Even I know you’re not supposed to start a movie with a dream. Nobody likes it because it’s cheap, it’s confusing, and if it’s a good dream, somebody’s got to pay for it by the end. But in real life—or I guess my second life—I never saw the dream coming.

My HUD buzzed on the nightstand, the wood resonating with the vibrations, waking me up and making Kest groan.

“What time is it?” she grumbled without unhooking her arm from around my waist.

“I don’t know. I didn’t set an alarm.” I slapped around one-handed for the hunk of junk. Not easy with my eyes still shut and Kest lying across half of me. My palm bumped smooth plastic and glass and the edge of the soft leather band. I caught the HUD just before I knocked it off the nightstand.

The notification was a message from Warcry.

Let’s go, grav. Hour ten to tournament check-in.

I sighed and strapped the HUD onto my wrist.

Be right there, I sent back.

“I’ve got to go.” I kissed Kest on the cheek.

“Don’t get killed,” she said, already messing with a schematic on the HUD screen she’d integrated into her tricked-out prosthetic arm. “I’ll be at the workshop when you get back.”

“What, you?” I got up and pulled my pants on. “At the workshop all day and night until somebody has to come get you? No way.”

“Yeah, sorry.” She wasn’t, and she didn’t look up from the schematic. “I’m just so close to a breakthrough on this mechanical Spirit sea. I was dreaming about one of the components until your dumb SignalSong woke me up.”

“SignalSong?” I frowned down at the all-black HUD and ran my fingertips across the smooth surface of the screen. Not a crack or scratch in sight. “What happened to my Winchester?”

Kest looked up at me like I was crazy. “It died, like, two years ago.”

“And I just threw it away and got this?”

“No, you begged me to rebuild it four times before you threw it away and got this. I keep trying to get you to upgrade to the SS12, but—” She rolled her lacy eyes and shot me a smirk. “—you’re being a classic Hake about it.”

“What’s the point in upgrading when this one still works fine?” I mumbled absently. Throwing away the Winchester didn’t sound right. I wouldn’t have thrown away the very first thing Kest ever gave me. I would’ve at least saved the broken pieces somewhere.

I tried to remember deciding to ditch them or stash them, but nothing came to mind. In fact, nothing since transferring from the shuttle to the Eight-Legged Dragon’s cross-galaxy transport ship came to mind. Not meeting the gang’s Emperor, not getting whatever job paid for this fancy new HUD, nothing about how Kest and I ended up in the same bed together… All things you’d think you would remember about your life.

“Hake?” Kest was looking up at me from her HUD, the lace in her eyes thinning out with concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Where’s Rali?” Hanging out with her brother was the last thing I remembered. We’d been on the ship to the Shinotochi sytem, practicing cultivation and conversion. According to Rali, space was ideal for strengthening your Spirit sea because dragging Spirit in through the vacuum was hard for everybody but Celestial affinities.

Kest opened her mouth to answer, then stopped.

In the silence, I heard birds screaming at each other outside, the tinkle of wind chimes, and the low whine of semi tires on the highway. Closer, a coffee maker gurgled.

I knew those morning sounds. There was nothing unfamiliar or alien about any of them, which made them the weirdest thing I’d experienced since dying and being dropped on a prison planet in another universe.

“Where are we?” Kest asked, sliding out of bed. I only sort of half-noticed she was wearing one of my shirts and looked amazing in it, which probably meant I was in serious shock.

She went to a window and tried to lift the cheap plastic blinds out of the way like a curtain. Plastic shuffled and clicked. She was bending the slats and messing up the cord, but I couldn’t get my brain to work well enough to explain that wasn’t how you did it.

Especially not when I saw the crabapple tree I always had to duck under when I mowed and Mrs. Shawe’s trailer next door with its half a dozen wind chimes and the crumbling skirting her little dog liked to chew on.

Kest shook her head. “I don’t recognize this place.”

“It’s…”

A fist pounded on the front door, shaking the whole trailer. Warcry’s version of a polite hello.

