Jill’s head constantly tilted up and from side to side as she made her way through the school, silently observing the scenery. Ever since the first night when Wasp Girl had shown up, her dreams had been larger and more beautiful, but also emptier. There were so many rooms, quite likely an infinite number, with almost no-one in them, when her dreams used to be full of random characters. Now, they were populated by real people, and not very many of them, considering the scale of the places she found herself.

Her intuition was still a good guide through the dreamscape. She followed the trail of unlocked doors out to the school’s lobby, then picked another door and found herself in the history area. Instead of the sleek touchpads from the maths wing, the doors here had what looked like intricate wooden dollhouses bolted on.

She narrowed her eyes at the nearest. There were thirty or so figures with painted outfits standing in and around a squat building. There were no instructions anywhere, and this clearly wasn’t the same as the maths puzzles.

Usually, these worlds seemed to have a few different aesthetics randomly patchworked together, with minor obstacles scattered throughout. It wasn’t usually too hard to get anywhere, but it tended to be slow going. If she could find a shotgun, she could probably just break through the doors, but that was a long shot: the only times she’d ever seen any respectable weapons, they’d been in the hands of someone who turned out to be a murderer that time round.

Like you.

She pushed the thought aside and focused on the puzzle. For any puzzle lock, there is a goal state, which implies that if the door isn’t already unlocked, it isn’t in the goal state. She shook the dollhouse, and the figurines vibrated. They weren’t fixed to the floors; they could be moved. The objective had to be to put them into the correct positions, to … for a history problem, probably to reenact some important historical event.

She looked the figurines over more closely. One had nice-looking clothes; she decided he was probably a high-ranking official, so she put him inside the building, which she designated either a small castle or an ugly government office. Several with red shirts could have been soldiers, so she placed them around the top of the building like sentries. Some of the figurines had darker skins, so on a whim she decided that it was a rebellion against a British colony, and they were attacking from outside. One by one, she arranged the dolls, and finally there came a grinding sound from the mechanism, and the door swung open.

The area past the first door was thick with dust, cobwebs, and old reference books. That was another thing that she was still getting used to: she’d never seen true writing in her dreams before. There had been books and signs, but they’d only ever had vague squiggles which sometimes parsed as a sort of writing substitute that fed directly into her understanding without any actual reading.

There were more doors, but these were already open. There were footprints in the dust, describing a twisting path through one room after another, finally leading outside, to a little courtyard enclosed by ivy-laden brick walls. Pure blue sky radiated heat overhead. Jill barely noticed.

The hunchbacked man wore a green janitor’s jumpsuit. He leaned against a mop like a walking stick and was smoking a cigarette. He spared her only a twitch of his eyes as she approached.

“Hey,” she said. He ignored her. “I think there’s a rule against doing that within ten metres of most schools.”

He let out a put-upon sigh but didn’t butt out. “Don’t you have classes?”

“I’m doing private study,” she said.

She knew that none of this was real, but if she said it out loud or even hinted at it too obviously, normally she’d wake up. That rule might or might not apply to shared dreams, but there was no telling what would happen if she did wake up prematurely.

At real school, she’d told Roger she had a bad feeling about Wasp Girl, but that was only because she wasn’t at all eloquent in real life. Really, she was terrified. In dreams, she could generally intuit who would be friendly and who hostile, and that still applied, but when she met Wasp Girl, all she could sense was alien wrongness.

“And I was hoping you might be able to give me a few pointers,” she went on.

“Think again,” he said.

She’d expected him to be unhelpful, so she ignored it. “Do you have a name?”

He glared at her. “Why would I need a name?”

She nodded. “I thought not. I recently met someone else who didn’t have one. You’re the same as her, aren’t you?”

He spat out the cigarette and let it smoulder on the concrete. “Don’t compare me to that thing.”

“Inasmuch as neither of you are real,” Jill said smoothly.

“I’m as real as you,” he said. “I’m just not physical. I live with the transfer student. That thing – I don’t know what she is, I don’t want to know.”

“What are you, exactly? Back before she came along, I’ve never met one of your kind lucid enough to answer. Some sort of NPC? I guess these worlds are normally supposed to help the – visitor – form memories or something, and people like you help with memories involving interactions with other humans?”

“Why are you still talking at me?” he asked. “I don’t like you.”

“Partly I’m fishing,” she said, “but mostly I’m trying to segue back to her. If she’s not like you, what is she?”

“I already told you I don’t want to know.”

