“Yeah, but there must be hundreds . . .”
I looked up at her. “You have somewhere to be?”
She looked pointedly at her watch. But though it felt like an eternity had passed since we’d snuck through the main gate, apparently, in real time, it wasn’t that long. When Rita saw that we still had plenty of time, she sighed and nodded.
I turned back to the fetters. “Why don’t I go through these to see if Morgana’s symbol matches anything, while you check out the rest of the place? ’Cause we don’t know for a fact that what she’s looking for is in here.” Anything that keeps you from looming over me like a vulture while I search for Dreamwalker artifacts. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Her mouth tightened, but my suggestion was perfectly reasonable, so she moved off to explore the rest of the facility. Which left me alone to flip through the metal plates one by one, looking for any markings that might indicate whose fetters they were. There were several lines of information inscribed on each plate, but aside from a date at the top, it was all rendered in mysterious codes. It soon became clear that nothing like Morgana’s mandala design was going to be found here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other things I could search for. The fetters were arranged chronologically, so I started looking for ones that had been made while the coma boy was still alive. If I was right about his being the presence the Seers had sensed, then those were the fetters I needed to see.
“Any luck?” Rita whispered loudly from across the room.
I shook my head. “Nothing yet.”
I finally found fetters from the right time frame, but they looked no different than any of the others. Clearly this method of searching was not going to help me. With a sigh I leaned back on my heels and tried to think of a new angle. The fetters were supposed to have mental energy bound to them. So if the boy’s energy contained a hint of the Dreamwalker Gift, could that be used to identify it? It was worth a try. Risky as hell, since the kid had been a basket case when the fetter was made, but worth a try.
Drawing in a deep breath, I laid my hand on the first fetter and thought: C’mon, fetter, do your stuff. Let’s see what you’ve got. Dr. Tilford had said that the glow lamp required both touch and intent to operate, so I offered it both. Do something.
Nothing happened.
I tried a few more fetters, and it soon became clear that a general invocation was not going to trigger any of them. Which actually made my search much easier. If each fetter responded to a specific type of command, I wasn’t going to set any of them off accidentally.
Drawing in a deep breath, I spread my hands out over the fetters so that my skin would make contact with as many of the fetters as possible. I had to lean forward to use my forearms as well, but once I did that I was able to make contact with the fetters in two of the boxes, all at once.
Give me your dreams, I thought. My command wasn’t in words this time; rather, I was calling to the fettered energy with my own Gift: soul to soul. I was willing it to respond to me, to commune with me, to reveal its true nature to me . . . whatever that turned out to be.
Still nothing happened.
Muttering a curse in frustration, I moved into position to test the next batch. Maybe this whole trip was a fool’s errand. Maybe experimental fetters couldn’t be activated by just anyone. Maybe you needed the Weaver’s Gift to do it, otherwise they would just stay inert strips of metal.
Steady, girl. Keep it together.
Carefully I laid my arms and hands across the next two rows of fetters, shut my eyes, and tried to summon whatever residual bit of dream-power one of them might contain.
The castle is tall beyond measure, and shadowy figures can be glimpsed through its windows, each one of which reveals a different time and place. . . .
The tower looms overheard, the signatures of thousands of travelers spiraling around it, leading the eye upward, upward. . . .
The mausoleum is vast, grey and cold. So cold! Tier after tier of stone crypts stack up into the windswept sky, a plaque on each one identifying its occupant. The names are all different, but the same word is carved beneath each name, in identical letters: Dreamwalker. . . .
With a gasp I fell back from the fetters, the image of the Dreamwalker tomb seared into my brain. Was that the same shape-changing structure I had seen in the avatar’s dream? If so, it had taken on a pretty dark aspect this time.
“Jesse!” Rita’s voice was a hiss. “You okay?”
“Uh . . . I cut myself,” I muttered. I shook my hand and sucked at a fingertip, to lend the fiction weight. “These things have sharp edges.”
I waited until Rita had turned her attention back to her search before reaching out to touch the fetters again. Slowly I ran my fingers down the first row of plates, touching them one by one, attempting to summon back the vision that I had experienced so briefly. And I tried to lock my body in a rigid position, because I knew that if I moved suddenly or made a suspicious sound when I found the thing, Rita would be on me in a heartbeat. And this time she’d want more than a lame story about a non-existent wound.
Fetter by fetter, my fingertips slowly caressed the stack, and I fixed the position of each one in my mind so that I would not forget which I was in contact with when—
Color bleeds from the sky, from the trees, from the ground. The world is dissolving into thick black muck, and it traps his legs like quicksand so he cannot run, he cannot run! Darkness rushes down from the sky as he struggles to envision the pattern he needs to escape this world, the maps that will open a gateway for him. Desperately he sketches out its shape in his mind’s eye, but it’s not coming out right, the darkness is skewing his brain, it’s not good enough! So he tries another—and another and another and another—and the patterns start overlapping, details running into one another until all he can see is a vast mandala that contains all the patterns he needs, but gives access to none. Then the darkness closes in on him and he hears himself screaming, because he senses what it can do. The taste of death fills his nose and mouth as memories start to rush out of him, every thought and hope and fear and love that he ever knew, sucked out of him into the void and devoured until there is nothing left . . .
