Gunnar snorts. “See it how. In your sleep?”
“Not the worst idea,” Leif says, even, “if you can manage it and come back.”
Rayner huffs something like a laugh.
The rest of us don’t.
Because we almost lost him to exactly that, once. Dream walking sounds like a parlor trick until you remember that for Rayner the dreams are real places. Real ground under real feet. Real things in them that can do real harm, and some dream walkers lie down onenight and never find the way back up. We’ve stood over a body that was still breathing and couldn’t be reached.
I don’t care to do it twice.
When I look up, Leif’s already watching him. He clocked it the same second I did — Rayner offering to scout a place that nearly kept him, light, like it’s nothing, which from Rayner means the opposite of nothing. Leif doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. You don’t corner Rayner; he goes further inside himself, not less. But I move my place in the line without making it look like moving, and now I’m walking where I can see his face.
It’s been off since the residence. Not afraid. Pulled somewhere the rest of him hasn’t caught up to. I’ve read this man for hundreds of years, and I can read him now, clean enough: something on the far side of this crossing already has a hand on him, and he either doesn’t know what it is or won’t say.
We’re coming back to that.
The crossing’s still hours off. The dark out here is the real kind — no towers, no glow but what we carry. The talk’s gone easy again, Leif walking us through the last time he went over, Gunnar accusing him of leaving out everything worth hearing, all of us loose with the rhythm of it.
All of us but Rayner, who’s drifted to the back.
I catch myself watching Gunnar. I usually am. He’s loud now, easy, the fear walked off him miles back, filling the quiet so nobody else has to. He’d hate that I noticed. I don’t say anything. Most of what I don’t say is about him.
Midnight, the far side. We’ll be there.
And so, I’m fairly sure, will whatever’s waiting.
Chapter 9
Elara
Why is life like this?
Why can’t a girl go out and have a few drinks with a friend and not pay for it the entire next day? Why can’t she have a couple of glasses of wine and a normal night’s sleep instead of — instead of whatever last night was. Vivid. Detailed. Thorough, even. Yeah, thorough was definitely the word for… him. It. For it.
And I can still smellhim. I’m not examining that. I close my eyes and I can feel his hands on me, and my body is fully convinced it happened, like it was there, like it kept receipts.
It did not happen. He is not real. I made him up out of a paperback and half a bottle of cheap wine.
Tell that to the rest of me. The rest of me is not taking notes.
Deadline.
There’s a deadline. There’s always a deadline.
So here I sit, on a Saturday — 11:57, technically still morning, I’m choosing to count it — writing eight hundred words about herbal teas that cure headaches. Which is rich, because I currently have aheadache that no tea on earth is touching, and the cure for it is a glass of water and lying very still in a dark room, neither of which is in the article.
Oolong has been shown to support—
Who cares. Genuinely. Who is reading this? Who wakes up and thinks, today I will research the wellness properties of oolong on a content farm. I don’t care, the imaginary reader doesn’t care, the oolong doesn’t care. We are all united in not caring, and yet here I am, and there the cursor is, blinking at me like it’s disappointed.
I’m halfway into a sentence about antioxidants when I hear it.
Paper.
The slide of it across the floor.
I spin so fast I nearly take the chair down with me, and I catch it — the corner of something cream, moving under the gap of the door, coming to a stop on my floor like it has every right to be there.