“Okay, then give me something else. What does she want? Why is she so strong?”

He said nothing.

“I know you know,” she said. “If not the answers to these questions, you have to know at least part of what’s going on. I record all these adventures, you know. I can’t remember all of what you said, but I once saw you talk to her. You knew some of what was going on.”

“Go away and enjoy the ride,” he said.

“I’m losing track of how many times I’ve been brutally murdered in what’s normally my personal sanctuary,” Jill said. “‘Enjoy’ is not the word I’d use.”

“I can’t help you,” he said.

“Then why not point me to someone who can?” she asked. “Maybe, the guardian?”

He pursed his lips.

“You mentioned it when you talked to her. I forgot, but a friend read my record yesterday and pointed it out to me. I don’t know who or what it is, but she seemed afraid of it. Like it wasn’t aware of her, or couldn’t reach her in time, but if someone fetched it, it would be able to defeat her. And she seemed to think that you could reach it.”

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“I’m not going to tell you again,” he said. “Drop it and leave me alone.”

“Every time I’ve fought her, she’s slaughtered me,” said Jill. “Every single time, and I get the feeling she wasn’t even trying. I need the guardian’s help, and you’re my only lead.”

“Then find another lead.”

She blinked. “You’re not just programmed to be surly and obnoxious. You’re afraid. Of what?”

The hunchback glared at her. “Of dying, you imbecile. You really have no idea what you’re up against. She kills you a few times, and you think that’s the threat? No. She has this entire reality in total lockdown, including everyone in it. She can read and control minds as easily as breathing. There is no going against her.”

“She can’t control my mind,” Jill countered, shoving down the memory of cutting Roger down. “Her telekinesis doesn’t work on objects that I touch. Her powers don’t directly work on me. My intuition says she probably can’t read my mind, either. I can’t beat her, yet, but I can fight her.”

“When you do, she’ll just kill you again.”

“Not this time. Because this time, the guardian is going to fight her for me. Look at it this way. Either you lead me to it now, and you’re no longer relevant to either her or me, or you stonewall me, and you make yourself her one weakness. If she’s as omniscient as you think she is, she’ll know that, and she’ll know that I’ll come back to hassle you next time, and the time after.”

He growled in the back of his throat. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

“That would be why I’m asking the world’s most obnoxious janitor and/or friar for help. You’re going to agree, you know. See, she knows it, so she’ll kill you if she gets the chance. And you know that, so you’ll have to agree. And I know you know that, so I’m going to keep pestering you.”

He spat on the ground. “You have no idea how annoying you are.”

“That reminds me, I should give you a name,” she said. “I’m thinking Irony is suitable.”

“Rr. Fine. The guardian is exactly what it sounds like. The same sort of thing as me, except his job is to keep the transfer student’s head healthy by killing off mind infections. I don’t know if she is really an infection, but if there’s anything anywhere that can beat her, it’s him.”

“Then why hasn’t he already?”

“I don’t know why you think I know everything,” he said. “I’m only supposed to help with the transfer student’s socialisation, and I wasn’t even in charge.”

“Then who is?”

“Nobody, they’re all dead. That thing wiped out everyone who might be able to stop her when she first showed up; that’s why these places are always so empty. The only reason I think the guardian’s even alive is that she hinted it when I saw her.”

Jill already knew that Wasp Girl wasn’t just dumb muscle, but it was still disheartening to be told that she was also methodical. “Let’s assume that she did something to keep the guardian from finding out about her, or maybe from acting on it, but if we tell him or bring him to her, he’ll be able to take her on. How do we do that? Where is he?”

“I still don’t know everything.”

“Guess. If you were the guardian, where would you be?”

The hunchback shrugged apathetically.

Jill let a breath out through her nose and began thinking aloud. “If I were a sort of psychological police officer, I’d stay somewhere I could monitor things and respond quickly, so probably in the middle of the area. But that isn’t what actually happens. I’m pretty sure Wasp Girl’s shrine is often in the middle.” She frowned. “I must be looking at this the wrong way. Advanced computer viruses include code to deactivate antivirus software, but not to uninstall it, because that’s harder to do and more obvious. If I were whatever she is, how would I ensure the guardian couldn’t interfere? I’d put him in a locked box where everything looked fine, and I’d put the rest of the world out far away from that, with my shrine in the middle. I’d make his area as inaccessible as possible, so that there was no chance of anyone accidentally finding him.”

