Dreamfire (23 page)

Will peered at the pendant, then smiled. “That's nice.”

Josh tucked the necklace back under her shirt. “Supposedly, someday the True Dream Walker will return and fix whatever causes the universes to slide out of balance. I don't know quite how he'll do that, but a lot of people think that our job will basically end when he returns.”

“So, if Gloves is the True Dream Walker, he was trying to kill us because the World doesn't need us anymore?”

Josh heard surprising fervor in her own voice when she said, “
That thing
was not the True Dream Walker. I don't know what he was, but he wasn't the Dream Walker.”

Will backed off. “You'd know better than I would.”

“I don't know who those people were,” she said. “I don't know why they can do what they do. But I don't think their ability is natural. Snitch mentioned a name: Feodor.”

“You recognize it?” Will asked.

“I've never heard it before. I'm not even sure how to spell it. But there's a dream-walker database we could run the name Feodor through, at least to see if anything pops up.”

Will nodded. “Let's do it.”

They met up in the office after Will made a trip back to the kitchen for Oreos. “This place is starting to look like your bedroom,” Will noted, sitting down on the messy, unmade futon.

“Kerstel brought down a bunch of my clothes. But I might have to send her up for some more, since I'm about to run out.”

And since my knee is back to being nearly broken after yesterday,
Josh added in her head.
I don't think I'll be moving back upstairs for quite a while.

“I can get you some stuff,” Will said.

Right, like she was going to ask him to fetch her clean panties and a bra. Josh made a noncommittal sound and logged onto the website for Dashiel Winters Consulting.

The website was a front for another very exclusive, very encrypted website for dream walkers. Josh typed her username and password, and then submitted a retinal scan.

The database searched official historical documents, declassified monarchy documents, the diaries of dead dream walkers that had been typed up (a project only recently begun), and a number of academic databases. After consulting the Internet on how to spell Feodor, twenty-six entries—and fourteen different spellings of six variations—popped up. Next to the title of each entry was a brief description, and Josh scrolled through them, removing the obvious misses from her list.

“Here's one,” she said. She pointed to an entry labeled
Feodorik Jambulira Bronis
ł
aworin Kaja
ż
ko
ł
skiocsi.

A grainy photograph of a small, intense man appeared beneath the biography. Will squinted at the photo as if he thought he was missing something. Josh felt the same way.

“What do the other files say about him?”

Josh read off the titles. “Awarded the Shotts Fellowship in 1949. Won the Hume Award for Dream Theory in 1952. Received the Star of Ha'azelle in 1955. These are like, the biggest awards a dream theorist can get. These are a huge deal. The Star of Ha'azelle was a medal that the queen gave out for special service to the Crown. Here's a list of stuff he published.”

“That's a long list,” Will noted.

“No kidding—oh my god! I've read
War and Rumors of War: A Compendium of Medieval Prophesies
! Well, I read part of it. It's, like, five hundred pages long, and it's really boring. But I didn't realize this guy wrote it.” She read down the list of publications again, more carefully this time, wondering what other titles she might recognize if she were better read in dream theory. Although she couldn't say, what she did notice was that there wasn't an area of dream work to which Feodor hadn't contributed. From
Implications of Planck's Law on Archway Creation
to
The Dream and Modern Theories of Evolution
to
Translations of Etruscan Dream Walking Records,
he appeared to have worked in every academic field.

But he returned to one topic over and over. “He wrote a lot about dream-walker ethics,” Josh said.

Will pointed to an article title, “Why Staging Will Destroy Us.” “Sounds like he agreed with the monarchy on staging.”

“Look, there's no death date. It just says he was ‘exiled by order of the monarchy.' I don't even know what that means. Outside of the monarchy's lands? There are dream walkers all over the world. So where did they exile him to, the moon?”

“Why would Snitch have mentioned him?”

Dustine walked down the hall, past the office door. “Grandma!” Josh called, and the old woman stopped.

