Fearsome Dreamer (19 page)

It was something that neither of them cared to dwell on, and he was grateful that Frith had never since brought it up as ammunition against him. But the fault for what had happened lay with White, and he accepted it as a man should.

So Rue would be handled carefully, and White would do his best to heed Frith's advice.

It was almost a shame about her spiky personality. There was something almost ethereal about her, as if she had one foot permanently stuck in another time, and she had the kind of unspoiled lovely face that the city women tended not to have. Life moved more easily for pretty women, and if Rue were possessed of a graceful, demure deportement she would soon find situations opening up like flowers for her, instead of the constant series of arguments she appeared to be in.

White watched her reach his desk, and then say something unconsciously rude about the size of his room. He held his temper in check. The encounter proceeded on firmer ground after that as he expanded on his basic theories of the Talent, growing more confident the more he talked.

They all started out this way. Like an eager sponge, greedily soaking up little pieces of validation of themselves – that they were special, that the Talent was special. But when Rue told him about the carrot dream, he became confused. Did she mean it, or was she playing with him? Mindful of Frith, he chose the former for safety. When he apologised, she smiled, and the most extraordinary thing happened to her face. It wasn't just a smile, but a smile directed to him. He felt an unexpected sharp wave of happiness for managing to make her smile. Then he felt embarrassed; then angry about being embarrassed. The girl was like some sort of emotional conductor; why was it so difficult to be normal around her? Did she emit an airborne chemical designed to upset people?

When Frith came by his rooms that evening, officially for a drink but mostly to check up on how the lesson had gone the second time, White gave him the reassurance he needed and said nothing of the discomfort he felt around Vela Rue. What was there to say?

Their lessons continued, and he continued to be baffled by her. She was Talented, of that he had no doubt. Her dreams were nicely varied, which spoke of a goodly amount of raw ability, but how Talented she would become would depend on how disciplined and focused she was. Which, at the moment, was ‘not very'. She much preferred to pick at him and his private life than concentrate in their lessons together, and his disquiet mounted until he began to grow nervous moments before each time she was due to walk through his door.

She was a young thing, a silly thing. But sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes she would say something and her face would catch the dim light just right, and he would be utterly caught off guard at how wise she seemed, just then. Her body seemed to emit nothing but energy, energy; passion, raw passion; until he was exhausted just being near her. Areline hadn't affected him like this. No one had ever affected him like this; not even Wren.

It wasn't until the first dream he had about her a few weeks later that he realised what the problem was.

It began harmlessly enough. White felt that he knew, by now, which dreams were caused by the Talent and which were just dreams. This one seemed like it was just a dream, but calling it that diminished the effect it had on him. It stayed in his brain for days, echoing round and round again, destroying his ability to concentrate on anything else.

In the dream, he was with Rue, and they were in his classroom.

They were discussing Ancient Theory, something that was not usually included in their lessons. He was expanding on the now defunct branch of psychology, and she kept asking him questions in a quiet, serious fashion that was completely opposite to her usual playfully complicated manner. In dream logic they could of course communicate perfectly; his grammar was not bizarre, his accent normal and not cause for odd looks and mockery.

He told her of the old masters, now obscure, who postulated such things as parental influence on behaviour and the unbelievable theory of Elektra and Oedipus. Rue expressed amazement and laughed. Then she told him quite suddenly that she had never known her parents. Which was odd, when he thought about it afterwards, because she had never told him that before (why would she?) and he knew nothing about her previous life at all.

He asked her how she felt about that, and laughed at the joke. But she hadn't understood it and looked only puzzled.

How I feel about you?
she said.

Wait, that's not what I meant,
said White.

How do you want me to feel about you?
Rue continued.

I want you to see me as your teacher.

But that's not how I want to see you,
she said.

They carried on with the lesson, but White could see her heart wasn't in it.

Is something wrong?
he said at last.
You know that you can talk to me if you need to.

Unthinkable outside of the dream. He would never, ever ask her to tell him anything of a personal nature, even if she wanted to. That way lay danger. A student was a student, not a friend.

I can't talk to you about it,
said Vela Rue.
You especially.

Why not? What is it about me that stops you?

I think about you,
she said.

And then she added,
Not as a tutor
.

She was blushing and looking at the floor.

