by Kit Alloway
Will stopped and shook himself. “Find another way,” he said curtly, and went back to breaking up the s’more stick.
Josh looked down at the sketch pad beneath her hands. She’d always felt it was full of dirty secrets. “He’s right,” she said. “I have to stop.”
She rubbed at her tired eyes, longing to rub at her soul the same way, to shrug off this moral confusion. Did she want to build Feodor’s better weapon because she wanted to protect the Dream or control it?
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t trust herself, not after all she’d done.
Yes, you can, a little voice inside her whispered.
She hadn’t heard that voice in a long, long time, maybe not since the moment she’d rescued herself, Will, and Haley from death in the Dream so many months before.
Of course you could put the devices down afterward, the voice told her. You would be disappointed, but you’d do it. Will is just afraid because Will is always afraid.
She glanced at him, where he stood throwing bits of stick into the fire.
Maybe the voice was right. Maybe she would be able to use the devices one last time to defeat her grandfather and then let them go. But she knew one thing for certain: she would lose Will if she did.
“Think of something else,” she told Feodor.
His earlier glee had cooled into something akin to distrust. “The best solutions are simple,” he said. “I have given you a simple solution.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Josh told him. “Building a bigger gun isn’t the answer.”
“You desire a moral weapon to point at an amoral enemy,” Feodor warned. “Peregrine Borgenicht is not a stranger to me. You will not defeat him with your conscience.”
“It’s my choice,” Josh said.
Feodor shook his head slowly. Josh recognized the emotion hidden deep in his expression—he didn’t just think she was making a mistake, he was actually angered by her moral qualms. Feodor didn’t believe in the limitations of conscience.
That Josh did reassured her.
“You can either come up with a different plan, or we can hike back into the forest and end your vacation right now,” she told him.
He sighed. Then he smiled irritably and said, “Tell me again about the towers.”
As Josh talked, Will came back to the picnic table and sat beside her.
By dawn, they had agreed on a new plan. It was a terrible plan, and Josh knew it. She suspected Will knew it, too, and Feodor actually laughed at them when they agreed to it, but it was the second-best plan they had, so they took it.
* * *
Afterward, they got ready for bed. “Ah,” Feodor said, and then asked Josh, “Gdzie tu jest toaleta?”
She thought about telling him to piss in the woods and then shrugged. “I’ll take you.”
Whim refused to let them go alone, so the three of them walked the half mile down the road to the latrines. Whim went inside with Feodor, and Josh went to wash her hands at a nearby spigot, but when she straightened, Feodor was standing in front of her.
“This will not work,” he said plainly.
Josh wiped her wet hands on her jeans, said nothing.
“I know you have not told me everything. I understand that you do not trust me, and that your friends would like to kill me, but if you wish to survive this encounter, you must confide in me.”
The plan was not quite as bad as Feodor believed, but only because he didn’t know that Josh was the True Dream Walker. And that was the last thing she would ever tell him.
She started to walk past him, but he touched her arm. He didn’t grab her, he merely laid the cold tips of his fingers on her wrist.
“You said you have my memories. You must know something of who I am. I will stand beside you against Peregrine.”
She didn’t remember how Feodor knew Peregrine, if they had known each other. She did remember that he used to touch her like this in her nightmares, so lightly, such fleeting promises to draw her closer.
Right before he tore her to pieces.
Josh smiled at the sight of his skin against hers.
“I know exactly who you are,” she told him, and she walked away.
* * *
After they had tied Feodor up and locked him in the trunk of Josh’s car, and everyone else had gone to bed, Will found Josh sitting on the cooler beside the cooling fire.
He sat down beside her and took her hand.
“Promise me,” she said, “that when this is all over, you’ll still love me.”
He kissed the side of her face, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“I’ll always love you,” he said.
But she knew it wasn’t true.
Twenty−six
Because they didn’t know what they might encounter at the Weaver-Avish-Mckarr house—brainwashed parents, surveillance cameras, a torch-bearing mob—they decided to enter the Dream through the archway in the basement of Josh’s mother’s cabin.
Will hadn’t been to the cabin since before their first encounter with Feodor; he didn’t think any of them had. As they walked down the gravel drive toward the charred mess of rubble, Whim suddenly said, “Oh, my God! Is today the day?”
“No,” Josh said tightly. “It’s still two days away.”
Will knew what she meant, but Mirren asked. “What’s two days away?”
“One year since the cabin burned,” Josh said.
“And Ian died,” Deloise added, shooting Feodor an ugly look.
Will didn’t think Feodor noticed. For the first time since his resurrection, he seemed confused, alarmed even. As they reached the remains of the cabin, he asked, “Where are we?”
“Just outside of Charle,” Josh told him absently, her eyes searching for a way through the rubble.
But Will saw Feodor’s face stiffen, not so much with anger as … fear?
“Whose home was this?” he all but whispered.
“What does it matter?” Whim asked, at the same time Josh said, “It was my mother’s.”
Will took a couple of steps toward them, uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.
“You are Dustine Borgenicht’s granddaughter,” Feodor said. “I had forgotten.”
