Kaylie grinned.
Nick picked up one of the blue binders on the guards’ desk and began to flip through it. “Kara’s private quarters are at the top,” he whispered. “There are an awful lot of executive suites. But which one?”
Kaylie scanned the binder. “I don’t think any of those,” she said. “At least not yet. I think this is what we want.” She pointed to Research and Development.
Nick nodded, and they headed for the elevator. Once inside, Kaylie opened the reality door and stepped back into the false world. Nick did the same and hit the button for the correct floor. It was a long, long way down.
DREAMTREADER CREED, CONCEPTUS 14
At this advanced point in your studies, you no doubt have questions, more intelligent questions than you ever could have asked prior to your calling to Dreamtread.
And while it is true that you are ready to ask these higher questions, it is not true you are ready for all of the answers. There is, however, something of a historical fact of which you must now learn. There is a reason the first Nightmare Lord came into being.
For many ages, the Waking World slept in peace with no fear for darkness intruding upon its slumber. But mankind was not content with that which was provided. Man strove for more and got precisely what he asked for.
And this is the Tragedy of the Ages.
Dreamtreader, you must not look in disdain at this tragedy . . . as if to ask, “Why, oh, why did mankind commit an act of such tragic foolishness?” Had you lived in the beginning and had you faced the same situations and choices, you likely would have committed the same . . . or worse. And do not think yourself safe now either.
That same temptation exists for you now. You have been provided with amazing powers. You have been granted access to a world that others of your kind quite literally can only dream about. Be content. Do not reach above your station. Do not pine away for more than you have been given. And do not plot to take more than you are allowed. There is an order to things, and if you violate that order, you will either provide a tool for our enemy to use, or you will become the enemy.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE VERDICT
THE COURTROOM WENT SILENT AS ARCHER’S CLOSING words hung in the air for several moments. The jurors on both sides had shifted their scrutiny to the hooded prosecutor. Nobody dared speak. Well, almost nobody.
“Ridiculous!” Bezeal cried out to the courtroom. “I am not on trial here.”
“Perhaps you should be,” Chief Justice Michael quipped. “I find it a great and terrible irony that you have brought charges against Archer Keaton’s actions when you yourself have acted to influence most of those actions! Think that you are as clever as to deceive even me? You have cast a dark cloud over Archer’s mind, but you have not deceived me. Yes, oh yes, I think I know who you are. And given the notes I have in your file here, I have become even more certain of my guess.”
The merchant seemed to shrink a size. “You have a file on Bezeal?” he asked meekly.
“We have files on everyone. And for reasons I cannot reveal here or begin to understand, you are not to be imprisoned. Be glad that—for now—my hands are tied where you are concerned. Otherwise, Bezeal, to put it in terms Archer might appreciate: I would open up a galactic-sized can of whoop-your-behind!”
Bezeal did not respond directly. In fact, he seemed deep in some conversation with himself. The court had become so entranced and silent that all could hear the merchant’s words. “Misbegotten fool that I am, I should have just delayed the trial! I should have taken the time to gather the evidence. You wanted to put him away for good, but all you needed was six days. Now, you’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined everything!”
“Enough!” the judge roared. “You will not make a mockery of my court any longer. Bailiff, toss this miscreant out on his ear.”
The bailiff and a few armed guards moved toward Bezeal. The merchant shrieked. His eyes turned blood-red and tripled in size. He held up his sickly green hands. Red flames rose up and encircled him. The entire courtroom trembled. The chandeliers swayed overhead and went out.
That foreign, otherworldly voice rang out. “Guilty! You are all guilty! And I will render sentence upon you all!”
The flames intensified. There came a sharp crackling, and the floor beneath Bezeal’s feet dropped away, and, in a split second, he was gone.