And then he couldn't remember how he felt about that because the next thing was that she was underneath him and he was kissing her. She was pressing upwards against him. The flagstones were hard and cold against his knees. He was ripping at her clothes. Her skin was hot. He pinned her arms down, grinding them into the ground, and pushed his face into her neck. She was rippling and whispering something over and over in his ear.

When he woke immediately afterwards, his heart was trying to climb out of his throat and his skin glistened with sweat. There was a long lump in his bed next to him, and for just one terrifying, incredible moment he thought that it was her. A brief examination, however, revealed it to be his pillow, which he had apparently been attacking.

The sensation of flat, rigid stone and her wriggling body on top of it stayed with him for days after the dream had ended. He would be teaching, or walking, in the middle of a sentence or a drink, and that feel of her would flash suddenly in his mind. He would remember every second of it, trying to prolong it, trying desperately to get rid of it.

People would talk to him but they sounded muted, as if he was cut off from them by a wall of glass; trapped in a dark, hot bottle of his own making. In the bottle he could be with the dream, as long as he wanted. He could watch her underneath him again and again.

And that was the beginning of White's fall.

It had been a busy dream life for Rue these past few weeks.

Since her first dream featuring the silver-eyed boy, she had had several more. Each time she had one, they felt so real, and she felt so tired the next day, that it was as if she hadn't been sleeping at all.

He seemed apart from her, as if he was just a visitor to her head, and now that she knew she had this phantom ability lurking somewhere inside her, she wondered if he weren't somehow a product of that instead of her normal dreams. Mostly, he lurked in the background, catching her eye as she wandered around the landscapes of her mind, one blurred face in a crowd, or a figure whisking behind a building when she turned to find him.

In one dream she had, she found herself in the kitchen of Red House again, and there they were together, sat like old friends at the table. This time he had a bunch of grapes and picked them off their stems one by one, eating with obvious relish as they talked.

She tried to quiz him on who he was, but he wouldn't tell her his name. When she asked where he came from, though, he talked of a place that sounded both beautiful and impossible. In this place, he said, people were never hungry. Food was never scarce, and appeared magically when you had the right token to make it do so. Everyone lived together in beautiful cities, and their souls were all connected as one living creature, and no one could ever be lonely. People thousands of miles from each other could talk and touch with their souls while their bodies stayed put. Everyone played games with hundreds, thousands of other people at the same time, and everything was easy. He called this place Life, and said that it was the only place worth living in.

She was more accustomed to the strangeness of his beauty now. He couldn't be real because he looked, smelled and moved perfectly, as if formed from an idea and not the messy horror of birth. When she woke from seeing him, she would lie in bed for a time, staring up into the darkness and thinking about him and the things he told her, desperate to extend the dream. Then she would sigh and turn over. Perhaps if she went back to sleep, she could return to that place and that moment, and see what happened next. Perhaps if she slept for ever, she could live there inside her head, inside her favourite scenes, for as long as she wanted.

In dreams, nothing was ordinary. There was no clothes washing or banality, dull people with their dull conversations, no humiliation, no wrong decisions or maliciousness. No boring boys with their boring ways. Everyday people in her life became extraordinary in her dreams.

She'd even had a dream about Mussyer White. The kind of secret dream she was used to having about men. White had told her, in his peculiarly emotionless fashion, that such dreams were an expression of her body's need and nothing more, and she could see the sense of that. So she tried to forget it. The next lesson she'd had with him after the dream had been nerve-wracking beforehand; but then he had behaved in his usual cold, uninterested manner and she had gone back to being irritated by him, as quick as thought.

The silver-eyed boy was surely more of the same; a beautiful, flirtatious dream she'd conjured up to keep her loneliness at bay, in the way that her mind often did. So she never spoke of him to White. He would think her disgusting, she was sure, if all she ever talked about were dreams like that.

Tonight, it was to be her third dream spent entirely with the silver-eyed boy, rather than merely seeing him out of the corner of her eye. And it would be the last time they ever met in Red House kitchen.

When she realised where she was, she looked around expectantly. The kitchen had become her favourite room, partly because of him. Whenever she was there in the mornings, she imagined him hiding in the pantry, or even walking around, watching the whole Talented group as they helped themselves to breakfast, as invisible and insubstantial during the day as a ghost.

