They walked back to the trailer in silence.

  After a few minutes, Mark said, without preamble, "You're doing it again."

  Maggie looked at him. "Doing what?"

  "Denying. Before it was the memories—you didn't want to look at them. Now it's this." He kept walking. "You're using me as a reason to stay instead of dealing with the fact that you don't want to leave."

  "I just want to help."

  "I know." His tone wasn't unkind. "But wanting to help me is convenient. It gives you something to do that isn't going back."

  She didn't have an answer for that. Not one that wouldn't sound like an argument she was losing.

  "Besides," Mark continued, "I've already asked for every kind of help I can think of. Tried entering people's dreams to get information. Tracked down dreamwalkers—they either forget or disappear before anything comes of it. Even tried my family's dreams. Looking for something concrete."

  Maggie opened her mouth.

  "I got ahead of myself," he said. "Let's get back first."

  · · ·

  The trailer was where they'd left it. Mark led her past the main space and down a short corridor she hadn't noticed before, stopping at a door that opened into a room that was not, in any way, what she expected.

  It was full of things. Shelves along two walls, dense with objects—small sculptures, stacked books, a few framed drawings, something that looked like a compass that couldn't decide which direction north was. A low table in the center with two chairs that had clearly been used. A rug on the floor with a pattern that shifted slightly when she wasn't looking directly at it.

  Maggie stepped inside slowly, scanning the shelves. Some of the objects were clearly unfinished—a half-formed bird in dark stone, a glass bottle that was solid on one side and hollow on the other, a stack of books where the spines were blank. Others were precise enough to seem old. A small oil lamp that probably worked. A wooden box with a latch that her hand reached toward before she decided against it.

  "I expected more... empty wall," she said.

  "I've been here a long time." Mark pulled out one of the chairs and sat. "Most of it is practice work. Creating something specific enough to last takes repetition."

  Maggie sat across from him, still scanning. A small clay figure near the edge of one shelf looked almost like a dog. Almost.

  "Locke?" she asked.

  "Third attempt."

  She looked at him. "What happened to the first two?"

  "They were aggressive."

  She looked back at the shelves and decided not to ask follow-up questions.

  Locke curled up near the door and closed his eyes with the conviction of someone who had been waiting for an excuse to rest. The compass on the shelf rotated once and stopped. The room had the quality of a space that had absorbed a lot of silence over a long time.

  "So this is a result of your training," she said. "You did mention having a master once. Back when Jay was with us you said you couldn't talk about it."

  Mark looked at her steadily. "Still can't. Not in detail." He paused. "He's a divine entity, an archangel. That's the part that limits what I can say."

  Maggie stared at him.

  "Holy sh—" She caught herself. Then uncaught herself. "Holy shit."

  "You can finish that. I've said considerably worse."

  "An archangel." She said it back to him like testing whether the words would sound less absurd the second time. They didn't. "You're telling me you apprenticed under an archangel."

  "That's what I'm telling you."

  She leaned back in her chair. The wood creaked. Somewhere on the shelves, something small shifted—a book settling, or maybe the room adjusting to the weight of what had been said.

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

  Maggie looked around the room again—the practice objects, the unfinished things, the decades of accumulated work. Twenty years in the Dreamscape. A divine entity for a teacher. And he'd delivered it with the same energy other people used to mention they'd taken a night class.

  "How does that even—" She stopped. Started again. "What does that look like? Does he give you assignments? Grade your clay dogs?"

  "He suggested I help others. Said it would give me something real to do." Mark's voice was flat, but not closed. "I started, and it turned out he was right—it meant something. So I kept going."

  Maggie was quiet for a moment, letting that settle. An archangel had looked at Mark and decided he was worth the effort. Or found him interesting enough to bother with. She wasn't sure which was stranger.

  "So," Mark said. "What do you want to know?"

  "How did you get here," she said. "And you've been ready to leave for a while—you said so yourself. So why are you still here?"

  Mark exhaled. "I told you before. I was bored."

  Maggie looked at him.

  He held her gaze for a moment, then exhaled again. "Fine." He leaned back. "Normal family. Older brother. Nothing remarkable." He said it the way someone reads a list they've already memorized. "I always felt slightly out of place in it. Kept to myself. Spent most of my time studying because that was the one thing that made sense."

  Maggie didn't say anything.

