Dreamland (19 page)

The lights clicked off once more. Dea ran the water again and dampened a finger. Quickly, before she could reconsider, she reached up and scrawled across the mirror:
Let me in.
Almost immediately, the words began to dissolve, gravitating down across the murky reflection of her face.

And then—Dea swallowed to keep from screaming—all at once, the mirror began to dissolve, too. Her face was gone. The glass was melting, pouring, beading into the sink; and everything it touched dissolved just as quickly, as if the liquid were an acid that was swallowing objects, transforming them into shimmering, reflective pools. There was no longer any sink, or wall, or floor. There was nothing but a vast hole, full of a shifting darkness, and a path through to the other side.

Dea's ears were filled with the sound of wind. She felt an invisible pressure on her lower back. She thought of the men with no faces, and towers built from the bones of men.

She knew if she took even a step forward, the life as she knew it, real life, would change forever; it would mean she had gone insane. Or that the world had gone insane.

The wind blew harder. She thought—just for a second—she detected traces of her mother's scent.

She went forward, into the mirror that was no longer a mirror, along a path of darkness.

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke.

Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

—Chuang Tzu

She was in a tunnel filled with the smell of damp; the paving stones beneath her feet were slippery with trickling water and garbage and other substances she didn't want to think about. Up ahead, she heard voices and shouting, and, through a vaulted archway, had a glimpse of a sun-dappled street, and people passing back and forth. From a distance, they looked like bright blobs of color, streaming together into a single rainbow image.

She glanced behind her but the mirror was gone. The dream—because this was a dream, she was sure, though unlike any she had ever walked—had sealed shut behind her like skin around a wound. There was simply more tunnel, running
off into the darkness, and huddled shapes she originally mistook for animals until she realized they were people—mostly men—filthy and obviously homeless, gazing at her through alcohol-hazy eyes.

“You look like one of the lucky ones,” one of them rasped. She couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.

She turned around and hurried forward, toward the street. Her footsteps echoed on the stone, and made it impossible to hear whether she was being followed. She was too afraid to turn around, worried that if she did, she would find one of the men lurching after her. But she made it to the end of the tunnel, and when she finally risked a glance behind her, saw that she was alone.

Emerging onto the street, she was immediately forced to leap backward, pressing herself against the wall of a building, as a man driving a carriage came barreling down the narrow street, holding a whip, scattering the people in front of him. She had a quick view of his face, pockmarked and cruel, and the animal yoked to the carriage—like a huge housecat with an elongated snout—and then the carriage was gone, rounding a dizzying curve in the street, and the crowd flowed back into the space left in its wake.

Dea didn't move. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to stop the crazy pounding of her heart. ‎But every time she opened her eyes, she was gripped by a terrible feeling of vertigo. Or maybe the reverse of vertigo: she felt she was standing at the very bottom of an enormous canyon, and was in danger not of falling down but of being crushed from above.

Because the city she'd entered was built not just out, but
up. She must have been on one of its lowest levels, although when she finally managed to take a staggering step forward, she passed over a grate through which she could see people moving below her, their necks yoked with heavy gold bands like the animal pulling the carriage had worn. Slaves.

The street was teeming with people and lined with shops and market stands, and at intervals staircases led up to another level of buildings, where even more staircases wound to another level, and another, and another—so much construction, all of it built on top of previous construction, it seemed impossible the whole city could remain standing.

High above her, so high she had to crane her neck all the way to see it, was the sky, and small dark shapes zipping through it. Birds? She couldn't tell. Looming above the rest of the city was a tower that seemed to have been hacked out of an ancient mountain, built half of rock and half of spiraling structures of glass—this, too, a construction so absurd and disproportionate it could have existed in no real place.

“Entschuldigung,”
a man said, shoving by her. She thought the word was German; all around her people were shouting in various languages, some of which she recognized, some of which she didn't. A woman was arguing in rapid French with a vendor of mirrors—thousands of mirrors, glinting in the sun, were laid out along a table. Dea had studied French since eighth grade but understood nothing but
remboursement
, refund. As she passed, she noticed that all the mirrors reflected not the landscape in front of them, but random scenes, maybe other portions of the city.

Or maybe, she thought with a tiny shiver, portions of her
world. She remembered her mom had once told her: the mirrors are how they see out.

It was so crowded she had no choice but to move along in the direction of the rest of the foot traffic. ‎It was hot and noisy and it smelled bad, but she didn't mind the clamor or the closeness: she felt secure here, lost in the crowd, unobserved and unobservable. And she was so stunned by the sheer size of the city and the great canyon walls of its growth that she even forgot to worry about her mother; she just walked, and watched, filled with wonder and awe.

