“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it!” -Full Band, Ace Combat 7-

______

James was breathing heavily as he neared the top of the hill, asphalt under his feet feeling just a little bit like it wasn’t fully solid. The others were at the bottom of the hill behind him, in a small loop of the path where there were actual benches to sit on.

They were tired. Mauro, tough looking dude that he was, could barely keep walking. And he was the one who wasn’t hurt. Sienna, Zari, and the man who still wouldn’t tell James his fucking name all had bad injuries to legs that made walking for any longer basically untenable, and they only had one cart and a single tiger to pull it. Johns was near collapsing too.

Harlan was fine. Harlan had barely blinked through all of this. James didn’t actually know how Harlan was still looking like they’d just walked out of a catalog ad for turtlenecks, but they were, and it left him pretty certain they were lying about only having two forms of magic. Even if it was an unintentional lie, it was still pissing him off. He was in a snappy mood right now, and the fact that Harlan was probably giving him bad information due to their own self-induced amnesia wasn’t exactly fun to think about. Though to be fair, it could just be Harlan’s military grade training in action. Despite being a nominal member of US Air Force, James didn’t actually know what level of physical conditioning your average soldier would be at compared to him. It was probably more than what he had, but less than “stroll through suburban hell”, somewhere in between those two sides.

“Suburban Hell sounds like a really lame dungeon name.” James gasped out between heavy breaths. He was sweaty, and tired, and this hill had an incline that he was pretty sure was magically enforced, and he just wanted to sit down. But he needed to see if there was anything coming from ahead before committing to a real rest.

“What do you think?” He continued, talking to the air. “Stupid name ranking of, like, three? No higher, because it’s just sorta boring. See, I feel like Sarah had the right of it with Officium Mundi. Bad Latin or whatever that is just sounds punchy.” He kept moving, pressing a hand onto the top of his knee as he took the long steps up, making sure not to nail himself with his sledgehammer again.

James was also not taking a break because he knew, knew, that once he did, he was out. His Endurance stat was keeping him mobile, and at least viable in any fight that came up, but it was a form of tension that he could not afford to let slacken.

He was also talking to himself. Technically, he was maybe thinking of talking to Zhu, but Zhu wasn’t manifested right now. And without a shared medium, the human and the navigator couldn’t really talk. So realistically he was talking to himself. And he was doing so because Aurelio had punched through his infectious aphasia, and claimed that he’d only started feeling better when he’d actually started talking.

So James was talking. As much as he could, away from everyone else, because the actual words he was saying were about drinking blood or some crap. Aphasia was fucking terrifying to him, in a way that he was trying not to think about. James could form the words, know exactly what he was going to say, and then open his mouth and have something radically different come out. Or, sometimes, nothing at all.

For all that he was a socially anxious introvert, James actually loved talking to people. Loved communicating and sharing, trying to use words to crystalize emotions and ideas, to convince people of his point of view, or to ask questions about theirs. This disease that he’d picked up, which fortunately didn’t come with any associated physical damage, was still nightmarish in just how it took away his connection to other people. And the worst part was that, if he didn’t know it was happening, he wouldn’t have noticed that what he was thinking and what was coming out of his mouth were radically different words.

“I like a good two word dungeon name, I think.” He kept saying, hoping to shake loose whatever magic virus was in his brain just through drowning it in language. “Fake Latin helps, but, like, I think the key is just words that sounds sparkly. Clutter Ascent isn’t fake Latin, it’s just cool words put together. Man, we should get Sarah to name all our dungeons. Forget this ‘whoever finds it’ thing.” He put another foot forward and hauled himself up the hill, still feeling like terrain was steeper than should have been possible. “All I’ve seen of this place is glowfog and cookie cutter houses, though. So… I dunno, Contaminated Neighborhood?”

James stopped and caught his breath, looking up at the last twenty feet of walking. “Okay. I got this. Also I’m calling that a rank two bad name.” He shook his head. Too wordy. “Also the word neighborhood just makes me think of Mr. Rogers, and I’m not putting that here.” His tongue felt heavy in his mouth as he coughed again. Orange juice was something, but it wasn’t exactly as thirst quenching as just plain old water. He was still actually annoyed the cafe hadn’t had any. He was going to have words with their delivery company when they got back. Words like… like…

He gave up thinking about it. James was simply too tired to plot petty revenge. It felt like every part of him hurt in a different way. But after he made sure nothing was coming at them from the front, he could go sit. Maybe nap. He could use a nap.

