Dreamstrider (31 page)

You will fail them all, but you will not fail me.
The gems flash before my eyes, washing away all other sight, as they whisper through the room.
You will bring us the last shard. And thank us for the privilege. My heart will be bound once more.

A shadowed figure emerges from the darkness, the firelight slithering across her facial gemstones. Lady Twyne. A vicious smile curves her lips. A seeping wound stink floods the temple, turning it into a swamp. My eyesight swims. The water turns to tar, flowing up and down around me like the bars of a cell. I hear something circling my cage, like a pacing animal with long, deadly claws. It growls, low and feral in the back of its throat.

You will bow.

Dreamer, please,
I whisper silently. He may ignore me, but I have to try.
If ever there was a time I needed your embrace, it’s now. I’ve fought it before but I don’t know if I have the strength tonight—

Water splashes across my face, warm and welcome as it cuts through the sulfurous chill of my captors. I gulp down air and sit up in bed. Someone’s staring at me—my eyes slowly focus on her flyaway hair and dingy gown.

“I’m sorry.” Sora’s cheeks are flushed with scarlet; big fat tears cling to her chin. “I’m so sorry, but you wouldn’t wake up, I know you said never to wake you unless it’s an emergency, but he’s gone too far and I had to warn you—”

“What? What’s happening?” I blink slowly. My thoughts are packed with gauze. Nothing’s making any sense, and my vision is strewn with castoff images from my dreams.

“The Farthingers.” Sora looks away from me. “The invasion’s begun.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Brandt stands right behind Sora, glowering at me like I put a toad in his trousers. I can hear boots heavy against the barrack corridors, the distant report of cannon fire on the battlements overhead. “The Farthingers are attacking? What about the Commandant’s troops?” I ask.

“They’ve breached the bay.” Brandt clenches his jaw. “Our blockade never even saw them approach. They just—
manifested
inside the harbor.”

“No—are you certain?” I ask, springing from bed. But Brandt’s expression leaves no room for doubt. “They’re using transference. Hesse’s theorem—traveling into Oneiros and then back out to cover great distances.” I wince. “Must be a damned powerful priest to be able to do that for a whole fleet.”

“And we have more immediate problems here,” Brandt says. “The Farthingers have confiscated the Ministry for themselves. We tried to burn as many records as we could, but the first place they went was the archives, and now they’re rounding up all of our operatives.”

“Nightmare’s teeth. We have to help the other operatives.” My pulse is racing; I scan the quarters for something, anything we could defend ourselves with. “Are we still safe here in the barracks? We can lead everyone out.”

“We barricaded the doors, but it won’t last much longer if help doesn’t arrive.” He narrows his eyes. “You sent the message to Durst, right?”

I stare through him as some fragment of a dream drifts past me. “The message?” Did we have a conversation about this last night? No, surely I dreamt it. Wait—was Brandt in my dream? “Are you talking about—You were writing a letter to the Minister. In my dreams.”

Brandt’s shoulders tighten. “No, I’m not talking about dreams. I’m talking about your little show at my office. You were supposed to send the letter to Minister Durst at the palace to tell him about the Farthingers. Nightmares, this is perfect.” He turns away from me. “If you’re going to pretend none of that happened … that you didn’t say those things—”

“I’m not pretending! I’m just trying to understand. You mean that wasn’t a dream?”

Something shatters in the corner of the room. We both whip around to find Sora staring at the broken porcelain ewer at her feet. Her eyes go wide as eggs, and she begins to tremble as tears run down her face.

“Sora, darling.” I throw my arms around her. “Shh, shh, it’s going to be all right. It was just an accident. We’ll worry about it later.” I pet her springy curls. “We need to make our way out of the Ministry right now. Do you think you can help us through the tunnels?”

“It’s not an accident!” she sobs, shoulders heaving under my grasp. “It’s all my fault! Please, Miss Livia, don’t be angry with me. I was only trying to—to get out of the tunnels, like you did.”

I pat her shoulders. “Sora, it’s all right. We’ll get out of this. But we can’t fix it if you don’t tell us what’s happened.”

She pulls back from me and turns her head aside. “He said he loved me. That he’d take me away from here. I was only trying to make a better life for myself. I—I didn’t know!”

Brandt rounds on us slowly, eyes hooded. “Who promised you what, Sora?” His voice is deathly, stiflingly still. “What have you done?”