Women hung from the windows of nearby buildings, calling down to passersby in the street. Kids with bronzed arms threw olive pits into the crowd and then ducked away, giggling. Dea saw stacked cages filled with strange hybrid animals: feathered reptiles, horses no bigger than housecats, duck-like creatures with the scales of a snake. She passed a store selling masks that moved and grimaced, like human flesh, and one in which pale white statues chanted and muttered through porcelain lips. Suddenly the street opened up and deposited her in a square: on a cracked stone platform at its center, a man with two heads, arranged not side by side but front to back, was auctioning off slaves, drumming up bids from the assembled crowd. Dea watched a girl, probably no more than eight, her posture distorted by the weight of the two thick bands around her neck, be led to the block, and felt suddenly sick.

The crowd surged forward, flowing down toward the slave auction, but Dea turned and fought her way against the flow of people, reaching a stairway stitched vertically between buildings. She grabbed hold of the railings like a drowning person
finding a lifeline, and began to climb.

The staircase corkscrewed several times and then dumped her on another street, this one a good twenty feet above the square, and the shouting, jeering crowd, and the slave auction. It was only slightly less crowded than the street she'd come from. She could still hear shouting from the auction below, and it made not just her ears but her whole body hurt. It didn't take her long to find another staircase, this one so steep it was practically vertical, sandwiched between a shop that sold nothing but wooden puppets and a tavern from which an alcoholic stink rolled out in waves. She took the stairs, sweat moving down her neck freely now, but also dimly aware that she felt stronger here, healthier than she'd ever been.

The architecture changed as she reached the city's higher levels, as did the nature of the shops and the look of the people strolling the streets. In the city's lower levels, the buildings were built primarily of thick blocks of grimy stone, green with age and jammed together like a series of overlapping teeth. But up here, Dea saw steel and glass and other modern materials. The streets were quieter, and lined with trees and flowerbeds, and the shops sold sparkling jewelry on velvet cases, including dazzling cat-shaped brooches that paraded back and forth in the windows, flicking their diamond tails; or long dresses made of white silk that looked like bits of cloud. Stone bridges spanned the vast chasms down to the bottom of the city, and even the staircases between city levels were better built, out of winding iron or dramatic marble, with ornately scrolled banisters.

She'd climbed six street levels already; still, she was only about halfway to the final level, and the tower that twisted like
a ribbon of steel and stone toward the sky. But at the top of the next stairs, two men were standing, blocking her passage. Dea drew back, swallowing a sharp cry as they turned to face her: each of them had only a single eye, large and unblinking, and a mouth full of hundreds of sharp, overlapping teeth.

For a second she just stood there, frozen, fighting the urge to turn and run.

“Passage interdit,”
one of them said at last.
“Niveaux privés.”

“What?” It was so shocking to hear the
thing
—the man—speak well-accented French, Dea temporarily forgot to be afraid.

He switched seamlessly to English. “Restricted access,” he said. “You have a pass?”

Dea shook her head. “I—I didn't know I needed one.”

The men kept on staring. They couldn't help it, Dea supposed, but it made her stomach turn: their eyes were enormous, like the lenses of a telescope. “Levels nine and above are restricted access,” one of them repeated. Dea wondered whether he was being deliberately unhelpful, or whether he simply didn't know very many English phrases.

“Where do I get a pass?” she asked. She couldn't explain it, but just as she felt somehow stronger here, freer, more purposeful than she ever had, she was also being drawn up and up, pulled toward the very top of the city, as if the whole landscape were exerting on her a reverse gravitational force.

The men exchanged a look. Despite the strangeness of their faces, Dea could tell that they were bewildered. “From the king,” one of them said, turning back to Dea. “Where else would you get it?”

“But—” Dea started to protest. Then she heard footsteps behind her, and a voice, half-breathless, spoke up.

“She's with me.”

It was the boy again: the boy from the desert, the one who'd told her to come through the mirrors.

“You're following me,” she said, to conceal the fact that she was relieved to see him.

“You're welcome.” He barely glanced at her, instead reaching into his shirt pocket and removing a small golden book that resembled a passport—presumably, this was the pass from the king. When he handed it to the guards, Dea sucked in a quick breath. Immediately, the pass dissolved into a hundred winged insects, glittering like gold, which arranged themselves into a complex design in midair.

“The king's crest,” the boy said. Dea wasn't sure if he was speaking with her or to the guards. Today he was dressed all in black, in standard trousers and a shirt with a stiff collar. He'd even made some effort to untangle his hair. She wondered whether this was his city look.