“I dunno. I keep saying that! I dunno!” He half-heard the words come out different each time. “But what am I supposed to do, know things?” James breathed out something that was almost a manic laugh. “I’m trying to name a nightmare from inside it. What the fuck am I doing. I might as well call it…”

He crested the hill, and looked out over the landscape.

Ahead of him, the little path wound down the thin strip of trampled grass and dead dirt populated with weeds and blackberry bushes. It vanished out of sight three hundred feet down, where the mist faded away and the darkness came back. But the vista stretched on for what looked like miles. Patches of luminous mist ruining James’ night vision, while in the mostly dark space ahead of him, the orange glow of street lights lit the space like distant fireflies. He could see dozens of them. Hundreds. And he could see a few other paths like this one, crossing like a wobbling grid across each other as they linked up streets.

And row after row after row of shillouetted rooftops. Cul de sacs and dead ends and a few places that must be empty lots. House after house after house, either visible as an outline through the mist around them, or as a dark space blocking off a street light. Things moved in that distance, tiny things at this distance, darting between pools of light, or crawling over roofs. But also…

James looked down to what must have been five miles away, where something was moving that he could see a little too clearly. It was one of those massive metal towers that held up power lines, though James wasn’t sure exactly what he was seeing for a moment. Electric blue motes danced around its legs, and he could imagine the air vibrating as the wires attached to it as it stepped over one of the empty places. The creature was ten, maybe twenty stories tall, a collection of metal arms that bent at thirty degree angles and formed a thousand triangles. It stepped and lightning bloomed where it planted itself, the thousand power lines it held unconcerned with the change in position.

And then something shifted. It felt like it saw him.

In a panicked reflex, James toggled the automatic target selection on his bracers on, not capable of sorting through them to do it one at a time. He was just barely quick enough, as something slammed into his mind through his optic cortex.

“Slammed” might have been the wrong word. It didn’t hit him at all, it simply moved through his vision and into his body, and started electrocuting him. It was only for a half second before his shields snapped up, precious defensive charges consumed in a trio as they blocked the effect, and James rolled backward down the hill, screaming in pain. The cursed lightning stopped as soon as the bracers triggered, but it still left a Lichtenberg scar around his left eye, flaring out around his nose and mouth.

The last thing he saw of the distant space as he dropped back and caught himself before he fell was the horizon. Not the horizon below, but the horizon ahead. Where, in the ‘sky’, another patch of mist and smattering of street lamps was visible at eye level a few miles away. And more silhouettes of houses among it.

They weren’t even on the upper level of this neighborhood.

“…Stratified Underburb.” James gasped out, trying to say anything that wasn’t a scream of pain. Surprisingly, his eye didn’t hurt that much. Though he felt like he’d just gotten the worst ice cream headache humanly possible without just detonating his skull. And the lines in his skin itched.

“I like that name.” Zhu’s voice whispered, a single feather with an inset eye poking off James’ upper arm.

James gulped down what felt like a bitter mouthful of adrenaline, and slowly dropped himself to the asphalt, scraping his hands as he sat. “Hey.” He muttered. “I’m glad you’re alive. Wait, you can understand me?”

“You are speaking again.” Zhu said, sounding almost as tired as James was, a sharp pain in his normally steady voice

James let his eyes unfocus as he realized he’d been ignoring the intrusive thoughts that had been inserted into his head about the time he was trying to be murdered by a distant kaiju.

[Survivor : Low : +1 Skill Point]

[Watcher : Deep : +5 Skill Points]

He tilted his head to look at Zhu, and realized that the single orange light feather was smoking. White wisps of physical smoke coming off Zhu’s manifested form. The navigator was slowly building more feathers, but the eye that he’d put together here looked like it was almost cracked, or deflated. “You okay?” He asked.

“I saw it.” Zhu said. “It was… it drew me out. It wanted to be seen. It is a landmark.”

