up behind Josh, and he slipped those small, clean hands around her waist. As he slid them up her sides, she raised her arms, and Will saw some sort of contraption on her left arm from wrist to elbow, a strange metal brace or piece of armor. It reflected the red sky, and a similar reflection made him notice that she wore a metal crown, hanging down low over the back of her neck.
She raised her arms above her head, and Will stumbled out of his chair, revolted at the sight of Feodor sliding his hands up Josh’s body. She opened her mouth; her jaws were full of gnashing fangs, and she released a roar that could have been in either Polish or Demonic.
No, Will thought.
Josh flung out her machined arm, and black fire erupted from her palm. The bolt reached for miles, burning the warring creatures to cinders and charring the earth. She cast her fire as far as Will could see, releasing a triumphant roar, and as she scorched life from the earth, Feodor brushed her hair away so that he could trace the back of her neck with his tongue, his arms clutching her close, his hands cupping—
The Veil popped.
In the silence afterward, Will realized that the dream hadn’t ended, he had just broken contact with the looking stone long enough that the archway had let go of that particular nightmare.
“Will,” Mirren said, but he couldn’t look at her. She touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she told him, and then she just stood there, the weight and heat of her hand growing on his shoulder.
Will waited for himself to react. He knew there were any number of psychologically legitimate responses, and he waited to see which one he would experience, but oddly what he thought was that he finally understood why Haley was so enamored with Mirren. She didn’t obfuscate or distract, she didn’t avoid or pretend, she just told the truth and faced what was ahead of her. And for a guy like Haley, who couldn’t help seeing the truth when he touched someone, that must have been a very great relief.
Will nodded to himself, filing the information away, and then noted that the psychological reaction his brain had chosen was avoidance.
“I’m sorry,” he told Mirren. “I think that’s all we have time for. I’m sure you’ll do great tomorrow. Good night.”
Then he even managed to smile.
“Remember,” she said, ignoring his words. “It was a nightmare, not a fantasy.”
He nodded and walked upstairs to the Weavers’ apartment. For a moment he paused outside Josh’s bedroom door, wondering what he would see if he went and sat in the armchair by her bed. Would she lie trembling, the pillowcase torn by her clenched hands, body rank with sweat? Would she be moaning—
He went back down to the second floor and his own apartment. For the first time, he depressed the lock on his bedroom doorknob.
He climbed into bed, but every time he closed his eyes, he saw Feodor’s hands sliding up Josh’s small body and her mouth full of teeth and the way the pale green of her eyes had vanished beneath a reflection of the poppy-red sky.
So he didn’t close his eyes, and he didn’t sleep.
Seventeen
Mirren knew she was squeezing Haley’s hand so hard that she must have been hurting him, but she couldn’t let go.
I can’t do this, she wanted to say. I’m not ready. Take me home.
Braxton was a large enough city that the main archways were located in a central hub known as the Arches. Aboveground stood a public park with beautiful Gothic arches decorating the walking paths. Belowground, a nine-archway hub provided an organized area where the local dream walkers could put in their hours.
The archways—all marked by much tidier and more recent stonework tha
n the one in Josh’s basement—stood in a wide circle in an underground room. Two archways were in use by dream walkers, but the others stood empty, and one had several rows of chairs set before it. The junta, out of their robes but still imposing in business attire, spoke in a huddle, no doubt arguing some final issue of protocol. Josh had insisted that Will test the archway’s looking stone; Mirren didn’t know if she was more surprised that Josh thought the looking stone might have been tampered with or that Josh trusted Will more to test it out than she did herself.
Photographers and reporters made up a large percentage of the people in the archroom as well. Mirren counted Whim among them; he hadn’t stopped typing on his tablet since they’d arrived. She had been startled by the presence of so much media. How many reporters did one secret society need?
