A cold sadness filled my heart. I liked him. I wanted more than anything to be able to trust him. But if he really was spying on me for the Seers, how much of our relationship was even real? Maybe the chemistry I'd imagined between us was just a game to him, something he was fostering in order to manipulate me more easily. How much did I really know about him?

"Why are you doing all this?" He spoke so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it made me jump.

"Say what?" I stammered inelegantly.

Slowly he turned to look at me. "This trip. Crossing over into an alien world without any real preparation, taking crazy chances once you get here . . . why do you do it?"

"You know the answer to that," I said. "I'm trying to find Tommy."

"Why?"

I wasn't sure what his point was, but the intensity of his expression told me that it wasn't just a casual question. "Like I told you before. He's family." I shrugged. What more could you say? All my hope, dreams, motives, and fears were wrapped up in that one statement. "I know you had a falling-out with your family, but if you heard they were in trouble, wouldn't you want to help?"

He hesitated. "Crossing over into an unknown world, knowing I might never come back?" He shook his head. "I don't know," he muttered. "I don't know."

"Of course you'd do it." I was trying not to think about the "knowing I might never come back" part. Of course I'd go back home when this was all over. And Tommy would come with me. Someday soon, G.o.d willing. "It's natural to doubt that now, especially with what's happened to you. But you still love them, right? So I'm sure you'd do whatever was necessary to keep them safe."

A haunting sadness filled his eyes. There were volumes of things not being said, and I sensed behind them a sea of sorrow so vast and deep you could drown in it. Just for a moment, and then they returned to their usual unreadable state.

"Love isn't the same for us as it is for you," he told me. "Pa.s.sion isn't valued by my-" he hesitated. "By my family."

"How can loving your family be bad? Other than when it makes you run off to strange worlds to rescue your kid brother. . . ." I forced a smile to my face, trying to ease the mood.

He shook his head tightly. "It's not just family. Any strong attachment is bad. To people, to things . . . even a love of beauty can betray you. Anything that makes you lose focus."

He turned away from me, back toward the sunrise. A thin band of gold was creeping into the sky. Soon the sun would breach the mountaintop and molten light would flood the valley. Maybe he didn't want to miss that sight. Or maybe he didn't want me to look in his eyes any more, for fear of what I would discover there.

"What's it like to care that deeply about someone?" His voice was little louder than a whisper. "Does it change who you are?"

I wasn't totally sure I understood the question. "Why would it? Nature meant us to love. It's part of being human. Look at how long Sebastian has held onto his pa.s.sion, even though his family pa.s.sed away long ago. When we connect to other people... it's what makes us real. It's what keeps us alive."

I thought I saw his shoulders tremble slightly.

"Is everything okay?" I asked softly. When he said nothing I dared, "Do you miss your family? Is that it?"

I knew nothing about his background save what Ethan had told me-that he'd left home to escape an arranged marriage. I couldn't imagine anything my own family would ask of me that would cause me to abandon them for so long.

"You don't understand," he whispered. "You can't understand."

"Maybe not . . . but I do know that it's okay if you're conflicted about it. You left home for a reason, right? Not because you didn't care about your family. And I'm sure that deep down inside they know that. Maybe someday you'll go home, and things will work out. If you showed up on their doorstep tomorrow-"

Suddenly the words caught in my throat. I was remembering that terrible day when my dad left us. Years later I came to understand why that had happened, and the rational half of me recognized that it had been coming for a long time. But we're not purely rational beings. There was a part of me that would never understand or accept it.

As far as I knew, Isaac didn't hate his family or his home life. He left because his parents had wanted him to do something he found untenable, and he thought that was the only way out. But there had to be another way. No family on the face of the earth-any earth-wants to lose a kid over something like that. Oh, sure, they'd yell and scream if he showed up on their doorstep without warning, and he'd probably be grounded until Doomsday, but they'd get the message. When a kid cares so much about something that he's willing to give up everything he loves for it, parents have to listen. Right?

But I couldn't tell him that. No one could tell him that. It was the kind of thing you had to discover for yourself.

Quietly, I walked up to him. He stared out at the sunrise in silence and said nothing, but I knew that he was aware of me. He had that look on his face that guys sometimes do when they're feeling so much emotion they don't know how to process it. At times like that there's nothing you can do but stand by their side, share their s.p.a.ce, and just let them know they're not alone.

