The Dreamer.

  Lucy’s mind was spinning just as fast her feet as she continued frantically shining her light everywhere to find the voice’s source.

  The Dreamer. She had finally found them.

  After searching aimlessly all this time, to have the Dreamer announce themselves to her sounded far too good to be true. And it didn’t help that besides their voice, she couldn’t sense them at all. Right now, it was as if the darkness itself were speaking to her. Who was to say this voice wasn’t just a hallucination crafted by the abyss swarming all around?

  “Where are you?” Lucy called out. She winced at her loudness and the way it echoed through the space, for the woman and little girl could very well be drawn back to attack her. But when her question only sunk uselessly into the dark without a response, she cast her fears aside and was awash with frustration.

  “Hello? I asked you a question.”

  “What, do you think this is kindergarten?” The same voice spoke again, its ethereal directionless quality at odds with its casually snide remark. “Not every question deserves an answer. But you know, now that I got a good look at you, you do seem the type.”

  “So you can see me?” said Lucy, trying to prevent the immediate resentment she felt from leaking into her voice. “Then let me see you. It’s only fair.”

  When she felt the tendrils of silence descending upon the conversation again, she added something based on little more than a hunch based on the apparent personality she could sense from the voice alone: “Unless you’re one of those weirdo stalkers who follow and watch people.”

  “Hey now, being a little presumptuous, aren’t we?” The voice was still smarmy, but Lucy could sense hesitation. “Once you see see me, you’ll know that’s dead wrong. Here.”

  Bulls-eye, Lucy said to herself. She had been right on the mark that someone so haughty would cave as soon as their integrity was called into question.

  Lucy was jolted out of her satisfaction by a loud thud behind her. She turned all the way around as fast her legs could take her, shining her light on a figure that certainly hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  “See? I’m as sweet as I look.”

  It was the same voice Lucy had been speaking to, but now localized to a single definite source: that being the young woman who had appeared just now. She had a snide smile befitting the tone of her voice, but it was incongruous with the rest of her appearance, from the pigtails to the colourful striped blouse to the denim shorts. She had to be around the same age as Lucy, and Lucy could easily picture her as one of her peers sitting in a lecture hall, sipping a grande mocha from Starbucks while typing on her Macbook Air and whispering to her friends. This girl looked so decidedly normal that she stood out like a sore thumb against the abyssal horror of this Dream—a Dream that purportedly came from her mind.

  Brushing aside the absurdity of all of this for now, Lucy asked her immediate question: “Where did you come from?”

  “New Jersey,” the girl said with an overly earnest grin. “I take it from your accent you’re American, too? Surprisingly, I—”

  “No,” Lucy said, fighting the urge to abashedly cover her mouth after seeing the Dreamer’s eyes go wide with disbelief at Lucy’s casual interruption. But there was something in this girl’s manner, something behind those big eyes and cherubic smile, that told Lucy not to show hesitation or self-doubt. Perhaps it was the haughtiness that Lucy could already sense from just a few verbal exchanges, reminding her of some prickly conversations she’d had with a certain someone not long ago. But regardless of the reason, Lucy did not falter as she said: “That’s not what I meant. I mean, where were you this whole time? Were you watching me from somewhere?”

  “Oh, you’re really out to paint me as the devious type, huh?” The girl laughed a sweet laugh, the kind that almost reminded Lucy of the laugh she would share with Kathy at their lockers back on a high school morning between classes. But the warmth and nostalgia was heavily tempered by the swarming darkness that frayed at the edges of the girl’s figure, making her laugh ultimately jarring. “But I’ll admit, I was watching you. From just up there.”

  Without an ounce of effort or decorum, she pointed her index finger straight up. Lucy stared in confusion, then followed her gaze and shone her light up toward the unseen ceiling.

  “Where do you mean?” said Lucy. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Oh, I guess it would be hard to see from here ‘cause it’s a solid black,” said the Dreamer. “Try moving your little light back and forth and focus on one spot.”

  She paused for a beat, then deepened her smile and added: “It’s all dark here, but you can tell when one darkness is different from another, can’t you?”

  “What do you…” Lucy let her voice trail off, not wanting to show her confusion and reliance on this girl and her cryptic ways. And why should she trust her, given that she had just admitted to spying on her from afar? So instead, Lucy kept her voice to herself and did as the Dreamer had suggested, waving her Ideal’s light back and forth across the formless darkness high above while squinting and keeping her gaze trained on a single spot.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She saw it.

  While the space high above them was a uniform black as the girl had said, there was a part of it that didn’t shift along with the darkness’s subtle but ceaseless swarming, that space’s limited perimeter contrasting with the abyssal sea that overflowed with endlessness. As Lucy traced her light and sight across the air high above, she saw that this solidified darkness was neat and rectangular: a kind of beam or platform, stretching parallel to the ground as far as the eye could see in either direction.

  “You were up on that the whole time?” Lucy asked, immediately bringing her light and gaze back down to focus on the Dreamer’s face. She still couldn’t bring herself to trust this girl before her, especially now that Lucy knew she had been literally watching her from the shadows.

  “Yup!” The girl beamed, one hand fiddling with her hair as if this were the most casual conversation in the world. “I saw the whole thing safe and sound from up there. Pretty neat, huh?”

  “The whole thing?” Now Lucy’s disbelief and nerves were approaching their breaking point, a brief flickering of her Ideal’s light betraying the emotions she was trying to keep in check. “So you watched me on my own, going up to those…people, who turned into machines, and getting attacked by them? And you didn’t try to stop me before any of that happened?”

