Dreamland (16 page)

This made her smile. For a second, he sounded like the old Connor—the one who could hardly ever keep a straight face, who made her laugh until she snorted her soda. “Well . . . thanks. For everything.” She stood up. Her body ached with exhaustion. At the same time, she wasn't ready to lie down. She wasn't quite ready to venture into Connor's dreams—she was afraid of what she would find and also what she might not find. Miriam had to be where the men with no faces were, which meant she had to be in Connor's nightmare. Or did she? What if Dea was wrong? She, too, was delaying. “I'm going to shower,” she said. “Try to relax.”

“Relax,” he repeated. His face got serious again. “So you can walk in my head.
In
me.”

She nodded. There was nothing to say—no words of comfort she could give him.

In the bathroom, she avoided looking at the mirror directly, and quickly hooked a towel over the bare bulbs mounted above it. She felt better once her reflection was concealed.

She took an extra-hot shower, scrubbing with the flimsy
rectangle of soap that had been provided, as if she could wash away the past few weeks and everything that had happened. She re-dressed in the leggings and sweatshirt, silently vowing to go shopping as soon as she could. She should do something with her hair, too—dye it or chop it. She experienced a moment of superficial regret: she'd spent her life hating her hair but it was still hers.

She left the towel hanging over the mirror and returned to the bedroom. At first she thought Connor was asleep already. The lights were off, and he had the covers pulled up to his chest. But when she started to climb into her own bed, he spoke up.

“I won't be able to fall asleep if you're just going to be, like, staring at me.”

The sheets were very cold. A radiator was spitting ineffectually in the corner, but the wind still came through underneath the door, and vibrated the windowpanes. “I'm not going to stare at you,” she said. “I'm going to close my eyes.”

“Still.” He was quiet for a minute. Then: “Come here.”

She was sure she'd misheard. “What?”

“You said it would be easier if you had an object. A doorway object. Or if we were touching.” He had rolled over so his back was to her. In the fine line of moonlight coming through a gap in the curtains, his shoulders were just outlined in silver.

“Easier,” she said carefully. She had told him about doorway objects in the car, and how they could substitute for closeness. “But—but I don't need to.”

“I want you to,” he said, and she felt the impact of the words—
I want you to
—everywhere, all through her body, as if she were swimming, as if she were absorbing them through her
skin. “I'm letting you into my
dreams
, Dea. It's weird that you're halfway across the room. Besides, I'm cold.”

She couldn't think of any other excuses. She stood up. Her body, dressed in strange clothing, walking through the dark of an unfamiliar room toward a boy's bed, felt alien. Her heart was opening and closing, opening and closing, like a hand grasping for something just out of reach.

She slipped into bed beside him. She was acutely, painfully, ridiculously aware of his body next to hers, of the rise and fall of his breathing and the smell of his skin. His bare shoulders and chest. The dark shadow of his hair against the white pillow. She was afraid to move or even breathe. She lay on her back, staring at the patterns of moonlight on the ceiling, and the occasional illumination of passing headlights. Their feet were only a few inches apart.

After a minute, he rolled over onto his back too, so their shoulders were touching. She felt his hand skim her thigh and she stopped breathing. A mistake, she was sure.

“Your hair's soaking,” he said quietly. “Aren't you cold?”

“I'm all right.” She wanted to say: she was burning. Her whole body was on fire, was alive at the awareness of Connor so close. She could tell he was looking at her. Part of her wanted to turn her head and another part of her was too afraid. Their lips would be practically touching. What if he wanted to kiss her?

What if he didn't?

They lay there for a while, breathing hard, fast, as though they were running. She felt like she was drowning in the dark and the quiet, in the anticipation. She wanted to say something. She wanted a shift, a change. She wanted
something
to happen,
just to bleed out the tension in the room.

“Roll over,” Connor said at last. His lips were next to her ear. She could feel the warmth of his breath.

“Which way?”

He put a hand on her waist—solid, gentle—and rolled her over, so that her back was against his chest. She wanted to die. She wanted to be reborn in the space beneath his hand.