He and Josh gazed at each other in a way that unnerved Will. Bad enough that they could communicate privately in Polish; could they read each other’s thoughts now?
“Josh,” Will said, but he had to shake her shoulder before she could look at him.
“What?” she asked.
“The plan?” Whim said. “Remember? Stopping your grandfather?”
“Right.” This time she shook herself. “Right. Uh, I think we can use that beam to make a bridge to the basement stairs.”
Ten minutes later, they were all jammed into one clear area on the basement floor. Will helped Whim push partially burned wood and the remnants of furniture and the scorched water heater out of the way while Josh located the archway to the Dream. Because this archway—which Josh’s mother had died creating—had never been properly finished, no arch framed its edges and any bits of looking stone it had produced had long ago been swept away.
“Let’s do a final equipment check,” Josh said. They each had a roll of duct tape and a fanny pack stuffed with electronic signal transmitters.
Josh and Feodor had spent the day before building the transmitters. About the size of a sandwich cookie, each would emit a radio transmission when Josh pushed a separate activator. The idea was too far rooted in dream theory for Will to understand; all he knew was that once they had attached a transmitter to each tower—or as many as they could find—Josh would activate them and the entire network of towers would stop working without tearing the Veil. It had to do with signals—or waves, maybe?—and Dream particles and ionization.
Their first major hurdle turned out to have solved itself. When Josh shone reflected light onto the archway hanging in midair, the basketball court they had been so worried about locating appeared in front of them. But instead o
f the dozen basketball players who had been present when Josh first placed the towers, now several hundred people were crammed onto the court.
“This isn’t right,” Josh said. “This nightmare formed an hour and a half’s drive from here.”
“Maybe it shifted closer,” Deloise said.
“If it had shifted,” Josh pointed out, “it wouldn’t still exist at all. Somehow the towers are preventing this part of the Dream from changing.”
Feodor stepped closer to the archway. “I wonder if perhaps we are observing Kristiking’s dreamspace.”
“Which is what?” Will asked.
“Kristiking theorized that because the Dream does not occupy physical space, it is possible that all nightmares share space-time dimensions and occur simultaneously—”
“And I’m out,” Whim declared. “Josh, give it to me straight.”
“It means,” Josh said, “that since the towers are preventing this part of the Dream from shifting, everyone who should be having their own nightmares in this area is having a big shared nightmare on the basketball court. It’s not a good thing, but in this case it works in our favor, since we don’t have to wander around in the Dream looking for the spot where Bash and I placed the towers.”
“See how much simpler that was?” Whim asked Feodor.
Feodor eyed him dryly. “Kristiking would not think so.”
Something was different about Feodor. Will had noticed it in the temple, and he noticed it again now. Although the man seemed just as dangerous as the first time they’d met, he struck Will as slightly less outright crazy. The manic glee in his eyes had dimmed, and … he was almost more attentive to the people around him, more aware of them as real people.
One by one, they jumped through the Veil; Will knew they each went for their own reasons. Deloise, because she wouldn’t abandon her sister; Whim, because he wanted to kill Feodor at the earliest opportunity; Feodor, because this was the only way to extend his vacation; Mirren, because she was determined to save Haley; Josh, because this was her mess to clean; and Will, because he needed this to end. He needed all of it to end.
He just couldn’t let Josh build even more powerful devices. The cycle would never end. More powerful devices would create more powerful enemies, which would require more powerful weapons, and so on, and so on.… No one solved problems by escalating the behavior that had created them. At least, not in psychology.
They landed in the center of the basketball court, where at least a hundred nightmares were occurring simultaneously. The court was jammed with people like right after a big tournament, and many of them were shouting at one another, some were tussling on the ground, one group was building a human pyramid.
“Try to stay together!” Josh called over the din. She led them along the edge of the court until they reached a corner, where she crouched down beside what appeared to be an aerosol can on the ground. “This is one of the towers.”
“That?” Whim asked. “When you said towers, I thought you meant towers, not a can of hair spray.”
“We called them towers because they work like cell phone towers,” Josh told him. “Watch.”
She pulled a transmitter out of her fanny pack and duct-taped it to the side of the tower. “Done.”
“That’s it?” Deloise asked.
“That’s it.”
Although Feodor claimed their plan was a terrible one, Will actually thought it was sort of clever. Once they had a dozen or so of the towers fitted with them, Josh would press that activator and send a signal that would deactivate not only the towers that were fitted with transmitters, but all of the towers.
Assuming, of course, that Peregrine and Bash hadn’t increased the grid to include forty or more towers, in which case the signal would be too weak to destroy them all. And assuming Peregrine wasn’t wearing the devices and didn’t catch them installing the transmitters.
Will had been gung ho about the plan when they were back at the campsite. Now that they were in the Dream, he felt less certain. Especially because Josh knew the location of only the four towers that marked the corners of the basketball court, and the number of people around would make it difficult to find small cans.
As they crossed the basketball court, they discovered that the frozen area of the Dream extended into a formal garden. They began searching for more towers hidden beneath the ornamental shrubs and within flower beds. Unfortunately, the garden was as densely populated as the basketball court had been, and they struggled just to stay within sight of one another.