Suddenly the images were gone. Maybe I banished them. Maybe when you saw a vision so horrifying that your soul begged for it to end, the fetter interpreted that as an “off” switch. Or maybe there was nothing left to be seen. Maybe the boy’s emanations ended when the dream-wraith devoured his soul, and that was why he became catatonic. His body had gone on living, but his soul was dead.
Tears threatened to come to my eyes as I removed the dream fetter from the box, keeping my movements as small as possible so that Rita wouldn’t notice what I was doing. No one but a Dreamwalker should possess such a fetter. I would take it home with me, and I would explore its mysteries, and maybe learn more about the strange castle which seemed to have such significance to my kind. And I would mourn this boy who had slipped through the Seer’s net because they thought his Gift was not strong enough to manifest, who had left me this precious inheritance.
Suddenly my reverie was broken by what was, in our current context, a truly terrifying sound: a key turning in the lock.
“Shit!” Rita muttered.
Desperately we both looked around for cover. The room’s interior door was too far away for us to get to it in time, and there were few hiding places nearby. Rita flattened herself against the wall behind a filing cabinet, scrunching down a bit to make sure her head couldn’t be seen from the front door, but as soon as someone walked past the filing cabinet she’d be in plain view. I dove for cover under the desk, then realized that I’d left the safe door open, so I nudged it closed with my foot even as the doorknob began to turn. I tried to fit myself completely under the desk, but the space was too shallow for that, and my legs were stuck out the back. Like Rita, I would be vulnerable to discovery as soon as someone wal
ked past my hiding place.
Things were not looking good.
Heart pounding, I peered under the desk’s lower edge to see who entered. My view was limited to six inches above the floor, and all I could see was that the newcomer was wearing black shoes—nicely polished but with mud on them—and blue uniform pants. A guard, most likely. But why was he here? The guards didn’t enter this building as part of their regular rounds. Our whole operation centered around that premise. Had someone seen us cross the compound, or heard us moving around inside the lab?
It could be my fault, I realized. I’d spent half the night crafting dreams for the head Weaver, in which her precious lab was threatened with destruction. She might well have felt uneasy when she woke up, and asked her guards to check in here, just to be safe. If so, it was a frightening lesson in the consequences of screwing with someone’s dreams. If I survived this, I should learn from it.
The feet had stopped moving, and just in time; two more steps and he would have passed Rita’s hiding place. Thank God I’d thought to close the safe. I glanced back at it—and froze. Morgana’s mandala drawing was lying on the floor beside it, in plain view. In my panic I’d forgotten about it.
I slid the dream fetter into my back pocket as I waited to see if the guard would come any closer, and I took out my knife, though I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to use it on him. This wasn’t some creepy servant of the undead, a monster who had helped kidnap my brother, maim my mother, and destroy the house I’d grown up in. This was just some working class guy trying to earn a living, at a low wage job in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Rita could stab somebody like that, but I didn’t think that I could.
Maybe he wouldn’t notice the paper. Maybe he’d just make a cursory check of the premises and leave without ever seeing us.
A beam of bluish light swept across the floor. It worked its way around the room, then stopped when it hit the safe. And paused there. It was centered on Morgana’s drawing.
Shit.
The guard began to move forward—and then suddenly there was a sickening thud and he fell to his knees, stunned. As I scrambled out from under the desk I saw Rita cast aside the metal lamp she’d struck him with, and lunge for the back of his neck. She didn’t have her knife out, so I wasn’t sure what she meant to do. Tear his throat out with her teeth? My own preference would have been to try to talk our way out of this situation, but that option was off the table now, so I rushed in to help.
Rita was a small girl, no match for the guard’s six feet of beefy weight, but she was quick on her feet, and her surprise attack had gained her a few seconds to act. The guard was still struggling to get his bearings when she grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arm around his throat in a chokehold that pressed in on his windpipe, cutting off his air supply. That woke him out of his daze pretty fast. He reached up to try to break her grip, but she was squeezing so tightly he couldn’t pry her loose.
Suddenly he lurched backward, slamming Rita into the filing cabinet with a crash. She held on tight, so he tried it again, pounding her back against the thing as hard as he could. But he was rapidly losing strength, and as I ran to help her, he collapsed to his knees. I saw him fumbling for the nightstick he’d dropped when Rita first attacked, and I tried to kick it out of the way. But he was faster than I was and he grabbed it first. The next thing I knew the heavy black rod slammed into my side with stunning force. Pain shot through my ribs, and then I was on the floor, struggling to get my bearings. He resumed his assault on Rita, so I stumbled to my feet and tried to help her, but it was no longer necessary. Lack of blood and air had drained him of strength, and even as I watched, his struggles ceased, and he closed his eyes and slumped down to the floor. Rita still held on.
