Dreamfire (10 page)

Josh explained what each circle represented. Will, using a touch suitable for stroking a newborn baby's face, ran his fingertips reverently over the triangle where all three circles overlapped and said, “What's this black part?”

“Nothing. The diagram sort of fails here, because there is no place where all three worlds overlap.” In examining the triangle, however, Josh realized that the fabric wasn't black but the darkest peacock green, and she understood what the quilt maker had been trying to show her. “I take that back—there are myths that a place where all three worlds overlap used to exist, and dream theorists think it could possibly exist, but no one's proven it.”

She shook her head, amazed that the person who had made the quilt had thought to include a theoretical universe, and amazed by the care and complexity that had gone into the quilt's creation. Her grandmother had been right; the quilt was a beautiful teaching tool. Why hadn't Dustine ever showed it to Josh before? As far as Josh knew, none of the other dream walkers who had been trained in this house had seen it either.

And why would Dustine suddenly share it now?

Setting the thought aside, Josh pulled a blank sheet of paper out of her backpack and drew a Venn diagram of the three universes, explaining as she went. “We can cross from one universe to another if we know how. Sometimes the boundaries are broken, sometimes the worlds spill into each other. Some of the boundaries are broken on purpose when we build archways.” Between the World and the Dream, she drew arrows pointing both ways, but arrows only pointed into Death, never out of it. Will asked about them.

“You can only go into Death. You can't come back out.”

“So you couldn't go into Death and bring someone back?”

“You can't…” She started and had to stop and swallow. Her chest began to ache. “You can't cross into Death without dying. Nobody comes back.”

He doesn't know, Josh,
she told herself
. Let it go—he doesn't know anything.

Will simply nodded, and Josh knew for certain then that his question had been innocent, but that wound was already open, that Ian wound right in the center of her chest that bled with every heartbeat.

Her fingers walked across the quilt, tracing the passage from the World to Death.

Nobody comes back.

Josh reached for the quilt and began folding it, forcing the memories down. So her chest hurt. So what?

“I asked around about you at school today,” Will said, and Josh's head shot up.

“You—?”

“Yeah. I'd heard about that house fire out in Charle last summer, with the fireworks, but I didn't connect you to it until today. Somebody told me that the guy who died was your boyfriend. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry, and I know that you're probably still dealing with it, and if, you know, you ever want to talk or anything, I'm a pretty good listener.”

His expression was absolutely sincere, even when Josh blurted out, “I don't want to talk about it.”

“I'm not trying to pressure you to,” Will assured her. “Just, in the future, if you ever need to—”

“No,” Josh said, panicking. “
No
. I thought you said you were a good listener.”

Will raised his hands up like he was being held at gunpoint. “Okay. I'm sorry.”

Josh couldn't think clearly. She knew she had just been bitchy but she didn't know how to backtrack without weakening what she felt was a desperately important message:
I don't want to talk about Ian—not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

“It's all right,” she said. She lifted her palms from the quilt and then allowed her fingertips to rest there again. “I think that's enough for today. Kerstel will give you a ride home.”

She turned and headed for the basement before she had to watch Will's face fall.

Through a Veil Darkly

More weird news. Not only are people going into comas for no reason at all while they sleep, now people are worried about a new pair of villains roaming the Dream. One's really tall and sort of thin and the other's wider and shorter, but they both wear giant dark green trench coats and carry silver canisters on their backs. Some people say they're wearing gas masks, but others say they use the masks to suffocate dreamers. (“Just like the facehugger in
Alien
!” one girl said.)

If you've seen them, send me an e-mail about it with the subject “TCM.” (That's Trench-Coat Men, in case you haven't had your coffee yet today.) Maybe we can figure out what book or movie our new friends are from.

 

Eight

The first afternoon
Will spent at Josh's house, he figured the chances that he'd still be working with her a month later were around 2 percent.

Four days later, he'd increased the chances to 25 percent.

Josh didn't like the emotional stuff. She didn't want to talk about her feelings or her family or her past—definitely not her past. She didn't want to know why Will lived with the county (Mom drank, Dad just didn't care) or if he was single (he'd broken up with his last girlfriend because she was obsessed with cross-country) or what he was into (he lived and breathed self-help books).

What Josh did like was dream walking and anything to do with it. When she talked about her work, she spoke easily. She explained concepts clearly. She was patient. She even gave examples from her own experience, which were as close to sharing personal stories as she ever came.

And she was
good
. From the moment she began instructing him, Will didn't doubt that she knew what she was talking about. Not just the ass-kicking stuff—although he was pretty sure she could name every bone and muscle in the body and apparently she was a black belt in three different forms of martial arts—but how to make decisions while in the Dream. She knew why she did what she did.

“There are only three ways to deal with a nightmare,” she told him, the day after she showed him the quilt. “One: Resolve it. Two: Convince the dreamer that they're dreaming. Three: Bail.”

“Bail?” Will had repeated. He was sitting on a trunk in the basement where the training equipment was stored. Josh was pacing in front of a dry-erase board that he and Josh had purchased and hung on the wall right after school.