He held out his hand again and the shape collapsed, siphoning into his outstretched palm, as the insects once again flattened themselves into a paper booklet.

“All right.” The guard stepped aside. “Just keep your pass handy. You'll need to show it again.”

“I know the rules,” the boy said. He gestured for Dea to go first. “After you.”

Here there were hardly any shops at all: just beautiful homes set behind high gates, half-concealed behind enormous trees Dea had no name for.

“
Why
are you following me?” she asked in a low voice, as soon as they'd left the guards behind, since the boy no longer denied that he was.

“I'm helping you,” he corrected her. “This way.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward yet another staircase, this one flanked by stone lions—that, Dea noticed, shifted position occasionally, or yawned, or blinked. Dea again felt that explosion, as if someone had set off a fire deep in her blood.

“Where are we going?” She removed her hand from his, deliberately, partly because she had suddenly wanted
not
to remove it—to cling to him, to beg him to stay close to her. Then she thought of Connor and felt guilty and angry with herself.

He had already started climbing. Now he stopped and turned around to face her, with that mysterious half smile that reminded her of a satisfied cat. In the sun, his eyes were honey-brown, filled with light.

“To the very top,” he said. Then he kept climbing.

“What is this place?” Dea waited to speak until they had left the guards behind. She was scared, which made her angry. And the boy seemed as unconcerned as ever. He even whistled occasionally, something tuneless and vaguely sad.

“Isn't it obvious by now?” He looked at her with that infuriating half smile of his. Today his eyes glimmered in the sun, practically yellow. “This is the king's city. Some people call it the first city. It's really the only city that matters. Beyond the borders are just deserts and free people.”

“Like you?” Dea asked. He put his hand briefly on her back to steer her down a narrow, cobbled street, its walls crowded
with an explosion of flowers and climbing vines, and she quickly sped up.

“Like me,” he said.

The boy's name, Dea learned, was Aeri: a strange name where she came from, but he told her it was common enough in this world. For someone who had been following her through dreams and had managed to track her down in the enormous city, he seemed largely uninterested in her company, and answered most of her questions in as few words as possible, or with circular nonresponses that left her more frustrated, not less.

“Why are we going to the tower?”

“I told you. To get answers.”

“How?”

“We'll speak to the king.”

“Why?”

“He'll have answers.”

Eventually she gave up, and they walked in silence. She needed to save her breath, anyway: on the city's upper levels, the streets were steeply pitched, winding toward the tower, which she now knew to be a portion of the king's palace. Here, the city became busy again—servants bustled between enormous stone mansions and homes built of rose-colored glass, although it was strangely silent, a peace disturbed only by the twittering of invisible birds and the rhythm of water flowing in various delicate fountains. Aeri explained briefly that these homes were, actually, property of the king, gifts to his favorite friends, military officers, and supporters. Some of them, he said, were actually connected via passageways to the palace's lower levels.

When she peered down over the wrought-iron railing of one
of the bridges to admire the city stretching out beneath her, the people at its very bottom looked hardly bigger than ants. From here she could see not just how deep and tall the city was, but how vast: buildings, bridges, streets, and market squares sprawled all the way to the horizon, so much space and so much life she couldn't imagine how many people it contained. How had Aeri tracked her down? How would anyone be found in a place this size? It would be like trying to pinpoint an individual grain of sand on a beach. She thought of her mother and felt a sharp ache of sadness.

She hoped Aeri was right, and the king would have answers.

Aeri had shown his pass to gain access to every subsequent level of the city after level nine, and Dea had noticed that the guards grew more numerous as they'd climbed—and more monstrous, too, with deformities that ranged from multiple sets of eyes to multiple sets of heads, mounted on the same neck like flowers budding from a single stalk. She was happy, now, that she and Aeri weren't speaking; she wasn't sure she could have formed a sentence.

When the tower was directly above them, so that it cast them in shadow, Dea could see that her original assumption—that it seemed to have been hacked out of the mountainside, and then extended and modified with glass-and-steel additions, was correct. The palace itself was much larger than the individual tower, and sprawled across the high apex of the city like a series of smaller foothills clustered around a mountain peak: walls and battlements, exterior staircases and vaulted archways, plazas and gardens. The palace was in itself the size of a small
city: probably the whole population of Fielding would fit in just one of its outbuildings.

Thinking of Fielding made Dea feel dizzy all over again. How was it possible that any of this was real? And yet . . . standing here with the sun warm on her neck and Aeri's shoulder touching hers, she knew it was. Now, it was
Fielding
that seemed like a dream.

