The flame flickered. I’d thought it was a cigarette lighter, except that it grew brighter and larger too quickly for that. The incandescent whiteness crept up an arm to the torso, down a pair of too-thin legs to the floor, and at last to a face that had too many eyes in it. I frowned, straining my eyes against the darkness—no, it had only the two, and yet they seemed oddly detached from the face. The nightmare, for he must have been one, tilted his head back and forth, and yet his eyes stayed determinedly fixed on mine, unblinking and unmoving.

Robin took a step back. “He’s looking at me. Why’s he looking at me?”

I let her keep retreating, placing a hand on her shoulder to let her step behind me. “Cause you’re in front,” I lied. “Or cause you made about as much sound as it was possible to make getting in here.”

“I didn’t mean to-”

Most nightmares tried to be human—to look the part, to act the part, to speak the part. A kind of subconscious mimicry on their part, perhaps—or maybe it was just easier, spending so much of their time in humanity’s minds. This one didn’t bother. He was oddly stretched out, long and lanky, with his clothes turned to rags and hanging limp over sharp protruding bones. There were dark slits beneath his eyes, like second lids, through which a pale liquid oozed and seeped down his chin. He stooped low to the ground, dragging one finger through the fine film of Jabberwock coating the floor.

When he spoke, it was a hiss, a growl, as if through a microphone that hadn’t been set right. “Watch…” he muttered. “Set to watch…”

Conjager had his weapon raised, but now he lowered it. “A sentry,” he said. “A nightmare that watches and watches, that has eyes where you expect none and looms large out of the darkness. I wasn’t sure they still existed here.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Robin asked.

“Such nightmares exist half in and half out of dreams,” he said. “People wake up and see them; people fall asleep and see them. They are…malformed, then, half-present in this world. They watch and they wait and they need almost nothing at all—but I thought they had faded from this city. For Jabberwock to be using them now…what can they be promising it?”

“Who are you?” the Watcher barked, whirling on us. “Who.”

“Don’t answer,” Conjager warned.

“He’s seen us already,” I said.

The Watcher dipped lower. He brought his hand up to his face and smeared Jabberwock across it. The mix of the heady liquid and the dribbling pus made tracks like tears, running down beneath its eyes. “Who?”

Conjager fired a shot into the air. We were done with stealth, I suspected. The Watcher reeled back, but his eyes opened even wider, exposing dark, bloodshot sclera that burned with their own inner glare. “I’ve only read about them in the archives,” he whispered. “Long-held records. But they are sentries, watchers, because they seek out information and can never be sated by it.”

The Outscape’s record system was spotty at best; I’d talked long enough with Zamir to know that, and to know exactly why that was, where the money that went to maintain the archives went instead. But I could feel what he described, no doubt much worse than he could feel it himself: the sense that the Watcher’s eyes were raking over me and going deeper than the skin, that I owed this creature all I knew and I could say simply to make it look somewhere else, even for a second; that I should say it because it would be taken from me no matter what I did. The hanging fumes of Jabberwock in the air didn’t help—it shouldn’t have affected me, but something in them was starting to make me feel light-headed.

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“God damn,” I hissed, grounding myself in the sound of my own voice. “Can’t say I’m sad they’re gone.”

The Watcher’s eyes moved for the first time since I’d seen him. They flicked downwards, past me. He took a lurching step forwards, the light around him growing brighter like a warped and sickly angel’s halo. I couldn’t hear what he said, the guttural words in which he demanded—because he didn’t demand it of me. There were easier targets, targets who didn’t know to look away, targets who could still dream…

She found her voice, at the worst possible time. Who? I knew he had asked; and “Robin,” she answered.

It had always been a terrible idea to take her here. She couldn’t handle the worst excesses of the city, couldn’t handle what it threw at her. Conjager knew it too, but the Watcher’s gaze had so transfixed her that neither of us could drag her back. “Robin. It’s who I am.” Then she surprised me. “Who are you?” she asked. “It’s only fair that you answer.”

His teeth clattered against one another. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing, noth-”

If I killed him, Robin would see me kill him. It’d be burned into her mind like—well. Like enough bad memories had burned themselves into mine. I shot the ground near his feet and the bullet skittered away into the darkness, sparks faint and dulled against the pale light. He didn’t move, didn’t react, except to stoop a little lower, so that he faced Robin at eye level. “Why?”

“To help,” she said distantly. I could barely hear her with the ringing of the gunshots in my ears. “To find. Starling and Carrion think you killed him, someone here killed him-”

I was already moving to shut Robin up, to clap a hand over her mouth and drag her back. Maybe I couldn’t stop the Watcher but I could stop her—and then, just as I reached her, he lunged forwards, inhumanly strong arms slamming me to the ground. I heard Conjager loose another bullet, the flash and smell of sulphur, but it seemed to do even less to move the Watcher. But despite his strength, his fingers were blunt—it hadn’t been this creature who’d torn Chesnes apart. Jabberwock had more than one unknown tool at their disposal.

Robin spoke again. “What do you want?” she said. Her voice was unbothered—an eerie reflection of the nightmare’s itself. “I’m hurt. One of your people hurt me and I’m still hurting from it, and I don’t know where to go. I want to go home but I have no home here.” Everything I’d tried so hard to keep secret for her, spilled so easily against this strange nightmare. “Everyone here is hurt—and you seem hurt worst than most.”

“Nothing,” he tried again, breath heavy like the rest of its body. He was lighter than I’d thought he would be, but wiry like a puppet. “Hurt all over. Nothing fixes. My shoulder, not fixed…”

Conjager, as though he’d done it a hundred times before, stepped forward and pistol-whipped him on that same shoulder. And that, at last, broke the spell. The Watcher shrieked, a high, keening around, and Robin gasped. He dragged me to my feet—which hurt almost worse than the Watcher’s assault, and I pulled my arm free of his as soon as I could manage. “There’s nothing worth finding here,” he growled. “And I don’t know how long that will keep him down. Get out of here.” He shoved Robin towards me, out towards the faint square of light that was the door.

“What are you doing?”

He flicked the hammer of his gun. “He knows too much. And you won’t-”

“You won’t do it either,” I said. “You keep pretending to be crueler than you are, Conjager. But you could have shot him all that time, just to see if it’d stop him, and you certainly won’t do it while he’s injured and unarmed.”

“He can’t pass on that information.”

“He already knows!” I shouted. “You want to know? I’ve already made enemies of Jabberwock, of Fletcher, of the people dredging up new nightmares and new terrors from somewhere we can’t comprehend. This Watcher doesn’t know anything Fletcher hasn’t already spilled, and the only worse thing is that now you’re mixed up in it too.”

Conjager muttered something under his breath—but he lowered his gun. “What a mess,” he spat, and stalked away.