Before Lucy could say anything, the girl put her hands behind her back with a sweet, serene smile on her face and turned her back to Lucy. She paced off a few steps in the direction she was facing, as if reminiscing about a pleasant memory she’d shared with her crush.

  “You shook off that cute little bot very quickly,” she said. “But it’s what you did after that really made my heart throb.”

  She laughed again, a slow, gentle, and pleasant laugh tinged with the same warmth as a fireside reminiscence over Christmas cards. “You made one good downward thrust on that helpless little robot. It was so nice, so cool, so precise. You definitely fried its motherboard in one hit. But then…”

  She shook her hands, clasped behind her back, side to side in a girly, coltish showing of giddiness, her lively figure almost glowing with a blinding energy as Lucy kept her light trained on her.

  The girl gave an impassioned sigh, and said: “Then you stabbed the robot again. And again. And again. And again. You just kept going! There was the stabbing, the kicking, the stamping, at one point you even knelt down and punched it to smithereens! Even from where I was watching, I could feel the heat from all the moving you were doing, the fever from how much you wanted to keep on smashing the damn thing till there was nothing left of it.”

  Lucy’s head was spinning. Had she really stamped and kicked at the machine that much. And when had she punched it? She had a complete gap in her memory of getting herself that physically involved, which scared her and made her doubt herself the same way this relentless darkness made one doubt all their senses, their very sense of self.

  Meanwhile, the Dreamer brought her hands up to her face and let out a captivated sigh. Before her exaggerated exhalation finished fading into the void, she turned back around and stepped up closer to Lucy, leaning in with an urgent manner to her movements. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for a Dream Knight to do something like that. So when I saw you, I thought I had to be hallucinating.”

  “Hold on,” Lucy said, holding her hands up to prompt the girl to keep more of a distance. “You’ve met other Dream Knights before?”

  “Sure have,” the girl said while rolling her eyes. “I’ve had all that mumbo-jumbo about Dream Knights and Dreams explained to me like half a dozen times. So if you’re gonna go all video game tutorial on me, please for the love of god save me the trouble of mashing ‘A’ and just let me hit ‘skip’ right here.” She frowned again, pursing her lips while squinting and eyeing Lucy up and down. “You do know what a video game is, right? You’re not, like, a Mormon, are you?”

  “N-no, I’m not,” said Lucy. She didn’t know much about Mormons herself, but she was sure they were at least aware of what a video game was. Still, the question made Lucy wonder whether her appearance really gave off the vibe of a no-nonsense goody two-shoes, similar to what Diana had been mocking her for.

  Diana.

  The moment that name crept in through the edges of Lucy’s memories, she realized something that had been at the back of her mind this whole time: this Dreamer and Diana would likely have gotten along very well. Even besides the Dreamer’s apparent appreciation (“appreciation” might even be an understatement) for wanton violence, there was something about her manner and the way she carried herself that very much resembled the red-plumed Dream Knight, even though appearance-wise there was zero resemblance to be had between the sweet ordinary girl and the hulking, towering titan of a Dream Knight.

  Still, this acknowledgement helped Lucy to understand some of the disconnect and discord she sensed from this Dreamer. With this outwardly-pleasant girl standing before her, Lucy seemed to have an inherent inability to fully mesh with her, just as she had with Diana, like water and oil or light and shadow. But, at least in the case of Diana, Lucy had been able to pull through with her despite their jarring differences because they could still understand each other enough on a physical and mission-driven level in working toward the shared goal of rescuing the Dreamer.

  But what if it was the Dreamer that Lucy was incompatible with? Both Cole and Kenneth had required a great deal of effort from Lucy in order for her to fully connect with them on an emotional level, but in both cases they had at least shared in common with Lucy their desire to stop fighting and seek peace. If this present Dreamer girl were anything like Diana, especially in how she revelled in conflict and making new adversaries, then perhaps a Knight of Understanding like Lucy just wasn’t the right fit for this particular Dream.

  This was looking at the situation with grave pessimism, which Lucy wanted to avoid. But still, this line of reasoning brought Lucy to realize, with a shudder that emerged from deep within the marrow of her bones, something highly unusual about this Dreamer’s situation.

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  “You’ve seen a lot of Dream Knights in your Dream,” said Lucy, lowering her head to lock eyes with the Dreamer with a grave stare, “but you’re alone right now. Where are they, then?”

  “Oh, some of them weren’t as lucky as you and got some new hardware, if you know what I mean.” The quick and casual explanation from the Dreamer made Lucy bite her lip, both in terror and in solidarity for their horrific fates, but the Dreamer continued: “But a bunch of them just gave up. They were like, ‘Screw it,’ and went back to their own Dreams.” She sniffled with such swift exaggeration Lucy half-expected to see crocodile tears. “They’re so cruel, leaving a scared little girl alone in the dark.”