Even though they’d come inside through the janitor’s entrance, a crowd had been waiting for Mirren when she’d climbed out of the limo. A lightning storm of camera flashes had blinded her when she’d tried to enter the building. People had shouted questions, and a group of protesters had held up signs and hollered, “Off with her head!” Someone had hurled a tomato at her, and even though Josh had caught it in midair, the animosity had still frightened Mirren.
“Everyone here is rooting for me to fail,” she told Haley as they waited for the junta to pick a nightmare.
“Not everyone,” he said. She could tell by the way he was ducking his head that being around so many people was making him nervous, but he hadn’t hesitated to agree when she’d asked him to come.
The rules of the trial were simple. The junta would pick three nightmares for Mirren to enter, and she had to resolve each one, meaning she had to guide the dreamer to face his fears, or confront her demons, or escape from the nightmare’s danger. If Mirren woke the dreamer or exited the Dream without resolving the nightmare, she’d fail.
“Remember Gilcrest’s Warning,” Josh said. “An archway reveals no more of a nightmare than a mirror unmasks a soul.”
“Didn’t Gilcrest’s wife kill him by feeding him bonbons full of arsenic?” Mirren asked, which made Will burst into tremulous laughter and Josh look at him with confusion.
Mirren was worried about Will. He obviously hadn’t slept and he’d been wearing a sort of deranged smile all morning. Mirren promised herself that once this trial was over, she’d reach out to him.
“The point is,” Josh said, “the junta will only be able to see so much through the archway. They might send you into a nightmare that’s a lot more dangerous or a lot less dangerous than they expect.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Mirren asked.
“No, it’s supposed to remind you to stay alert and make no assumptions.” Josh ran a hand through her hair. “I could try to think of something encouraging to say, but at this point, either you’re ready or you aren’t.”
Mirren didn’t feel ready.
The junta broke their huddle, and Peregrine Borgenicht came over to wish Mirren luck.
Mirren smiled as sweetly as she could and said truthfully, “I wouldn’t be here without you.”
He laughed and took his seat, but Mirren felt an unexpected fury. She squared her shoulders. “I bet he won’t be smiling when I resolve the third nightmare,” she muttered.
Josh smiled at her then. “Now you’re ready.”
* * *
Mirren soared through the first nightmare. On a cruise ship transporting prison inmates, she avoided being killed by rioting prisoners and coaxed the dreamer—the onboard massage therapist—into saying what she’d always needed to say to her father. The Dream resolved just in time for Mirren to avoid going down with the ship.
* * *
The second nightmare was harder. Mirren followed a preteen diver up to the top of a ten-meter platform and tried to talk her out of her performance anxiety. The little girl wasn’t afraid of diving as much as she was of letting people watch her dive.
But nothing Mirren said seemed to help. The girl continued to tremble and hyperventilate, and Mirren began to fear that the Dream would shift before she resolved the nightmare, and finally she just said, “Come on, we’re going right now!” She grabbed the girl’s hand and yanked it as she ran off the end of the platform.
The fall was two seconds of mindless terror as the air tore at her flailing limbs. The girl fell with her, but they separated halfway down, and while Mirren managed to get her body mostly into the pencil position Josh had taught her, nothing she did could prevent the girl from landing on top of her.
Mirren heard her neck pop against the underwater silence, and her left arm went numb. Time stretched as she struggled to surface. The girl kicked her in the face, knocking Mirren back, and her numb arm was slow to respond, but she finally got her head above water and sucked in a grateful breath.
Beside her, the girl was treading water, a giant grin on her small face. The crowd was on their feet, cheering.
The nightmare dissolved.
* * *
“If there was a time limit,” Davita told Peregrine, “you should have brought it up when we agreed to terms. But since you didn’t, I’m informing you that Miss Mirren is taking a one-hour break to receive medical treatment and recover.”
“The fatigue of back-to-back nightmares is part of the trial!” Peregrine argued.
They kept arguing. Minister Speggra got involved, too. Mirren turned the chair she was sitting in away from them, causing Saidy—Whim’s mother, who was a paramedic—to admonish her to hold still.
“You need a cervical collar,” she added.
