Robin passed out nearly as soon as I let her, as soon as I’d dug the old blankets from the closet and tossed them on the ground.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. It wasn’t dreaming—it was just remembering, my brain sorting back through the files of its past. There was the face of Basil Grier, the nightmare whose death had dragged me to the Outscape as his captive audience, the hole that’d been opened in his throat grinning wider than his mouth. But I didn’t remember him well after so many years. I’d hated him at first, once I knew that it was his fault, but then it hadn’t been worth the energy any longer to keep hating him. After all, he hadn’t planned to die.

There’d been another dead man, once. Halle Mechane, whose name was everything I’d ever learned about him. When I’d seen Fletcher pull Robin from the water, for a second I’d thought she was pulling something else, something dead and rotten and half-disintegrating, for that was how I’d found Mechane’s body. It must have been a year after I left Luna, the first couple months I’d been trying to make my name as a detective. It was certainly before I’d learned enough to know which cases to take and which to run far away from. It was the lesson children learn pressing their fingers against the hot stove, opening their mouths under the bathwater and choking on it, a lesson that only painful experience imparts.

Mechane had been floating in the ocean perhaps two or three days when I found him. There were two small bullet holes just above his right ear, like the holes in a bowling ball, and they were crusted with dried blood and flecks of grey. That wasn’t the unusual part. He wore no coat and no shoes—just an unbuttoned undershirt and a pair of loose orange pants, sodden with water. Pajamas. No one would be able to prove anything. Even if I took him to Usher, there was little enough left of Mechane’s face or body to examine the blood splatter or rigor mortis.

I was sure of what I knew. He’d been killed in his sleep—but for what?

Mechane’s employer, a burly shop owner with too-sharp teeth, had hired me just to track him down, find out if he’d been stealing from the cash register, slickly pocketing a dollar from every sale and bringing it home. I’d accomplished the first half, at least, but I didn’t think it’d earn me any goodwill. A dead nightmare was no cause for mourning—there was no one who would thank me for bringing him to them.

But it was like I said—I didn’t know when to leave it. I called the store owner and asked him where Mechane lived, made my way to the dingy little apartment on the eighth floor that overlooked the sea. The lamp was still burning on the table, the fiber scratching from overuse, along with a glass of a dark brown liquid. There were deep grooves etched into the table and a small battered tin, about the width of my palm, fallen onto one of the chairs. Probably all second- or third-hand, passed around the endless circular form of the Outscape.

Something scraped in the next room, like the sound of boots on wood. I froze. I didn’t have a gun, I hadn’t found the right one yet, just a chipped knife with a coil of rope wrapped around its handle. I drew it before I pushed the door open.

A man was sitting on the bed, a finely inlaid revolver in his lap. He was elderly, an uncommon sight, with slicked-back white hair, and wore a brown leather jacket with mink fur at its collar. There were bloodstains on the pillow beside him and I could guess who they were from. His eyes lit up when he saw me with a measurable bright flash. “You’ve arrived,” he said in a rasping voice. “At last you’ve arrived.”

I frowned. “Yeah,” I said. The gun wasn’t pointed at me yet but it very quickly could be. “I have.”

He stood up. That light in his eyes flared again like lightning. The fear of storms, the fear of nature’s wrath, that at any moment you could be struck down; the claustrophobic isolation of storms that blocked out all other sounds. A potent nightmare even in the Outscape, as the rain pattered against the window. “What took you so long? It should have been instantaneous, no? Or something close to it…”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The storm-fed electricity in the air made all my hairs stand on end. “Did you kill him?”

“That man? I did.”

“Why?”

“For you.”

“For me? I don’t…” I smelled it. That faintly bitter scent of the Luna packets I’d delivered for years. “Who are you?”

I don’t think he could have been reassuring if he tried. The smile he gave was jagged and bent too far inwards, the split of his lip like the fork of a lightning bolt. “Malin Vin,” he said. “It will all make sense soon enough.”

“You were expecting me,” I said slowly. I gripped the knife tighter, but it felt as if my hands were slippery with rainwater. “But I’ve never seen you before in my life—and I’m not liking you now that I have. So it must be something about me that you wanted to see. Something you expected to find after you killed another nightmare in his sleep while he was dreaming and while his mind was thick with Luna.” Now he was the one wrong-footed by me and what I knew, and I gave a shaky laugh at that. “I’ve been here for years, Vin.”

He stared at me for a moment. I managed to duck out of the room and up against the wall before he shot me. “Then where is the other one?” he demanded through the open door, the ring of the gunshot still echoing. “Where?”

“There was no one else!” I called back. I ignored the little voice in my head that said to me: there could have been. There could have been another body in the water, who’d believed they would awake from this fresh nightmare with every foot they sunk deeper. There was no one else living, yes, but could I be sure that Vin hadn’t killed them in his haste? No. Wondering that wouldn’t help now. “But—why?” I asked. “Why would you want to do that?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Did you just want someone to fear you? Someone to be scared even when you weren’t sleeping? How dare you?” I shouted. “No one deserves that. You don’t have the right to inflict that on anybody.”

He sneered. “And what would you know? Seems you bear it well enough.”

I tensed for another gunshot, but there wasn’t one. We were both waiting for the other to make a move—and my knife hand was shaking with anger. I hated the Outscape. I hated the callous, power-hungry nightmares here, I hated that I’d become inured to it all. I couldn’t go back and change anything, I couldn’t find my way home, I couldn’t do anything but drag on living one day at a time in this damned city. And I hated Vin for it. I found that right here, right now, I hated Vin for what he’d tried to do more than I could remember hating anyone else.

Very quietly, I stepped farther into the kitchen and picked up the glass of whiskey sitting on the table. I swirled it around in my hand and then I flung it through the half-open door at where I judged Vin was standing. He reacted in an instant, the crack of that polished revolver sending shards of glass flying through the air. He raised an arm instinctively to shield his face and so he didn’t move in time to catch me. I grabbed his bony wrist and forced the gun down towards the floor as he squeezed off two more shots in panic. Then I was behind him.

I twisted the knife in my hand and brought its sharper edge to his neck—a mirror of how Fletcher would threaten Robin, years in the future. How did we always end up like this? “Don’t move,” I whispered. “Don’t try a thing.”

He dropped the gun. “Will—will you kill me here?”

I could. A press of the knife, a quick jerk of my arm left to right. “You’re scared,” I said. “I’ve power over you now. You don’t know what I might do and you’re terrified for your life. All this time you were gambling with other people’s lives but you never meant to bet your own and now you’ve lost.”

“I never meant…” He closed his eyes. “Please,” he said. “Do not.”

“How quickly fear makes a mockery of those that don’t live with it.” I hissed out a breath in disgust, then flicked the blade up so that it bit deep into his cheek instead. He gasped in pain, which only made it dig in farther. I yanked the knife back, then picked up the gun and flung it out the window into the sea where he must have flung Mechane’s body days ago. “Remember the pain,” I said. “Remember the fear. Remember what I could have done to you for that.”

I left him on the floor clutching his face, blood seeping between his fingers. I didn’t look back.