“The—the Farthing man. Marez.” She smears a trail of snot onto her sleeve. “He said if I’d let him in the barracks a few nights here and there, bring him up through the tunnels—”

I stagger back from her. My chest aches like someone took a hammer to it, and all I hear in my ears is the ringing of cannon shots.

“You let him into the Ministry? Into the barracks?” Brandt seizes Sora by the collar of her shift. Then, in a wave of revulsion, he lets her go and drives his boot down onto the fragments of porcelain instead. This time, his swears are so vivid I couldn’t repeat them if I wanted to.

Sora quakes like a cornered hare, each fresh sob gurgling from her lips with a high-pitched snap. “He couldn’t get into the Ministry building proper because of the guards, and there are no tunnel entrances to the main building. He had these rags that smelled like molded parchment…”

“Mothwood,” I whisper. The word comes from somewhere deep inside of me, an instinctive reaction. But the rest of me is adrift. Mothwood smoke. Marez sending me into the dreamworld with mothwood …

Sora nods slowly. “I think that’s what he called it, yes.”

My throat aches like I’ve been swallowing glass. Marez isn’t just a slimy operative. He’s a dreamstrider, too.

Hesse’s angry, vengeful test subject—subject 39.

I cover my mouth with my hand and will myself not to cry. “Marez is a dreamstrider. He must be. And he’s been dreamstriding with my body to get the Ministry’s secrets.” All those strange dreams of digging through the Ministry archives rush back to me now. Searching for more information about the shards of Nightmare’s heart. Marez used me in my sleep, when he only needed my identity to grant him access. And when I was awake, he used me, too—like guiding him through the tunnels last night.

Of all people, I should have seen the signs—but I didn’t have a clue.

“He promised he’d buy me my citizenship papers,” Sora says, scrubbing away her tears. “Promised to take me back to Farthing. He said he loved me! I had no idea he was after Livia. I swear, I didn’t know—”

“Enough.” Brandt’s every muscle is tightened like a loaded catapult as he cups one hand around my shoulder. “Liv, I know you’re in shock…” He bites off whatever else he’d been about to say, jaw muscles working. “But we have to leave
now
, before the Farthing army breaches the barracks. If you never sent that letter, then Durst doesn’t know that the Farthingers mean us harm—”

Jorn appears in the doorway, a pack slung over his shoulder. “I couldn’t get everything you asked,” he tells Brandt. “There’s too many of them.”

“We’ll have to make do.” Brandt turns back to Sora. “We need you to get us through the tunnels. Then we can talk about your betrayal,” he adds, with a fresh edge in his voice.

“Of course.” Sora stifles a sob and draws a deep breath. I can see the tunneler in her shine through. While I share Brandt’s rage—how dare she, after everything I’ve done for her? But if I were still in the tunnels, wouldn’t I have done the same for a chance to escape? Didn’t I believe the same wretched lie from those velvet lips? Disgust is curdling, poisonous and sour, inside of me, and I don’t know whether I feel it more for Sora or myself.

No, Marez deserves it most of all.

I snatch up Professor Hesse’s journal and shove it into my bag, as well as a handful of tithes. The knowledge of Marez’s true identity feels like iron in my boots, weighing me down as I try to keep up with Brandt and Sora through the barracks halls. Hesse never specified what happened to Subject 39—I assumed he’d been consumed by the Nightmare Wastes, or else that he decided the danger was too great and forfeited his claim to power. But the truth seems much crueler, and I wonder if that’s what sent the professor into such despair. Marez is a dreamstrider with no regard for the Dreamer or the rules of the dreamworld. A dreamstrider who sought to use his powers against the Dreamer’s people instead of for them. Marez told me himself how he craved balance, to seize a power that he no longer felt Barstadt deserved. But is that, too, a lie? How much can I trust the doubts I’ve had in Barstadt and the Dreamer, knowing he steered me down that path?

What more did he need from me? He can already dreamstride; while I’m sure he would love to deprive Barstadt of my ability, there must have been more to it. He needed me for something specific.

I stop in the middle of the corridor, just outside the laborers’ entrance that leads to the Imperial Quarter tunnels beneath the ministry building. “The key.” I smack myself on the forehead. “The cabinet in Hesse’s Oneiros home—he used my memories to find it in Hesse’s old storage room, from after his office flooded. I didn’t even remember it myself, but it must have been there, recessed deep in my memories.”