“Shit.” James didn’t know what else to say. “Well, at least we’re going to die with more skill points than anyone else in the world.” He coughed, and regretted it instantly as he felt the pressure against the inside of his skull spike.

Zhu weakly flickered against him. “Please… don’t.”

“Sorry.” James sighed. “Sorry.” He felt all the resistance drain out of him. “We should get back. Do you know where we’re going?”

“No.” Zhu said with a twitch of his slowly manifesting form. “I got us… somewhere safer. This is somewhere safer. Also you smell like a swamp.”

“I know. I got attacked by a swamp.” James wobbled to his feet with a grunt. “Are you sure this is the safer option? We’re in the middle of nowhere, apparently there’s a whole other strata of the dungeon above us, and probably more below, and there’s a literal titan of industry out there that can kill people by being seen.”

Zhu’s feathers hugged against James’ arm while the navigator started forming a line down to manifest a tail. “Safer. Not safe.” He thought for a second. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Me neither.” James said. “But we’ll figure something out. Let’s go check on everyone.”

James made his way back down the hill, knowing he couldn’t take too long to rest before his Endurance would fade. The other humans in the little loop of the path watched him as he approached, a mixture of exhaustion and anxiety in their eyes. Half of them had been crying, which was only fair, given how badly they’d been hurt, and how terrifying this whole place was.

“Okay.” James said. And then stopped. He didn’t even know where to start with this. None of what he had to say counted as good news, unless he flagrantly lied. “Good news first,” he flagrantly lied, “it doesn’t look like there’s anything coming from ahead of us, and I kinda think that anything that tries might die doing it.” He cleared his throat, which turned into a set of dry coughs that failed to dislodge whatever felt like it was stuck back there. “Bad news is there’s something ahead that kills things by looking at them. Or by being looked at. It’s a problem.”

“Is that where the facial tattoo came from?” Harlan asked casually, the mercenary amusing themselves flipping a half-empty bottle of apple juice over and over in their hand. “Because you’ve got a…”

“Yeah, thanks.” James shut them down. “There’s more bad news. This is… this is it. This is the safer place, that Zhu got us to. Ahead of us…” How did he even describe it. “This place has layers.” James settled on. “And we’re not even on the top one. There’s at least ten miles of samey neighborhood streets in all directions, but if you go up? There’s another neighborhood. I think there’s one below, too. I dunno if there’s more.”

“…this is hell.” The quiet man who was sitting on the edge of a bench with his hands wrapped around his bloodied knee said. “We’re already dead, aren’t we? And this is hell. This is what I get for all of it.”

“First off, no. This is, like, not quite the worst dungeon I’ve been in.” James sometimes wished he could turn off the part of his brain that demanded he snark. “Also we’re not dead. And we won’t be.”

“What are we supposed to do then?!” The outburst from Zari came as only a slight surprise. The girl had been holding on pretty well so far, but the pain of having her ankle shredded and the news that they didn’t have a way out pushed her over a very thin line. “You said you’d get us out! You said you could find the exit! I want to go home!” She screamed, before her leg twisted under her and she dropped back to the bench, sobbing wildly. “I want to go home…”

James started to step forward, but Harlan’s tiger beat him to it. The big cat, looking perfectly normal and really imposing for something that rolled up to a layer of magical ink on an arm, stepped in close against the bench, and shoved its snout up against Zari’s chest. The thin girl tried to shove the heavy whiskered face away, but the tiger was insistent, lapping at her face with a thick tongue until she eventually relented and wrapped it in a hug. Her body still shook from silent crying, but at least she wasn’t screaming anymore.

James sighed as he looked at the others. “She’s not quite wrong.” He whispered.

“We are gonna die here, aren’t we?” Mauro asked, the big man giving him a vacant stare.

“No.” James said. “But we aren’t out. And that’s a problem.”

“Kinda sounds like dying’s still on the table.” Johns said. He was laying on a coat on the path just in front of one of the benches, eyes closed, but clearly listening. He looked like the kind of guy who had experience napping when he could, though he clearly wasn’t actually sleeping here.

“Maybe.” James conceded. “But at least here is safer. So we have a chance to… rest, at least. If not just hunker down and wait for rescue.”

“Rescue from who?!” Zari’s voice through the tiger’s orange and white fur got a rumble of protest from the big cat, who shoved against her again.