  The girl’s mouth twisted into a knowing smile, but Lucy realized the fatal assumption she had made in her question, and added with a tone of certainty: “You know about these machine-people, don’t you?”

  “Pfft, of course I do,” said the girl, making a dismissive gesture with her hand as if saying she already knew all the topics needed for tomorrow’s quiz. “Not like I’m brand new to this place.”

  “Then why didn’t you talk to me sooner?” Lucy’s voice came out louder and more rushed than she was expecting, and despite all her effort she couldn’t keep herself from audibly swallowing and her voice from warbling as she said: “If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have had to…had to…”

  “Oh c’mon, don’t take it too harshly. It’s nothing personal.”

  Lucy’s barrage of emotions were stonewalled by sheer shock as she took in the girl’s nonchalant and slightly bemused tone. She’d taken on a neutral expression, completely unfazed by Lucy’s clear outpouring of regret and frustration.

  “I always watch you Dream Knights first before I approach,” the Dreamer said, continuing on with an even tone that carried a smidge of dismissiveness. “Too many of you are just so…what’s the word…a stick in the mud? A sourpuss? I was over here worrying you’d be another one of them, but right before I was going to write you off, I saw it. You were different.”

  “Different?” Lucy said, no longer making an effort to hide how much she demanded an explanation. “Saw it? What did you see? What are you even talking about?”

  “Well,” the girl said, placing her hand on her hip as if she were about to recount the dinner she had with her friends the night prior, “it’s more than one ’it,’ really. First was the way you smashed that bigger bot to pieces while turning around all dramatic-like. It was like, whizz-whir-kapow! Like something straight out of Star Wars or Fate/stay night. Man, that was so hype! Really got my blood pumping.”

  Lucy opened her mouth, but didn’t even know where to begin. It was absolutely ludicrous to think that her fight for her life against those machines could be viewed as entertainment to onlookers. There was no way she could look back at her struggle for survival, especially now that she knew what would happen if the machines had gotten just one clean hit on her, and view her plight as some action-packed battle scene from a movie.

  Or at least, that’s what Lucy wanted to tell herself.

  There was, unarguably, some small part of her that did think it was cool, after hearing the Dreamer put more emphasis on the spectacle of her experience. It was the same part of her that had pushed for her to choose Concentrated Illumination as her latest Feat, and that had dreamed up the armour she wore and the sword she carried. She wanted to silence that part of herself, suppress the glee and satisfaction that were trying to make her neutral frown curve upward, but the Dreamer seemed to have already noticed, for there was an apparent gleam in her eyes as she stared at Lucy’s face.

  “But the real plot twist,” the Dreamer said, using a dramatic hand gesture as if chatting about her movie night last weekend, “was after you shook that little bot off your foot. You remember what you did next, right?”

  Lucy went stiff, but fought to maintain her neutral disposition. So the Dreamer had seen that happen, and probably remembered it far more vividly than Lucy ever could. But that couldn’t be true. Lucy didn’t want it to be true. She wanted to stay silent, let the Dreamer ramble on, let her describe a different series of events that had led to Lucy’s victory over the boy-turned-machine that was different from the shaky kaleidoscope of memories Lucy had of that encounter, memories she wished were just falsified by stress and adrenaline and terror.

  For the first time since she had made herself visible, the Dreamer frowned. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. You know full well what you did to that cute little bot, don’t you?”

  Lucy had to bite her cheek—cute? In reference to the little horror that had almost transformed her into another horror? She’d been doubting this Dreamer’s grip on reality the whole time, but this one absolutely sealed it in Lucy’s mind.

  Still, Lucy couldn’t escape the question, as the Dreamer continued to stare at Lucy with a much more serious expression that was at odds with the rest of her appearance and demeanour. It was as though a shadow had fallen over her face, as if she could blend back into the darkness at any moment and will it to make Lucy’s life miserable under its all-consuming vastness.

  “I defeated it,” Lucy said with her head held purposefully high and with her voice carefully kept at an even pace. “The little machine attacked me first, so I fought back and won.”

  The Dreamer nodded slowly, but Lucy could see in her eyes and pursed lips that she was expecting more.

  So Lucy added: “And that was unexpected because the machine got me first. It almost turned me into another machine.”

  The girl stared at Lucy, into her eyes, into what lay behind her eyes, into everything that Lucy couldn’t see and everyone else could see if they looked hard enough.

  And then she gave a low chuckle.

  “What?” Lucy said this flatly, but her voice quavered as she was still shivering at how effortlessly this girl had subjected Lucy’s entire being to her searching glance.

  Dream Knights are Dreamers, too.

  Ricardo’s words resounded in Lucy’s mind like an distant unseen bell, and Lucy’s nerves went even colder as she felt suddenly violated and like she had been flipped onto the other side of the looking glass. Just who was this girl, and why was she reading a Dream Knight like Lucy with the same thoroughness reserved for helping a Dreamer? But Lucy realized this comparison wasn’t correct, as that searching glance was different in its depth, aiming not for understanding, but something else entirely.

  “Don’t worry,” the Dreamer said, the casual tone returning to her voice despite the lingering after-image of that searching glance Lucy could still see in her eyes. “I know you know what I mean, but it’s difficult for you to say. So I’ll just say it for you. No biggie.”