"A stray?" Maggie said. "What's wrong?"

  "How bad is it?" Mark cut in.

  Johnny looked at him. "Very bad."

  "Okay." Mark was already moving. "Lead the way."

  No discussion. No assessment. He just started walking, and something in that particular efficiency made Maggie's stomach tighten in a way she didn't examine. She fell into step. Martin moved beside her, quiet. They exchanged a glance and neither of them said anything.

  · · ·

  Mark got the trailer. Two minutes, no discussion—he disappeared, came back with it parked outside the east gate, engine idling in whatever way trailers idled in the Dreamscape. They piled in and Johnny directed from the front, pointing at roads that may or may not have existed before he pointed at them.

  Maggie turned in her seat toward him and tried to get something useful out of him.

  "What happened, exactly?"

  "I'm not sure," Johnny said. He wasn't in animal form, which was unusual enough on its own. "Could be a transformation gone wrong. That's what the settlement folks thought, anyway. Some of them had seen something nearby—they just weren't sure what it was or where it came from."

  "So it's a person."

  "Maybe. Was." He paused. "I was heading back to find you and I ran into it. Tried to talk to it. It could answer—small words, nothing complicated. But they didn't connect to anything. Like it was repeating sounds it remembered without knowing what they meant."

  "Like what?"

  He thought about it. "Home. Help. Something like that. In the wrong order. Wrong tone." His expression settled into something uncomfortable. "I figured it was a stray, told it I'd find someone who could help. Then I came after you."

  Maggie nodded slowly.

  Johnny kept talking—something about the settlement, about what the people there had said—but she'd stopped tracking the details. She was thinking about the way he'd described it. Small words. They didn't connect to anything. Not confused. Not lost. Just emptied out and still walking around in the leftover shape.

  She'd never thought about what that looked like from the outside.

  She glanced at Mark ahead of her, at the set of his shoulders, the pace he was keeping. Then at Martin beside her, jaw tight, eyes forward. She opened her mouth once, searching for something to say, and found nothing that wouldn't make it worse. The silence between them was doing its own kind of work. She let it.

  · · ·

  They smelled it before they saw it.

  Not rot, exactly. Something older. Like wet earth and copper and the particular staleness of a room left sealed for too long.

  The thing was crouched at the base of a low ridge, half-hidden in tall grass. From a distance it read as a dog—large, matted, still. As they got closer it became something that made the brain stall. The shape was wrong in too many ways to count cleanly. Four limbs, but arranged with an ambiguity that the mind kept trying to resolve into one thing or another and couldn't. Fur, but patchy, interrupted by stretches of pale skin. Hands, but not quite. A face that had started as one thing and been renegotiated into something the Dreamscape had settled for.

  Maggie's feet stopped.

  Mark stepped forward.

  "Hey." His voice was careful. Not gentle, exactly—more like the tone you'd use near a structure you weren't sure was still load-bearing. "Can you hear me?"

  The thing's head turned. Its eyes tracked toward him.

  "Lost," it said.

  "I know." Mark crouched down to its level. "Do you remember your name?"

  A long pause. Then: "Stairs. Green."

  Mark didn't look away from it. "Where are you from?"

  "Falling." It shifted, a small movement, its weight redistributing with an articulation that was neither human nor animal but somewhere between the two. "Soft here. Before."

  Mark kept trying—careful, methodical, working through the gaps. Each answer it gave landed slightly to the left of where it should have. Not evasion. The connections simply weren't there anymore. Whatever had organized that mind into a person had come undone, and what remained was running on the residue.

  Martin stepped up beside Maggie. "Is there somewhere we can take it?" he asked quietly. "It doesn't seem dangerous."

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  Mark stood.

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a sword—long, plain-handled.

  "Mark." Maggie heard herself say it before she'd decided to. "You don't have to—"

  She stopped. She could hear how it sounded. She could feel the shape of the argument she was about to make, and underneath it, she could also feel the part of her that already knew it was empty. The thing in front of them wasn't suffering toward something. It wasn't on a trajectory that led anywhere. It had already arrived at its destination and the destination was this.

  The thing's head lifted. For a moment—one clear, terrible moment—its eyes focused.

  "Kill," it said.

  Mark didn't hesitate. One clean motion, and it was over. Then he crouched and pressed one hand to the ground beside it, and fire caught, burning slow and thorough, the kind that doesn't spread.

  He straightened and turned around.

  The space behind him was wrong. No sound, no visible seam—just a weight that hadn't been there a moment before, like the air had been asked to hold something it wasn't built for. The grass around the fire lay flat, then straightened wrong, bending toward something that wasn't wind.

  A figure stood at the edge of the ridge.

  Tall. Robed in yellow so vivid it seemed to exist at a slightly different frequency than everything around it—not bright, but insistent, the way a bruise insists on itself. The robe moved without wind. The figure's face was a surface that the eye couldn't quite commit to: a face, or a mask over a face, or the memory of a face translated into something that no longer needed to be accurate. Whatever was underneath regarded them with the particular patience of something that had been waiting long enough that time had stopped being a relevant concept.