Archer raced the bailiff to the scene and peered over the edge of the smoldering hole in the courtroom floor. He gasped. There was no sign of Bezeal, but a snaking tunnel, painted with rings of fire, plunged downward and away. Archer couldn’t see the bottom . . . nor did he wish to.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the judge announced, “you are all bound by what we have seen here. And much will be made of it . . . at the highest levels. But for the purposes of this case and this trial, I declare this a travesty!”
The crowd cheered, but Archer had no idea what the judge meant. “Sir,” he asked, “what is a travesty?”
“In your vernacular, it means, I have declared a mistrial. Archer, you are free to go. Please, return to the Waking World, rejoin your comrades, and put a stop to the anarchy occurring there now.”
“I will, sir,” Archer replied. “Thank you.”
“But before you go, Dreamtreader,” the Chief Justice said, “I have for you two warnings. The first is to beware of yourself.”
“Sir?”
“The accusations Bezeal brought against you were inflamed, some of them coerced even. But you are not guiltless in all this. When you place your desires above your Dreamtreading duties—and orders—you are begging for tragedy. And should this court see you accused once more, I fear the verdict would not remain so sympathetic. Do you understand me, Dreamtreader?”
Archer nodded vigorously. “I understand, sir. Loud and clear. And the other warning?”
Michael the Archelion’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Beware of Bezeal. He will not give up.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Archer replied. “Neither will I.”
TWENTY-NINE
UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
NICK AND KAYLIE HUNG BACK WHEN THE ELEVATOR OPENED to Research and Development at last, more than six hundred feet below the surface. A pair of guards was waiting, of course, but when no one came out, the guards went to investigate. The two Dreamtreaders waited until the guards inevitably looked inside. Nick dropped the first one with a quick boomerang blow to the back of the head, and then dragged him inside the elevator. When he turned to inspect the opposite side of the elevator, he found the other guard sitting cross-legged, wide-awake, and with the goofiest look on his face Nick had ever seen.
Nick whispered, “What did you do to him?”
Kaylie shrugged. “I happified him.”
“Glad you’re on my team, mate.” Nick shook his head and slid outside.
Before Kaylie followed, she quickly hit each and every button inside the elevator. “I love doing that,” she said.
Research and Development was a world of brushed steel. There were massive curving pipes overhead, spider webs of cables running up the weight-bearing pillars and shrouded in the eaves, and approximately every ten feet was an immense bank of winking and blinking fiber-optic servers.
Nick and Kaylie slid in and out of corridors, ducked around corners to avoid the lab-coated scientists who seemed to roam everywhere, and came at last to a pair of pressure-sealed, smoked glass doors. There were four guards there: two seated at matching computer stations across from each other and one on either side of the doors. All were dressed in spotless white uniforms and wore a strange silvery sidearm.
Kaylie ripped a door into reality and passed inside, with Nick right behind her. When Kaylie sealed the false reality behind them, she bent over at the waist. “Just a second,” she whispered, breathing heavily. “Doing that takes a ton . . . of will.”
“I don’t think there’s any other way,” Nick said. “For this part, anyways. Sealed up tight. At least the Rift helps us recharge, eh?”
&
nbsp; They waited in silence until Kaylie finally sighed. “I’m good.” They walked right past the two seated guards, who didn’t stir an inch. Neither did the two guards at the doors. Nick reached for the brushed metal handle on the door and pulled, but nothing moved.
“I don’t think I can hide us for much longer,” Kaylie whispered, sweat trickling down her forehead. “Hurry.”
Nick tried the other handle, but the door was shut tight. He looked right and left. Just past the guard to the right, there was a keypad and some kind of optical scanner. “Hmm,” Nick whispered. He snagged the ID badge from the guard and swiped it across the scanner. There was a hiss of air, the doors parted, and the two Dreamtreaders slipped inside. “That was just in time,” Kaylie whispered. She peeled open the reality door, and they rushed beyond its threshold. Kaylie swayed a little.
Nick picked her up and carried her behind a bank of servers. “You going to be okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” she said, clutching Patches. “I think so . . . it’s exhausting.” The lab they’d stepped into was flush with noise: muted buzzing, regularly spaced tones, and a warbling beep that sounded like an alarm clock going off underwater. On top of all that, there was a constant pressurized hissing sound.
