Wai-Mae’s expression was quizzical. “What’s an automobile?”
Ling shut her eyes, took a deep breath. “Never mind.” She started back toward the forest. “Henry! Henry!”
“Here we can change things,” Wai-Mae said, catching up. “It isn’t like other dreams. Here, I’ll show you.”
Ling stopped and folded her arms across her chest, defiant.
“Think of something you want,” Wai-Mae said. “Something small.”
I want my legs back, Ling thought. I want to walk without braces, without people staring at me in pity or fear. I want to wake up without pain.
Ling swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat. “Fine. Shoes. I want a pair of beautiful shoes.”
“Very well,” Wai-Mae said, pleased. She reached down and scooped up a rock, and her hand dropped as if the rock had real weight.
“How did—”
“Shhh. Watch.” Wai-Mae shut her eyes. Her mouth went tight with concentration. She moved her hands over the rock, skilled as a magician with a well-worn trick, and as Ling watched, astonished, the rock shifted beneath Wai-Mae’s hands, no longer solid but something between states, a moment of becoming, observed. Wai-Mae’s edges blurred as well, as if she and the rock were joined in this alchemy. The rock wavered for a moment more, and then it was gone. In its place lay a pair of elegant embroidered Chinese slippers.
Ling ran her thumb across the raised thread at the tips of the shoes and felt just the tiniest static, some lingering charge. “How… how did you do that?”
Wai-Mae wiped sweat from her brow. “It’s this world. Our dream-walker energy is like magic here.”
“Not magic,” Ling murmured. Her mind whirred: She knew the dream world was not the real world, and yet, as fantastical as it all was, she’d never been able to change or create anything within it. This seemed unbelievable—as if Wai-Mae had altered the atomic structure of the dream landscape somehow.
“This place makes whatever you dream come true. It makes me very tired, though.” Wai-Mae trembled, breathing heavily. For the first time, her mouth wasn’t running amok. “Come back tomorrow night, and I will show you how to do it, too.”
“But how do I come back?”
“Take the train from the old station, of course. Just as you did tonight,” Wai-Mae assured her, grinning. “We will be friends, you and I. I will show you how to change dreams. And you…” Wai-Mae twisted her mouth to the side and looked up to the trees, thinking. “You will tell me stories of your New York City so that I will know it when I get there. So that I will not feel like such a stranger.”
Ling couldn’t stop staring at the slippers. “Tomorrow night,” she said.
The first sharp ring of Ling’s alarm clock roared across the dreamscape. Her body grew heavier, a signal that she had begun her ascent into the waking world.
“Till tomorrow, Little Warrior!” Wai-Mae called.
Tomorrow, Ling thought, and like the flapping wings of a dove, the night whitened and twitched, then blurred into a great cottony nothingness.
At the first peal of the alarm, Gaspard barked furiously.