  The air around it didn't warp or crack. It simply became less trustworthy.

  Maggie's hands came up on instinct.

  "RUN." Mark's voice cut across her. "NOW."

  She turned. Johnny wasn't there. She hadn't seen him go—one second present, the next just absent, like a word she'd forgotten mid-sentence. She figured, for him, waking up counted as running.

  Martin's hand closed around hers and he was already moving. She ran.

  Mark and Locke stood twenty meters back, not running. Backing up, slowly, deliberately. Mark's eyes were on the figure. Locke stood pressed to his side, hackles raised, head low—not attacking, just present. The two of them formed a line between the figure and the direction Maggie and Martin were running.

  Buying time. Not fighting. Just buying time.

  The figure watched. It didn't advance. It didn't react. It simply stood there, its robe pooling around it in ways that ignored the terrain underneath, until—without transition, without movement—it wasn't there anymore.

  Maggie slowed. Then stopped.

  "It's gone," she said.

  Martin pulled up beside her, breathing harder than she was. He looked back. "Gone where?"

  "Just gone."

  Mark reached them at a pace that was brisk but not running. He stopped in front of them, expression unreadable, and looked at them both.

  "You need to leave," he said. "Both of you. Now."

  "Who was that?" Maggie asked.

  Martin said, quietly, "Was that the King in—"

  "Don't say its name, or title." Mark interrupted. "If you know who that was, then the sooner you leave, the better." His eyes went to Martin specifically, and his voice dropped into something that wasn't unkind but allowed no room. "If you die here, you won't be able to say goodbye to your wife."

  Martin stood very still for a moment.

  He turned to look at Maggie. "Do you know who that was?"

  Maggie's eyes dropped to her dress for a half-second. The same yellow.

  She shook her head.

  Martin looked at her for another moment. Whatever he read in her face seemed to settle something in him—not resignation, exactly. Something more deliberate than that.

  He was quiet long enough that Maggie heard the grass move. Then he exhaled through his nose—slow, controlled, the kind of breath you take when you've made a decision you're not going to revisit.

  "Alright," he said. He turned to Mark. "I'm ready."

  Then he turned back to Maggie.

  "You know," he said, his voice easy in a way that didn't match his eyes, "my wife hates it when I come home late. Worries herself sick." He paused. "She also hates it when I lie to her about being careful."

  Maggie didn't say anything.

  "Whatever that thing was—" He gestured vaguely toward the ridge without looking. "—you know more than you're saying. That's fine. I was a cop for thirty-two years. I know when someone's protecting me from something." He met her eyes. "Just make sure you're not protecting everyone else at your own expense. That's a bad habit. I'd know."

  His hand came up—briefly, awkwardly—and rested on her shoulder. The contact lasted maybe two seconds.

  "Be smart," he said. "I'll see you on the other side."

  He stepped back and nodded at Mark. "Okay. Now I'm ready."

  Mark looked at him. Then he snapped his fingers.

  "Wake up."

  Martin left. No ceremony. No gradual fade. Between one breath and the next there was simply one less person standing in the grass.

  Mark looked at Maggie.

  "You too."

  "Explain it to me first."

  "No." Flat. "The less you think about it, the better. Thinking about it draws attention. You don't want attention from that direction."

  "That's not a satisfying answer."

  "It's not meant to be satisfying. It's meant to keep you in one piece."

  Maggie looked at him. At the thing burning behind him, almost down to nothing. At the space on the ridge where the figure had been. She thought about the aberration and its borrowed words, and the way the Dreamscape had looked for a moment like something that had no bottom to it—like she'd been standing at the edge of a pool and finally looked down and realized it wasn't a pool.

  She had been underestimating this place.

  She'd known that, in an abstract way, for a while. She knew it differently now.

  "Fine," she said. "Distract me then."

  Mark looked at her. "What?"

  "You said don't think about it. So give me something else to think about. Tell me about yourself."

  A pause.

  "That's your solution," he said. "To an existential threat."

  "I'm very goal-oriented."

  He was quiet for a moment. Locke sat down beside him and looked up at him with the patience of someone who had seen this exact calculation before and knew how it ended.

  Mark exhaled.

  "Fine." He started walking. "It's not like you'd be the first." He glanced back at her. "Let's walk. And don't look toward the ridge."

  Maggie fell into step beside him.

  "I've been here for about twenty years," he said. "Give or take. Time doesn't track cleanly."

  "I know that part."

  "Then you know it's a long time to be somewhere you didn't choose. The rest of it—where I came from, why I'm here—that's the part that takes longer."

  He kept walking. Locke padded alongside him. The fire behind them had gone out, and the ridge was empty, and the Dreamscape settled back into the silence of a place that never entirely stops watching.

  "Keep up," Mark said. "And stop thinking about the ridge."

  Maggie stopped thinking about the ridge. Mostly.