Dreamfire (13 page)

“We can't be. But there's a rough geographic correspondence between the Dream and the World, and the house is only a hundred miles from here. Our chances are good.”

They used a lighter and compact to open the archway, the edges of which had never been marked in stone and so hung jagged in the air. They had no looking stone, either, but they got lucky in that the first dream to appear was a teenage boy's SAT nightmare. Josh and Will took seats in the back of the classroom and watched as the poor guy ran into every possible test-taking misfortune: His pencils snapped, his erasers tore off, his calculator melted into a smoldering mess.

In order to trigger Chyman's Dilemma, they had to sit through a nightmare until it ended on its own. Josh wasn't fond of test taking herself, and watching the kid grow increasingly panicked was brutal. She'd had just about all she could take when the dreamer accidentally set his completed answer sheet on fire and wailed himself awake.

Josh and Will slid straight into a nightmare about evil Martian ghosts. After much firing of laser guns and the complete destruction of a space station, they earned their way out of the Dream …

And onto the archroom floor.

Josh found her father waiting for her, holding a stapled handful of papers in his hand. He had his eyebrows raised, and his unexpected presence made Josh anxious at a time when she was already emotionally drained.

“It's after seven,” Laurentius said, sounding more concerned than angry. “How late do you two train at night?”

“Um,” Josh said. His question startled her. “Usually not past dinner.”

She caught Will mouthing
Eight thirty!
to Lauren.

“Good grief,” Lauren said. He lifted the papers in his hand. Josh got just enough of a glimpse to realize it was her history test and that there was a lot of red pen on the first page. “I was thinking that we might need to have a talk about this, but now I realize how much time you're putting in, between training Will and keeping up your own skills. Just make a little more time to study before the next exam, all right?”

Josh nodded. “I will. I promise. We were just about to knock off for the night and go study anyway.”

Lauren kissed her forehead and headed up the stairs to the pantry.

“So, when your dad finishes adopting me,” Will said to Josh when they were alone, “can I blow off schoolwork to dream walk?”

“Oh, shut up,” Josh said, amused and embarrassed at the same time. Then she grew more serious and said, “But I do expect you to reread that article on nontraditional dream-exit strategies.”

“Yes, ma'am. Right
after
I do my reading for history.”

“All right,” Josh agreed.
“After.”

 

Ten

“So, where are
we going?” Will asked as he and Josh drove out of Tanith.

“We're going to Braxton, where the headquarters of the junta are. The junta controls all the dream walkers on the North American continent. Their office keeps calling and demanding I bring you in to get registered as a dream walker.”

“Isn't a junta a group that holds power after a revolution?” Will asked, adding mentally,
And aren't they usually part of a really scary, horrible military dictatorship?

“We used to have a monarchy,” Josh explained. “The Rousellarios. They didn't rule all the dream walkers in the world, but they ruled over most of Europe and Asia, and all of North America, and I think a good part of Africa.”

“What happened to them?” Will asked.

“The short explanation is, my grandfather brought them down.”

“Ah, that might be too short.”

“All right. Let's see. For as long as anyone can remember, there's always been controversy about whether or not dream walkers are doing enough for humanity. The last few centuries, the theories about exactly what more we could be doing center around one idea called staging, which is going into the Dream and influencing dreamers' subconscious minds to make them happier and more peaceful.”

“How does that work?” Will asked.

“There are a lot of possibilities. The simplest is called influential staging, and dream walkers do it all the time. It's where we put an idea in a dreamer's mind—you know,
This door is unlocked,
or when I tried to tell the woman in the mob dream that she would be safe. That can be a little risky for dream walkers, but it's not a big deal for dreamers. But what most people refer to as staging is where people go into the Dream in groups and actually act out scenes of happiness to change nightmares into joyful dreams.”

“That sounds okay,” Will said.

“It's not,” Josh told him, a little too sharply. “Sorry. Yeah, it sounds okay—until you start thinking about ways you could abuse it. That's why the Rousellarios, the royal family, kept forbidding anyone to try it. Like, for centuries. Then twenty years ago, my grandfather, who is a despicable person, led a movement to get staging approved. His group was called the Lodestone Party, and they didn't just ask permission from the royal family, they prepared a whole proposal. They had shrinks and lawyers and social workers all involved. They wanted to stage dreams for the people of this country, Khuzegistan. Ever heard of it?”

“Ah, I know it's some tiny war-torn country in Asia.”

“That's pretty much all you need to know. It's tiny, it's war-torn, it's in Asia. That was all true back then, too. The Khuzegi dream walkers begged the royal family to let the Lodestone Party try staging in their country. They even sent a choir of blind schoolchildren to sing at the palace. But the king and queen kept saying no.

“So Peregrine just went ahead and launched the project without their permission. The Khuzegi people worship some god nobody here has ever heard of, and the Lodestone Party went into nightmares dressed like the god and gave everybody messages of peace and love. The next morning the president declared military rule over, the war over, and the army disbanded. People were dancing in the streets and dismantling weapons to use as flowerpots.”

“Wait,” Will said. “I heard about this in school. Didn't this end really badly?”

“Yeah. A few days later, a foreign warlord got wind that Khuzegistan was completely defenseless, so he marched in with his guys and took the whole place over. Then he put everybody in camps and made them work in smelting factories, and years later NATO had to go in to clean up the mess. But before all that, the day after the staging, the dream-walker king declared Peregrine guilty of treason and put out a warrant for his arrest.”

“Wait, he could just declare someone guilty of treason?” Will asked.

“I guess. I don't know much about the monarchy. Anyway, it gave Peregrine an excuse to stage a full-blown rebellion. He and a bunch of other Lodestones went to the palace, and
somehow
it got set on fire. It burned down with the king and queen and their baby daughter inside.”