But here, in the soft and dark hours, he was real enough. His eyes had their strange gleam under the lamplight.

‘Hello, Rue,' he said.

Rue smiled.

‘How are you this evening?'

‘Well enough.'

‘Bored?'

Rue shrugged, running her fingers along the table top. ‘I suppose.'

‘You must be,' he said, taking an apple from the huge bowl in the centre of the table and tossing it up and down. ‘Last time you said that you never get to see anything in your lessons with White. All he does is talk.'

‘I know,' said Rue. ‘It's just chat. I thought I was to learn about how to do things with the Talent, but he just talks, as if he thinks I'm useless at practical things. At everything.'

Somehow, she knew, her anger towards White was something to do with the dream she'd had of him compared to the reality of him, and how those two sides could never exist within the same person, and how stupid that was, and how stupid she was for wishing that it could.

‘I can teach you.'

Rue laughed and tossed her head, trying to appear unmoved. ‘You can?'

‘I'm extremely Talented, Rue. How else do you think I can appear to you, and talk to you like this?'

Rue felt her heart beat quicken, sure he would at last tell her a great truth about himself. No matter how much teasing and tugging she had done before, he had spoken of his life in the vaguest terms, and had never explained who exactly he was. She waited, patient, eager.

‘Have you ever wondered how much of our time together is a dream and how much is real?' said the silver-eyed boy.

‘It feels real enough. I've always had a bit of trouble telling the difference between my Talent dreams and real life, though. Now they say it's because my Talent dreams
are
real.'

He smiled, his eyes gleaming in the gaslight. ‘Clever girl. So if I tell you that this is real, and that I'm really here, in the kitchen with you now. And then I tell you that we're going to Jump together. What would you say?'

The languor of his presence faded. He was fired up, excited. He tossed the apple up again and caught it deftly.

‘What?' she managed.

‘Jump. We're going to Jump together. Now.'

‘But. I can't. I haven't even got past the hook yet. Mussyer White said it would take months to even think about a Jump.'

‘White,' said the silver-eyed boy, ‘is an idiot.'

Rue was shocked into silence. She watched him put the apple back in the bowl and come around the side of the table towards her. He looked less like a cat and more like a spider tonight.

‘But –'

‘No, listen. I've been looking for someone like you. Your Talent could blossom and unfold to give you the most amazing power. Don't you want that? You won't get it with White. He's holding you back. Think how astonished everyone will be by how quickly you progress. You'll be top of your class. Envied and powerful. I can show you how.'

Rue hesitated. It sounded good, his promise. It also sounded terrifying.

The silver-eyed boy leaned forward and grabbed her arm. His violent movement panicked her.

‘No, I'm not ready!' she said.

‘Of course you are,' he sang, and laughed. Sometimes his laughter frightened her. His hand had fastened around her wrist. She made a half-hearted attempt to pull back, but he gripped tighter. She saw his knuckles slide and twist.

‘But they said I could die if I tried to do it without learning properly!'

‘That's just what they tell you,' he said, hauling her close to him. ‘Anyway, there's always a chance you could die. We spend every minute of our lives almost dying.'

How profound, she had time to think sarcastically, but then he was crouching with her pressed in his arms, and all further thought vanished. The feel of his body pressed against her should have been making her belly squirm, but her attention was caught by the odd sensation coming from his fingertips on her skin. The flesh felt as if it were billowing like sheets hung up in the wind, and where his skin met hers she could feel prickles, as if he had suddenly sprouted stiff spines of fur.

Her arm began to thin.

She gazed at in horror. It was definitely thinner. The thinness rolled slowly up to her shoulder, across her chest, creeping along like ground fog on a dark, weighted night.

And then the pain began.

It was like being forcibly squeezed into a gap between two stone walls that would fit the width of a knife. The silver-eyed boy was pulling her into it and she could not stop him. He tugged until she was screaming at him to stop because she was sure he would wrench her arm off. She could not fit through that gap – it was impossible. Her chest had collapsed and her hips were shattering into tiny shards, and the shards ground against each other like crushed glass. She could feel the inside of her stomach pressing against the bones of her spine. Her heart stopped, too squashed to beat.

And then she was on her hands and knees, and the floor below her was warm and hard. Her throat rippled and she vomited.

