“Thank you both,” James said. “I think that helps. I’ll start thinking about how to expand more quickly than Dominion can travel. On a slightly different subject, how’s Moishe doing?”

“That’s much simpler to answer,” Alan said, his expression grim. “No big changes. That is, his condition seems to be stable. That’s how the real doctors described it.”

“Gupta and Zirndorf?” James asked.

Alan nodded. “Rotter assigned them to help Moishe. He’s only staying here, because we volunteered—because we know him. A very brave young man.”

“You said stable,” James said. “Does that mean what it sounds like? Is he improving at all—or just hanging there, unconscious?”

“I think he might need your attention, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Mitzi quietly. “This is probably one of those things that only you can do—or, if there are others who could help, they’re simply not here, so they’re as good as useless.”

“The burns are healing a little, but it’s only marginal,” Alan said. He shook his head, a sad expression overtaking his face. “Even if he woke up today, the poor kid is probably scarred for life. They said he needs skin grafts.” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Obviously, we don’t have access to fucking skin grafts. If he recovers, he could end up looking like Freddy Krueger. I can’t imagine going through something like that when he’s so young. He had his whole life ahead of him…” Alan covered his face with a palm.

Mitzi also looked sad. The mood around the table had changed drastically.

James nodded and exhaled heavily. “Okay. That’s probably the most I can get from hearing about his condition. Again, thank you both.” He made eye contact with Mitzi and then Alan as he spoke. “Now I’m ready to see him.”

Alan led him into a bedroom that was sparsely furnished. In the bed, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, lay Moishe. Every inch of skin that peeked out from alongside the bandages looked pink and irritated.

James’s eyes were drawn away from the patient, however, to the floor. Despite the room being lit by sunlight streaming through the window, there were a dozen candles near the bed, slowly burning down—and a supply of additional candles in the corner of the room, waiting to be lit.

James raised an eyebrow and turned to Alan wordlessly.

“The doctors said that burns this severe need a warm, humid environment,” Alan explained. “We don’t have climate control, but Florida’s always humid. And the candles provide heat. It’s also useful to have light at night when we change the bandages.” He swallowed, and James could see again how difficult it was for Alan to see Moishe suffering this way.

James didn’t know all the details of the experiences that Moishe, Alan, Mitzi, and the rest of the group had had while James was gone, but he had gathered that Moishe had acted the role of defender of the group. James had personally experienced how Moishe took the fight to the Moloch cultists.

I can’t let this end here for you, he thought. Your story isn’t over yet.

“I’m going to try and enter his dream first,” James said. “I’ll hopefully be able to gather some information on what happened to him. If that works, then I’ll have an idea of what to do next.”

“If not?” Alan asked.

“That, I’m not sure about yet,” James said wearily. His body was still not at its peak strength. He could handle giving out a blessing, he assessed, without an embarrassing collapse. But he wanted to know for certain that nothing else would work to cure Moishe’s present condition.

“All right, then,” Alan said. He stood awkwardly for a moment, as if looking for something to do. Finding nothing, he finally said, “I guess I’ll just leave you to it.”

Then he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.

“It’s just us now, Hester,” James said quietly. “Ready to join me on a Dreamwalk?”

“Ready as ever, sir,” she said in a subdued tone. “I remember Moishe—I mean, how he was before this, whatever happened to him. I remember how he looked at you…”

“I know.”

He looked at me like I was a hero, James thought.

“Let’s see what happened to him,” Hester said gently.

James nodded and slipped into a seated position, back against the wall opposite Moishe—far from the candles, so that in case his body tumbled forward, he would not light himself on fire in his sleep.

Then he touched a hand to the back of his ear, a single fingertip on Hester, and focused on his intention to take her with him. As far as he knew, Anansi had not done anything more than this when he first initiated James into Dreamwalking.

Dreamwalk!

James’s body instantly went limp.

He found himself in the Dreamspace void again, and he felt another presence with him. James turned his head and saw a human-sized spider. The spider appeared to be a dark brown with lightly striped legs. It was almost as tall as James.

Whoa!

Despite the surprising size of his guest, James kept his composure. He already knew who this must be.

“Hello Hester,” he said a little uncertainly. “You are looking, um, large and in charge.”

“Oh, thank you, sir—I, um, I think.” It was the same old Hester voice, though a bit louder—but still an inside voice, apparently based on her natural temperament.

So, it is her.

