I blame myself,” Ani said, back in the real world. “We should have been more attentive! We should have intervened. Maybe then they wouldn’t have…”

“—It’s not your fault,” I said. “The military’s experiments were going to move forward no matter what you did. I don’t think there was anything any of us could have done to avoid this outcome.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ani said. “It wasn’t your family that was on the line.”

“Oh, Beast’s teeth, I…” Immediately, Ani looked away and shook her head. “Genneth, I didn’t—I didn’t mean it like that. I’m s—”

“—I know,” I said.

Inside, I looked Nina in the eyes.

“If you don’t mind, Nina, there’s something I’d like you to do with you.”

That certainly came out awkwardly.

Nina grimaced. “Are you coming on to me?”

I stuck up my hands in a defensive posture and shook them and my head. “No no no no no no no—”

“—I’m just kidding,” she said, with a laugh.

At this point, I was starting to miss the chaos and the zombies.

“So… what is it?” she asked.

With everything coming up crazy, I figured it wise to go back to the roots. If my religion’s foundational assumptions were in error, maybe rethinking them would lead me to recover something useful.

Now: what root antedated the Testaments and even Angelfall itself?

Answer: dreams.

Though much of Trenton’s ancient pagan traditions had been lost, we could gain insight by extrapolating from the vestiges of pre-Lasseditic Polovian folk-belief. After all, Polovia and its people had interacted with and been influenced by Trentons since the stone age. And one of those extrapolations was a belief that dreams could bridge the worlds of flesh and spirit, and man and god.

Andalon had appeared to me in a dream. Mr. Himichi had come up with Catamander Brave thanks to a dream. Human cultures and religions across the world attributed mystical and prophetic significance to dreams that went far beyond modern science’s current—albeit slightly murky—understanding of them as stirrings of the subconscious.

What if there was something to those beliefs? What if the Angels and Demons that lurked in the aether had communicated to ancient peoples through dreams? Ancient Trenton witches consumed special herbs to place themselves into a deep slumber to open themselves to divine influence. There was even precedent for it in Scripture: supposedly, the Blessèd would hear the Triun’s commands in their dreams.

And now, I had all of Nina’s memories and dreams at my fingertips.

I figured it was worth a shot.

“I knew it was bad,” Ani said, “but… this? What were they doing?” Ani bit her lip. “Angel… maybe this really is the end.”

Ani looked drained and downtrodden, as if every last drop of sunshine had been rung out of her.

I shook my head. “Ani, don’t do that. Please.”

“Don’t do what?” she asked.

“Give up hope,” I said, answering gently.

“Now you sound like Jonan,” she said, tears twinkling in her eyes.

I chuckled softly. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s just… so hard.” Ani squeezed my forearm tightly and stared down at the ground.

“Remember when I said I thought you might be one of the Blessèd?” I asked Nina.

The young woman nodded. “How could I forget?”

“Maybe it’s because I just knew less then than I do now, but… I’m not sure anymore. I don’t know what you are, or what Suisei is, for that matter. But… perhaps there’s a way I can find out.”

Nina shot me a wary stare. “Is this gonna be some kind of dangerous?”

“No.” I shook my head. “At first, I wanted to believe you were one of the Blessèd, because that would mean you were an all-powerful divine warrior capable of fending back even the deepest darkness. But, as I said, now I’m no longer sure. Still, I wonder…”

“Yes…?”

“If what the Old Believers and the ancient pagans believed was true, and the divine really does communicate to us through dreams, there’s a chance that they communicated with you at some point in the past, only you don’t remember it. Most people hardly remember any of their dreams. So, you never know: there might be something important locked up in your head.”

“Like what?” Nina asked.

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“Mmm… maybe something that explains why you have your powers?”

“You know me,” I told Ani, “I put up a front all the time. I do it for the patients. It helps when they see someone smiling.”

She let go of my arm. “Genneth… I’m worried I’m losing my faith. It’s so hard. Every step gets more and more difficult.” She stared off into the distance. “Looking around, I wonder what I’m even fighting for. I mean… what’s left?”

“I would tell you if I knew.” I wanted to hold Ani’s hand, but I hesitated. I was afraid she’d be able to feel my missing fingers, so I kept my distance. “Right now… I’m just glad that you’re okay.”

Back in my mind, Nina gave me a skeptical look. “You really think this’ll work?”

“A vital clue to your powers, the monsters, and who-knows-what else might be lurking somewhere in your subconscious mind,” I said.

“Really?” She stared at me, and her gaze made me fidget with my mental recreation of my lucky bowtie.

“Honestly…” I bent forward and sighed. “…I have no idea.” I made a piston of my leg: shaking, shaking, shaking. “I’m freaking out here, and am absolutely, 100% grasping at straws. According to Scripture, the Lass herself heard the Godhead speak to her through her dreams. Maybe you did, too. I mean, wouldn’t that be so nice? If the stories people told really were a depiction of the world as it was and is?”