“From the Order, the rest of my people. I don’t know if this place has any time dilation going on, or maybe they just haven’t figured out how to get in yet. I somehow doubt this place has a fucking address on google maps they can look up to teleport to, you know? But, well, Alex knows I’m here. She’ll tell the others. Or the people we sent out will. We’ll have help coming. I trust them. I have to trust them.” James whispered the last part before raising his voice again. “Or we rest and recover, and give Zhu a chance to heal up and find us the next step. Or maybe we start raiding houses for magic items and get our own teleporter. I don’t know. I’m not a long term plan kinda guy.” James shrugged. “I’m not dead, I’m not giving up.”

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“Dumbass.” Harlan snorted.

James shot a look their way. “You have a better idea? Wanna just cut your way through on your own?” He demanded, tolerance level for Harlan’s bullshit hitting rock bottom. “Harlan, you are obviously the toughest person here, since I’ve been slacking on my magically boosted exercise regimen. Just fucking leave if you think this is a lost cause. Fuck off.” He snapped.

“Hey, woah.” Johns rolled to his feet, holding his hands out between the two of them.

Harlan slapped his hand aside. “You think you’re going to save everyone, be a hero, and just walk out of here?” They asked James in a dully sarcastic tone. “You think someone’s going to come save us?”

“More or less.” James answered. “And you’re going to help me.”

“Am I?” Harlan sounded actually surprised.

“You are.” Zhu rumbled.

“Harlan.” James said, giving up being angry for a moment. “Look in your little notebook. The one you keep scratching stuff in when we’re walking. Look at who you want yourself to be.” He glanced over his shoulder, doing a reflexive paranoid check of the area, even though nothing was moving. “You know, my partner, Alanna. She can read people like a book. It’s a magic thing.” He met Harlan’s eyes. “She clocked you the first time we sat down. You’re scared.”

Harlan didn’t wait for James to keep talking. Just pivoted like they were in a military parade, and walked away, putting distance as they started climbing the hill before stopping a good hundred feet away and taking a relaxed watch stance.

“Well that went well.” Johns said sarcastically.

“I’m gonna go talk to them privately.” James said. “We’ll be on watch. Everyone take a nap or something.”

“Do you have more of the magic potion?” Aurelio asked, hopeful.

“Yes. Take a nap.” James said, heading after Harlan. Zhu fluttered feathers around James’ shoulder in a silent laugh as he left the others and glared at the hill. Fortunately, Harlan had only gone a short ways up, enough to have a little more of a view, and to be away from everyone else, but not far enough to be away. “Hey. We need to actually talk.” James said firmly as he approached.

“No we don’t.”

“Harlan…”

“Stop saying that.”

“Your name?”

“Yes.”

James stopped next to them, turning to still be able to talk, but also keeping a view on the people below. “Okay. Well, you, we still need to talk.” He paused, and then just stood there, waiting for them to acknowledge that. They didn’t. Instead, James flicked his eyes sideways to see Harlan paging through their little notebook that they’d pulled out of… he’d assumed it was a pocket, but there was real chance that was a tattoo, actually.

It took a few minutes. Long enough that James was worried Endurance was going to burn off and he was gonna collapse. But eventually, Harlan spoke again. “I don’t really want to talk.” They said, flipping the notebook closed and palming it. “Nothing to say.”

“Mind if I talk then?” James asked, and got an incurious shrug in response. He took a deep breath. “So, back at my home, we’ve got these people called inhabitors.” He started on a tangent. “They’re living potions that kill the person who drinks them, and then replaces them. They’re all jam packed with guilt over the process of their creation, which was out of their control, and they don’t… they don’t really get emotions. Yet. Sort of.” Harlan was staring at him now, with a look like they were wondering when James was going to get to the point. “See, they know everything about the person they replaced. But they didn’t feel it, didn’t live it. They know what emotions do, but not what they feel like. Basically, they’re a Chinese Room where the guy is frantically trying to learn Chinese before anyone notices.”

“Is this going somewhere?” Harlan asked, annoyed.