“It’s a compliment, Hester. At least I think it is. I remember Anansi changed his size freely up and down when he was showing me the world of dreams.”

“Then I will make sure to continue using the fact that we are in dreams to my advantage!”

James could hear the joy in her voice. He had correctly guessed that Hester would find almost any comparison to Anansi flattering. Perhaps she was even more excited to be an active participant in his adventures for a change, not just an advisor or the connection between James and the Spider God.

He decided he would observe how she performed in this place carefully. If Hester was good at Dreamwalking, he could make it a regular job for her. There would always be enemies who needed to be harassed or spied upon, and he was sure he could think of a thousand other tasks that could be better done in dreams than in real life.

In this place, a small person could cast a very long shadow.

James quickly found Moishe’s dozing consciousness. Besides a few people napping in a couple of other apartments, Moishe was the only landmark visible right now. The landscape felt peaceful. Pristine.

It was nice to see that the residue of Sister Strange’s incursion into James’s territory had faded away. She was only a bad memory now—and whatever remained of her inside of James himself.

He reached out to take Hester’s limb, and she reshaped the end into a hand.

And the two of them stepped into Moishe’s dream.

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As they materialized, James found himself in a place that resembled the Grand Canyon.

He saw no signs of life in any direction around him. Just a narrow path through dry, sandy ground, cliff faces on both sides of him—and strangely pitted soil on both sides of the narrow path. It was as if this place had been struck as many times by space objects as the surface of the moon—and therefore become just as pockmarked.

Does that mean this is someplace on Earth? he wondered. Where the hell is Moishe?

“This is interesting,” James muttered quietly.

“It certainly is, sir,” said Hester.

James turned his head and saw the spider had returned to just slightly larger than her real life size. She rested on his shoulder now.

“I guess that’s a good call, Hester,” he said. “You were worried about falling into the pits?”

“I figured there wasn’t room enough on this path for the two of us, sir,” she replied.

“Well, there’s not,” James said, “but remember that this is a dream. Reality is what we make it.” He stepped into the air and simply imagined himself walking on invisible stairs, and the reality around him complied. His body slowly rose into the sky until he was level with the top of the canyon.

“Right,” she said. “I'll have to remember how overpowered imagination is here. Leave it to you to figure out how to exploit that!” Her tone was slightly teasing.

“I am pretty good at optimizing how I use my Skills,” James said, trying to sound modest. “It helps that I could control my own dreams prior to getting this Skill. The idea occurred to me naturally. I’m sure you’ll be doing it soon, too. Now, how do we find Moishe…?”

Hester stepped off of James’s shoulder and then began to grow dramatically in size, until she was towering far above James—taller than any monster he had ever seen, including the Spider Queen and Samuel.

And she just kept growing, until she was the height of a skyscraper.

James stared at her and simply watched as she continued increasing in size. He was fairly certain that he knew what she was doing.

I get it, he thought. That’s using your head.

Hester began looking back and forth across the desert, as James had guessed she would. She had given herself the highest vantage point she reasonably could, to better search for Moishe.

James decided to simply remain at ground level for the moment and wait for Hester to tell him what she saw. He looked around the cliff surface where he had found himself, but there was little of interest up there. Perhaps Moishe’s imagination had not populated this part of the dream with content just yet, or maybe, if it was a real place, it was an area Moishe had never visited.

There has to be a reason we spawned in the valley and not up here, James thought. We were probably closer to Moishe before I decided to walk on air.

Hester began shrinking back down, and James watched. He enjoyed seeing how Hester adapted to this new environment. He wanted to know how resourceful she could be as a dream explorer. He decided to wait for her to report what she had seen before he suggested anything. This trip was about Moishe, but there was no reason not to try and let Hester take the initiative here.

“Did you find anything interesting?” he asked once she had reached his height. “Any sign of Moishe?”

Hester stopped shrinking and shook her head.

“No sign of Moishe,” she said, “but I did see something that might be worth investigating.” She pointed at a ridge, and James saw that somewhere in the distance, there was a light source, flickering like a campfire. Whatever the source was, it must have been a mile away.

Even with his superhuman senses, he would never have noticed it unless he was looking right at it. The light did not stand out much in the bright atmosphere, and the ridge blocked the actual source completely from view.

“What did it look like when you saw it?” James asked.

“A pillar of light,” she said a little doubtfully. “It looked kind of like it was on fire.”

“An angel,” James said, his heart sinking.

What do the angels have to do with this?

