Free Dreamland by Robert L. Anderson Page A

feel the tickle of the snow, the drumming of the dream-woman’s heart, the stirring of the dream-child in the dream-world of snow as soft as kisses.
    â€œI’ll save you,” the dream-woman said, opening her eyes, and sliding a hand inside her coat, onto her swollen belly, where a tiny dream-heart drummed and drummed. “We’ll save you. Just let us in.”
    Then the snow became a river of plastic, sliding down her throat, and the snow broke apart into white walls, and the whole world became a scream.
    Two screams.
    Then the woman who was supposed to have died woke up, and found she had given birth to a beautiful child, with eyes the blue of new ice and skin the color of snow.

EIGHT
    In the weeks since Dea and Connor had met, she had walked his dreams four times. She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to. For the first time in her life, she could sympathize with addicts. She was filled with a near-constant ache, an itch that seemed to come from inside her, as if her blood were infected. She got relief only when she walked. The guilt—knowing that she was breaking the rules, that she was doing something wrong—made walking his dreams feel even more delicious.
    Each time she entered his dreams, she found them softer, more pliable, more responsive to her. The overstructure was crumbling.
    The second time she walked, she arrived in the middle of a crowded wharf in what looked like the 1920s, except that the deckhands were checking off lists of passengers by administering math homework. The third time, she ended up above an old racetrack that Connor and his dad were endlessly circling in separate cars, trying to get the advantage. In the distance, she spotted a single other spectator leaning against the chain-link fence that divided the car track from the fields beyond it, dark hair hanging to his jaw, hand up to his eyes to shield them from the sun so that his face was in shadow. He struck Dea as somehow familiar, but she was too far to make out what he looked like clearly.
    The fourth time she walked, she found herself in a set of high bleachers bordering an indoor pool. The air stunk of chlorine, and people were cheering. Above them, a cracked-glass ceiling was webbed with condensation. Connor was swimming, his arms circling soundlessly, his body sleek as an animal’s. Birds raced above the water, casting shadows on its surface, occasionally submerging to sweep up the flashing belly of a fish.
    Dea had sat alone in the very back row of bleachers, cheering for Connor along with everybody else, knowing he wouldn’t see her.
    â€œDo you ever miss swimming?” she’d said to him the next day, at lunch.
    He looked up, startled. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “Yeah. I do.” Then he’d reached over impulsively, grabbed her hand, and squeezed, and Gollum smirked in a way that made Dea both embarrassed and deliriously happy.
    All of the reasons she had never walked Gollum’s dreams—itwas intrusive and weirdly intimate; she didn’t want to do that to a friend; what if she saw something terrible?—she was quickly able to dismiss when it came to Connor. She knew she was invading his privacy, feeding on his innermost thoughts and using them, but no one cared about privacy anymore; everyone knew that. Connor was on Facebook, after all—that was almost just as bad. (Last year, Greg Blume had hacked Coralie Wikinson’s profile and switched her profile picture out to a blurry camera shot of her . . . Dea didn’t even like to think the word. Her mom still called it the “flower pot,” which for years she had heard as “flour pot,” a misunderstanding that had made the act of baking cookies very embarrassing.) And it wasn’t like Dea would use the knowledge against him.
    The fifth time she walked, she was back in Chicago.
    There was the usual swinging feeling, the sensation of darkness and an imminent fall. But she was