Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (46 page)

Laura and Grace stood in the crowd and watched fire rise to fill every window of the front façade of the People’s Palace. During those minutes someone came and draped a blanket over Grace’s shoulders. She said “Thank you,” but her eyes never strayed from her watching. The engine and tender backed out of the side street north of the building—retreating—the firemen hauling the heavy hoses with them. More fire trucks had arrived, and hoses were working over the whole front of the building. The smoke flowed straight up now, pushed by superheated air.

Someone put a hand on Laura’s shoulder, and she looked around and saw that it was her uncle. Chorley stood behind them, almost supporting himself on them. There was a bandage wound around his head. He caught Laura’s look of horror and said, “It’s nothing. A bump.” He bit his lips. He didn’t say, “Where’s Rose?”

Grace was weeping and trembling from head to foot.

Some stranger first spotted Rose. He shouted and pointed at the figure in white, glimpsed through the smoke streaming from the plumes of fire that belched from every window. Then the whole crowd saw her and made a sound, a rumble of anxiety that gained volume and turned into urgent yelling. The firemen moved almost as one, turning their hoses on the windows directly beneath where Rose was standing.

Chorley and Grace ran into the confusion of water, shouting their daughter’s name. The firemen rushed to hold the couple back. A truck was being moved. The fire nets had been laid aside, unused. Now a group of firemen converged on one net. They spread it out, pulled it taut, lifted it, and hurried across the plaza to stand beneath the corner of the building, the only place without windows, and so also without fountains of fire.

Laura could see that Rose was watching the firemen. She’d
seen the net. She came nearer to the edge and picked up her skirt to climb out onto a jutting cornice.

It was then that the big skylight exploded. It sprayed glass in every direction. The crowd howled in terror, but the girl on the roof only dropped into a crouch and covered her head. Then she got up again, slowly. Her hair had come loose and was floating straight up from her head like a bright flag. She stood looking down at the net, a slender figure in white, apparently utterly composed.

It was a long way down. The circle of the fire net seemed a small hope. A twisting column of flame had erupted from the gap where a skylight had been. Rose could hear tar sizzling, she could see where the roof was sagging. The heat behind her was terrible. In a moment she’d be on fire.

Rose took a couple of steps back. She wanted to be sure she could jump far enough to clear all the masonry below her. Only two steps should do it. She kept her eyes on the circle of the net. She lined it up with her gaze as she’d line up the deepest water when she was jumping at high tide from the rocks below Summerfort.

The crowd saw her retreat and howled. Rose heard her parents’ voices rise above the cacophony of the fire, the roar and splash of hoses, and all the other voices. Their despair made them audible; those cries could be heard through anything, it seemed, even through the rules of the universe.

Rose ran forward and jumped. The air rushed past her. Her feet flew up over her head so that she slapped, shoulders and back first, into the canvas. Her breath was knocked out of her. She bounced up once, then the canvas caught her and she lay tumbled on it, her elbows smarting.

Through the faces bent over her and the hands reaching for her, Rose looked up at the roof, which didn’t seem so far away now. It really wasn’t any surprise that she’d made it.

Then her ma and da and Laura appeared. The firemen laid the net down, so Rose was on solid ground. Her father scooped her up. He was crying. Her mother was crying. Laura was crying. But why on earth were all the other people crying, even the firemen? Weeping and touching her as though she was a holy relic.

HE FIRE BURNED FOR A NIGHT AND A DAY, FUELED BY COAL STORED IN THE PALACE CELLAR. WHEN IT WAS OUT, THE SMELL OF IT HUNG, HORRIBLE, OVER MUCH OF THE CENTRAL CITY. THERE WERE NO CALLING CARDS, NO PARADE OF MOTHERS, NO PREPARATIONS FOR LATER BALLS. FOR A DAY ROSE LAY UPSTAIRS AND COUGHED, THEN HER COUGH QUIETED. LAURA WENT OUT AND CALLED FOR NOWN UNDER THE DARK ARCH OF MARKET BRIDGE, LOOKED FOR HIM AMONG THE BROKEN GLASS, RAGS, AND HUMAN WASTE. THEN, WHEN ROSE WAS ABLE TO TELL HER STORY, SHE TOLD LAURA SHE’D SEEN NOWN FALL.

Laura lost track of time but did wonder why Sandy hadn’t come. Then, on the afternoon of the second day after the fire, George Mason arrived with red-rimmed eyes and his bad news. He stood in the library and showed the family what he had—wrapped in his handkerchief in a nest of soot—the broken chain and charred copper tags of his nephew’s dreamhunter’s license.

The next day, when Laura was sitting at the dinner table and her father was trying to persuade her to eat, even cutting up her food for her, Rose saw that Laura had a look like the façade of the People’s Palace, stony, and still standing, but burned out inside.

Rose went to visit Mamie. She waited in the entrance hall and overheard Mrs. Doran say to her daughter, “Really, Mamie, it’s so
common
of your friend just to turn up unannounced. It’s to be discouraged.”

Rose heard Mrs. Doran coming and darted away from the door. Mamie’s mother emerged, gave Rose a smile with no buoyancy whatsoever, and said, “Mamie is waiting for you, please go in.”