“There.” James pointed at them. “That. That’s what’s so fucking familiar here. You… you’re not some hardened badass, are you? You talk like how a high schooler thinks a hardened badass talks, and I’d know, I’m raising a bunch of those. I’ve been one of those. You kept all your memories about how to fight, how to operate, everything functional, and you don’t know how to process feelings that aren’t combat, do you?”

“I’m not a blank slate, paladin.” Harlan snorted. “I’m a person. Don’t psychoanalyze me.”

“I know you’re a person.” James said.

“Of course you’re a person.” Zhu added. “That’s why he’s trying to help you.”

Harlan’s eyebrows quirked up as they looked down at the navigator. “You’d know, I suppose.”

“Stop being such a bitch to the one person here who would care if you died.” Zhu hissed out like a punctured tire. “Do you know, I can see the outline of your book?”

Harlan’s eyes turned to flint. “What.”

“Oh, yes! You’ve written quite the fine map!” Zhu shot back. “Not a kind I’d seen before, but there it is. Do you think-“

“Zhu.” James settled a hand on the feathers on his arm. “It’s okay.”

“But-!“ The navigator protested, but James just ran his fingers through their dusty glowing feathers.

He looked up at Harlan. “Here’s the gist of it.” James said. “Because I’m tired, and I’m not as tough as you, and I need to go sit down before my legs give out. I know you’re scared, I know you’re letting it make you lash out, and you know what? I know who you are. Even if you don’t, I know. Because you’re still here. If you really thought you had a chance, and you were as much of a jackass as you’re acting, you’d be gone. But you’re here, helping.” He gave a wolfish grin. “Sorry, you’re a good person. Whether you remember it or not. So stand here and keep watch, and try to figure out why I’m being nice to you, and get angry and stew for a while, and sort your shit out, because even if you’re a good person, you’re freaking everyone out, and you need to quit that shit before you get someone killed.”

Without hearing another word from the confused mercenary, James stomped back down the hill and over to the group again.

“They gonna head off?” Johns asked, giving Harlan a nervous look.

“No. They’re standing watch. Which reminds me.” He pulled the pistol out of his holster. “Okay, you know how to use one of these?” He asked Johns.

“Uh… no?” The EMT stepped back. “Why?”

James sighed. “The magic keeping me going isn’t gonna last, and I need to sleep.” He said. “Soon. I’m gonna collapse as soon as I let it go. Someone needs to take this. So, I guess, who’s least tired?”

Slowly, from her seat on the slightly battered couch cushion they’d tossed on the cart, Sienna raised her hand. “I… I slept for a while, I guess?”

“Being unconscious isn’t sleeping.” James preempted Johns’ own complaint. “Can you stand? You don’t need to, but you need to be able to.”

The girl nodded, vigorously bobbing her round face as she put on a serious look. “I can do it.” She said. “I… you all… yeah. I can do it.”

“Okay.” James crouched in front of her. “This is the safety.” He said, pressing the gun into her hands. “If this is on, it won’t fire. Here’s how you eject the magazine, here’s a spare. The spare is full of Harlan’s stupid memory bullets, and they’re all empty, so be careful with those. I don’t know what firing them without loading them does, but maybe Harlan will tell you.” He adjusted her grip. “Hold it like this. You’re going to want to keep a tight grip, so that it doesn’t buck in your hands. We can’t really take practice shots, so I can’t get you used to the recoil, but if you keep a solid grip, you’ll be okay. Remember, don’t point it at anything you aren’t ready to kill. Okay?”

“It’s… heavy.” She said, holding it up and adjusting to the grip James had put her in.

“You get used to it.” James said softly.

“No, I mean… not, like, metaphorically.” Sienna clarified in a voice that sounded like she wasn’t sure if she should find this funny. “I mean-“

James felt a grin creep onto his face. “I am also not being metaphorical, though I suppose it is that too. It’s a box of metal designed to contain explosions. It’s got some weight to it. Movies don’t ever really give you a sense for how these things are bricks.”

“This one’s kinda old, isn’t it?” Sienna asked.

“Yeah. It’s a Walther P38. This one’s almost a hundred years old. Still shoots though.” James smiled. “I have an affinity for it.”

Sienna looked over at his face. “You don’t mean you like the model, do you?”

“No, this is still literal, and it’s magic.” James said. “Now. You good?”

“Y-yes!” She saluted with the gun, and James winced. “Sorry!”