Spooning
. The expression came to her—she'd heard about spooning, read about it. It was all wrong, she decided, while Connor's chest swelled against her back with his breathing, and his exhale tickled her neck.
Spooning
was something hard and metallic.
Spooning
was organized, like a silverware drawer. This was warm and soft and fluid. This was a cup of milk before bedtime, sunshine pouring like liquid down a wall, soft model clay, imprinted with a finger.

She felt calmer, warmer, happier than she had in weeks. She was drifting, breaking apart on soft, insistent waves of darkness. She fought against the sensation of sleep, tunneling her down into dreamlessness. She needed to focus.

“Connor?” she whispered.

He didn't answer, and she knew he had fallen asleep. It was time.

I'm sorry
, she mouthed silently. She closed her eyes. She felt the velvet pressure of Connor's mind almost immediately, a momentary resistance; then, just as quickly, the resistance yielded. She broke through the surface. It was like throwing a stone into the water and watching a reflected image ripple away.

The blackness dispersed.

She was in.

It was different, much different, walking Connor's dream now that she had permission to be there. It was far easier. He seemed almost to be working with her, as if he could sense the direction of her thoughts, her needs and impulses, and was trying to give her as much help as possible. Doors opened at her touch. Glowing exit signs appeared to light the way out of the long white corridor in which she now found herself—a hospital corridor, she thought, except that on both sides of the hall were not rooms but enormous fish tanks, most of them empty. There was no resistance—no overstructure, no maze of concrete rubble to navigate. It was as though he'd been expecting her—which, of course, he had.

“Chicago,” she said out loud, into the empty hallway, even as she began to jog toward the glowing exit sign. Her voice echoed back to her. “Bring me back to Chicago.”

She felt the dream shifting, the way that sand shifted underfoot on a beach. Connor was listening. Connor understood. The moment she burst out of the glass doors she was there, on Connor's old street.

This time, there was no snow. It was blazingly sunny, and hot. Summertime. In the distance, she heard the faint tinny music of an ice cream truck. A woman was watering flowers on her porch; as Dea watched, they grew enormous, into shading vines that clawed up the front door and started reaching for the windows. Down the street, a nurse was wheeling a girl with a swollen balloon-head on a stretcher. This was dream stuff, mixed-up imagery and time frames, a jumble of past and present.

She started walking, then quickly drew back, sucking in a breath, into the shadow of a nearby alcove.

Connor. She recognized him immediately, though he was much younger—maybe eleven or twelve; a time when, in real life, his mother was already dead. He was still tall, but all elbows and knees and awkward angles, and his hair was longer, nearly hitting his jaw. He was wheeling a bike, walking next to a few kids—friends?—all of them sweating in the heat. He didn't stop at his house, but instead swung a leg onto his bike and pushed off down the street. As soon as he was gone, his friends evaporated like liquid in the heat.

She cast a quick, instinctive glance up toward Connor's apartment as she passed and stifled a small cry. In the window, Connor's mother was standing naked, her waist encircled by the
arms of an enormous cockroach. The insect was the size of a man, and Dea felt her whole body go tight with fear and disgust. She looked away quickly and hurried down the street, trying not to think too hard about what it meant.

Her mother was here—somewhere in this world of concrete and heat, of buildings that shifted in the flat light, grew new planes and angles or rubbed away into nothing as Connor's mind shifted or failed to sustain them. But where? The monsters knew, she was sure of it. They had her imprisoned, or they were tracking her. Dea sensed, intuitively, that it was because of the monsters that her mother had been sucked into this dream-space in the first place. But that was no help. The men with no faces were tracking her, too—that much was obvious. She had to find her mother without being seen, without being sniffed out. That meant disturbing nothing, working quickly, staying concealed.

Several blocks from Connor's apartment, the city began to lose its shape. Buildings opened to the sky. Telephone poles tapered to tips no wider than a pencil. Cars were mere suggestions, sculptures of metal and rubber. This far away from the center of the dream, from its focal point, laws of sound and motion became fluid and flexible.

She was uneasy. She had the sense both of being observed and of total solitude. Every few minutes, she turned around, convinced she would find the monsters grinning raggedly at her. But there were only empty streets, increasingly undefined and undetailed, as though she were entering a drawing sketched by a toddler. Even the streets were changing, turning to a dark ink, sticky and difficult to step through.