“Yes, my dear, demanding child?”

“Do you know anything about a Polish dream walker named Feodor, uh,
ka-jazz-kol-skee
?”

“Kaja
ż
ko
ł
ski,” Dustine corrected. She pronounced it
ka-yazh-kow-skee
. “What about him?”

“His database bio says he was exiled. What does that mean?”

Dustine turned her walker, entered the office, and closed the door behind her. Will jumped up to offer her his seat, but she ignored it. “What do you want to know about him for, Joshlyn?”

Josh was not a good liar. She knew this, and she also knew that, even had she been an excellent liar, Dustine would have been the last person she could have fooled.

“I think he's related to the men in the trench coats. One of them said his name.”

Dustine sucked in such a deep, sharp breath, arching her back as she did so, that Josh was afraid she was having a heart attack.

“Grandma!” Josh cried, springing to the old woman's side, but Dustine ignored her concern.

With flushed cheeks and hands clenched around her pine walker, she said, “Tell me what you know.”

“Are you all right?” Josh demanded.

“Tell me!” Dustine insisted. “
Right now!
”

Josh glanced at Will, who looked petrified.

With some reluctance and lingering concern for her grandmother's well-being, Josh related what had happened the day before. She expected Dustine to be angry, but she didn't expect Dustine to say, “Go put on your shoes,” and then pick up the library phone extension and dial from memory.

Josh and Will looked at each other again. “Wait a sec—what?” Josh asked.

“We're going to see Ben,” Dustine said. Then, into the phone, she said, “It's me. I'm bringing Josh and Will over. It's about Feodor.”

 

Nineteen

An hour later,
Josh and Will were seated on a cat-hair-coated couch in a snug, extremely cluttered living room. They were each drinking chocolate milk, which Young Ben seemed to think was all the rage among young people. Ben was sitting in a recliner that retained a perfect imprint of his body when he got out of it. Dustine sat in another chair drinking rooibos tea from a mug that read
PLUTO IS TOO A PLANET!

The ride to Young Ben's house had been nearly silent. Will had known from the way Josh pursed her lips the whole time that her grandmother's behavior was making her nervous. They had obviously stumbled upon something big. Either that, or they were both about to learn firsthand how someone got exiled from dream walking.

The doorbell rang, and Young Ben got up to answer it. A gray Persian climbed into Will's lap and looked at him expectantly. He gave in and petted her. Will had met Young Ben once before; the seer had come over to the house to welcome Will to the dream-walker community. After being somewhat intimidated by both Dustine and Davita, Will had been relieved to meet the easygoing old man.

Young Ben returned with Davita Bach, who wore a black suit with white piping. Her red hair was twisted off her neck with a long, pearl-ended stick. She kissed Dustine's cheek and said hello to Will and Josh, and then she looked meaningfully at the couch with its layer of cat hair, and Young Ben said, “I'll get a towel.”

When Davita was seated on a large, clean towel, she said lightly, “So, Josh, I hear you and Will ran into something strange in-Dream yesterday.”

She failed to point out that they weren't supposed to have been in-Dream, which made Will anxious. Adults only ignored what you had done wrong if something else was even worse.

He noticed, also, that she addressed herself exclusively to Josh.

Josh told Davita what had happened the day before, leaving out most of the fighting and that fact that Will had gone in after her against orders. The elders and Davita exchanged covert glances as Josh spoke. Will felt the tension in the room rise with a pressure like humidity.

“All right then,” Davita said, as if coming to some decision. “We're going to tell you about Feodor, because if we don't I assume you'll keep digging, and there's a lot of wrong information about him floating around out there. Especially on the
Internet
.” Davita gave Josh a hard stare that left Will assuming she was referring to Whim's blog.

