Free Waking in Dreamland by Jody Lynne Nye Page B

itself is at stake.”
    As one, both dogs sprang up and stretched out noses and forepaws, pointing to the east. Roan stood up and squinted under his hand into the lengthening shadows. The tracks he had seen before were just visible as dark depressions on the sand.
    “Thank you!” he said, patting both sentries on the head. “Others will follow me soon to help you.”
    Roan pulled a handful of colored pebbles from his pocket and dropped one on the threshold. He pitched three back toward the castle door so there’d be something for others to follow when they came out at last. He started walking east.

    The soft, fine sand made the going unexpectedly difficult. At each step, Roan’s boots sank in to the ankle, making every yard an effort, and every mile an agony. The sun was no longer directly overhead, but the sand and the sky were still hot and dry. His face was hot, and his lips were dry and beginning to crack. Roan’s only consolation was that his quarry would find it harder going than he did, burdened as they were with the Alarm Clock. He hoped the Sleeper’s mood would pass soon, and leave the landscape a nice open grassland, or something, so he could catch up faster. It was already late afternoon. He had little time to find them before dark.
    As if teasing him for his thought, a stray breeze whipped up a small sand cloud. Roan covered his face with his arm and squinted out over the top of his sleeve. A shadow on the crest of a dune to his right caught his eye, and he stumbled forward.
    The scientists had managed to eradicate their trail close to the castle, but they had given up disguising their tracks after some ninety paces. Roan had to do some to-ing and fro-ing to find the first trace. Yes, here again was his old friend the Alarm Clock bearer with his slippery shoe. The dust devils were erasing the trail less energetically now, but most of it, leading roughly southward, was still easy to discern. Roan hurried his pace, driving his feet deeper into the sand, until a stitch in his side reminded him that he had a long way to go. Surely, the bicycles would return soon, and the others could catch up with him.
    Roan dropped a blue glass pebble to mark his trail, then hurriedly stooped to retrieve it when a passing breeze buried it under a film of sand. That wouldn’t do. He molded the glass bead between his hands until it formed an arrow-shaped sign on a post, and set it firmly into the path. His worried thoughts became a litany as he ran. The whole fabric of life as he knew it could be destroyed. Precious life, sweet as birdsong, as honey-scented as hay and wildflowers, as exciting as wind in the face as he hurtled down a snowy slope on skis. Roan sighed with a desperate feeling in his belly, wondering if he would be too late. What would discontinuation feel like? He’d lived unscathed through regional Changeovers, but what would happen when all of reality was rent asunder? His hands shook a little, and he nearly dropped the arrow he was making.
    Brom’s audacity still astounded Roan. Was such a thing as he proposed possible? No one had ever dared to find, let alone approach, the Hall of the Sleepers with such a purpose in mind. If, that is, it existed at all. Indeed, the Hall had become a legend. But considering the power of people to shape their own reality, were the scientists merely creating the Hall from sheer will? No, Roan corrected himself. He must not let circumstances lead him to question his faith. He believed in the Sleepers. He’d had plenty of time to think while out on the road by himself, and nothing else he had ever heard would explain the randomness of life. Reality was so strange that it couldn’t have happened by accident.
    Now past the initial shock of Brom’s abrupt disappearance, Roan began to reason logically. Where could he be going? In all of history, no one had ever reported stumbling upon the secret place of the Sleepers. For the sake of their creation, the Sleepers needs must be