  Went back to their own Dreams? In this darkness that was currently making it nigh-impossible for Lucy to find her return point? The very thought of it was impossible to believe, but Lucy decided that wasn’t as pressing as the larger implications of what the Dreamer just said. “The ones who gave up, they felt like they couldn’t understand you and your Dream?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “But you know about us Dream Knights and our three Axes, right?” When the girl gave a carefree nod, Lucy added: “Then do you remember if you ever had a Dream Knight whose Primary Axis was Rebellion?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. Ooh, I think I know where you’re going with this. I already know you’re gonna ask, so before you do: I did find them a lot easier to get along with than…the other two ’Axes’ or whatever. They didn’t want to sneak around and run, and they didn’t want to sit down and talk some crap about ‘my feelings.’ Just good old-fashioned kicking ass, like what you did. Are you with Rebellion?”

  “No, no,” Lucy said in haste, mortified to have herself miscategorized under that Axis. “I’m on the Axis of Understanding.”

  “Heh, really, you’re the type to talk about feelings like some therapist in fancy clothes? Could’ve fooled me with that brutal beat-down back there.”

  “I can fight when my life’s on the line,” Lucy said with measured patience, “or yours. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Why didn’t the Knights of Rebellion rescue you, then?”

  Silence, and then a laugh—more like a giggle this time, little sparks of light that dropped through the darkness from an unseen source. The girl looked Lucy in the eye, then let her gaze wander off to the side where it trailed far off into the distance, her pretty blue irises reflecting the infinite void. “Oh, they tried to rescue me all right. At least while they thought they knew what they were doing.”

  Lucy stared with her skin buzzing, as if the darkness were nibbling at the edges of her soul. “What do you mean?”

  The girl giggled again, her grin casting a harsh glare back at Lucy. “Those Knights of Rebellion were cool, too. Hell of a lot more willing to actually fight, compared to those other sticks in the mud. But every time, every single time, it became really obvious that they were only in it for the sake of opposing whatever they were fighting. They only wanted to stop the other side from winning, and that was it.”

  Lucy’s gaze flicked from the girl’s face to her glowing blade, reflecting her face as she considered the girl’s words. What she’d just described matched Diana almost too perfectly: in every single encounter she and Lucy had gone through together, Diana had revelled in being the deterrent force, whether that involved breaking the queen’s influence, or challenging the golden words of General Hawthorne, or defying the desperate will to live from two unassuming bakers.

  “But what was wrong with that?” Lucy said, her eyes trailing from her Ideal’s light to the girl’s face, which seemed, strangely enough, to not be as illuminated as it should have been. “That’s what Knights of Rebellion focus on, and isn’t that what you want to see? Someone who wants to win against the machines no matter what?”

  “Oh?” The girl raised her eyebrows, but her eyes maintained a sharp, knowing look that, in Lucy’s light, contrasted sharply with her mellow clothing and cute hair. “I’m surprised you would even need to ask that question. I thought you would know right away why their way of thinking is different.”

  “Different?” When that word left Lucy’s lips, a deep abyssal stirring welled up from the pit beneath Lucy’s heart, like a night-black flower clawing its way up to bloom.

  “Fine, I’ll spell it out for you, then.” There was the slightest flicker of movement to the girl’s perfectly still, perfectly calm, perfectly picturesque figure, and Lucy took a moment to spot what had moved: her hands had balled into fists. “I don’t give a shit about winning. That’s just the consequence everyone writes down in some imaginary scoreboard that doesn’t matter. I want what happens before that. I want the means.”

  The girl brought her fists up in front of her face, opened them into wide palms, then squeezed them back into fists with such speed and force Lucy could swear she heard skin tightening.

  “Crushing them.” The girl said it suddenly, her voice lowering to a near-whisper, though it was still startlingly clear. “Breaking them apart from the inside out. Grinding them all to dust because every part of them is wrong. It’s fun—no, no, fun isn’t the right word. It’s euphoric. Like when the hole in the ozone layer closed. It’s so euphorically right for the world.”

  It was only when the girl’s words faded out, but continued to ring in Lucy’s ears in a haunting dance, that Lucy realized she was breathing loudly and rapidly while staring deep into those abyss-reflecting eyes.

  This Dreamer was insane.

  Absolutely, maniacally insane.

  Lucy’s body moved before her mind could catch up, holding her Ideal out in front of her while bracing her entire body.

  But the sweet young girl didn’t pay so much as a passing glance to the weapon held out in defence against her. She walked forward, her leisurely steps seeming to float effortlessly as if carried by the darkness that swirled behind her, and in one quick motion she reached up and grabbed Lucy’s face with both hands.

  “You can only keep lying to yourself for so long,” said the Dreamer in a tender, friendly tone. “You get me. You get me like no one else ever did.”

  Her smile widened until its creases melded into the darkness on either side of her, then she brought her face close enough to Lucy’s to make visible the entire lightless cosmos that swam within her pupils.

  “I saw the smile you had.”