“Mom?” She tested her voice and then paused, still, alert.
Nothing. She called “Mom” a little louder and heard her own voice echo back, rolling off the planes of the empty city. She kept going, wondering whether at a certain point Connor's dream would simply run out, would turn to the darkness of unconscious space and force her to turn around. Or maybe it would go on forever, just getting less and less convincing, until she was walking through a smudgy gray space where buildings were shells and the landscape existed only in silhouette.

Above her, the sky began to
shrink—
narrowing like water into a fine stream just before it pours down a drain. Simultaneously she realized she was no longer walking but
climbing.
The ground was now steeply pitched, and, furthermore, covered with a fine, blowing layer of sand—so much so that after a few feet she could hardly keep her balance and fell forward, gasping, driving her hands out to brace her fall.

She banged her knee, hard, even as her hands closed on something metal: the rung of a ladder. Twisting around, fighting a surge of dizziness, she saw that the road had somehow led her not out but
up
: up a sheer-sided tunnel embedded with a metal ladder. Sand continued to rain down on her shoulders and neck from above.

There was nowhere to go but up. She found a foothold and began climbing the ladder toward the small circular opening of sky above her. It was hot—lava-blast hot—and wet, like being inside a living body. She reached the end of the ladder, where the cascade of sand was even more constant, and hauled herself free of the tunnel. Her arms were shaking as she staggered to her feet.

She was in a desert. In front of her, in the direction of the
low-hanging sun, stretching to the horizon, was sand, and more sand—soft ocean swells of it, baking in the heat. When she turned around, she saw that the pit from which she'd emerged wasn't unique. There were thousands of holes, some gaping wide, some no larger than a human mouth, stretching toward the horizon. And even as she watched, she saw the sand shifting slightly, almost breathing, as new holes bubbled up and others collapsed.

“What the hell?” she said out loud. Her voice sounded small. When she peered over the lip of the pit from which she'd emerged, she could still see in the very distance—so small it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—the trembling silhouette of Connor's Chicago skyline.

So what was this desert and all these pits? A new dream? No. She knew what it felt like when dreams changed. This was different. It was almost as if she'd climbed
out
of Connor's dream.

But then where the hell was she?

With a growing sense of anxiety, she edged toward a different pit, testing her weight on the sand before she committed, worried that a hole might open up beneath her feet. Endlessly far below her, she could see the interior of an unfamiliar living room buried in its depths. At the bottom of the next pit was a scene of war, flashing momentarily into view before turning, abruptly, into a suburban barbecue.

The thought flashed: other dreams. Each of these pits—the endless quantity of them—contained dreams.

Just as quickly, though, she forced the idea from her mind. This
must
be Connor's dream, all of it. The alternative didn't make any sense.

Still, just to be safe, she took off her sweatshirt and tied it to the top rung of the ladder she'd climbed, leaving a bit of pink fabric visible in the sand. And as she set out across the desert, she couldn't shake the feeling she was leaving Connor behind, and leaving behind her way out, too.

But she had seen a set of footsteps leading across the golden hills, dark as shadow, stalking off toward the unknown. A woman's footsteps, she judged, from the size of them.

That meant her mother might have come this way.

The sand made it hard to walk, and soon she was sweating. She was dressed in the same leggings and T-shirt she was wearing in real life—an aspect of walking she had never fully understood, as if she carried an unshakable image of her own body with her, and couldn't get rid of it. She moved parallel to the line of footsteps, keeping them in her sight—though increasingly, she wished she had stayed in the city and not ventured out this far. It felt like she'd been walking for hours already. Birds circled overhead, black spots against the clouded sky, and she was at first comforted by them. Harbingers. Then one swooped closer and she recognized its stringy neck, red as exposed muscle, and ugly, old-man face. A vulture. It seemed like a bad omen.

And suddenly she was furious. Furious that this was her life, her legacy, her curse. Furious that her mom had dragged her into this, had even given birth to her, when she was meant to spend her life fumbling through other people's dreams,
feeding
on them.

“Mom!” she yelled. Nothing. Just the silent drift of the birds across the sky. Her mouth felt gritty with sand and dust. “Where are you?” She felt reckless and careless. She would
almost welcome it if the monsters appeared and gave chase. At least it would mean she was getting closer.

