Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

“It’s going to be all right, Casey. With any luck, we won’t have to climb down anywhere.” I hoped, at least. I really didn’t have the faintest idea.

But then I saw Tesla’s Gate. It sat in a corner, almost as if it had been shoved against the wall and forgotten, like unwanted holiday decorations in someone’s attic. Spindly and wholly unlike the Gate the Erlkin had constructed in the Mists, the whole thing rested on three squat legs, like a hat stand. A pair of metal arms arched overhead, a giant circuit connected at the top to a Tesla coil, which was attached in turn to a bulb of aether, sickly opalescent white with age and disuse, that barely moved any longer.

Two dials were attached to either side, just waiting for somebody to activate them, and I shivered, a shiver born not of cold but of pure excitement. This was the experience I’d hoped for, when I’d been holding Tesla’s journals. This connection, across time, to a man who’d envisioned such a thing, such a delicate piece of machinery that had the power to move whole bodies between worlds.

I couldn’t waste any time, I knew. Casey was right—by now, somebody had to have discovered we were both missing from our quarters. I checked for a power source, but the coil was it. I activated it and was rewarded with a spark of electricity before the thing began cycling. I was elated, but Casey shrank back.

“I don’t like the look of that thing,” she said. “Lots of faulty machines back in the Rustworks would kill you if you touched ’em. And that one looks rickety.”

I approached the Gate slowly, reaching out with my Weird. The coil was snapping and the ancient aether was drifting around inside its teardrop-shaped globe, but nothing pricked my Weird. The machine was, for all intents and purposes, alive but dead. It didn’t function, not even a whisper beyond the ions of electricity I could taste on the back of my tongue.

My hopes sank. A faulty Gate I could fix. But one that was simply dead, a lump of iron where a vortex into other worlds should be? I had no idea how to fix that, and my Weird wouldn’t help me if I did.

I tried both dials and was rewarded with electricity writhing across the ground as the Tesla coil released its pent-up energy, but there was still no flutter in the fabric of the space around us. Nothing. My Weird felt nothing. The machine was as dead and cold as the ice field outside.

I wanted to sob, scream, to kick at the Gate until it fractured, but the destruction all around us put me off. At one time or another, the Gate to the dreaming place had worked. I was missing something.

Be smart, Aoife , I told myself. Be an engineer . The Gate had both a power source and enough power in the aether to transform the dimension around us, but what did it lack? What, if I turned in this schematic in an Academy class, would I get marks off for?

Tesla. It began with him, it ends with him . Tesla was the connection. Tesla connected the Iron Land with all the others. Controlled the wild energy of the vortex between worlds. Beat back the Storm he’d caused even as he’d opened us up to unimaginable horrors.

He connected worlds, and his Gate needed a connector. Something to close the circuit that arced energy all around the spire, making Casey shriek with each new bolt, even though the offshoot of the coils was harmless.

“Don’t be frightened,” I told her. Maybe if I said it to someone else, I could take my own advice. It wasn’t very far to step into the rain of castoff electrical charge, to stand myself between the two iron bars that made up the main part of the Gate.

“What are you doing ?” Casey shrieked as the coil amped up to a roar. I felt a spark of life in the machine, just the faintest one. I opened my Weird, hoping it wasn’t the last time I would do so.

This time, though, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt as if I’d always been meant to be here, standing in the center of the only Gate to reach past Iron, past Thorn, and directly into the dreams of everyone in every world. This wasn’t a machine I was touching. This was the fabric of reality itself. I nudged gently, and I felt the vortex grip me.

Just one more step.

WHEN I STEPPED into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”

Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.

My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.

I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.

The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the hexenring or the Gates in the Mists. This was being pulled into a vortex, not transported from place to place.

Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.

I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.

Opening my eyes was a tremendous effort. Everything about me was heavy, most of all my thoughts, which were moving at the pace of sluggish snails.

Was I lying unconscious somewhere, or dead? Was any of this real?

It was my dream, I realized, but tethered to the painfully real, as every part of my body could attest. Above me, I saw a glass ceiling looking out onto a gentle blue sky studded with a few white clouds, delicate as spun sugar. A wind blew them apart and re-formed them into new shapes. Pink sunset blushed at the edges, and for a moment all I could do was stare through the spiderweb cracks in the glass.

“I like this time of day.”

I rolled my head to the left and saw bare white feet surrounded by the hem of a black robe, moth-eaten and nearly gray from wear.

The figure in black was no longer shadowed and covered by illusion and my own mind’s dream projections. His chest was bare, plain black trousers hidden under the robe, which he shrugged off and let fall to the floor. His hair was slicked back from his face, curls gathering at his neck. His eyes were strange, not silver like a Fae’s but white and ever-changing, like smoke under glass. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The dream figure was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.

“You’re the first person besides me to see it in a very long time,” he said. “It happens in the winters of the worlds, the same sunset all at once, when things are desperate and broken and on the verge of cataclysm everywhere else.”

The sky darkened to blood-red, blood dried to puce, turned to crumpled blue velvet and then darkness, studded with winking stars. The figure sighed. “And it’s over.”

I swallowed. My throat was tight and sore, as if I’d been screaming for hours. My voice, when I found it, was barely a rasp. “Am I dreaming?”

“No,” the figure said sadly. “You’re awake, Aoife.”

Then I’d made it. The Gate had worked. I felt like screaming for joy and sobbing with relief all at once. “I’m … This isn’t my dream?”