Out in the kitchen came the crackle of cheap linoleum as house slippered feet shuffled across it.

“Hell’s wrong with these yay-hoos,” Gramps’s voice drifted back to us. “Break down the door for a magazine subscription. News flash, pal, I ain’t buying.”

I raced out into the hall and made it to the kitchen in two strides.

“Grady, what kind of nonsense are you getting up to?” Gramps stopped with his hand on the doorknob, frowning like he’d have to holler at me for banging around, like he used to when I was a kid.

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His coffee cup sat on the table, steaming. Mine was still turned over on the dish towel next to the coffee maker, waiting for me. The morning light of a single yellow sun slanted through the car port and into the trailer house. Everything was right for a totally normal summer day, except Kest was in my bedroom and through the window I could see Warcry standing on our rickety metal front steps.

Gramps figured it out first.

“Another dream.” He shook his head and let go of the doorknob to run a shaking hand through his thin white hair.

Seeing him, everything from the last two months hit me all at once. The prison planet and joining a gang and killing a guy and slaughtering a whole arena full of Dragons and Contrails.  I wanted to tell Gramps everything and promise to find a way to make him proud of me again and redeem the family name, but I couldn’t talk.

So I just hugged the old man.

This didn’t feel like a dream. Cold, textured linoleum stuck to my bare feet, and Gramps felt like that combination of brittle old people bones and sturdy barrel gut he’d always felt like.

After a second, Gramps exhaled and squeezed me like he was trying to break my spine.

Warcry thumped on the door again.

“Hang on a second!” I yelled. Then I wished I’d told him to get lost.

Letting go of Gramps, I leaned over and ripped the front door open.

Warcry threw up his hands. “You ain’t even bleedin’ dressed yet! Where’s your shirt? Did you see the time, grav? Warcry Thompson’s never been late for a check-in, and I ain’t starting now.”

“Screw the tournament,” I said. “I’m not going.”

Gramps nodded at the hallway behind me. “These friends of yours, Grady?”

Kest had come up from the bedroom. She was back to wearing her usual welding-burnt canvas skirt and shirt and her long black hair was done up in messy buns. The lace in her eyes had thinned out until it was barely spiderwebbing against the opalescent white.

“Guys, I can’t find Rali,” she said. “I always know where he is, but I don’t have anything in my HUD or memory about where he is or what he’s doing.”

“Well, he’s…” Warcry faltered. “The big man’s got to be somewhere, don’t he? He’s probably in seclusion.”

Kest shook her head. “He hates seclusion. And he would’ve told me, anyway. Something is very wrong here.”

I looked at Gramps, the coffee mugs, the regular sunny summer day.

“I’m not really home.” I let out a long breath. “None of this is real. It’s just another stupid dream. I need to wake myself up.”

Purple and white shimmered, and Sushi appeared next to Gramps. Not in her dorky little fish form, but in the fantasy-hot mermaid form, narrow shoulders, wide hips, all covered in variegated purple and white scales. Long purple hair splotched with white hung around her shoulders, waving slightly like fins in an underwater current.

“Grady!” Sushi grabbed me by the shoulders. “Dream Spirit attacks! Sushi can’t catch Rali!”

“What are you talking about, Sush?”

“Rali!” She shook me like that would help me understand. “Dream attacker takes Rali!”

Kest nodded. “Of course! I’m dreaming. That’s why I can’t remember anything and why…” She looked at me. Black lace trickled down into her cheeks where a human would blush. “It just lines up with something I would dream about.”

I smiled. “Thanks, but you don’t have to cover for me. I know what I was dreaming about. I’ll take the blame for it.”

“This dream ain’t either of yours,” Warcry said. “I’m nobody’s figment, I’m meself. You bleeders are the figments.”

“Oh, come on,” Gramps said like he used to when he was about to accuse me of pulling his leg. “If this is anybody’s dream, it’s mine.” He looked at me. “I been dreaming about you since the night it happened.” He cleared his throat. “I miss you, buddy boy.”

Sushi settled it.

