A boy in short pants tossed newspapers from a bag slung over his shoulder. One landed near the porch of a pale brick foursquare—the Zenith Caller. Zenith, Ohio. That was Evie’s hometown. He was inside Evie’s dream, then. The door of the house creaked open. Henry went inside. Filmy Irish lace curtains sucked in through the open windows on a breeze. A fan whirred on a table blowing across a bowl of melting ice. Summer. A small, fair-haired woman rocked in a corner, hemming the edges of an American flag, which pooled on the floor in mounds.
The creak of the rocker, the gentle whine of the fan’s blades, and the hazy sun were hypnotic. Henry felt as if he could stay in this dream forever. A girl in a ruffled pinafore, her hair done up in a large blue bow, jumped out from behind the wall of the dining room. “Find me!” she said, and ran, and Henry knew beyond a doubt that it was Evie as a child. The same mischievous glint in her blue eyes. The white of her pinafore bled into the sunshine streaking through the tall windows, blurring her as she slipped out the side porch door. Henry ran after. In the kitchen, a much younger Will jotted down notes without looking up. The eye-and-lightning-bolt symbol shimmered on the notebook’s cover.
Henry pushed through the side door.
The house had gone now. He was in a forest. Snow dusted the ground. There was a clear lake, a hawk soaring above it. A circle of chairs sat on the pine-needle floor of the clearing. There were boys in uniform, sitting stiff-backed, hands on their knees, waiting—for what, Henry did not know. On a tree stump, a Victrola played an old war song. Through the dense trees, Henry caught sight of Evie wandering through. She was no longer a child but the Evie of today. Henry had a vague, emotional sense of her that stretched back far longer than he’d known her. He knew somehow that she hated licorice and cried when a neighbor boy accidentally ran over a frog with his bicycle.
A tornado of black birds swirled up before Henry; he put up his hands to block their wings, but they were nothing more than figments fading into the air. Panic seized Henry, though he couldn’t say why. It was as if he knew that some terrible fate beckoned, as if this was a dream he had lived through countless times before. He was running through the forest. Trying to get away from whatever unseen monster chased him. Trying to get back to the happy memory of the house. Henry’s heartbeat quickened—he could hear it in his ears, a walloping rhythm, like the clang and whoosh of a great machine. It hurt to breathe. He’d run in a circle, back to the clearing and the Victrola. Trees fell as if trampled. The clanging grew louder. In the chairs, the boys in uniform had become ghosts with skeletal faces. Fierce light blazed through the falling trees, and within it, like an alien sun, was the eye symbol tearing the sky apart while the soldiers screamed and screamed. Pain. So much pain. As if his body and mind were being stretched beyond all endurance. He no longer knew who he was. He had to remember: I’m Henry. Henry Dubois IV. But when he looked down, he saw that a name had been stitched onto the front of his uniform.
JAMES.
XAVIER.
O’NEILL.
Henry’s blood pounded in his head as he woke. His body hurt, and he couldn’t move.
“Henry? You copacetic?” Evie’s face swam into view.
“Yeah. Rough… landing.” He felt as if he might vomit. “Where’s… where’s Ling?”
“I’m here. I couldn’t get inside the dream.” She didn’t sound happy about it.
Henry gagged. He had sweated through his shirt.
“Here. Hold on.” Memphis laid hands on Henry’s arms, and soon, Henry’s sickness began to subside.
“Thanks,” he said, gingerly rotating his arms.
“Hen, you sure you’re jake? You scared me,” Theta said, sitting at his side.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“What happened? What did you see?” Evie asked.
Henry took in a few deep breaths. “I wasn’t just an observer in somebody else’s dream. This time, I was actually inside the dreamer’s body. Sort of a kidnapping.”
“Has that ever happened to you before?” Memphis asked.
Henry shook his head. It still hurt a little. “I saw terrible things. Worse, I was living them. And I was powerless to stop them. Except that, as I said, I wasn’t me. I was someone else.” Henry looked over at Evie. “I’m fairly certain that I was having James’s dream.”
There was a whine in Evie’s ears, as if she were on the verge of fainting. She steadied herself by grabbing the edge of the table. “But you said that Ling wasn’t with you.”
“Right,” Ling said, and Evie could see from the look on her face that it was dawning on her, too.
“And… when you dream walk, you only see the living. So how…?” Evie trailed off, letting Sam say what she couldn’t seem to manage.
“How’s that? James is dead.”
Henry nodded. “I know. And dead men don’t dream.”
How could Henry have experienced James’s dream? That was impossible. Unless James was still alive. But he’d been killed during the war. Evie had seen it in Luther’s memories. Hadn’t she?
“Are you sure?” Evie asked.
“I… I don’t know. But I’ve never walked in a dead person’s dream before.”
“Suppose it could’ve been Ling’s doing, then?” Memphis suggested.
“But I couldn’t get inside the dream with Henry,” she answered. And the dead aren’t speaking to me right now.
Memphis put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Evie was right beside you. Could you have been picking up on her emotions somehow, living through her memories?”
“I’m telling you: I was in his body, living his dream.”
Evie nestled closer to Henry and looped her arm through his. “What do you remember?”
Henry blinked up at the ceiling. “A house—brick foursquare with Irish lace curtains at the windows, a side porch off the kitchen.”
“That sounds like our house!”
“Then I was in a forest. I heard this awful hum rushing through me, sort of like the throbbing of a wounded, mechanical heart. I thought it would drive me mad.”
“Did you ever see what it was?” Ling asked.
Henry shook his head.
“Does that mean James isn’t dead?” Theta asked.
Evie would give anything for James to still be alive. To hear him calling, “Where is my sister, brave Artemis?” as he used to do on warm summer evenings when the two of them would run around the garden trying to catch fireflies in mason jars to light the night. After James was killed, Evie had never again tried to catch lightning bugs. They were magical creatures, and she couldn’t bear to cage them.
Henry was picking absently at his shirt cuff. He looked unhappy.
“What’s the matter, Henry?” Evie asked.
He winced. “Wherever James is, I don’t think it’s a good place. There was terrible pain and fear. I’m sorry to tell you that.”
Evie didn’t know if what Henry had experienced was a dream or something far too real, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her brother suffering.
“He has to be dead,” Sam said. “Evie saw what happened to the one forty-four when she went into Luther’s memories. Will and Sister Walker confirmed it. All those soldiers—they’re gone.”
“Yes. But gone where?” Ling said.