Brandt reaches for my hand to pull me into the dark mouth of the tunnels. In the distance, we can hear the dull echoes of shuffling feet. “Marez took what was in that cabinet?”

I steel myself against the cool, damp air as we follow the twisting stairwell deep into the earth. “It must have been the binding ritual. In Oneiros—the gemstones—they said his heart will be bound once more. Nightmare’s heart. He has everything he needs to launch an assault on Barstadt with Nightmare’s help.” My hands flutter uselessly against each other. I can’t allow that tremor into my voice for what I have to say next. “Marez is the Commandant’s mystic, who promised him a warbeast. Nightmare.”

Brandt swears, and Sora wails with a fresh set of tears. But she only allows herself that one outburst. She clamps her jaw shut as we enter the main trunk line that runs beneath the Ministry and Imperial Square. A throng of workers stream in both directions past the enforcers at the tunnel’s mouth, joined by more than a few folk who I suspect are refugees like ourselves. I dive my hand into my coat pocket, feeling around for the stash of tithes I keep on me, but instead my fingers brush across the wrapped ball of Lullaby.

A line of escapees and workers snakes down the tunnel, and we shuffle into the flow, heads down, unquestioning. Jorn shuffles alongside me with all the coolness of a caged tiger, though the tunneler instincts in him, too, keep his gaze cast down.

Brandt takes a deep breath. “All right. We can use this. If the Farthingers have free access to the Imperial tunnels—”

“Not free,” Sora says. “The tunnels connecting to the palace were sealed after the last protest by the Destroyers. But they do have the gang leaders’ support and access to several of the main tunnels.”

“So the gang here knew the invasion was coming?” I ask.

“That’s my understanding, yes.” Sora scowls. “Our gang bosses told us all to report to work as usual, though the Destroyers were hinting they had other plans.”

“And we already know one of the gangs supplied them with mothwood smoke. Among other things, most likely.” Brandt scowls. “Their dealer must know where Marez and Kriza are stationed.”

“So we’ll just charge into the gang leader’s office and demand to know their whereabouts! That’ll go over wondrously,” I say.

Sora flinches. Jorn cracks his knuckles. “I can try to reach out to the Destroyers. See if they’d be willing to aid me one last time,” he says.

Brandt frowns. “They might just as easily turn you in to Retch for the bounty on all our heads.”

“Sora,” I ask, looking between her and Jorn. “Which gang has control of the tunnels beneath the Ministry of Affairs these days?”

She bites down hard on her lip and mumbles something, the sound lost in the crunch of gravel underneath our feet.

I draw a deep breath. I cannot lose my temper. I need every ounce of energy I have left to find us a way out of this mess. “I’m sorry. What did you say?” I ask, as calmly and as patiently as I can.

“Stargazers,” she says again.

Brandt crashes into the person in front of him. I nearly choke on my own tongue. And Jorn, Jorn—he sweeps Sora off her feet and in no time at all is dangling her over the stream of runoff by her ankles.

“We’re headed straight into Stargazer territory?” He rattles her like he can shake the truth away.

“Enough!” I cry, tugging at his arm. “It’s not as if we have any other options. These tunnels are our only way out. Put her down already!”

Jorn flips her around and plops her right on the edge of the creek. Her arms windmill as she seeks balance. An older man sniffs at us.

The Stargazers will be another matter entirely. And right at the fore of their constellation is Adolphus Retch. The man whose main bodyguard Brandt and I liberated so long ago, at the same exact moment his Lullaby operation burned up at the docks, just after he murdered his lieutenant in cold blood. The man who’s promised to kill Jorn if he ever sets foot in Stargazers territory again.

“Well, then,” Brandt says. He flicks the coin I’d given him as his tithe into the air and catches it. “Let’s make the best of it. Any way we could get the Destroyers involved?”

“We just might.” Jorn fingers a scar that spans the knuckles of his left hand. We’re nearly to the gang lieutenant’s post, where he collects each tunneler’s tithe. “Do you trust me?” Jorn asks.

No
, says the voice in the back of my mind, without hesitation. He may have kept us alive in Birnau, during the Stargazer Incident, and plenty of times between. But this is personal for him.

But Brandt answers for us, chin high, defiant. “I don’t see how we have any choice.”