“Dream Spirit is attack on Sushi’s friends!” She laced her fingers through Gramps’s. He squinted sidelong at the alien fish girl, but she didn’t notice. “Sushi uses Grady and Gramps’s Lost Mirror to catch friends. Same Lost Mirror. Dream Spirit attacker can’t reach into Grady’s lost plane. Only Rali slips through Sushi’s fins.”

Gramps grunted. “Musta fallen asleep watching one of them martian movies.”

Sushi’s vocabulary was growing all the time, but in situations like this it was obvious how far she still had to go.

“I don’t understand,” I told her. “Are you saying this dream is an attack?”

“On Sushi’s friends!” She nodded frantically, her long hair floating along behind the motion. Her mismatched blue and brown eyes were huge and panicked. “Save Rali, Grady!”

“How? Where is he?”

“Alone!” She balled her scaly fists in frustration. “Rali needs Grady!”

“Sushi,” Kest said, her voice going deadly calm, “I need you to focus. Can you take us to my twin?”

Another wild nod.

“Follow Sushi!” the fish girl said, yanking the door open.

In one of those insane dream logic situations, instead of the car port and lawn, the door opened into the main hall of my high school. Lockers lined the walls, sneakers squeaked on red-brown terrazzo floors, time-dulled skylights let in grayish squares of sun, people hung out talking and laughing or frantically doing their homework before class.

The scene change didn’t bother Sushi. She ran out of the trailer and into the hall. Nobody freaked out that a purple and white fish-girl had just stepped into the middle of a rural Missouri high school before the first bell.

Kest only hesitated a second before tearing off after Sushi.

Warcry glared at the mix of farm kids and town kids and jocks and artists. “What’s this, then, one of the meat roach internment camps? Where’s the Ylef trash guarding the place?”

I shook my head. “This is Earth. Where I used to live. We only had the one race.”

“Grady comes this way!” Sushi yelled, her voice echoing in the school hallway. She wheeled her purple and white arm at me. “Save Rali!”

Warcry gave the school and students the hairy eyeball, then let out a disgusted grunt.

“You heard her, grav. Let’s go get the big man.” He jogged out into the hallway after Kest and Sushi, his boots thumping on the tile floor.

“But…” I looked at Gramps.

Out in the hallway, black-clad ninjas rounded the bank of lockers, sprinting through the crowd toward my friends.

“Incoming!” Warcry warned, getting into a fighting stance. Red Burning Hatred Spirit flamed down his head and shoulders, covering his fists in fire.

“Machete,” Kest said. Her homemade blade appeared in her hand from the storage ring.

I knew they needed me, that somewhere Rali needed me. Whatever was going on, Sushi was really worried about him.

But Gramps was right there. If I left him now, I might never get to talk to him again.

“Balls,” I whispered under my breath.

“What kind of talk is that?” Gramps snapped, his wrinkled brow furrowing. Apparently, his hearing was a lot better in dreams than in real life. “You best straighten up and knock that off right now. I didn’t raise no damn heathen.”

“Sorry. I just…” I looked from my friends to my grandpa. It felt like someone was ripping me in half. “I don’t want to go.”

Gramps’s disapproving frown faded into something tired and sad.

“That ain’t how dreams work, Grady,” he said. “I’ve had enough of ’em to know.”

I edged toward the door as I stared out at Kest and Warcry trying to fight off the ninjas. There were way too many for them to take alone. My friends were going to get overrun without my help.

But I could feel that this was my only chance to come clean.

“Gramps, I need to tell you some stuff,” I blurted out in a rush. “The last couple months, I—I’ve been doing a worse job than Dad. I screwed up. I—”

“It’s okay, buddy boy,” Gramps said in an understanding tone that just about killed me. “We’ll catch up later.”

I swallowed hard.

Gramps reached up and gave me a weak noogie. I knocked his gnarled hand off because that was how the business went, not because I actually wanted him to stop. He grinned his toothless old man grin.

“Be good,” he said.

I couldn’t answer him, so I just nodded.

Then I left him behind and ran out the door to help my friends.