At one point I took his hand, or maybe he took mine. I'm not sure. We watched the dawn together, sharing the beauty of a world being revealed to us inch by inch, mile by mile, as golden sunlight flowed across it, purifying and awakening every living thing in its path.

I still didn't know how I felt about the spy issue. But the chemistry was real.

25.

SHADOWCREST.

WHEN THE SHADOWLORD ARRIVED Tommy was at the far end of his cell, looking as miserable and forlorn as it was possible for a thirteen-year-old boy to look. He was tucked into a rocky niche barely larger than he was, with his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped tightly around them, staring into s.p.a.ce and muttering inaudible things to himself. Soul-shards flitted about him like flies near rotting meat, and occasionally he lifted a hand to swat at them. On those rare moments when he connected with one, his hand pa.s.sed right through it.

The tall figure stood before the bars for a few minutes, watching him in silence. Tommy was so wrapped up his own mental world he wasn't aware of his presence.

"Tommy."

The voice echoed emptily in the dank chamber. It was not a human sound.

Blinking, Tommy slowly looked up.

The thing standing outside his cell was human in shape, but not human in essence. Its face was pale, with translucent skin and seemingly bloodless flesh, and the bluish halo that the light-spheres cast down about its head and shoulders only made it look more eerie. Its eyes were black and empty.

The figure gestured. "Come here."

Slowly, Tommy got up. His limbs were stiff after sitting in a cramped position for so long, and he was clearly less than enthusiastic about coming close to the visitor. He walked halfway across the chamber and then stopped.

"Do you know what I am?" the ghastly figure asked.

"A Shadowlord," Tommy said hoa.r.s.ely. "Your people run things here." He'd picked up that much from comments made by the servants who brought him food. They never talked to him, but they talked to each other despite him. Like he didn't exist.

That the spooky creature had authority here did not need to be explained. Power hung about him like a dark cloud, fearsome and compelling. The Shadowlord held out a sheaf of papers: pages from Tommy's dream journal. "What are these?"

"Dreams. You told me to record them."

"Barely legible. Incoherent in places. These are not the quality of what you produced before."

Tommy shrugged stiffly, in the manner of someone who was so physically and emotionally exhausted that he no longer had the energy to care about anything. Inside, his heart was pounding. "It's harder in this place."

"Your duty is no different," the Shadowlord said. "Your life will be spared as long as you are useful to us, and not a moment longer. Was that not made clear to you?"

He whispered it: "Yes, sir. It was."

"Do you wish to die?"

"No, sir."

"So the problem is not motive. What, then?"

Tommy hesitated, then looked anxiously at the shades surrounding him. The fear he was exuding was real enough, even if the source of it wasn't quite what he was pretending. "The shades," he whispered. "They show up in my dreams, whispering to me. It . . . it disturbs everything."

The Shadowlord's eyes narrowed. "You can hear the voices of the dead?"

Oh h.e.l.l, Tommy thought. Was I not supposed to? "Sometimes," he hedged. "Maybe it's my imagination. I . . . I don't know."

"Can you make out what they say?"

He was aware that he was totally out of his depth, lost in a nameless mine field. There was no safe answer to give. So he just looked down at his feet in terrified silence and trembled. Let the undead b.a.s.t.a.r.d read into that whatever he wanted to.

There was silence for a moment. Then: "I do not think you are a dreamwalker." The chill in his voice made Tommy's skin crawl. "Some others believe that you are, but they have never met the dream-cursed. I have. I know how they think. You do not show the signs."

Tommy's heart skipped a beat. "The Seer said that I was one."

"She said you had the potential to become one, nothing more. A thousand children with such potential are born every day, of which perhaps one will manifest the dreamer's curse. If even one. The fact that we take in such children doesn't mean we expect them to become dreamwalkers. It is simply a safeguard."

It is simply a safeguard.

The dreamwalker Gift wasn't something these people valued, Tommy realized suddenly. Not something they wanted him to manifest. It was something they wanted to isolate. To destroy. They were using him right now as a scientist would use a mouse in a lab, studying him in order to learn how to make a better mousetrap. That's what the dream reports were all about.