They entered the palace through a narrow passageway guarded by monsters so hideous that Dea drew back, gasping. These monsters weren't men, not even a little: they were patchwork creatures of snout and teeth and scales, so ugly Dea couldn't stand to look at them.

“It's all right.” Aeri touched her lower back, and she felt a small burst of warmth there. “They won't hurt you. We're on the king's business.”

“I don't understand.” Dea was embarrassed to feel tears burning the back of her eyes. “Where does he get them? And what
are
they?”

Aeri shrugged. “He recruits them. Pulls them from the pits. From dreams,” he clarified, when Dea only shook her head. He was doing his best to seem casual, but Dea could tell he was just as tense as she was. She could see it in his jaw, in the way he kept withdrawing the pass from his pocket as if to verify it was still there. “They work for him as guards and soldiers. In exchange he gives them power and freedom. He gives them
life
.” He managed a small smile. “What else do monsters want?”

Monsters. A tiny shiver moved up Dea's spine. What did that say about the men with no faces? What did it
mean
? If all those pits in the desert were dreams, then what was this place? Could
the men with no faces be recruits in the king's army as well? Had the king somehow pulled them—extracted them—from Connor's dreams? Was that why Dea's mom had insisted on precautions for so many years—because they were being pursued?

But that didn't make any sense. Why would the king care about Dea?

Aeri was right. The guards left them alone, watching them silently with glitter-black or yellow eyes or eyes the raw pink of a new wound, as they moved into a small room with glass doors. Only when the room began to shoot upward, the view rapidly swallowed by a vision of sheer stone walls, did Dea realize that they'd entered an elevator.

“Are you okay?” Aeri said, as the elevator began to slow. It was the first time he'd expressed any concern for her. He was looking at her with the strangest expression—his mouth was all twisted up, as if he wanted to tell her something but was holding the words back by physical force.

Dea nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

The stone walls released them and they floated up through the floor into a beautiful, high-ceilinged atrium. Sunlight poured through enormous skylights set in the domed roof. Through them, Dea saw massive, swooping dark shapes that were not birds, but winged and catlike creatures. The room itself was inlaid with an intricate mosaic pattern made of marble, and decorated gilded columns that appeared to be made of molten gold. As Dea stepped out of the elevator behind Aeri, she felt her knees give momentarily and worried she might fall. Hundreds of those creatures, the king's monsters, were arrayed in a circle around the room, and a long line of people snaked toward a man
sitting on the raised central dais.

And yet somehow, despite the distance between them and the assembled crowd, the king's eyes went immediately to Dea. She got a sudden electric shock, as if someone had pinched the back of her neck. She didn't know what she'd been expecting, but after seeing all the monsters, she'd imagined the king must be a sort of monster himself. Instead he just looked tired. His hair was graying at the temples, his face just softening at the jawline. But he looked like anybody, like any teacher at school, like any father she might have seen in Fielding, loading his kids into an old minivan.

But of course, he wasn't. With a gesture so subtle Dea nearly missed it, he managed to convey that everyone else should be dismissed from the room. There was a burst of murmuring and protest from the crowd, quickly silenced when dozens of monsters came forward to herd everyone out through a set of double doors at the far end of the room. Dea wished desperately that all the monsters would leave, but half of them remained standing, watching her through faces half-melted, smiling with mouths studded with teeth.

She still hadn't moved. For a long time, she and the king stared at each other, and she willed herself not to faint or turn around and run.

When the king finally spoke, it was to Aeri. “All those years I was recruiting soldiers, and really I should have just sent a boy to do the work,” he said. Again, Dea was surprised by his voice, which was light, faintly sarcastic, full of humor. “Go on,” he said, inclining his head toward the double doors. “One of my men will see you get paid.”

Dea turned to Aeri as understanding opened like a hand in her chest, leaving her gasping. “Paid?” she repeated. Aeri wouldn't meet her eyes. At least he looked embarrassed. She turned back to the King. “Paid?” she said again. Her voice was loud in the room, rolling off the marble floors, but she didn't care. Anger made her feel careless. “He told me you'd have answers for me.”

The king laughed, a sound so rich and warm that Dea felt again uncertain. “You
are
the answer, Dea,” he said.

Dea took a step backward. Could she escape before she was caught? It was a desperate thought, stupid. She wouldn't make it even a step before the king's monsters pounced. “How do you know my name?” she asked, wishing her voice weren't trembling.

Next to her, Aeri sighed, with a helpless gesture toward the dais, the throne, and the man who sat in it. “Dea,” he said. “Meet your father.”