“That seems extreme.”

“I think Peregrine was waiting for an excuse to revolt. He saw his chance and he took it.”

“Yeah, but a baby? That's awful.”

“Some people think the baby survived. Maybe that's just what they want to believe, but there are a lot of rumors that she's hidden away somewhere. The Rousellarios have a weird cult following now—Deloise has a bunch of books about them.

“So, the staging in Khuzegistan ended badly for everyone. There was one other incident of staging, back in the '60s, in this little town in Iowa called Maplefax. One guy was trying to stage dreams all by himself, and he accidentally ripped the Veil and the whole town went crazy from fairy dust. And those are just the instances where people were trying to do good. Part of the danger of staging is that not everyone will use it to create peace. People could use it to influence what dreamers buy, how they vote, decisions they have to make. Today you'll have to take Melrio's Oath, which says you promise to try not to influence dreamers beyond the scope of the Dream. But every few years you hear about somebody breaking the oath. One guy last year was going into women's dreams and convincing them he was their soul mate so they would sleep with him when they woke up.”

Will shook his head. “That is really pathetic.”

“Agreed.”

“So you guys got the junta after the royal family burned up?”

“Yeah, but only in North America. It was supposed to be temporary and only hold power until a permanent government could be formed, but that was almost twenty years ago, and they're just now getting ready to hold elections. The junta has seven members, and Peregrine is one of them. He still leads the Lodestone Party, and they're still pushing for staging, but after what happened with Khuzegistan, the other members of the junta were worried enough that they always put off legalizing staging. The other big party is the Troth Party, which I guess I'm old enough to join now that I'm seventeen, and they say the way we've been doing things for hundreds of years is working just fine. The Dream is stable. The World hasn't ended yet. We're doing as much as we can without risking too much.”

“So the reason you don't like staging is that you feel like it's dangerous and unnecessary?”

Josh thought for a long time before answering. “I don't think we have the moral right to manipulate people that way. I mean, keeping the Dream stable is necessary. If we didn't, the World would dissolve into chaos. And it's a kindness to people, a service, at the same time. But to say that we know what's best for other people and then force that vision into their subconscious minds … I don't think we have
that
right. My grandfather only wants staging because he loves having power over other people, not out of any desire for world peace.”

“You decide what's best for me,” Will pointed out, half joking.

Josh laughed. “I try. That's about all I can claim.”

The car fell silent as they both reflected. Will agreed with Josh's concerns, and he could see dozens of ways staging could be abused that she hadn't even mentioned. But …

If he had been given the chance to go back in time and stage a dream that would make his mother stop drinking, no argument in the world would have stopped him.

Josh, as if hearing his thoughts, said, “I won't be mad at you if you decide to be a Lodestone. Whim agrees with them more than he does with me, and we're still friends.”

“That's good to know.”

After thinking a bit longer, Josh added, “But I will be mad if you decide you like and admire my grandfather.”

Will laughed. “I'm sure I'll loathe him on sight.”

*   *   *

At the junta's headquarters in downtown Braxton—a skyscraper made of gray granite and steel-framed windows—they were ushered to the registration office.

“Hello!” squealed a woman with brunette curls cropped short against her scalp. “Oh, this is so exciting! I was hoping I'd be here when you came in!”

“Sorry,” Josh said, awkwardly drawing her shoulders up to ear level and cramming her hands into her pants pockets. “I—have we met?”

“Oh, no, honey. I've just heard so much about you over the years. And when I heard you were going to have an apprentice, well, we were all thrilled that you might pass some of that talent on.” She looked at Will. “Do you know how lucky you are to be working with her?”

Will smiled because he didn't know what else to do. This was a decidedly weird reception. This woman had
heard
of Josh? He'd known Josh was a good dream walker, but he hadn't realized that people had
heard
of her.

In the woman's office, Josh produced affidavits from Davita, Young Ben, Dustine, and Josh herself, all attesting that they approved Will's entry into dream-walker society. He felt unexpectedly touched that Dustine had written a letter of support for him.

Then the whole process nearly fell apart when they discovered that Josh had forgotten to bring a copy of Will's birth certificate. However, after several uncomfortable moments, the woman said, “Well, let's just pretend you brought it, all right? I think the junta can trust that Josh Weaver's apprentice is who she says he is.”

Although this raised more questions in Will's mind, he tried to concentrate as she speed-read him two pages of tiny type explaining exactly what he was and wasn't allowed to do in the Dream according to Melrio's Oath—which, more than anything else, gave him all sorts of ideas for devious things he could do in-Dream—after which he took a two-sentence oath.

She issued him a user ID and password for the dream walker's online database, then said, “This is completely optional, but if you like, we are offering to store ear prints, bone scans, and DNA for all dream walkers. I want to assure you that this information remains private and secure and will
only
be used in the event that your remains need to be identified. The junta has agreed that it cannot be accessed even by subpoena, and you have the right to destroy it at any time.”

Will couldn't help feeling alarmed. “Is there a big need to identify remains?”

“No,” Josh told him before the woman could answer. “It's mostly just an excuse for the junta to charge people a fifty-dollar storage fee every year. But Dad wrote the check for the registration fee for an extra fifty in case you want to do it.”

“Did you do it?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. Okay then.”

The bone scan only took ten minutes, the ear prints were just high-tech photographs, and the DNA sample only required a cheek swab. Finally, the woman opened a desk drawer, and said, “Just one more thing. Will Kansas, as a welcome gift from the dream-walker community, I hereby present you with this trimidion.”

She held out a pyramid made of six silver sticks and a stand with a circular base and one long pole to balance the pyramid on. “May the True Dream Walker watch over you, that you always walk safely.”