“He’s in this world somewhere,” the hunchback said. “I don’t know much about him, but he knows enough about the transfer student to be able to tell if they’re in the same general area.”

Jill ran her tongue over her teeth. “I’d interpret that as meaning that there has to be some path connecting him to the rest of us, so she can’t just bury him in a bunker a mile below the surface with thirty blast doors. The world probably isn’t that large, too, not if it has to fit inside our heads. She might try security through obscurity, hide him in a toilet or something, but I don’t think so; too much risk of one of the others bumping into him by accident. If I were her, I’d hide him at the edge of the world, behind something as discouraging as possible.” She blinked. “The Chypros tower.”

“Maybe,” said the hunchback, unimpressed. “Maybe not.”

She shook her head. “I know it’s a leap of logic, but it’s worth trying. The Chypros Institute keeps cropping up, and I have no idea who or what they are. Do you?”

He grumbled.

“Even if I’m wrong about the guardian being there, they’re a piece of the puzzle that I want to find out about,” said Jill. “Let’s go.”

“Why would I want to go anywhere with you?” asked the hunchback.

“Because Wasp Girl’s powers don’t work on me, so she can’t scry on me and won’t know to come find you. If I’m not around to block her, though …”

He grumbled again, but followed her as she led him back through the history classrooms, to the foyer, and out the front gate. The autobus that Roger had come from was still there, waiting. Beyond it, the grey Chypros tower stretched up to the sky.

“Let’s talk tactics,” she said. “If there are more raptor cyborgs, I can handle myself, but I’m not sure I can protect –”

A bullet zinged past Jill’s head; she instinctively ducked and twisted, and a second one went through where her neck had just been. She shoulder-checked the hunchback and used the impact to push off, and a third bullet went between them. She grabbed the crook of his elbow and sprinted, staying low and zigzagging as more bullets tore chunks of concrete out of the lot.

They made it onto the bus. The hunchback ducked under the side panelling and moved along so that the sniper wouldn’t know where to aim; bullets punched through windows, spraying glass along the aisle, but not doing real damage. Jill went to the driver’s seat. The bus was self-driving, but it still had a steering wheel and ignition, with the key in the glove box. She hit the engine and floored the accelerator, tearing out of the school grounds with a squeal of rubber.

The hunchback hobbled over. “This was a great idea,” he said sarcastically.

“Thanks so much, Irony. Did you get a look at who it was?” she asked. He shook his head. “Neither did I. Well, nothing we can do now except hope the others can hold their own until we find the guardian.”

She turned onto an arched stone bridge and into a section of city that looked burned out and somehow even more derelict than the school. It definitely looked like the edge of the dream world. The roads became choked with rubbish, and she had to swerve from time to time to avoid broken glass.

Finally they came to the base of the tower. She killed the engine, and they climbed out of the bus.

“Well?” he said, as Jill was standing there, not making to go inside. “Front door’s right there.”

“I was thinking,” she said. “If I were Wasp Girl, I’d put decoys or maybe even traps around anywhere important. The front door is the direct approach, but maybe there’s a shortcut.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked up. There were metallic walls, but also mirrored windows, drainpipes, and windowsills that could make for decent ledges. In real life, she would never consider it.

“I think we could skip the first few storeys by breaking a window,” she said.

“Do you seriously think I can climb a sheer wall?” he asked.

She looked him over. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but even if he was some sort of dream construct, he was still physically a disfigured old man. He didn’t move much, so she didn’t really notice, but when he did, it was slow and clumsy.

“I’m going to do a lap of the building and look for a rope to pull you up, or a fire escape, or something,” said Jill. “Stay here.”

The hunchbacked man folded his arms and watched as Jill walked away and passed behind the building.

“You promised not to tell,” said the girl with wasp wings, directly behind him.

He jumped, whirled with more agility than his posture would indicate was possible, and backed away very quickly. “You! I didn’t say anything she couldn’t have guessed, and I wasn’t going –”

The hunchbacked man flew up six storeys, reversed direction, smacked into the pavement hard enough to send out spiderweb fracture lines, and bounced into an industrial wood chipper that appeared behind the girl.

Jill finished her lap. “There’s nothing much, but I’m sure I can find something to use as a rope inside –”

The hunchback was gone, replaced by a thick red spray across the building’s facade that slowly seeped down into the gutter. She walked forward and tested it with her boot: slick, with small gritty objects that could have been teeth or bone fragments.

“…”

She looked up at the tower, then went over to a drainpipe and began to climb.