Dreamfire (5 page)

Josh began to feel sick again. “Do the scrolls tell your destiny or control it?”

It was a question she and Ian had struggled with until the hour he died.

Lauren had no answer and could only shake his head. “It's a paradox,” Kerstel said softly.

Josh stared into her father's eyes. They were so much like Deloise's, big and brown and … certain. They trusted. And Josh didn't. She didn't trust her scroll, or her destiny, or even her father at that moment.

But most of all, she didn't trust herself.

“What if I can't do it?” she asked. She knew she sounded pathetic. “What if I
can't
?”

Lauren covered her hands with his own. “Josh, you will figure it out. I've never seen you fail at anything.”

She closed her eyes, wanting to contradict him.
You mean you've never seen me fail at anything in-Dream. But what about Ian? Remember when I failed Ian? Remember when Ian died?

But she didn't say it because she didn't want to talk about Ian. She didn't want to know if her failure to protect him had been in her scroll as well, and if her father had decided not to warn her.

“I thought I would be in control of my life,” she said. “Isn't that what being an adult is about? Making my own decisions?”

Her father didn't reply, only reached out to hug her. This time, she didn't push him away.

 

Four

“Okay,” Josh said
as Winsor pulled into the parking lot outside East Tanith High School. “We need a plan.”

The main building of the high school looked exactly like the Army barracks from which it had been converted. In the growing seasons, the grounds crew did a cheering job with flower beds and well-trimmed trees, but today the gray concrete structure looked no warmer than the parking lot.

This might have accounted for the dejected expressions worn by many of the students lingering outside. Josh knew most of them by name if not personally. Elliot Meyers stood by the front doors, smoking a cigarette and grinding the toe of one shoe into the pavement as if he had a personal grudge against it. Will Kansas was arguing with the driver of the bus for the county home. Rose Cloud and Seagull were digging through the trash for aluminum cans to recycle. In stark contrast to their weary classmates, Kara Lisney and Kyle Finner were necking passionately on a bench.

None of them were Josh's friends. Although she'd gone to school in Tanith her entire life, she'd never been particularly popular, unlike Deloise. Since Ian's death last summer, Josh had withdrawn more and more, preferring the company of those few people who understood the full story of what had happened. She'd entirely lost touch with her few non–dream walker friends. After all, she couldn't explain to them about Ian's scroll, or the archway in the cabin, or the part she had played in the fire; the dream walkers operated in strict secrecy.

“A plan to do what, exactly?” Winsor asked.

Josh realized with dismay that Winsor and Deloise were both opening their doors and exiting the car. She hurried after them, still hoping to wrangle a planning session. “We need to be prepared for tonight.”

“Why?” Winsor asked simply.

“What do you mean, ‘why?'” Josh asked.

“Nice legs, Del,” Elliot Meyers called as they passed him. “Thanks for having 'em.”

“Fall down a well, Elliot,” Deloise replied sweetly.

“The scroll said your apprentice would show up at your house at twelve thirty,” Winsor reminded Josh. “It didn't say you had to do anything to make that happen. So there's no need to stress out. Just let fate run its course.” They passed through the front doors of the school, and she turned away from Josh to head down the west-wing hallway, then stopped to look over her shoulder. The thin silver blade was back in her voice when she added, “
Trust
your scroll, Josh,” before merging with the crowd of students.

Ouch.
Josh had said the same thing to Ian more than once, and anger made the blood rush to the palms of her hands. She shut her eyes against the desire to say something cruel to Winsor.

She turned, expecting Deloise to offer comfort, but Deloise must have headed for her homeroom before Winsor's barb, because Josh realized she was standing alone in the lobby. With a sigh, she turned and headed for class.

*   *   *

Josh fell asleep in history class. The teacher was showing a documentary on the life of Pope Beautiful Wonderful Chastity III, and Josh dozed off. In the snug darkness, even her desktop felt like a feather pillow.

She woke up to a light tap on her arm. “Josh,” someone whispered.