“It did look sort of familiar to descriptions I’ve heard,” Hester said. “Although my understanding is that angels can look very different depending on the type…”

She continued talking nervously for a few more seconds, not saying much of substance, until James opened his mouth to ask another question.

“Did it see you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Okay. That could be important,” James said. “I was wondering if the angel is part of Moishe’s memories, or if it’s actually a real thing visiting this dream, like us. If it’s visiting the dream, it could cause a lot of trouble for all I know. But if it didn’t notice a giant spider staring at it, then this probably isn’t the real deal.”

There was some amount of wishful thinking to this on James’s part. He knew he wasn’t equipped to win a fight with an angel, and he doubted that being in a dream would give him enough of an advantage to change that. It was one thing to fight magical creatures like the Wraiths in a dream. It was another to fight creatures that were powerful enough to give out blessings like they were gods.

“I could have been wrong, sir,” Hester said nervously. “I—you know, these things don’t really have faces. It could have looked at me—”

“We’re going to trust your initial judgment on this, Hester,” James said. “It’s better to be optimistic, anyway. We’ll just try to avoid going near where the angel is for right now. If we thought the angel noticed us, we might have to make a strategic retreat, when we haven’t seen Moishe at all yet. I’d rather keep going. Why don’t we go back down to ground level?”

He explained his theory that the dream had probably popped them into a place that was relatively close to Moishe’s location, based on his previous experience.

“That makes sense to me,” Hester said, sounding very relieved.

“There’s one more thing,” James said. “It might make it harder to find Moishe, but it should make it easier for us to avoid being spotted by the angel. I think, if we focus, we can make ourselves completely invisible here.”

“Oh, yeah, dream,” Hester said. She instantly popped out of sight.

“Wow,” James said. “I thought that would take you a minute.” He looked around for a moment, wondering where she had gone, or if she had shrunk as well as turning invisible.

A hand reached out and grabbed his. A chitinous, exoskeleton hand.

“I’m still here, sir.”

“Right,” James said, chuckling. “Well done.”

He thought for a moment and then willed himself invisible, too.

The two of them stepped off the cliff, hand in hand, and they floated gently down to ground level again.

They began walking along the path, Hester following James’s lead, looking for any sign of Moishe.

As James rounded a corner, Hester gave his hand a sharp yank.

“There!” she breathed.

James turned and saw a piece of the cliff face opposite them moving. It was a man-sized chunk of rock. As the hunk of stone dropped from the valley wall, though, James recognized that it was not stone at all. It was a cloth that had changed color and texture to blend in with the wall. There was a person under there, and the person was now running.

He followed the trajectory of the running figure’s movements with his eyes, and James realized he was dashing toward a rabbit with antlers that had its back turned to them.

James willed himself visible just as the rabbit turned to face its predator—and the running man stuck a dagger into its shoulder.

“Moishe?” James called out. He couldn’t imagine who else this could be.

The figure in the camouflage outfit, still holding the dagger with the wriggling rabbit on the end of it, turned his head toward the voice and pulled the fabric away from his face.

It was Moishe. Bearded, sunburnt, sweaty, and hollow-cheeked, with blistered lips. He looked badly dehydrated.

But it was definitely Moishe.

“It’s you?” Moishe asked, his voice cracked and weak. Then his face turned wary. He assumed a fighting stance, pulling the rabbit from the dagger and snapping the creature’s neck in one smooth motion so that he could brandish the blade at James. “Or are you another illusion?”

“I’m real,” James said simply, looking Moishe steadily in the eyes with a calm expression. James kept his arms at his sides but opened his fingers and pointed them away from his body to emphasize that he wasn’t holding anything.

He waited for Moishe to put the knife down, but the Assassin had a slightly crazy glint in his eye as James looked at him.

Okay, I guess there was no way this was going to be simple, he thought.

James threw an Air Strike at the cliff wall beside Moishe.

“Could an illusion do that?” James asked.

“That could have been any attack,” Moishe said. “Show me something that only James could do.”

“How about I tell you something only I would know,” James replied. “Since you could assume that anything I show you is an illusion?”

“Fair enough,” Moishe replied after a brief pause. “Go for it.” There was an undercurrent of suspicion still in his voice.

“I know that Officer Ross’s wife died to save her husband’s life back in Orientation, and I know that you were the only witness to that,” James said. “I assume you didn’t tell a lot of people besides me.”

Moishe nodded reluctantly. “So it is you.” His body slumped as if disappointed. “Then we’re both trapped here.”