I wasn’t sure which of us was more startled. Probably the doctor. I could almost hear the click as his eyes went to me and then back to Valerian, still in his office, the calculations humming inside his brain.

He was smart enough to figure out who I was—a human, running around Jabberwock halls, clearly not in the cell that had been prepared for me. But more than that, and I saw him smirk at the prospect: I was Fletcher’s catch, Fletcher’s problem, Fletcher’s project, a little pet to show promise and to prove that Fletcher could handle herself in the upper echelons of the cabal. My being free meant that she’d failed somewhere along the line—and if he could recapture me, that’d be proof of his place in the organization.

“Hell,” I said, and charged him.

He shouted something in Valerian’s direction—damn, I’d held out the faint hope that maybe I’d be able to scrape my way out of this without tipping him off, without getting the leader and the rest of Jabberwock on my tail. But that would require fortune to smile on me, and Lady Luck and I had what might charitably be described as a contentious relationship. I could only beg her for so much and she only gave me half of whatever I asked.

His nightmare flared, and a crushing mass of despair washed over me like the ocean: deep and blue, sinking the hallway around me into a navy-colored haze that would be so easy just to sink into. Only momentum kept me moving forward, and I slammed into him. We went down together, and the shock of hitting the floor jolted me out of my fugue. Serhoeyen clawed at me, but he was a scrawny man, and I managed to throw him off before he could draw blood. I’d lost the knife somewhere in the tussle, and it hadn’t even meant anything to me when I did, just another meaningless hunk of metal floating in the same void…

I put a hand to my forehead. My mind was my own. “Why’re you all like this?” I said. “I’m so tired of the nightmares trying to make me lie down and forget everything about who I am. And you’re all bottled up with each other every day, no wonder you act the way you do.”

“Then fall apart,” he muttered, trying to pull himself to his feet. “It all ends, then.”

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“This isn’t my end. I-” I faltered. My eyes had flickered back towards Valerian’s office. I took a step back, away from it, then another, before I turned and started running. I didn’t have the time to pick up the knife, for if I stopped for a moment and looked back-

What the hell was he? What kind of twisted warped nightmare-? His exterior was hardly remarkable: black hair with a widow’s peak sharp enough to cut steel and a neatly trimmed beard, broken only by a scar that ran from the edge of his mouth down his neck. He was neither tall nor short, with an asymmetrically-buttoned, high-collared black suit that reached down to his knees. But that was not all he was. That was hardly a fraction. There was an expanse behind him, a burning, spiraling void that went on forever in all directions. It smoldered behind his eyes and in the lines of his face, in a color that I could barely describe.

The Outscape was an old city. As old as evolved humanity—or even older than that, some said. Didn’t animals have nightmares, too? Didn’t their brains still fire in sleep, didn’t their paws still beat against the air? Valorian was human, but deep in that gaze was something inhuman and ancient, something vast that had distilled itself into the body calling itself Valorian.

Nothing in the Outscape scared me easily anymore. I couldn’t let it. But Valorian did.

I ducked into what seemed to be a small access corridor, rather than take the heavy door back into the hall of mirrors. I didn’t trust myself to find my way back through, nor did I trust that any other nightmares I encountered would be as accommodating as Fletcher. I hadn’t got what I came for, I hadn’t discovered how to get the ‘Dreamwalker’ off my tail or stop it killing. But at least I’d learned what it was: a chimera, an artificial monster, built out of scraps on Valerian’s private boat, far away from the messes of the Outscape streets.

There was more to be found here. There always was. But they’d kill me if I tried, and I was falling apart at the seams regardless. I didn’t even trust that I could stay upright for much longer without rest.

I emerged into an office. A regular, bare-bones office, with papers stacked up on the desks and simple lamps providing a yellow-orange light. I blinked. Someone had to handle the paperwork, of course, and ensure that the finances were in order…but to have your accountants bordering the circus seemed strange. Maybe it kept them in line, or maybe they enjoyed it. I snatched a few of the papers from the top of the trays as I went by, stuffing them into the fragile pockets of my hospital gown. Paper trails brought down more bosses than murder.

Then I saw it. Sunlight. Faint and cloudy as always—but it was the first time I’d seen it in days. And where there was sunlight, it meant Arcadia was wrong—there was a way out, an exit to this terrible maze.