Bolting upright, she blinked and found the lights still off. The video continued to play on an old TV with bad color. None of the other students around appeared to be staring at her: Kara Lisney was passing a note to Camille Gothan; the Korean kid who never talked was drawing in his notebook; Will Kansas was taking a calculator apart. At first Josh thought she had imagined hearing her name, but then the guy at the desk next to hers whispered, “You were snoring.”

“Oh. Thanks,” she whispered back.

Louis Poston smiled.

And Josh knew.

It's Louis!

All need for sleep left her, and she saw him as clearly as if they had been sitting under stage lights. Louis Poston had been in Josh's class since they started high school. He was an excellent student but not arrogant, he was a little dorky but not socially inept, and he was an all-around easygoing guy.

Josh knew he would be easy to teach. And most important, she got the feeling he would
like
dream walking.

Louis caught her gaping at him and lifted his eyebrows. He was on the short side, a little round but not incapacitatingly so, and he had a nice, simple smile.

“Did I miss anything?” Josh asked quickly.

“Yeah, the pope quit the Church and founded Scientology. It was cool.”

And he was funny to boot.

Josh smiled and sat back in her chair.

Crisis averted.

*   *   *

She grabbed Winsor at lunch and the two of them fell into chairs at their usual table in the back corner. The cafeteria was a grungy old room that smelled like years of hot lunches past and had developed a disturbing layer of sticky gray dust on the ceiling. The food was surprisingly edible.

Kids were scattered around tables throughout the room. Brianna Selts was burning a lock of her hair with a lighter, hiding it from the lunch ladies with a notebook, and Will Kansas was trying to stuff a bunch of napkins back into the dispenser after accidentally freeing them all. Roth Purfin was playing footsie with Gretchen Mallory, while Johnny Packard tornado-whipped his potatoes with three taped-together forks. Lunch as usual.

As she dumped her backpack onto a spare chair, Josh realized once again how empty the back corner table felt. A year ago, Ian would have been sitting next to her, Winsor and Haley would have been passing notes, and Deloise and Whim would have been trading side dishes or gossip or playful insults.

Now it was just Josh and Winsor. Deloise was sitting with friends from her grade, as she had every day this year. Ian was dead. Haley was … gone. He had left town right after Ian's memorial service. Whim had taken off too.

Whim was Winsor's older brother, and the autumn before, he'd taken the money his grandfather left him and vanished. The only real signs of him were postcards from exotic international locales and frequent posts on his underground, anti-junta blog,
Through a Veil Darkly
.

It would be nice to have him around,
Josh reflected. Whim always knew how to lighten things up.

But Whim was a touchy subject with Winsor these days, so instead of asking if she'd heard from her brother lately, Josh walked over to where Deloise was sitting, at a table of kind, pretty people. They greeted Josh with smiles and homemade brownies. Josh dragged Deloise back to their old corner haunt.

“Okay,” Deloise said as she slipped onto a chair, “
that
was bad timing. Neil just asked for my number.”

“I'm sure it will be the same number when you get back.”

“Yeah, but now it's going to seem so …
deliberate
when I give it to him.”

“Sorry, but I figured out who the apprentice is.”

Unimpressed, Deloise lifted the top slice of bread on Josh's sandwich to see what was underneath. “Who?”

“Louis Poston.”

Winsor scoffed. “You wish.”

“Who's Louis Poston?” Deloise asked. She made a face at the sandwich and closed it.

“He delivers pizza for Serena's Pizzeria—he's one of their scooter delivery guys. He's been to the house a couple of times.”

Deloise frowned and ate a French fry. “I don't remember him.”

“And how exactly do you know it's Louis?” Winsor asked.

The tone of her voice made Josh feel small and stupid. She said weakly, “I … just know. I have a feeling.”

Winsor rolled her eyes.

“Maybe she does know,” Deloise said. “Maybe a teacher and an apprentice have, like, a psychic link.”

“You just want it to be Louis because he's smart and he's not a jerk,” Winsor told Josh.