Nick leaned around the bank of servers to get a better look. Through a panel of crisscrossed wires, he saw what appeared to be a kind of command station. It was composed of wide rectangular tables arranged like the top half of an octagon, and upon those were strange pyramid-shaped white pods—each with a single, blinking red light and at least a dozen large flat screens. “We’ve got to get a better look,” Nick whispered.
“Let’s go up,” Kaylie replied. She flexed a little of her will and began to rise.
Nick followed suit and said, “Oh, I see. That’s genius, Kaylie.”
Kaylie winked. The ceiling was an absolute labyrinth of pipes, cables, cords, filters, and scaffolding amidst the computer monitors. They found crevices to fit into and, though they trusted none of it to support their weight, they could hold themselves there by force of will.
“My view is blocked here,” Kaylie whispered. “What do you see?”
“I dunno what I’m lookin’ at,” he said. “There’s a wicked strange series of graphics on one screen. Trying to make out the data here. It looks like 1900 MHz in one corner of the screen, but then a series of different colored bars are moving up and down like a stereo equalizer.”
“Are there any numbers beneath the colored bars?” Kaylie asked.
“Dooley, there are!” he replied. “Beneath each bar is the word cell followed by a number. One is 65°; the next 92°; and the next 37°. Temperature? Is Dream Inc. monitoring climate for some reason?”
“Possibly,” she replied. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, but the rest of the screen makes even less sense . . . to me anyway. I see some abbreviations: MHz, GHz, and Rf quotients, whatever those are. Still, I’ll wager it’s important to Dream Inc.”
“I’d better look,” Kaylie said. “Let’s switch.” Like astronauts in zero gravity, the two Dreamtreaders floated out of hiding but only as long as it took to exchange spots.
“Much better,” Kaylie said. She saw all the numbers, graphs, and figures Nick had described but instantly became spellbound by a graphic representation of the earth. She’d seen the type before. There was the globe and a pulsing line plunged north to south, showing the spin axis, and springing out east and west from that were concentric circles of differing colors. These circles, she knew, were magnetic field lines, estimates based on the earth’s rotation.
What Kaylie didn’t understand was why there was a second throbbing line forming a perfect cross through the center of the earth. It was as if there was a second axis. Another entirely different set of magnetic field lines extended out from this horizontal pivot, these circles radiating outward to the north and south. Strange, blinking pulses showed up intermittently as the graphical globe rotated to show North America. It reminded Kaylie of a deep-sea submarine’s sonar making contact. At that moment, another little blip showed up in the northeastern United States.
Next to that display was another, but this one was filled with a single, bright, white point that bounced and danced across the screen, much like the pulse of a heartbeat monitor. Beneath the ever-gliding blip was a numerical interface. It read 138.42.15.07, but it was counting down.
Some of this began to crystallize in Kaylie’s mind. “Nick,” she whispered. “I think we’d better go.”
He hovered over to join her by a huge duct. “I don’t understand any of that,” he said.
“I think I do,” she said. “And it’s not good. We need to get back. We need to talk to Master Gabriel again.”
They left the same way they’d come in, and once more Kaylie was nearly tapped of her will. Nick had to carry her back around the corner to the elevator.
“I can stand,” she said, and he put her down gently.
Nick hit the elevator button, and they waited for what seemed like an eternity. “You had to hit all the buttons,” he said, “didn’t you?”
“Yeah, sorry,” she replied. “Not my best plan.”
When the elevator doors finally parted, the guards were gone. In their place stood two people: Rigby Thames and his uncle, Doc Scoville.
THIRTY
DARK NEWS
KARA WINDCHIL LOVED SEEING THE MOON’S LIGHT reflecting off Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. She lay atop her California king bed and stared through the crystal-clear glass of her penthouse window. The way the lunar gold shimmered on the dark water was entrancing.