‘You're alive!' said a delighted voice above her. ‘Did you know that this proves you definitely have Talent? If you didn't, you'd be dead. A Talented can't Jump an un-Talented, you know. It's a shame.'

She felt him crouch beside her.

‘What a rare, marvellous creature,' he cooed, rubbing her back. His flattery had the desired effect. Instead of trying to strangle him for what he'd done, Rue immediately started to feel better. Her body seemed intact and not misshapen in any way. She looked down at her arms, both of which were fine – in any case they were propping her up from the floor without much direction. A small puddle of vomit kept flitting into the corner of her vision, despite her best attempts to ignore it.

‘Sorry,' she said, shamed.

‘Don't think on it. Most Talented people have that reaction the first time they Jump. We'll clean it up quick as thought,' said the silver-eyed boy. He unfolded upwards and brushed his hands off, pulling something from his tunic.

‘I'll get you some water, too,' he said from behind her. She sat on her haunches for a moment, until she was fairly sure she wouldn't vomit again. Then she stood up. Her stomach rolled, but the worst seemed to have passed.

‘Where are we?' she said.

‘A place you've never been before,' he teased. When she turned, he straightened up. The vomit was somehow, mercifully gone. She tried not to show that she had noticed – she didn't ever want to mention it again. Worlds would collide before she alluded to it again.

He handed her a small glass of water and she gulped it, looking around and wondering where he had got it from. Wild, gleeful curiosity took over.

‘Where've I never been before?' she said.

‘Iceland.'

‘Is it made of ice?' asked Rue, delighted. The room they were in was smaller than hers, but otherwise unremarkable. The walls seemed much smoother and more lightweight than stone, and were painted an odd, glowing sort of pink. For a place made of ice, it was very warm.

‘Almost. It's a very cold country, overall,' he said. ‘Not that it matters. Everyone lives together in a warm city, protected from all the stuff outside.'

‘Whose room is this?'

He waved a hand. ‘It doesn't matter. We'll only be staying a few minutes, anyway. I've timed it beautifully, but the owner of the room will be back in a while.'

Rue started to feel uneasy. ‘Won't they be mad that we're trespassing?'

‘They will never know, my sweet. Take a look around.'

My sweet? Rue didn't quite know what to make of that. But he was watching her, so she let it be, and turned around to explore their surroundings.

It was a disappointingly dull kind of room, except for the ethereal warmth. There was no fire that she could see, but when she touched a hand to each wall, she could feel a gentle glowing heat coming from it.

‘This is what I really wanted to show you,' said the silver-eyed boy, pointing to a small black box sat innocently on a desk top. ‘It took me a while to find someone else with one of these. People don't really need them any more.'

‘What is it?'

‘A gateway to another world,' he said, smiling. ‘I promise. In that box is a whole other place, invisible until you access the box. We call it Life. In there is how everyone's souls meet. It's what makes things beautiful. Life is full of everything you could ever want. It's like an endless dream.'

Rue stared at it.

‘It doesn't look like much,' she said at last.

‘The most powerful things often don't.'

‘Will you show me the invisible world in the box?'

He laughed. ‘Not this time. But soon, I promise.'

‘Do you go there often?'

‘To Life? As much as I can. There are people that rarely come out of it.'

‘I wouldn't neither,' Rue mused. ‘If I had that instead of just this.'

She turned away and wandered about, running her fingers across everything she found.

‘Do you live in this country?' she said.

‘No. This is far away from where I live. Iceland is closer to Angle Tar than I am, in fact.'

Rue looked at him sharply. He was leaning against a wall, watching her.

‘How come I don't know about it, then?' she said.

‘Angle Tar doesn't like to talk about what lies outside of Angle Tar.'

Rue shook her head.

‘What is it?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘People keep telling me about that, in my wake life. But then everyone always said before that they were all wastelands and not worth much. Who am I supposed to believe?'

The silver-eyed boy came forwards, stretching his arms wide. ‘Does this look like wasteland?'

‘No, it looks like a fairytale,' said Rue. ‘Boxes that have secret worlds in them and walls that give off heat.'

‘This place is real. And I can show you all the other places that are just as real as this one, and as amazing, and long before they will ever allow you to leave Angle Tar.'