Dreamscape Code

Six months ago, on the night of the worst storm the town could remember, Tom walked out into the rain and never came back. By morning a boat was missing from the harbor. Everyone agreed on what that meant.

Everyone except his wife.

Kate is a nurse. She knows what death looks like, and this is not it. Tom left his pajamas folded on the pillow. He left thirty-one books about dreaming on his shelves, and a promise, made that same evening, to take her with him wherever he was going. Since that night she has dreamed the same dream: a ruined city under a gray sky, a single oak tree, and silent figures in the rubble who seem to be waiting for her to understand.

Then, one night, the dream gives her a road.

It leads to the In-Between Hotel, headquarters of DREAM, the agency that polices every world a sleeper can enter. Its agents wear cat ears and carry tablets. Its directors are three infants in a conference room, and no one who has faced them laughs twice. Its law is the Code, a black book a thousand years old that has kept a thousand worlds at peace by making sure nothing is ever allowed to happen. To DREAM, Kate is a problem to be filed: a walker with no license, a key that belongs on no list. Their advice is to go home and grieve.

Kate is not going home. Beyond the last of the guarded worlds, a man is erasing entire civilizations one by one, and has been for two hundred years. The last person seen at his side was her husband.

To reach him, she will need a permit she will never be granted, six strangers from six dying worlds, and the nerve to do the one thing the Code was written to prevent. And when she finds Tom, she will have to decide whether she came to bring him home or to stop him.

To dream is to resist.

Dreamscape Code is a novel about grief and the bureaucracy that manages it, about a marriage with a locked room at its heart, and about what a careful woman does when every rule she has ever followed tells her to sit down and wait.