Waking in Dreamland by Jody Lynne Nye

job, making him dizzy while standing in one place. Roan had to pit every erg of strength he had, every degree of concentration that he could muster to keep his reality his way. Hidden in the cloud Brom could alter small details, and he wouldn’t be able to tell.
    The tall figure in gray-blue and white tilted his head, and the other, more indistinct figures started closer to him. Alarmed, Roan stopped moving his feet, and allowed the sand to whip him around and around. The scientists must not be allowed to touch. As if seen in a magic-lantern show, Brom’s people started to move jerkily toward one another. Roan built with the tools to hand, forming walls out of the sand around each apprentice, willing the panels to transparent, stonelike impermeability. The figures stopped, feeling the confines of their prisons. He heard voices muffled by the roar of the wind, and Brom’s shouting over all.
    The tall figure turned away from him to feel the translucent walls with the palm of his hands, making him look rather like a pantomime artist. Roan had left no way out of the prison. Brom threw a gesture over his shoulder at Roan. With a backward glance of disgust, Brom had to let go of the influence he was using to break out of Roan’s. The King’s Investigator stopped spinning so abruptly that he stumbled a few paces and dropped to one knee in the sand, but he kept his concentration fixed on making the walls stay. He had to hold the others in place long enough for help to arrive. How long? he thought. Bergold, where are you?
    The apprentices tried to climb out of their prisons, and Roan saw hands waving out of the top of cells where the ground was too soft to give them a foot up. He made the glass slipperier, and they fell back in.
    “When?” Brom shouted out loud. Roan started. The question was not meant for him. One of the male assistants stopped trying to escape from his prison. He yanked out a gold pocketwatch and opened it.
    “Not yet, sir!”
    “Wait for it, then!” Brom said. He put his hands together and dissolved the glass walls with a burst of power. The cylinders crumbled, and the apprentices ran toward one another through the shards raining down upon them.
    Roan forced the unwilling grains to fountain up and mold back into shape around each of the apprentices. As long as his strength held, the crucible couldn’t reform.
    He thanked the fate that left him in an immutable body. The chief scientist checked again and again as he almost threw whammies on Roan, then diverted at the last moment to blast Roan’s surroundings. Most of the time, he simply tried to knock the ground out from under him. Roan was staggeringly dizzy from his spin, but he couldn’t let the feelings of nausea stop him. He rolled when the dunes disappeared from under him, or braced himself when they grew to tower height. He might not have had an adaptable body, but he had a highly developed sense of self-preservation.
    Come on, Bergold! he thought desperately. Hurry up!
    A dark shadow at his feet made him look up suddenly. He rolled out of the way just in time as a ten-ton weight crashed down into the sand exactly where he had been standing.
    Brom seemed to make use of his hand gesture to focus his mental powers. Roan made the glass walls turn into a ribbon of glass that wound around and put a squeeze on him, pinning his arms to his side.
    The scientist with the pocket watch shouted, without looking up, “Sir! One of them’s coming . . . now!”
    Roan wanted to know what “them” was, but he didn’t dare break his concentration to look around. Did the little device indicate the arrival of Bergold and the others?
    Suddenly, he was surrounded by a crowd of men in white shirts, and black trousers and shoes, and gaudy ties, shouting into small rectangular black boxes held to their heads.
    “Sell IBM! No, buy! Sell, sell, sell! Buy IBM! Buy AT&T! No, sell!”
    A nuisance! These random neural storms were the product of odd bits of active influence