I trusted Zamir. Of course I did.

And all that trust was the reason I was at the archives early in the morning, before the sun had pulled itself over the choppy and ragged skyline, using the spare key she’d given me to slip in through the heavy side doors with their thin rectangular windows. I didn’t like the city buildings, I didn’t like their cold tiled floors or the sickly brown walls that seemed to close in on the ceiling. I didn’t like the nightmares with cold bureaucratic eyes that walked along the halls, and I certainly didn’t like the way they sized me up, raked their eyes like claws along my form.

Maybe it was a sort of bitterness, the sort that could crystallize over time; a lens that I hadn’t thought about for years but which I looked out through upon the world every day and that colored my vision. The Outscape had given me nothing—the city hadn’t cared that I existed. The city had wanted me dead if it wanted anything at all, and I’d fallen in with Luna because there’d been nowhere else to go. For Zamir to offer Robin a comparative paradise, that I’d never heard of nor been offered—it was too good. It was too much. So if Zamir was claiming to get that information from her precious archives—well, I had access to those same archives to see whether she was proffering six aces from a full deck.

No one came here most of the time. No one cared. A water stain formed an ugly scar along one wall where rows and rows of metal shelves had been pushed. The pages of old books and file folders were thick and crunchy with damage, and there was a brown mold that spiraled out from several of the pages and smelled like a rat’s last gasp of air.

And were these archives organized? Were they put together in any logical manner? Was the information collected so that it was easily accessible and formed a complete tale of the Outscape’s history and the people who ran it? Take a goddamn guess. Violations of Invasive Species Policy F.4, some obscure rule which sought to classify nightmares through conspiratorial taxonomy and which, as far as I could tell, had been shelved minutes after the council had penned their signatures, filled loose-leaf binders labeled as expense reports, and ancient paper clippings, death reports, and print carvings were stacked in unmarked boxes whose bottoms had rotted through aeons ago.

“What the hell does Zamir do here all day?” I muttered to myself, taking a left turn down another endless stretch of shelves. “Complains to me about her own nightmare, feeling trapped? She’s built the place for it.”

I’d like to say I didn’t really mean it. The Outscape metastasized, time and time again, the city of nightmares becoming a nightmare itself. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t halt that same churning tide—so what chance did Zamir, the nightmare, have? That didn’t mean it didn’t grate upon my nerves, that a headache didn’t grow behind my eyes as I prowled the shelves, that my eyes didn’t start to burn at cramped scrawled labels stapled to the covers or a numbering system that rose and fell out of order like a mountain range.

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Even the fragmented bits of paper I found were full of stories—half-blurred photos and excerpts from the Outscape’s past, enticing and despairing at the same time. There had been worse than Drakon: there’d been Timay de Shields, a raging murderous nightmare who was all the worse that he didn’t seem to want anything, that power and money and worship, even, from some, couldn’t stop the streets from being painted scarlet. There’d been Lavinia “the Lion” Mazaran, whose etching depicted her with swirling bright eyes and sharp, flame-red hair, who carried a bewitching power in her words, who crooned sweet nothings to her victims as she gutted them with a barbed scimitar. None of the records ever recorded how de Shields or Mazaran had met their end, had been killed—for they must have been killed—just that they’d faded away for another to take their place.

I thought, for a moment, of Philippa and her bright red hair, the way she knew everything, the way she could bend me around her finger if she tried. Maybe it meant nothing—nightmares were concepts, embodied and re-embodied—and maybe it did.

What I didn’t find, what I couldn’t uncover more than passing reference to, was humans. Us. Rarity became obscurity became nonentity.

Not for all, and not always. Decades—no, likely centuries, the dates were flaking off the paper, a fact which managed to both hide and confirm its age at once—ago, there’d been a researcher installed at the archives, and they’d been fascinated by us. Riestern’s papers were bound in blue ribbons and seemed to be the truth behind nearly everything I knew. They’d guessed at the mechanism by which we found ourselves pulled to the city, even the odds, estimated at 1 in 932, that it would actually happen upon a nightmare’s death.

“Studying humanity,” they’d written, “is the mechanism by which we study ourselves. Yet we are driven by craven instinct to hate those who are brought here, to press down upon them with the full force of the Outscape, and so such opportunities are lost. And most importantly, there is a strange lack of investigation into the question of a two-way street: can nightmares find a way to Earth? We scrap over a shred of that power here in the Outscape; think what such access would allow us! All that is only possible with more data, more testing, more knowledge we have not yet found, and so we are forced to play the odds.”

I decided perhaps I didn’t love Riestern, that I didn’t want to be a statistic measured and bet upon like a roulette wheel at a casino, spinning around a static point for someone else’s benefit. Obscurity was better. Obscurity was what I wanted from Zamir—the chance for Robin to fade away, to take the eyes (and knives) of the city off her for a week, a month, longer…

I trusted Zamir to provide it. I had to—and that was the problem. For all this archive-diving, I hadn’t found what I wanted: a reason to trust her enough.