The Dream Thief, Kari Kilgore [reading well TXT] 📗

"Based on what? Your designs? You use her like that?"

"Not my designs," Loretta said. She put a box full of spools of copper wire on the rock wall beside the house and faced Karl with her fists on her hips. "She dreams them. That's where they come from. She dreams of these things, then she knows how to make them work. I don't know how or why, but that's what she does. If you want to call that using, be my guest!"

Karl looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was still closed as he followed Loretta back out to the wagon. None of this was making sense.

"What do you mean, she dreams? Like daydreams, things she makes up in her mind?"

"I didn't say daydreams," she said. "She dreams when she sleeps. She closes her eyes, and she sees these things. I don't even know if she knows how to use them until she builds them. She's always done it though, since she was small."

Karl grabbed her arm, hoping her grandmother wasn't watching.

"You're making all of this up. No one sees things when they sleep, Loretta, not even out at the Columns. You close your eyes, and that's it."

She jerked her arm free and stepped toward him, her own eyes flashing.

"No one who takes Crumble," she said. "It steals your dreams away. I see things when I sleep all the time, Karl. Ever since I stopped that nonsense, shutting my own mind down just so I'd fit in a little better into Waldron's Gate’s oh-so-perfect little society. The same society that's obsessed with the horrifying things I can provide for them!"

Karl backed up against the wagon, not sure he could believe any of this.

"She doesn't take it either?"

"Not for most of her life," Loretta said. She brushed loose strands of hair off her face and glanced toward the house. "That's part of why she's hidden away up here, and why I took her to the city with me. She had trouble with it when she was small, from what I'm told. It made her dull, barely awake. Like an empty-headed child. When she stopped, she could think again. Maybe it worked too well for her, who knows? But my great grandparents kept it secret as well as they could. Once she got older, she had to do that for herself."

"So you took her south with you," Karl said. "With Rhysto."

"No, I never would have exposed her to him." She shuddered and hunched her shoulders. "That was after I met Bill, on my return trip. That's how he knew where to bring us today. One of her neighbors in our old village realized she was off Crumble somehow, maybe something as simple as her never being seen taking it. Or maybe one of my father's brothers or sisters told, or mine. It doesn't matter. Once I got established a little bit in Waldron's Gate, I brought her there to get her away from them."

"And that's when she made the Dragon and your compass."

"Among other things, yes," she said. "Can we please finish this later? She's going to wonder where we disappeared to and get upset."

Karl followed her, his mind bristling with questions. Even after he decided whether he could accept this idea of dreaming or not, there was the matter of Gemma's mental state. He'd seen the look, heard the sound of the voice far too many times to mistake it.

She was at the very least naive, too much so to live out here on her own. If that was new since she'd returned from Waldron's Gate, she might not be able to help Loretta with repairs or anything else. And Karl might not be able to walk away and leave her up here in the middle of nowhere alone.

Just like it had since his little brother's anxious request to look into all of this, Karl's life was getting more complicated by the minute.

When Loretta opened the door, Karl was thankful he only had their relatively light bags in his arms instead of the heavy honey. The room was a blur of activity, more than even the busiest of medical experiment theaters he'd seen.

Pipes and belts and pulleys seemed to cover all of the walls and ceiling, dropping down here and there in shapes he couldn't understand.

He could see far more clearly than light from the fire or candles in such a remote location should have allowed. When he finally realized where the bright light was coming from, he knew his jaw dropped comically, but there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it.

"Gemma, you've been busy," Loretta said, trying her best not to laugh.

The older woman fairly preened before she launched into explanations.

"I'm making progress, yes, but such a long way to go. The electricity is certainly helping. So many tasks are easier when you can do such a simple thing as see clearly at night, don't you think, Karl?"

"Yes," Karl said, his eyes wide. "Yes, ma'am, I can see what you mean."

"Once I saw how the lights would work, the rest was fairly easy. Winding the copper wire just...so...is the hardest part. The steam keeps everything spinning and does all the rest."

Karl watched her nearly prance into one corner, to where most houses like this would surely have a normal fire burning. He could see the fire, and smell the strange flat mud burning, but the huge space above it was taken up by several odd cauldrons.

All of them had covers with tubes coming out the top, not like any cooking pot he knew of. The biggest one led to some kind of contraption that bristled with loops of more copper wire than he'd ever seen.

"Not all of it uses electricity, of course," Gemma said. "Some of it uses good old steam. Can't get gas up here, not like you do in Waldron's Gate. I dream of it often. The wonders I could do with gas..." She rubbed her