“Thank you,” Rose said. She opened the door a crack and flitted through it, trying not to touch anything as she went.

Mamie didn’t get up but did begin to fidget. She said, “What’s under the scarf?”

Rose touched her silk bandanna. “My hair is frizzy at the front. I’ll have to let it grow a bit before it can be repaired.”

“You look sphinxlike,” Mamie said.

“You mean I don’t have any eyebrows. Frankly, being a sphinx stinks.”

Mamie said. “Do you want tea?”

“No, thanks. Do you want to play hostess?”

“Not really.”

“Aren’t you pleased to see me?” Rose said, being blunt.

“Yes.” Mamie straightened her spine, sat as a lady should. She looked like her grandmother, without that woman’s corsets. “I saw you jump. There was even a picture of it in the papers.”

“I’m sorry that you felt I bossed you about the ball,” Rose said.

“Don’t think about it. You meant well. And I couldn’t have resisted Mother anyway.”

Rose wriggled forward on her seat. “Just because everyone
imagines that coming out means we’re advertising ourselves as available for marriage, that doesn’t mean we have to experience it all that way. We don’t have to take any of it seriously.”

Mamie shrugged. “But have you thought what you’re going to do with your life apart from getting married?”

“No. I’ve only thought what I might do for the next year or so. Have a final year at school, then travel around the country staying with all my classmates and distant relatives—really get to know the whole country, not just resorts like Sisters Beach and the spa in Spring Valley. Then, when I’m twenty-one, I can go to university.”

“To study what? And why?”

“Something for its own sake. Or law—for justice.”

Mamie gave Rose a slow smile. “I’m going to eat until I’m so fat that everyone will leave me alone.”

“No, you’re not,” Rose said, impatient. “Da is going to teach me to drive. He can teach you too, if you’d like.”

“What on earth for?”

“Independence. Get-up-and-go. Honestly, Mamie, complaining doesn’t make you a rebel, only action makes anyone a rebel. We girls have to do what we can. Take whatever opportunities we’re offered.”

“Tea?” Mamie offered again. “There’s some lovely almond cake.”

Rose laughed.

Mamie continued. “What you have to realize, Rose, is that I’m not adventurous. Laura is your natural companion for adventures. You can’t charm me into joining you. It’s not that I’m timid, it’s just that I hate failure, and hate to be uncomfortable, and I don’t particularly enjoy effort. I’m a lost cause.”

Rose looked at the floor. She thought, “Whereas Laura is just lost.”

The day before, Laura had gone with Grace to see George Mason off at the station. Mason was taking Sandy’s remains—a collection of carbonized bones—back to his family. Afterward Laura had talked to Rose, in a wispy voice. She told Rose what she knew about Sandy’s home—his six brothers and sisters. One brother was the head of the night shift at the sawmill. Another was an engineer in a railway workshop. His father was a shop steward at the carpet factory. Laura talked about the year Sandy had spent working in that factory, about his school, with its tattered books and sour hallways. Sandy’s mother was a teacher at a similar girls’ school. The family had tenuous respectability—all of them had stayed in school till fifteen.

Rose said to Mamie, “Laura has had adventures I can’t even imagine. She’s even been in love. Her heart is broken.”

“Laura hasn’t been lucky, has she?”

“No. Sandy. Her mother …” Rose looked hard at Mamie. “I suppose you’ve heard that her father’s back?”

“I’ve heard that he’s ill.”

“Yes. That’s what’s finally roused Laura. In a couple of days she is going In to get The Gate.”

“The miracle dream.”

“I’ve had it three times now.” Rose could feel her face softening. “It’s extraordinarily beautiful. It is proving a little controversial, though. At Fallow Hill it carried off any of their patients who were close to death, or ready to die. It can’t be dreamed near anyone critically ill or injured who has any chance of recovery. What it does is tell whoever dreams it that there’s something beautiful to go on to after death. It tells it with such conviction that very sick people just let go of life. But it’s excellent for chronic illness, pain, madness, and misery. I’m glad Laura’s father has persuaded her to get it for him. Of course he’s hoping it’ll help
her.”

“Is your mother planning to catch it too?”

“No. Ma is going farther In to get Drought’s End. She’s going to perform it at the Rainbow Opera. What Founderston needs after the fire is a balm of rain—and the dream’s sloppy romance, and little white horses.”

“You forget I haven’t had any of these dreams.”

“Oh,” said Rose, feeling awkward. She did keep forgetting that Mamie’s mother hadn’t let her daughter go to a dream palace.

Mamie was looking sly and thoughtful. “Is Drought’s End a master dream?”

“I didn’t know you knew anything about that.”

“I know all about it, despite my lack of firsthand experience.”

“I don’t think it is a master dream.”

Mamie rearranged herself and seemed to change the subject. “Well,” she said, “I’m getting on a train tomorrow night. My father is sending me off to our summerhouse.”

“Alone?”

“The servants will be there.”

“Does your father think you need a holiday?”

“No.” Mamie stared into Rose’s eyes.

Rose searched her friend’s face. Mamie was looking sphinxlike, though she still had her eyebrows. She was trying to tell Rose something, to tell without actually saying.