“I know that this makes no sense,” Plum said, “but I think what I saw was real. I think it happened in the past, and somehow I was able to see it.”
“Is that possible?” Gwendle plucked a tiny dragon insect from her hair. It sailed dizzily skyward on gossamer wings. “Nothing that happens in our dreams has ever been real before.”
“This felt real,” Plum said. “It felt like Artem—” She cut herself off. She didn’t want to say anything out loud until she was sure she’d sorted it out in her head. When she spoke again, she chose her words carefully, for this was a very strange situation. “I think Artem knows something, and that’s why he disappeared. I think he’s trying to warn us.”
“Why doesn’t he come out and tell us himself?” Vien asked.
“Maybe he can’t,” Plum said.
“He’s only spoken to you,” Vien went on, thinking aloud. “Maybe he’s reaching out to all of us, but you’re the only one strong enough to get the message.”
Gwendle nodded in agreement, her eyes wide. “He’s right. You’re the only one who’s been able to speak to Artem since he disappeared.”
“But we all saw that burning house,” Plum said.
“You dreamed us there,” Vien said. “That monster who swallowed us was after you. It only took us along because you were holding on to us.”
“If that’s true,” Plum said, “then we need to get Melinda to trust us. When she was in her trance, she said the same thing that he did. And the way she acted today on the mountain in the training arena—she definitely knows something, even if she doesn’t know what it means.”
The grass shifted and sighed, and Plum realized it was not grass at all, but rather the grasslike scales of some gigantic creature Gwendle had dreamed.
Overhead, the sky filled with birds. Dozens of them, in a rainbow of colors.
“Look.” Plum shielded her eyes and tilted her head skyward. Birds were Artem’s trademark. “He’s nearby. He’s dreaming.”
The three of them jumped to their feet. The birds began flying south, some of them straggling, flying in flourishing swirls and loops to amuse themselves. Definitely Artem’s birds.
As they ran to keep up with the birds, the grasslike creature growled and stirred. It was pulling them in one direction while the birds went another. Plum ran faster and faster, and when she realized she was making progress despite the creature’s efforts, she laughed in triumph.
She looked over her shoulder, and then she realized that Vien and Gwendle had fallen so far behind that she could no longer see them.
Above her, the sky turned gray and then rapidly black. Flashes of hot white lightning traced the outlines of churning clouds.
A voice was echoing through the sudden winds, calling her name.
“Artem?” She ran forward and then back, trying to follow the voice as it echoed all around her.
“Plum!” Artem cried. “You have to get out. They’re coming for you. They’re coming for all of us.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was desperate. She was so tired. So tired of being afraid and sad and worried. So tired of dreams that made no sense. So tired of not understanding what was happening, or knowing whom to trust. “Artem!”
This was still a dream. She knew it. But it felt very real. Her grief felt real, and she didn’t even know what it was that she was grieving.
The giant animal below her feet twisted and bucked, and she was thrown into darkness.
A hand grabbed her wrist before she could fall, yanking her so hard that her arm felt as though it might break.
“Hold on!” It was Artem. She looked up and saw him, on the edge of the creature’s back, keeping her from dropping down into that endless darkness. “Try to give me your other hand.”
She could barely hear him over the howling wind. Though she knew that this was a dream, Plum felt a very real sense of dread over what would happen to her if she slipped out of Artem’s grasp. She remembered falling down the monster’s throat when it had swallowed her, and thinking that she would be trapped in that bottomless nothing forever.
Plum focused on her core strength, remembering everything she’d been taught in the training arena. She managed to get one foot on the side of the monster, then the other. Then, with the last of her strength she raised her other arm to Artem’s outstretched fingers.
His arms were shaking from the strain—another sign that this was no ordinary dream. In an ordinary dream, both of them would possess strength beyond what they could accomplish when they were awake.
But he didn’t let go. He gritted his teeth and pulled, and Plum worked her feet against the side of the monster, giving herself leverage.
As she got closer to the surface, she clawed at the ground, and Artem grabbed her by the back of the collar, pulling her the rest of the way.
She landed on the ground beside him, and they both lay there for a few seconds, side by side, breathing hard as the adrenaline surged and then began to die down.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“What is this place?” Plum said. “Why can’t we control anything?”
“I don’t know,” Artem said. “I’ve been calling for all of you, and I can never find you. I walk around and walk around, and can never wake up or find a way out. I think I’ve been stuck here for years.”
“You’ve been gone for days.” Plum turned onto her side so that she was facing him. She studied his face, his tired eyes, his brown curls, his gaunt cheeks. He was not a ghost, she knew. “Have you been asleep this whole time?”
“I think so,” Artem said. “Every time it seems like I might have woken up, something strange happens, and I realize I’m still dreaming.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Plum sat up.
He looked like he might cry. “I don’t know. It’s all foggy.”
Plum knew that there was a lot for them to figure out, but all she saw in that moment was Artem. Sweet, ever-nervous Artem, who had been alone in this place for far too long.