“It’s done,” I gasped. “Don’t kill him.”
She didn’t let go. Her expression was cold.
“Don’t kill him,” I ordered.
Muttering a curse under her breath, she let go of him. I went to shut the front door and set the lock. If someone came to investigate what all the noise was about, it would buy us a moment’s time.
“You okay?” I asked Rita.
“Yeah. You?”
The pain in my side was sharp but not unbearable. My ribs were bruised, but probably not broken. “I think so.”
She looked around the room, exhaling sharply in exasperation. “What now?”
Our original plan had been to set fire to the place, then exit out the back window and use the drainage ditch to get away. But we couldn’t lower the guard’s six foot body out that window. And I wasn’t going to leave him here to burn to death.
For a moment we just stood there, looking around at the body, the safe, the door, and not saying anything. Time was running out.
“You go out the back,” I said. “I’ll drag him out the front.”
She blinked. “Say what?”
There were voices outside now, coming our way. Clearly our struggle had been heard, and people were trying to figure out which building the noise had come from. Any minute now they would test our door.
“I’ll make a show of rescuing one of their people,” I said. “My back will be to most of them, and the others will be paying attention to the fire, not me—”
“Jeez, are you crazy? You can’t just walk out there—”
“So what the hell do you suggest we do?” I demanded. “We can’t get his body out through the back window, and I’m certainly not going to leave him here to burn. We need that fire to cover our exit, which means we need to get him out of here. Do you know another way? Because if you do, I’m listening.”
She stared at me for a moment. “You’ve got balls, girl.”
“No,” I said sharply. “What I’ve got is no other choice. Now, get the damn fire started while I drag this guy’s body over to the door.”
I checked his neck first to make sure there was a pulse. There was. Then I started to drag him across the floor, positioning him right in front of the door. It would have been easier if Rita had been helping me, but we needed to get our diversion started, fast. She was grabbing up handfuls of paper from the filing cabinet and cast them across the floor, creating a line of flammable refuse that stretched across the room. If we’d been able to follow our original plan to set the fire in secret, it could have grown to strength before anyone even realized what was going on. But any minute now someone could walk in the door, ready to beat out a small fire. So it had to spread fast.
“Here.” I pulled the guard’s keys from his belt and threw them to Rita. “Get the kids out of the compound if you can. If not, at least get yourself out.”
For a moment she looked like she was about to argue with me, then she just shook her head grimly and pulled out her lighter. Kneeling down, she set fire to the paper in one spot, then another. As the flames began to spread she grabbed up Morgana’s drawing and started to back away. It startled me at first that she would save the thing, then I realized she had no clue we had already found what we came for.
The fires spread quickly, joining together to separate us. There was no denying the bone-deep, visceral dread I felt at the sight of it, as memories of my own house in flames flooded my mind. I had to fight to stay focused on the present moment. “Good luck,” I heard her say, and then she disappeared into the back of the house.
Muttering a prayer under my breath, I pulled the front door open. There were people right outside, all of whom turned to look at me. Heart pounding, I took hold of the guard’s arms and began to drag him through the door, my back to the crowd outside. “He’s hurt!” I yelled. “Someone help me!” The panic in my voice wasn’t feigned, and within seconds people were at my side, helping me drag the man out of the building. Flames were now visible through the doorway, and I could hear frightened voices coming from every direction. “What’s happening?” “Oh my God!” “The lab’s burning!” Then the alarm sounded. It was much loud
er in real life than in the Weaver’s dream, and it made my head ring. “The fetters!” someone yelled. “Save the fetters!” To say that nobody was paying attention to me was an understatement.
Once we were clear of the doorway, two sturdy men leaned down to pick up the guard and carry him away. I stayed with the body, pretending to help, using it to shield myself from view. The crowd parted for us, and soon we were past the frightened throng and rushing across open ground. The next few minutes were so wild—and so terrifying—that I lost any sense of where I was in the compound. But then I saw the stand of trees nearby, and I figured that was as good a place as any to make my exit. As we passed by it I broke off from my group, and headed toward the shadows of the tree. No one noticed. No one cared. The men carrying the body were focused on pulling their comrade to safety, and behind us fire was pouring out the doors and windows of the lab, and people were rushing around trying to deal with it. In the chaos that now filled the compound, I was a mere shadow.
I ducked behind the trunk of a massive forked oak and leaned back against it for a moment, trying to catch my breath. People were shouting, water was splashing, and I could hear the spurt of what must be fire extinguishers. Whatever they were doing to fight the fire must not be working very well, because the compound was filled with blazing light, and I could feel the radiant heat of it even from where I stood.
Fetters would melt. Lab notes would burn. Test tubes would shatter. The whole damn place with its history of torture would soon be nothing but ash, like my home was ash. The image was deeply and primitively satisfying.
A hand fell on my shoulder; I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Easy,” Rita whispered. “Just me.”
The rush of relief I felt to have her there was undeniable. “Did you get the kids out?”
“Couldn’t. Take a look.” She pointed toward the center of the compound.