  "Didn't have many friends. Didn't particularly want them." He adjusted his glasses. "I went through most of my life in a kind of low-grade apathy. Nothing was wrong, exactly. Nothing was right either. I just never felt—" He paused, searching for the word and apparently not finding it. "Alive."

  The room was quiet. Locke's breathing was the only sound.

  "When I got to college, I had an accident. Ended up here."

  "That's it?"

  "Told you. I was bored."

  Maggie didn't push. She knew what bored meant when someone said it like that. She'd heard it before—in group, in waiting rooms, in her own head on the days when getting out of bed felt like a negotiation she was losing. Bored wasn't the word. It was the word you used when you didn't want to say the other one.

  "Anyway—when I arrived, I was like Jayden. The whole new world thing. No guide, no context, no idea what the rules were. I spent the first weeks trying to understand why the landscape kept changing and why half the people in it wanted to kill me." A dry pause. "I thought if I couldn't find a reason out there, maybe I'd find one here."

  "Did you?"

  "For a while I thought so. There's enough here to keep someone busy for a long time if they let it." He glanced at the shelves. "But the Dreamscape isn't interested in giving you a reason to live. It reacts. You can mistake that for meaning if you're not paying attention."

  Maggie nodded slowly. "And then you wanted to leave."

  "You have to understand how time works here. It passes at different rates—mostly fast. I've been here five years by outside measure, but the time I've actually lived through is much longer. Decades, without exaggerating." His eyes went to the shelves—all those objects, all that accumulated practice. "I didn't want to leave my family managing my body forever. I was ready."

  He stopped.

  "But I couldn't leave."

  She held his gaze for a second, then snapped her fingers. "Wake up."

  Mark laughed. "I already tried that. Well—I asked someone else to try it."

  "And?"

  "Nothing. I'm still here." He spread his hands briefly. "I tried everything I could think of, then everything I couldn't. Asked my master. Even asked Luc, which I don't recommend—he was helpful in the way that a fire is helpful for warmth, meaning technically yes but at a cost." He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his coat in a gesture that seemed more habitual than necessary. "I thought my body had died. But that didn't explain why I was still here—people don't persist in the Dreamscape because their bodies die, unless they've become something embedded in the collective. I'm not famous. I haven't been retold into existence." He put the glasses back on. "I have no explanation. I can't leave."

  Maggie turned that over. "Maybe you weren't actually ready. Or maybe there's a time limit." She paused. "Or something you still haven't resolved."

  "I've considered those." He didn't dismiss them. "Can't rule any of them out."

  "You said you tried your family's dreams." She leaned forward slightly. "They didn't give you anything?"

  "Personal dreams are hard to direct. Even if I managed to find something useful, you can't trust it—the mind reshapes information to fit what it already believes. I got contradictory things. Fragments." He shook his head. "And eventually they moved, and I lost the thread. Couldn't find them anymore."

  Maggie was quiet for a moment, thinking.

  "Where did you live?" she asked. "Before."

  He told her.

  Maggie went still. "That's where I'm from."

  "I know." Mark's expression didn't change. "I spend most of my time there when I'm alone. It's why I found you."

  She sat with that for a second. Same town, different decades. "Huh."

  "It's a coincidence," he said. Not defensively. Noting it.

  "No, I know." She shook her head slightly. "Have you been back? To your house, after your family moved?"

  "Yes. New residents moved in. I stopped going after that." He thought about it. "Twelve years ago, roughly."

  "Twelve years." She stared at him. "You haven't tried since?"

  "What would be the point? I can't get useful information from—"

  "Maybe they only rented," she said. "Maybe your family came back and you'd given up by then."

  "Or maybe they sold the house and moved across the country." He took off his glasses, cleaned them again. The gesture was starting to look less like habit and more like a way to not look at her. "I spent years trying to find answers. At some point you have to accept that some questions don't have them."

  "Aren't you just running? Like I did."

  "There's a difference."

  "Is there?"

  Mark didn't answer. He put the glasses back on, adjusted them once, and looked at her with an expression she couldn't read.

  "Let's go," she said. "Once. If we don't find anything, I'll drop it and leave—I promise."

  Mark looked at her with the expression of a man weighing how much energy it would cost to keep saying no.

  Locke, from his spot near the door, looked up at him.

  "You're both doing the same face," Mark said.

  Maggie hadn't been aware she was making a face.

  He exhaled. Then, quieter: "Don't forget you still have declarations to revoke. Before you leave."

  Maggie nodded.

  "Fine. Let's go."

  He stood, and Locke was already at the door.