“She can’t dream walk in a neck brace,” Josh said.
“She’s sprained her neck badly enough to involve the nerves in her arm. I can tape the hell out of it, but what she really needs is to sit still.”
“There aren’t too many nightmares we get to fight by sitting still,” Josh said.
“She doesn’t have to go back in,” Haley said, and everyone looked at him, even Saidy.
“Meaning what?” Josh asked finally. Mirren saw Haley flinch a little at her tone, but he pulled himself up and spoke again.
“Mirren,” he said, “do you want to keep going?”
For a moment, her neck stopped hurting. All she felt was happy.
Out of everybody here, he’s the one who thinks to ask me.
“Of course she wants to keep going,” Josh said. “This was all her idea. None of us would be here if she didn’t want to do this.”
On the one hand, Josh was right. Everything had been put into motion by Mirren herself. On the other hand, such endeavors had a way of taking on a life of their own, and Mirren knew that if she gave up, a small chorus of people would try to convince her to keep going.
Haley wouldn’t be one of them. He didn’t care if she was a princess or a queen or a nobody. And he didn’t care if she got something started and realized halfway through that it wasn’t what she thought it would be and needed to back out. She didn’t have to prove anything to him.
Strangely, that made her want to be brave.
“Mirren?” Davita was asking.
Mirren made herself look away from Haley. “I just need an Advil and a cup of coffee, and I’m good to go.”
* * *
The sound of the rain beating on the car’s roof startled Mirren with its volume. She’d been in a car during the rain only once, and she couldn’t remember if it had been this loud. She didn’t think so.
She sat in the passenger’s seat, and hot air from the defroster bounced off the windshield and onto her, carrying a dry, staticky scent. In the driver’s seat was a teenage boy, black, maybe three or four years younger than her. He hardly looked old enough to drive, but he was scrawny to begin with—thin wrists, knobby elbows, a hairless chin he needed to lift to see over the dashboard.
He didn’t react to Mirren’s presence in the car, prompting her to ask, “Where are we going?”
He glanced over then, smiled. His smile turned down at the corners, sad or maybe
wistful. “Green Lake.”
“This is poor weather for a day at the shore.”
The boy nodded, giving another empty smile.
They drove past a wooden sign announcing the entrance to the marina. The road wove between stands of maple and birch, passing turns toward various campsites. Mirren didn’t know if she should try to pump the dreamer for information or let the nightmare unfold, but when they entered the marina she felt safe saying, “So, we’re getting on a boat?”
The boy didn’t answer, and Mirren realized the marina was empty at the same moment he slammed down on the gas pedal and sent the car flying toward the water.
“No!” Mirren shouted, grabbing for the wheel.
The dreamer pushed her away, grimacing. The sound of the rain on the car roof was drowned out by the rhythmic thwack of the car tires bouncing over wooden boards.
The dreamer had managed to drive the car right up onto the pier, which was barely wide enough for the car. They were still a third of the way from the end when the vehicle’s left tires slipped off the edge, and their inertia sent them careening straight into the lake.
What Mirren felt was not fear but fury.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” she shouted at the boy.
The car began to sink, and the sound of the rain hitting the roof grew fainter as more and more of the vehicle sank underwater. Mirren frantically pushed the button to roll down her window, but it must have shorted out.
“I want to die,” the boy said with surprising calm and dignity. He tightened his seat belt.
Mirren didn’t know what to say to that.
Josh had briefly covered how to escape from a sinking car. Very briefly. In fact, the only thing Mirren could remember was that unless they got out before the car was submerged, their chances of surviving were, as Josh had put it, “complete shit.”
The car was nearly completely underwater already, sinking fast, and the weight of the water against the car door was enough that Mirren couldn’t open it. Water lapped at her ankles.
She realized she was breathing too rapidly. She would need to hold her breath if they were going to reach the surface. But the way the light inside the car faded as they sank deeper, and the knowledge that they were going to have to wait until the car was completely full of water before escaping, was freaking her out.