“No,” Josh protested. “I had a feeling. I really … did. He'll be there.”

Winsor added, “You hope.”

Through a Veil Darkly

This just in: A friend who works in an ER says that in the last month, three people have been brought to the same hospital after their loved ones were unable to fully wake them. Each case presented with fever, irregular heartbeat, and catatonia, and the patients have remained semicomatose due to frontal-lobe trauma.

What makes this story worthy of TaVD is that each of the patients appears to have become ill while asleep. All were reported to have gone to bed healthy. One woman says that she woke up and heard her husband making a choking sound and saw him scratching at his face, then called 911 when she was unable to wake him. Her story suggests a connection to a fourth case, that of an elderly man whose wife reported a similar scenario. He, however, died of cardiac arrest.

Sitting in her room in front of her laptop, Josh felt vaguely disappointed. Sometimes Whim's blog included a little vignette from his life or some hint as to where he'd been recently, but not today, and Josh wasn't convinced that this rumor he'd heard had anything to do with dream walking. Not that this had ever stopped Whim before; he had pages and pages devoted to proving that the thylacine wasn't really extinct. But there had to be more interesting occurrences in the Dream worth reporting on—

The thought made her recall the man in the trench coat, and moments later she was trudging downstairs to talk to her grandmother. She found Dustine in the living room, watching
The Barney Meadows Show
with an expression of staunch disapproval.

“That
man-child,
” she said to Josh, pointing to a man in a white undershirt, “has slept with
both
of his girlfriend's sisters. Isn't that deplorable? His girlfriend did hit him with a chair, though, that was well done.”

“Grandma,” Josh said, taking the remote, “I don't think this show is for you.”

“Don't change it. I like it. When Alex gets home, all he'll want to watch is game shows.”

Winsor's father did have an inordinate affection for game shows. Josh sat down on the couch next to Dustine and—against a background of screaming and bleeped curses—described her encounter with the man in the trench coat. By the time she was done, Dustine had lost interest in her show and muted it herself.

“Hmm,” Dustine said when Josh finished. She thought, tapping her short-filed nails on the knee of her polyester pants. “I see three possibilities. One is more likely than the others. First, someone who knew Jona and recognizes you is running around in the Dream, somehow causing nightmares.”

“That doesn't seem very likely,” Josh said. People couldn't survive for more than a day or two in the Dream—the constant need to fight off nightmares soon exhausted them and they would make a fatal mistake. Also, Josh didn't think that anyone who had known her mother was likely to run around in the Dream terrorizing dreamers.

“Second, the nature of the nightmare somehow involved mind reading, and the man read Jona's name out of your mind.”

“Maybe,” Josh said slowly. She wanted to dismiss the possibility outright because—having touched the dreamer's fear—she knew the nightmare hadn't involved mind reading. But she couldn't very well tell her grandmother that she'd broken Stellanor's First Rule of dream walking, so she told a partial lie instead. “The dreamer kept saying something about the man putting a gas mask on someone, and that person turning blue. It didn't sound like telepathy. And I don't remember thinking about Mom.”

“Well, then we have to fall back on the third, most likely, possibility, which is that you misheard him.”

“Oh.” Josh fiddled with the plumeria pendant around her neck. She just didn't think she had misheard him; the tunnel had been dead quiet. “Well, I'll probably never see him again and it won't matter. I was just perplexed. Thanks for thinking it through with me.”

“You were right to come to me with it,” Dustine said, already turning the sound for her program back up. As Josh reached the doorway, she said, “Josh. When logic doesn't get you anywhere, trust your gut.”

Josh smiled. “Thanks, Grandma.”

*   *   *

“I saw a gate beyond the arch.”

Josh opened her eyes. “What?” she said. Her voice was groggy, and she didn't know who she was talking to.

“I saw a gate beyond the arch,” Ian said again.

Now she really was awake. The alarm clock was bleating like a lost lamb. Josh managed to knock it off the nightstand and onto the floor, where it continued to beep until she yanked the cord out of the wall.