I was dreaming.

I shouldn’t have been dreaming.

There was no sensation in my body. Not even the numbness that I’d felt succumbing to Jabberwock—it was an emptiness, a distance, like someone had turned off all the lights and I couldn’t find the damn switch in the darkness. I couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything; I worried that the drug had burned it out, left a blank slate to play with.

No. Dreams weren’t empty like this. There was something here—I just needed the strength to chase it. I squeezed my eyes shut and ground my teeth, stopping only when a pain shot through my jaw. When I opened my eyes again, a dim silvery light met them, cut into slats by the windowpane. Moonlight. I hadn’t seen moonlight for...I blinked. Since before the Outscape.

I swung my legs onto the floor and stood carefully, worried that I might break something. The room was small, with a steeply angled ceiling sloping up above my head. The moonlight I’d seen crept in through a window to my left, speckled with the dust hanging in the air. To my right had been another window, but it was covered with a dark green blanket, through which a biting autumn wind blew. It’d been a tree that broke it, I recalled with sudden clarity; a branch, as thick as a forearm, picked up and slung along by a windstorm until it shattered the glass.

The blanket’s corner lifted easily when I pulled it away. The street outside was lit by a few scattered, yellow streetlights. The white, two-story house opposite house opposite seemed to glow in the reflected light. It was all so familiar—like I’d never left, even though I hadn’t remembered this room, in this little brick house on Newman Avenue, for twenty-five years. But that meant…

“Hell,” I said. “No lie. Jabberwock works.” My voice was higher than usual. A child’s voice.

There were…deleterious side effects, to put it lightly. But I couldn’t change that now. Whatever was going down in the Outscape promised to be miserable: Robin was gone, run off to who-knows-where, and I was no doubt going through every painful physical symptom Fletcher had promised and worse. But I wasn’t dead—I hoped, surely the dead couldn’t dream—and nor could I claw my way out of this dream. Might as well enjoy it while I could.

Because it wouldn’t last. I had no reason to trust anything Fletcher or Drakon had told me, but it was all I had to go off of. And, I had to admit, they hadn’t been wrong about this particular facet thus far. Dealers knew their product. If they were right, this was the night Basil Grier had the gall to get himself murdered and dragged me into the Outscape. This was the night I’d gone to sleep, not suspecting that anything would be different when I woke, not knowing that this was the last I’d ever see of this world, that I wouldn’t even have the memories to cling to.

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I swallowed. My throat had tightened of its own accord. But I was better than that. Stronger.

My desk was a light wood, the red paint peeling off it in flakes. There was a half-finished jigsaw puzzle atop it: a cherry blossom tree, I thought, petals flying in the breeze, although my younger self hadn’t even managed to find all the corner pieces. A couple dog-eared books were stacked precariously at the edge, with a leather bookmark dangling near the cover of the top one. There was a stack of clothes draped over the back of the chair: shirts with blue and red stripes, pants stained with grass and dirt, and mismatched socks.

Everything was exactly as I remembered it. Almost uncannily so. I could have reclaimed my chair, picked up a book at random—even if the text was dreamlike, a jumble of random characters and symbols—and tried to finish the puzzle, as though I’d never left. I could fall back into old patterns, old rhythms, without missing a beat, for as long as I had.

That was what dreams were supposed to be, wasn’t it? A chance to enjoy what you’d never get. And yet-

I had a jar of sand and ocean water sitting on a side table. I picked it up and held it to the light, trying to guess at where it might have come from. The air here didn’t smell of salt and brine, not like the Outscape; a souvenir, maybe? A keepsake from far away? The room might have been the same, but I wasn’t the same child who’d left it. I was a detective, prying the remnants of my old life apart to find out who I’d been.

The water in the jar shifted, as though pushed by an invisible force: the tide breaking against the contained beach. I couldn’t have long before this part of the dream fell apart, before the Outscape beckoned.

I didn’t want to leave.

The ground shifted under my feet. A wooden model of a ballerina rattled on its stand, and sharp-toed shoes slid to run up against the closet. I crossed to the room’s door, grabbing onto the handle to keep my balance.

My parents slept just down the hall. I couldn’t even remember their faces. If there was anything I deserved to find here…

The farther I got from my room, the faster the dream was dissolving. That was the nexus, the centrepoint, the place where the shock of Basil’s death had plucked me from this world and sent me tumbling into the Outscape. The farther away I got, the less my memories had to draw on, the flimsier these constructed walls grew, like a papier-mâché diorama of the house I’d known.

It felt like I was moving through syrup. The door buckled when I grabbed it, the handle rattling in its frame, but I threw it open without worrying if it would hold together. They didn’t move, didn’t wake, even with the dream disintegrating around them. Of course—these were my memories, not theirs. They’d never known what happened to me, and they never would. No way out of the Outscape and no way back.

They were ordinary. Peaceful. Unknowing.

I did my best to commit their faces to memory—and I wasn’t finished by the time the dream dissolved.