Dreamfire by Kit Alloway Page A

she was thinking. “This is complicated,” she said. “We can’t come out to the World because we have to protect the Dream from people who would want to manipulate it and use it for their own ends.”
    Whoa, Will thought.
    â€œBut that’s a different conversation,” Josh said before picking up where she’d left off. “Nightmares cause emotional turmoil in the Dream, which throws it out of balance with the World and Death. We monitor the balance between universes with this little thingy, which we call the trimidion.”
    She assembled the golden thingy. The pyramid balanced on a stand that stuck straight out of a flat base. Looking closely, Will made out tiny markings on the corners: an empty circle, a solid circle, and a spiral.
    â€œWhat are those?” he asked.
    â€œLabels, basically. The empty circle is the World. The solid circle is Death. The spiral is the Dream. When one of the universes is out of balance, that corner of the pyramid will hang closer to the stand.”
    The pyramid was, in fact, tilted so that the Dream’s corner hung lower than the other two. “That’s wild,” Will said. “This thing definitively doesn’t work on gravity.”
    â€œUm, no, it doesn’t. Each dream walker has one. It tells us how close we are to keeping the Dream in balance on a local level. If it’s hanging way too far, we all work extra shifts. If it’s about level, we can take a few nights off.”
    Will straightened up from examining the trimidion. “But why is Death always in perfect balance?”
    He realized too late that he probably shouldn’t have brought up death, that it was one of the topics Josh didn’t like to discuss, so he was surprised when she smiled enigmatically. “Nobody knows,” Josh said. “It’s a dream-theory mystery.”
    â€œDo you like mysteries?” he couldn’t resist asking, suspecting she didn’t.
    â€œNo,” she said. “But I do like solving them.”
    *   *   *
    After more than a week of learning dream theory and basic hand-to-hand combat techniques, Will went into his second nightmare with Josh.
    Will watched as Josh touched the looking stone in the archroom. Instantly, a vaporous image of a man with a bomb strapped to his chest appeared in the empty archway. Josh frowned at it, and another image took its place. She jumped from one dream to another as quickly as if she were changing TV stations with a remote.
    â€œWhen can I learn how to use the looking stone?” Will asked, and she glanced at him.
    â€œYou didn’t need any lessons last week.”
    â€œYou just put your hand on the stone? There isn’t any more to it?”
    â€œThere is for most people. But you must have some sort of knack for it. Believe me, if I’d known, I never would have let you near it.” She frowned, then lifted her hand from the looking stone. “There is one thing we should discuss before we go in, one of those mysteries of dream theory: Chyman’s Dilemma.”
    â€œChyman’s Dilemma,” Will repeated, trying to commit the name to memory. “Okay. What’s that?”
    â€œWhen we go through the archway into the Dream, the archway sort of … keeps track of us. It’s called ligamus . If we were in-Dream and Deloise walked into the archroom, she’d be able to see us in the Veil, and she’d be able to jump in and help. When we resolve a nightmare, we always come out the same archway we went into because of ligamus . But sometimes we don’t manage to resolve a nightmare, and it ends on its own because the dreamer wakes up or starts having a different dream or whatever. In that case, the Dream shifts and dumps us in some other nightmare.”
    â€œYou can’t just open an exit before the Dream shifts?” Will asked. He didn’t like the idea of being randomly dumped into a