Something glimmered in the sky to the west. Kara turned, shifting on the bed just in time to watch the light dust tail of a shooting star fade in the dark canopy of night. Ha,she thought, I made that.It had been a simple thing, really. Just a few lines of code and voila! Twenty percent more comets visible in the western hemisphere. Next month, she planned to give northern lights to North America. It made sense.
She flipped over onto her back and sighed, happily marveling at just how far she had come in the last few years, particularly the last. It had been close at times, but she’d managed to stay one step ahead of them all: Doc Scoville, the Nightmare Lord, Rigby, Archer, and all of the other Dreamtreaders.
Kara bounced off of the bed and strode toward her double-wide closet with mirrored doors. She watched herself twirl, and in the first spin she wore the stardust white dress, the same one she’d worn when she danced with the Nightmare Lord in the sky. With another whirl, she became adorned with the gray cloak she’d always clothed herself in for visits to the Inner Sanctum of Garnet Province. There, she’d learned so many interesting things. Thinking they were assisting a Dreamtreading Master, the Sages had been ever so helpful.
She reversed course and spun back toward her bed, clothing herself in what had become one of her very favorite visages: the bold, rose-red dress of Lady Kasia. “Oh, Archer Keaton,” she purred, “you are so very gallant. But you simply must stay for tea.” Archer had bought the act—hook, line, and sinker. That silly Nick Bushman had as well.
Just before passing the last mirror panel, she changed into the garb of the Wind Maiden, a spectral gown created from long, flowing translucent petals, each one moving as if from a different breeze. Kara had loved that role.
As she flew to the bed, she changed into an oversized hooded sweatshirt and comfortable jeans. She landed softly on the bed and reminded herself that none of her roles were gone. She could be those and any other she wished now. The world was better with her in charge and so much more interesting.
“Wait,” she said to her reflection. “You’re doing it again.” She shook her head. “I . . . I am doing it again.” Gloating, mocking, reveling in her superiority to them all—her stomach turned. But maybe,she thought, maybe it’s not so bad.
The thought had hardly left her mind when Kara heard muttering from the hall that led to her private elevator. The voice stopped, but she heard the familiar swish of
small feet on the carpet. Bezeal entered the room, his cloak fluttering like the gossamer pectoral fin of a sea skate ghosting across the ocean floor. The merchant paused in the middle, his beady eyes glimmering, but it was a cold glimmer, like ice on steel.
“I’m glad you’ve come back,” Kara said. When she sat up on the bed, she was again dressed in an exquisitely tailored business suit. “We need to talk.”
“I am here to listen, Kara, my friend. Here with my cunning mind to lend. Here for you . . . until the end.”
“Rigby Thames is dead.”
Bezeal’s eyes glinted, grew a size, and then shrank again. He did not smile. “Are you certain?” he asked, a tremble in his voice.
“Of course, I’m certain,” she said, a little off-balance from Bezeal’s lack of rhyme. “He’s dead, so I can’t ask him about the Veil.”
Bezeal turned away from her and ventured slowly toward the window. He seemed to shake a moment. Then he grew still and said, “There is another we could query about the Veil. One of greater knowledge we can assail. Fear not, my lady, your plan won’t fail.”
“Scoville,” she muttered. “I thought about that, and I’ve taken measures to make certain he doesn’t discover his nephew has died. If we can just get past this . . . this boundary, it won’t matter anyway. Speaking of which, how’s the court case going? You’re sticking it to Keaton, I hope.”
Bezeal did not reply at first.
Kara took a deep breath. “Bezeal?” Kara whispered. “Is it done? Is Keaton out of the way?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Well, Bezeal?” she asked. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
“Archelion, so high and mighty,” he muttered, “clings to his justice ever so tightly, and dealt with Bezeal most unkindly.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, her voice taking a hard edge. “Stop with the riddles. What’s going on?”
“My lady,” he said. “My queen, alas, I bear news of the terribly obscene. The high court was not high, only mean.”