“Be careful.” He said, laying on the asphalt and sliding a backpack full of juice bottles under his head. “I’ll be up in… a little bit.” And just like that, he was tired. He didn’t have anything he was heading toward, didn’t have anything he was struggling to survive. And abruptly, his exertions over the week, and the hell of the last day, and all his bruises and cuts and scrapes and infections caught up to him. “Zhu… you… rest too, okay?” He muttered, as he closed his eyes. And was out, like a light.

_____

Somewhere in a dream, James was playing Tetris.

The game was, as far as he could tell, something like a naturally occurring cognitohazard. If you played enough Tetris, your brain started to generate more Tetris. It was a self replicating meme, even if it didn’t have a very long lifespan, and it wasn’t actually alive like Zhu was.

Zhu was watching him as he moved office cubicles and halls around. Left turn block, straight hall, square block, one of those jagged side blocks that was part water cooler part low walled cubicle. He hated those. But he was in the flow of Tetris.

“Your mind is a mess.” Zhu told him. This was a deeper dream; there was no geometry here, aside from the impressions of squares and tetrominos. So it was easy for Zhu to sit over him and watch him while he was inside and facing the cubicles all at the same time. Or, not ‘easy’, just that it was.

Dream logic was fuzzy. A long time ago, James had gotten a skill rank in processing it, but time and experience had left him even better at simply shrugging and letting himself stay asleep. A good chunk of his brain resting while the part that stored this little sliver of his persona kept churning away.

James greeted Zhu, a passive pulse of recognition as he kept struggling to make the blocks line up even as the edges frayed to grey nothing and vanished back into chaos as soon as he wasn’t paying attention to them. He let it happen. That was how dreams were, usually. They were solipsistic; only what you knew was real, and a human mind just couldn’t maintain a whole world for very long.

Zhu’s wings curled down around James, touching on his arms and stopping him from his frantic arranging of the space. A word like a concerned and questioning warmth flowed out of him, and James let his hands pause for a time. Time meant nothing in dreams. He waited for as long as he needed, as long as he didn’t wake up.

Feathers and fingers, limbs and watching curious eyes. James had seen Zhu before. He wasn’t afraid of what the navigator ‘looked like’ here. He looked up.

Zhu’s body was full of holes. He’d grown, dozens of mile long wings and curling arcs of feathers and tails and arms, but the arms were pitted with holes that scattered wet dust fell from. The outlines like road maps where the feathers overlapped each other were looking cracked and uneven. One massive eye, like a painting of the sky, formed the locus of the form, but it was shot through with a series of black lines. The whole left side of it taken up by what looked like a painting of an orbital view of the eastern seaboard at night.

The navigator flinched back as James saw him, but James just raised his hands and brought Zhu down into a hug. Holding the damaged infomorph in the swimming environment of the dream as he wondered if he was going to drift off again.

The cubicles kept falling, but James stopped arranging them. Let the office blocks fall, and the hallways peel by, and just abandoned the dream to chaos while he held his friend.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered.

Zhu didn’t respond. Instead, the rough and feathered imaginary body tensed up. A ripple of anxiety and concern flowing through the dream space, changing it. Motions of walls and floors sped up, the dropping sliding changing patterns becoming frantic, more so than before.

“Something’s coming.” Zhu said to him. Or maybe to himself. Maybe it was a question, a confusion. How could anything be arriving?

The question had an answer James didn’t like. Because sometimes dungeons made infomorphs, and often those informorphs were hostile, whatever form they took. Zhu took offense to that, but couldn’t deny that even his own creation was a form of a self defense mechanism.

James could have forced himself awake, but that wouldn’t actually help. Being here, deep down in a dream with the navigator that resided in his mind at his side, it wasn’t real, it was just a reflection. An open channel. Being awake wouldn’t change anything, it would just leave him blind. So he tried to keep the thin corridor between falling potted plants and phones beeping with busy signals intact, and watched as whatever it was came into his mind from the other end of it.

It slipped through from inside the water cooler. From above/ahead of James, the water cooler stood at the end of the hall, unaffected by the falling debris of the rest of the collapsing Tetris floor. As it burbled and shifted, a single bubble rose up inside it. And then, instead of popping, the bubble expanded, and a thin green octopus tentacle coiled out of it, suckers attaching to the inside of the tank.