“I’ve missed you,” Plum said, pulling him into a hug. Artem clung to her, and she petted his hair. “I’ll get you out,” she said. “I promise. I won’t leave you here alone.”
Artem was the first to let go. He held her shoulders. “You can’t stay here forever,” he said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this place, it’s that the only way out must be in the waking world somewhere. You have to go back. Find where I’m sleeping and wake me up.”
“You can’t be outside,” Plum reasoned. “You’d have frozen to death by now. But if you’re at Brassmere, where could you be?”
“I remember going to sleep in my own bed,” Artem said. “But that’s it. Nothing weird.”
Plum thought back to the morning Artem disappeared, when Dr. Abarrane and Nurse Penny brought her to that strange room and hooked an IV to her arm. She thought about falling down the monster’s throat, when she knew it was time to wake up but her body wouldn’t let her. How the dream of the cobblestoned city and the couple crying in the window only came to her because she’d been forced to stay asleep and dreaming.
“I think I know what’s happening.” She stood, and Artem followed after her, confused. “You’re being kept asleep by Dr. Abarrane. There’s something he wants with your dreams. All those strange things you’ve been seeing—he must want you to learn something.”
“But where?” Artem asked.
“I saw a place, in my dream,” Plum said. “With all white walls and a funny smell to it. There were nurses giving medicine to a boy there.” Plum didn’t burden Artem with the knowledge that the boy in her dream had died. “I bet you’re there.”
Artem wrinkled his nose, as though he could suddenly smell it, too. “That doesn’t sound like Brassmere.”
“No,” Plum agreed.
“But if it’s not at Brassmere …” Artem hesitated. “Where is it?”
CHAPTER 13
Plum awoke without any warning. She opened her eyes and found hers
elf back in her dormitory.
It was still dark out. The clock on the wall said it was after three in the morning.
She took a moment to collect her thoughts. Artem had just been with her, sharing their dream, and now, with Gwendle breathing evenly across the room, Plum felt terribly alone.
She was afraid, she realized. It was such an unusual thing that it took her a moment to admit that’s how she felt. She was afraid, but she also knew what she had to do.
Quietly, she got out of bed and made her way to the closet. Gwendle didn’t stir, even as the door creaked noisily on its hinges. Plum didn’t know what Gwendle was dreaming, but she hoped it was something nice. She hoped that Gwendle and Vien weren’t too worried about her.
She retrieved her wool coat from its hanger and buttoned it all the way to the chin. Then she opened the window and climbed outside. A cold breeze blew into the room. Gwendle shivered in her sleep and pulled the blanket tighter around herself.
Plum stayed still, frozen with one leg out the window, not daring to move until she was sure Gwendle was still asleep. Plum knew that she had to do this alone. She was the only one who had dreamed of Artem, and of the strange building with the white walls. She was the only one meant to find him.
Brassmere’s campus was an entirely different place at night. The street lamps flickered as the wind blew. All the windows were dark and sleeping. The quiet was eerie. Even so, Plum kept thinking that she heard voices in the darkness, footsteps coming after her.
If Dr. Abarrane found her out here, what would he do? Force her into another sleep in which she dreamed and dreamed forever with no way out?
She shivered, and not from the cold. She moved faster, breaking into a run. She didn’t stop until she had reached the iron gate. The bars were too narrow for her to squeeze through, so she began to climb. She braced one foot on either bar and shinnied her way to the top. It was very high, and the metal felt like ice even through her gloves.
Halfway up the gate, her adrenaline surged. Her heart pounded in her ears. It wasn’t the treachery of the climb—she knew she could make it, and she had done far more rigorous climbs in the training arena. It was the realization that she was about to do what no student at Brassmere had ever accomplished.
She was going to leave.
Her hands were shaking. Strange, she thought. Her lungs ached with each cold breath she drew in. Leaving Brassmere. She was leaving Brassmere.
She reached the top of the gate and drew one leg over to the other side.
She paused. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to happen. Some great explosion, perhaps, or for the world to end. In class she had been taught that the world outside Brassmere was not safe for exceptional people like herself. There were too many people who would try to trick her or cause her harm. There were liars and crooks and murderers. There were unspeakable things that happened every day, especially to children who were too trusting.
But all Plum saw were trees. Trees that were lush and thick and rustling on the cold breeze. Far in the distance, the twin gargoyles slept at either side of the entrance gate, a perfect match for the gold embroidered gargoyles on either sleeve of her coat. Plum had gone out of her way to avoid them; she’d heard rumors that they ate anyone who entered or left without their permission, and she most certainly did not have their permission.
Tentatively, she swung her other leg over the gate and began to descend. Climbing down the fence took more caution than going up, and so she moved slower. It didn’t take much effort and she wasn’t exerting herself, and still, her heart was racing as though she were running up a mountain full speed.
One boot touched the ground and then the other, and just like that, she was outside Brassmere. Here she paused, waiting for some great catastrophe to befall her. She had never been frightened to leave Brassmere—not exactly. It was more so that the idea of leaving Brassmere, truly leaving it, had not crossed her mind any more than flying across the clouds like a bird had crossed her mind. It was not allowed, nor had it seemed possible.