As though in response, a soft wind rose, shifting the sands. Very faintly, she heard sounds of laughter.

Her anger was gone as quickly as it had come. She hurried forward, scrambling up a steep slope of golden sand, using her hands for purchase, and cursing as the ground shifted underneath her weight. The sounds of laughter and voices swelled; she heard the faint timpani jangle of music, too. At the top of the hill she stopped, panting a little, feeling her dream-lungs contract in her dream-body—all of it real, far too real.

Beneath her, cupped in a dip of land, was a long line of weathered caravans, like the old-fashioned kind she'd seen in history books about the settling of the American West—but wheelless. A fire was going in the sand, sending up a smoke that looked practically orange against the vivid sky, and dozens of people were laughing and milling around the makeshift camp, dressed in loose clothing. There were no horses, and for a moment Dea stood there, swiping at the sweat that stung her eyes, trying to make sense of how the caravans moved. Then she saw a bunch of enormous birds, some of them still yoked for service, feeding at a narrow trough, and realized that the caravans didn't roll. They flew.

She was so stunned she forgot to conceal herself. One woman caught Dea's eye and cried out. All at once, the whole group—at least thirty of them, Dea estimated—fell silent, turning in her direction, shading their eyes from the sun.

A bead of sweat moved like a finger down Dea's spine. Finally, she couldn't stand the silence. She cleared her throat.
“I'm looking for my mother,” she said.

One of the members of the caravan came closer. Everyone else remained frozen, watching Dea. His skin was dark from sun, his bare arms roped with muscles, his black hair nearly to his jaw. He was about her age, she thought, and something about him was familiar, and set off an electric wave of anxiety, deep in her stomach.

“Where did you come from?” he asked, stopping when they were separated by about ten feet. Dea was glad. If he'd come any closer, she might have run.

She ignored that—she didn't have an answer for him, anyway. “She was taken by the monsters,” she said, and there was a small ripple of response from the assembled crowd. Dea wasn't sure, but she thought she heard a woman say
king's army.

The boy half smiled as if she'd said something amusing. “Which monsters?” he said. “There are many different kinds here. They come in all shapes and sizes.”

“The men with no faces,” Dea said, concealing her fear behind impatience, and ignoring the fact that there might be more monsters, worse ones.

He shook his head, so his hair fell over one eye. “You don't find them,” he said, still smiling that infuriating smile. “They find you. They'll keep after you, until you give them what they want. It's what they're trained to do.”

He was staring at her so intensely, Dea wanted to look away. But she couldn't. She still had the sense that she
recognized
him from somewhere. “What do they want?”

“What do any of us want?” He crossed the distance between them casually, but all of a sudden it was done, closed, and he
leaned forward, and she could feel the roughness of his lips bump once against her ear as he whispered: “What belongs to them.”

He pulled away and Dea gasped. His eyes were the deep gold of honeyed candy, and suddenly she
knew
.

“You,” Dea said. She instinctively reached out, but stopped an inch away from touching him. “I've
seen
you before. In another dream.”

As soon as she said it, though, she realized she'd seen him even more than once. There was a time in Sedona, Arizona, when she was walking the dream of her old bus driver: a freaky dream, which had ended in watching the driver drown a kitten in the kiddie pool. She'd never taken the bus again. The boy,
this
boy, had been standing just on the other side of a white picket fence.

Then there was a time just a few months ago, when she'd stolen the hair clip from Shawna McGregor and walked a dream of a lame basement party. This boy had been one of the few unfamiliar guests; she remembered that he had almost spotted her. And now he was here, in Connor's dream.

But it was impossible. People didn't dream about the same things. Was this boy a walker, too? Were all these people walkers? Were they
following
Dea?

The boy looked amused—and satisfied, Dea saw, as if he'd been waiting for Dea to figure that out. “I've been curious about you,” he admitted.

“You've been following me,” Dea said.

“Not exactly,” he said. There was sand between her teeth, sand tangled in the long, sun-streaked strands of the boy's hair. Too real. “We're pickers. We make our living from the pits.
Whatever we find, whatever we salvage, we sell in the city.”

“What city?” Dea shook her head.

“The king's city,” he said. Something flickered in the boy's eyes, an expression gone too soon for Dea to name it. “The only city there is.”