But not really. They slipped through, and then were growing around the outside. A hole to nowhere letting through more and more of the thing as the singular flexible limb grew and wrapped around the thing that it had grown from.

Zhu flowed around to James’ back, wings wrapping around him like a shield, arms held out like claws. But even as the logic and surface of the dream broke and split open, no attack came.

“Wait.” James and Zhu whispered at the same time, both of them trailing off, unable to finish the thought before the tentacle turned again, and showed a different scene than James’ own mind through the ring of flesh. Like a gateway to somewhere else, but somewhere that he didn’t recognize.

Which wasn’t how dreams worked. If he didn’t recognize it, it wasn’t real. If he didn’t dream it, it wasn’t here.

When a teal form streaked with purple burst through the opening, a linear shot of scales and fanged mouths and fins, James wasn’t sure what he was expecting. He was only hanging onto the dream so that he could know what was happening in his head. The shock of this almost knocked him back to either wakefulness or a dreamless unconsciousness.

“Found you!” Speaky’s voice was tiny compared to their torpedo form, a squeak of exhausted delight as El’s kid nullified the distance within the dream and started spinning fins and fangs around James and Zhu. “Found you, found you, found you! I knew… I could do it! I knew! Planner! Planner I found them!”

“What…” Zhu’s feathers shifted end over end in confusion.

“Speaky, how are you here?” James asked as the dream cracked around them.

“You know me, I know you, I just had to cross the gap to your dream!” Speaky sounded so pleased with herself. “I jumped! Planner helped!” There was a moment of dissonance, and suddenly their form wasn’t there. Speaky was somewhere else, nearby, and wearing half of a mask. Some kind of bomber jacket and skirt combo that James had seen El wear before when they went into the Route. But it was leaking and cracked. Then they were back again, closer, but not touching. “Ooooh… don’t feel good.” Speaky shook themself, purple scales glittering. “Okay! Where are you!”

“I don’t…” James started to answer

But Zhu cut him off almost instantly. “Here.” The navigator said, a piece of himself breaking off and folding into a crystallized piece of orange light that he handed to Speaky. “All I can tell you.” He said, voice sounding woozy.

“Okay.” Speaky’s eyes flicked to James. “We’re coming.” She said.

“I know.” James said, heart swelling. “You have to go, you can’t stay here. Speaky, this dungeon can make you sick. You and El, you fucking get medical help when you’re out, okay?”

“Kay.” The young assignment demurred. “Planner can’t hold the bridge. I have to go.” Speaky spun circles around a space displaced from the two of them. “I might not be back.”

“Wait!” James said, reaching out. “The bridge… it goes back to El?” He asked.

“It’s Planner! It goes to a lot of people!” Speaky announced.

James could feel the wave of cold regret even inside the dream. But he spoke the next words anyway. “Zhu. Take Zhu back with you.” He said.

“Wh- no!” Zhu hissed in shocked anger.

“I’ve done this before.” James felt the thoughts in the corners of his mind, in the dark places that were blocked off to him, or cut away by some invisible old force. Like scars. But scars he could see the edges of. “Been here before, been this person before. I don’t remember it, but I know.” He turned and places his hands on either side of Zhu’s hundred foot wide form. “I don’t want anyone else to die for me again. I don’t want another empty scarecrow standing in my mind. You need to get out, before this place kills you. Please. I don’t want you to die. It’s not worth it.”

Zhu stared at him, like the idea that James might actually care was somehow a surprise to him, for all that he lived in his mind. His feathers folded inward, his eye twitched. The new wounds seeming to force themselves back every time Zhu’s body rearranged itself.

“No.” He said, simply.

“I have to go!” Speaky announced. “I can’t stay! Oh, this might have been a bad idea. I have part of Zhu! El says we will find you, and kick your ass! After we save it! Just hold on!” Speaky retreated through the nothing space that used to be a dream. There wasn’t much left anymore. “Gotta go!” There was a pull, and a twist from the ring of tentacle that Planner might have been. And then the strange part of what James knew was a much larger leviathan blipped out of his mind.

He woke up crying. But he didn’t wake up alone.