“If you want to understand Feodor, you have to understand the atrocities Feodor'd lived through,” Young Ben began. “He was born in Poland, and he was thirteen when World War II began. The Germans considered the Poles
untermensch,
subhuman, and planned to use them as slave labor until they died out. They killed Feodor's entire family, his entire community, and most of Poland's dream walkers.”

“AB-Aktion,” Dustine said in a grim tone.

“That's right, that's what they called it. Hitler wanted to destroy Poland's identity, so he killed politicians, teachers, professors, doctors, clergy, even athletes. Most of the dream walkers were well educated and had good jobs, so a lot of them ended up in camps, or they got worked to death on the railroads. Feodor managed to survive, even fought for the resistance in the Battle of Warsaw. After the war, Poland fell to the Communists, and Feodor immigrated to England and then to the US under the royal family's protection. He was a brilliant young man. He became a dream theorist and historian, and his interpretation of medieval prophecy is still the best around. But as time passed, I guess the memories started to get to him.”

“His theories grew more and more bizarre,” Davita explained. “He became fixated on the prophecies concerning the return of the True Dream Walker.”

The True Dream Walker again,
Will thought.
For a legend, people are really obsessed with this guy.

“Finally, Feodor published a theory that if people used staging to deliberately destabilize the Dream to the point that it collapsed into the World on a large scale, then the True Dream Walker would be forced to appear and save us.”

“Ah…” Josh said.

“Something about this theory seems off,” Will suggested.

“Even people who were pro-staging,” Dustine told Josh, “thought Feodor's idea was insane. But it played into a rumor people had been whispering for years that before Feodor's mother died, she had told him that his scroll said he would Temper the True Dream Walker.”

Will didn't know what it meant to “Temper” someone, but the conversation was moving along without him.

“No one knows if the rumor was true,” Dustine added. “The scroll was destroyed in the war, and Feodor's mother was killed.”

“But when he wrote that article, about deliberately destabilizing the Dream,” Ben said, “that was more or less the last straw. His employer fired him. The monarchy cut ties with him. His woman left him.”

“What did he do?” Will asked.

“He disappeared,” Davita said. “Nobody heard from him for years. Then, a little town in Iowa called Maplefax experienced a collapse of the Dream into the World.”

“Wait a sec—Maplefax?” Josh asked. “
The
Maplefax?”

“Yes,
that
Maplefax. Feodor went there and started staging terrible dreams for the entire town. He may have murdered people in-Dream; we don't know. Maplefax was a very small, isolated town—actually an ideal prospect for staging. Except that when the Dream destabilized and collapsed into the World, the True Dream Walker didn't show up to save everyone.”

Will vaguely remembered Josh mentioning Maplefax to him while they drove to the dream-walker headquarters a few weeks before. “You mean the Veil between the World and the Dream ripped?” he asked, jumping in before the conversation moved on.

“Precisely,” Dustine said. “And the nightmares came marching out, two by two. At least forty people wandered into the Dream and were never seen again. Another two dozen were killed on this side, either by nightmares or by each other. Some others went mad from Veil dust. The FBI quarantined the entire town, which made it all the harder for us to get in there and repair the rip. The government saw some things we'd have preferred they'd not seen, but it wasn't the first time.”

The room fell to silence. Will realized that the Persian in his lap was drinking the chocolate milk from his glass, and he gently nudged the cat off the couch. He set the milk on the coffee table.

“But why exile Feodor?” Josh asked. “Why not put him in jail?”

“He breathed too much Veil dust,” Davita said, and Will thought she answered just an instant too quickly. “He was insane before, but after Maplefax he went stark raving mad. And he was dangerous—even when he slept.”

Josh and Will glanced at each other.

“Ah,” Will said, “how does that work?”

“He started lucid dreaming,” Young Ben explained. “He'd realize he was dreaming and try to stage more nightmares. It was amazing how much havoc one man could wreak in the course of a few hours. That was when the monarchy realized they had to keep him out of the Dream entirely.”

“But he had to sleep sometime,” Josh said.