But now Plum suddenly felt as though anything was possible. It was exhilarating and strange, and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
She didn’t feel that she had truly left Brassmere. Not yet. The school was still in sight. But the air smelled different. Burnt and crisp and even sweet. A smile spread across her mouth.
And then, she did what she had been instructed all her life never to do, something she had once believed would mean the end of the world:
She ran away.
CHAPTER 14
There was a road on the other side of the gate, and Plum ran alongside it at a distance for a while. There were no lights out here, and the trees obscured the moonlight, making everything dim.
Plum thought about Artem, who was terrified of the dark. She thought of him being carried along this road, deep asleep, an IV trailing from his arm.
It made her angry. She realized that now for the first time. Gentle, warm, kindhearted Artem who would never do a thing to harm anyone did not deserve to be ripped away from the only home he’d ever known.
She was angry with Dr. Abarrane especially, for being so much like a parent and then betraying them.
And she was confused. Why Artem? He was not the fastest, not the strongest, and by far not the bravest student at Brassmere. What was it about him that Dr. Abarrane needed?
Plum was still considering this when she came to a fork in the road. There were no signs, but from here, she could faintly hear the sound of something happening in the distance. She held her breath to listen.
It sounded like cars, she thought. The only cars she had ever seen or heard had been the ones driven by the pinks. The tires crunching over the gravel, the hum of the engine, and the rushing sound as they drove off, like a hard wind.
That sound was definitely cars. Maybe even hundreds of them. There must have been a road to the left, then. A road meant people. It wasn’t likely that Artem had gone somewhere with other people, Plum thought.
She took the path that forked to the right, where there were no sounds at all. In dreams, Artem was always seeking out these sorts of places: quiet and calm, with nothing growling or rustling in the grass. Plum was rather the opposite. If she knew there was a monster, she couldn’t help but charge forward and conquer it. When she woke from those dreams, she always felt as though she had done something useful. The monsters always felt real somehow, even though they couldn’t possibly be. Even though the world she woke up to had always been calm.
Perhaps it had been too calm, she thought now, as she moved ahead. Perhaps Artem’s disappearance was not the only strange thing to have ever happened at Brassmere, but Dr. Abarrane had managed to hide it from her. She thought of how she spent her days: racing the other students on the track, or with her head bowed over her books as she studied, pen in hand. She was always focused. Always studious. But had that served to distract her from what was going on around her?
Artem did not obsess over things like running or studying; perhaps his anxiety came from his lack of distraction. He saw things as they really were. He was always watching.
What had he seen that Dr. Abarrane hadn’t wanted him to?
A horrible fear lanced through her. The idea that he was in danger and that she should have known something was amiss long before it came to this.
Over and over again she reminded herself that she was awake. That this was real. When she looked over her shoulder, she couldn’t see Brassmere. Its gargoyles had not eaten her when she made her escape.
It felt too easy, she thought. Too possible that all she had to do to leave the only home she’d ever known was climb an iron gate.
There were no clocks out here in the forest beyond the gate. There was no sense of time. The trees obscured the stars. To remind herself that she was awake, Plum pressed her hand against the trees she passed. In dreams, the trees often bristled at her touch, or the bark produced a weapon, or the leaves were filled with magical flying little things.<
br />
Nothing extraordinary happened. Plum walked on.
And then, all at once, there was light in the form of windows on a building. It was the tallest building Plum had ever seen. She had to crane her neck to see the top of it.
You’re not dreaming. To remind herself, she counted to ten in her head. Counting to ten was something she could only do when she was awake. Numbers and letters always eluded her in dreams.
She stepped closer, cautiously. The road came to an end at a giant concrete square before the building. It was unusual concrete, with little white lines painted onto it in the shape of rectangles with a missing side.
A map of some sort, perhaps. But the lines didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and they stopped well before the door.
The door was wide, glass, and illuminated by the light within the building.
Plum didn’t know what awaited her in this building, but she knew two things in that moment: Artem was inside, and she couldn’t use the door. If Artem was here, she suspected that Dr. Abarrane was here as well, and that he would put her in that awful sleep again, from which she could not wake up.
No. There had to be another way in.
Keeping in the darkness of the trees, Plum circled the building and studied it. The first floor of the building was well lit. Then, remaining floors were all dark, except for the fourth floor, whose windows were glowing.
There.
She examined the trees. One of them ran alongside the building. Its branches reached toward one of the windows on the fourth floor, but they were thin, quaking on the breeze. Plum wasn’t sure if they would hold her weight, but there was only one way to find out, and anyway she had no better options.
Halfway up the tree, she began to regret not waking Vien. Plum had strength and courage, but Vien always came up with a plan. He could look at anything as a puzzle and then figure out how to solve it.
But Vien was not here. He was in bed and dreaming of dangerous things that would all be gone by morning. Plum would have to figure this one out herself.
When she reached the fourth floor of the building, the branches that led to the window were even thinner up close. She held on to the tree’s trunk, watching as the branches swayed back and forth like slender blades of grass.
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