“If the odds are stacked against you, get out of there. A certain amount of risk is inevitable, but don't take stupid chances and don't stick around if you can't resolve things. Remember Burkov's Tenet:
A dream walker's life is worth as many resolved dreams as seven to the seventh power.
”

“What does that actually mean?” Will asked.

“It means don't get killed.”

She knew a seemingly inexhaustible store of sayings, all attributed to famous dream walkers of the glorious past. Will had been relieved to learn that Deloise and Winsor found this as irritating as he did.

“We work in quantity,” Josh added.

“Back up,” Will said. “Quantity?”

“Right, sorry, I jumped ahead there.” She ran a hand through her hair. She had very little ego about the work she did or how she did it, which fascinated Will. “Where's my trimidion?”

She went to a wicker basket that held an assortment of odds and ends, and returned with a small pyramid made of bars like golden toothpicks in one hand, and a little round base with another, longer gold toothpick coming out of it in the other. After setting these on the trunk next to Will, she pulled the diagram of the three universes out of the piles of notes they were generating.

She started to speak and then paused, and the pause turned into a stilted question. “Are you religious?”

Since Josh didn't like to get personal, the question surprised Will. He did his best to answer it honestly. “I was raised Catholic, but I haven't been to church since I was like eight.”

“But you probably believe in souls, right?”

He shrugged. “I guess I do believe people are more than just flesh and blood.”

“All right. So when people fall asleep in the World, some part of them travels from the World to the Dream. You can think of it as a soul or a spirit or consciousness or whatever you want, just realize that it's people leaving the World and entering the Dream.”

She pointed to the arrow on the diagram that showed this. Will felt himself frown without meaning to. He hadn't realized he'd still been thinking of dreams as something that took place inside people's heads; that was what all those psychology books he'd read told him, after all. That was what
science
told him.

“So at any given time, there are about half a billion people on the planet dreaming,” Josh said. “The trimidion is basically a scale with three sides instead of two. Each corner represents one of the universes. They measure emotional turmoil, and we need to keep them roughly in balance. Now, the World is much more stable than the Dream. It destabilizes over decades, not hours like the Dream. Death always remains in perfect balance.”

“So wouldn't the Dream throw everything completely out of whack, since it's full of nightmares?”

“Absolutely. Nobody's been able to measure how many dreams are actually nightmares, but some psychologists think it might be as many as three-quarters. Dream theorists think it's much lower, closer to one-quarter. Regardless, that's a lot of emotional turmoil to mess with the balance.”

Her whole job,
Will reflected, as Josh continued talking,
is about keeping emotions from spilling over. That's got to mess her up.

It explained a lot.

“Is that why you only try to resolve nightmares? Because they're the only ones that mess up the balance?”

“Um, yeah. Basically. Happy dreams can have the opposite effect and stabilize the Dream. Happy dreams do our job for us. But there's a lot of controversy over what sorts of dreams we should interfere with, if we should just try to end out-and-out nightmares or if we should get involved in any old unhappy dream. You should talk to Winsor if you're interested in that. She likes to resolve humiliation dreams. You know—you show up for class late, without your homework or your pants?”

Will nodded. That told him a
lot
about Winsor.

“But the long and the short of it is that we just don't have the manpower to deal with all the nightmares in the world, let alone go after embarrassment dreams and forgotten-homework dreams and running-late dreams.”

“Why not recruit more people?”

“We can, but at some point we're going to have trouble maintaining secrecy.”

This was something Will had been curious about. “Yeah, why the secrecy? Why not just come out and tell the World what you're doing? I mean, you're helping people. I know it would be crazy for a while, but in the long run everybody would probably be better off.”

Josh thought for a minute. She ran her hand through her short hair, which was something Will had noticed she did when she was thinking. “This is complicated,” she said. “We can't come out to the World because we have to protect the Dream from people who would want to manipulate it and use it for their own ends.”

Whoa,
Will thought.

“But that's a different conversation,” Josh said before picking up where she'd left off. “Nightmares cause emotional turmoil in the Dream, which throws it out of balance with the World and Death. We monitor the balance between universes with this little thingy, which we call the trimidion.”

She assembled the golden thingy. The pyramid balanced on a stand that stuck straight out of a flat base. Looking closely, Will made out tiny markings on the corners: an empty circle, a solid circle, and a spiral.

“What are those?” he asked.

“Labels, basically. The empty circle is the World. The solid circle is Death. The spiral is the Dream. When one of the universes is out of balance, that corner of the pyramid will hang closer to the stand.”

The pyramid was, in fact, tilted so that the Dream's corner hung lower than the other two. “That's wild,” Will said. “This thing definitively doesn't work on gravity.”

“Um, no, it doesn't. Each dream walker has one. It tells us how close we are to keeping the Dream in balance on a local level. If it's hanging way too far, we all work extra shifts. If it's about level, we can take a few nights off.”

Will straightened up from examining the trimidion. “But why is Death always in perfect balance?”

He realized too late that he probably shouldn't have brought up death, that it was one of the topics Josh didn't like to discuss, so he was surprised when she smiled enigmatically. “Nobody knows,” Josh said. “It's a dream-theory mystery.”

“Do you like mysteries?” he couldn't resist asking, suspecting she didn't.

“No,” she said. “But I do like solving them.”