If these people decided that he lacked the Gift, they would have no reason to keep him alive. That much he'd known all along. But even if he did have the Gift, he realized now, they would still kill him. As a "safeguard."

There was no way out.

The empty eyes were fixed on him. Not an ounce of humanity in their depths.

"It's the ghosts," Tommy whispered hoa.r.s.ely. Clinging to his original strategy like a lifeline, though it was rapidly fraying beneath his grasp. "They get into my dreams. It changes things." He spread his hands helplessly.

The Shadowlord glanced down at the journal pages in his hand. Tommy held his breath. This plan had seemed clever enough when he'd come up with it, but now that he was putting it into action he could see gaping holes in it, a mile wide. Had this creature spotted them as well?

The Shadowlord looked at him. The empty eyes flashed green in the darkness, like a cat's. Then he whispered something incomprehensible, breathing wordless sounds into the dank chamber. The spirits that had been hovering around Tommy left him, drawn to the pale creature as if to a magnet. Soon all the broken souls that were in the chamber were circling about the Shadowlord.

"Now there are no ghosts to distract you," the creature said coldly. "I will read your next set of dreams tomorrow evening. If they lack the signs I'm looking for, this experiment will end. Do we understand each other?"

Tommy didn't dare meet his eyes. "Yes, sir," he whispered, looking down. "I understand."

Then the Shadowlord turned and left the chamber without another word, ghostly soul fragments fluttering behind him. A moment later the entire retinue all pa.s.sed out of Tommy's sight, living and dead, and he heard the elevator carry them all away.

And he was alone. At last!

Reaching out with a trembling hand to a squat stalagmite nearby, he lowered himself slowly down onto it. His legs were so weak they could not have supported him a moment longer, and his chest was so tight he could hardly draw a breath. But . . . the ghosts were gone. He'd taken a terrible chance in order to get rid of them, but it had paid off in the end. No one was spying on him any more. And even more important, he'd proven that the Shadowlords weren't omniscient. They could be fooled, just like anyone. There was some hope in that, right?

One more day, he reminded himself grimly. That's all I have left, before this guy declares me a fraud.

Shutting his eyes, he drank in the wonderful silence, trying to transform it into hope.

26.

NORTH RIVER.

VIRGINIA PRIME.

"WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO destroy the Gate ," I said.

Sebastian didn't respond.

I was sitting in the boat with my legs stuck out straight in front of me, grateful to have a moment to stretch them while my traveling companions were answering the call of nature. Sebastian's canoe was big enough for the five of us to travel in it, but once his equipment and provisions were packed inside it was a tight fit.

He'd served us a quick breakfast at daybreak-flatbread with honey, strips of smoked rabbit, surprisingly good coffee-and then we'd set off down the river. I'd been too nervous to eat much, and now the hunger pangs in my stomach were getting intense. But I still didn't think I'd be able to keep anything down.

"That would be unspeakably dangerous," he responded.

I looked at him sharply. "But you know how it could be done?"

Rita emerged from a thick clump of bushes some distance down the riverbank and started back toward us. The guys still weren't visible. Which was pretty ironic, when you think about it. If Rita and I hadn't been present they probably would have just p.i.s.sed over the side of the boat, maybe even placed bets on who could shoot the furthest. But put two girls in the vicinity and suddenly they needed enough trees around them to reforest the Amazon.

If Rita heard our conversation, that was fine. Sooner or later I'd fill her and Devon in anyway. Isaac was another matter.

"You can't use simple explosives," Sebastian said. "That would only destroy the physical arch. You're talking about closing the portal itself, yes? Or at least making it harder to access?"

I nodded. "Is there a way to do that?"

Devon emerged from the woods. A moment later Isaac joined him. Sebastian lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

"It won't stop them, you know. There are other portals on Terra Colonna. If the Shadows want to come after you, they'll find a way."

"But what if they thought we were dead? Or lost somewhere in time or s.p.a.ce? They don't know that I have a codex, right? What would they expect to happen if we entered the Gate without one?"

"They'd expect you to be lost forever." he whispered solemnly. He held up a hand to forestall any response; Isaac was getting too close now for us to talk privately.