“I found one!” Deloise cried triumphantly.
We’ve been wandering around for at least twenty minutes, Will thought, and we’ve only found five towers, and four of them were the ones Josh placed.
Slowly, they made their way through the crowds. Will got jostled, elbowed, and even shoved, and more people stepped on his feet than he could count. The nightmares around him seemed to share a theme: interpersonal conflict. With the Dream unable to shift to accommodate the specifics of nightmares, everyone was just dreaming that they were in a mob full of strangers they didn’t like.
Will estimated they’d been in the Dream for an hour by the time they found a sixth tower. Over the commotion of the dreamers, Josh called everyone to her. They huddled beside a fountain with a statue of an angry old man vomiting water into the pool.
“This isn’t working,” Josh said.
“Maybe we should split up,” Deloise suggested. “We could cover more ground if we weren’t trying to stay together.”
“I’ll stay with Feodor,” Whim offered.
Will didn’t like the idea of splitting up. He wanted to be able to keep an eye on everyone, to warn them if Bash or Peregrine showed up.
But it was already too late for that.
The first thing that caught his attention was the quieting of the mob. Rising on his toes, he saw that an entire section of the garden had not only fallen quiet, but gone motionless. The silence and stillness were moving toward him with the speed of an ocean wave, and he had just opened his mouth to warn the others when Josh screamed, “Abort!”
By then, the inertia was already overcoming them. Will watched in slow motion as Josh thrust her hand out, her movement growing slower the farther out she reached, and he waited for the archway to burst forth from her palm, and waited … and waited …
He felt himself still. He didn’t so much go numb as terribly heavy, so heavy that he could no longer move, not even to breathe, and it was only by chance that his field of vision at that moment included Bash standing by the gazing pool.
“Look who I found,” he said.
And then Will knew that this had been a very poor plan indeed.
Twenty−seven
Bash looked crazy.
From where Josh stood frozen, her arm thrust uselessly forward, she could see Bash almost directly ahead of her. He stood with his hands on his hips, wearing a button-down and khakis so wrinkled that he must have slept in them. He’d torn one sleeve off to make room for the vambrace, and above the circlet his black hair stuck up in greasy clumps.
What worried Josh most, though, was the crazy look in his eyes. They were bloodshot and overly wide, and they moved constantly, as if they were bouncing around in his head. Against Bash’s pallor, his wet, red lips were parted as if with wonder.
Josh recalled Feodor saying that the devices would eventually kill the wearer. From the look of him, Bash had been wearing those devices since the moment he’d stolen them almost a week before.
“Josh,” he said with a little giggle, and he stepped closer. He sniffed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and Josh saw red smears on his skin. Now that he was only two feet away, she noticed blood crusted around the edges of the vambrace. “Wow, you brought the whole gang.”
No one answered. They were all as frozen as Josh was, Will with his mouth half-open, Whim scratching the back of his neck, Deloise’s mouth a perfect O.
Bash walked over to Whim and raised his fists.
“She never loved you, you tool.” He took a few quick steps on the balls of his feet before jabbing Whim in the face. Whim didn’t move, didn’t even rock back like a dummy would have. Bash might as well have been punching a marble statue.
“Ow!” he cried, and rubbed his knuckles. “Stupid, stupid.”
As he flexed his fingers, he caught sight of Feodor, who had flung his arm protectively in front of Mirren. “Who is this?” Bash pondered. “A friend, or just a dreamer who wandered by? Tell me your name.”
“Feodor Kajażkołski,” Feodor said, only his mouth moving.
“What?” Bash cried. He released a hysterical laugh, high-pitched and wavering. “He’s dead. Tell me your real name.”
“Feodorik Jambulira Bronisławorin Kajażkołskiosci,” Feodor repeated.
Bash stepped closer. “You do look just like him.” He giggled, blinking his bloodshot eyes. “I guess I’ll take you to Peregrine and let him sort it out.”
Then he lifted his metal-clad arm and wafted his fingers through the air. An archway appeared a few feet before him, complete with a gray brick frame. Josh felt herself rise from the ground and shoot through the archway. As soon as she passed through the Veil, her paralysis lifted, and she stumbled out of midair and into …
A very fancy living room.
Bash deposited the rest of her party around her, and their feet had hardly touched the marble floor before he was walking out of the room.
“Welcome home, Princess,” he called over his shoulder with another quivering giggle.
“Where is my family?” Mirren asked.
He didn’t answer, and as soon as he was out of sight, Josh turned to Mirren. “Where are we?”
Mirren swallowed. “This is the formal living room in my house.”
“Why would he bring us to the Hidden Kingdom?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know. He shouldn’t even know this universe exists.”
Before Josh could ask another question, Will grabbed her shoulder and spun her to face him. “Why didn’t you open an archway?” he demanded.
She couldn’t believe he was asking her such a stupid question, and her palms grew hot with anger. Shoving his hand off of her, she said, “Because I was frozen just like you were! This is why I told you this plan sucked. I warned you that this exact thing could happen!”