“Yeah, it would,” she replied. “So… what exactly do I need to do?”

“Nothing really,” I said. “Just… try to relax.”

I reached out to her gently and pressed my fingers onto her scalp. A light blossomed, spreading outward to envelop us as I pried inside a dream within a dream.

— — —

Nina’s consciousness wasn’t the first that I’d entered in this fashion; all the work I’d been doing in my mind office had given me plenty of experience for situations like this.

I made it through without any trouble. The light cleared as we arrived.

Nina and I stood side-by-side, inside a swirling sphere of sensory inputs. Images and sounds, and tastes and smells streamed around us like wind. Feelings flickered and flashed in the tumult. It was like standing in the heart of a storm, and was just as intimidating.

Even Nina, for all her grumpy butch energy, stepped back and grabbed my hand while casting a nervous glance my way.

“It’s okay,” I said, looking over my shoulder. I stepped out of the way to give her a better view. “There’s nothing you need to be afraid of.”

Indeed, the storm was growing calmer with every passing moment. Images reified and coalesced. Spirits of people, places, feelings, and things came together as Nina’s memories of her dreams self-assembled. Gradually, the movements stilled, until we were looking at a grand collage of her mind’s most glistening moments, floating in the aether.

She stared at it like she was window-shopping.

“What is all this?”

“Your dreams,” I said.

Speaking of which, my attention was immediately drawn to a dream that was giving off a definite “weird” vibe, so I stepped and grabbed it and pulled it toward us.

The sphere opened up around the dream as it began to play. Nina and I watched her younger self’s dream-self run through a dense jungle. The palms’ fronds were edged in glass. Animated bees with apple-sized bodies buzzed overhead. Behind her, something galumphed through the vitreous verdure, chasing in pursuit. It elbowed its way through the trees, flinging branches and animals left and right with swats of its grotesque, meaty hands.

“Oh god,” Nina said. “I remember this. I hate this dream. It kept freaking me out over and over again.”

Nina soon made it to a clearing, and it was just then that her pursuer burst into view.

It wasn’t a demon, though it certainly wasn’t pretty.

“El Balib,” she muttered, lowering her head

“That’s the… uh… that’s a Maikokan god, right?”

“More or less,” she replied.

El Balib was a giant, as tall as the trees, clad in a leaf-made toga. His body was a lawn of wiry red hairs, except for the bare, rough flesh on his oversized palms and soles and face, where his nose was bright red, and as swollen as a stretched raindrop.

“My Dad had gotten a mask for the festival. It scared the hell out of me.”

“I can tell,” I said.

I dismissed the dream with a wave of my hand.

Nina crossed her arms in concern. “Are you going to have to look through every single fuckin' dream I’ve ever had?”

I wanted to say, “No”, but that would have been a lie. Truth be told, I hadn’t given it any thought until she’d mentioned it.

“That’s a good point,” I said. “Hmm…” I curled my finger on my chin, scratching my light beard. “But how to do it?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“It’s not like I automatically know everything that you do,” I explained. “It would be a lot easier if I knew what I was looking for. Powerful memories have a… presence to them. I can feel them lurking; they’re kind of like bumps on the air. But here… trying to find a message from God in one of your dreams is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Of course it would help if you knew which dream had been the message dream, but you don’t.”

She lowered her head. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “You don’t need to apologize. It’s not like you signed up to be one of the Blessèd.”

And just like that, an insight popped into my mind. I raised my hand, sticking a finger up in a demonstration of enlightenment.

“Ah! I’ve got it.”

Nina’s eyes widened. “You found it?”

Smiling gently, I shook my head again. “No, but… I think I figured out how to get there.” I stuck out my hands. “I’m gonna focus on themes,” I explained. “Mystery and divinity, for example.” I made my hands glow for added effect.

The swarm of memories began to move once more. Images swam past us, receding into the depths as others came to the fore.

“It’s kind of like searching for something on the internet,” I said.

The memories settled a moment later.

“Tell me if you see anything,” I said.

Nina nodded.

We searched together.

There was a dream of Nina being judged by a council of her family’s deities. There was even a dream of Nina in a one-on-one boxing match with a bronze statue of the Holy Angel.

“I don’t even remember half of these.” She turned to me. “How will we know if we’ve found it?”

I sighed. “I’d like to think we’d be able to know just by looking. A special feeling, you know?”

She nodded.

Yet, no matter how much we searched, we couldn’t find anything.

“Shit,” she cursed, softly.

“Maybe I need to try different themes.”

“Fate,” I said. “Foreboding.”

There was a dream of Nina’s family casting her out, leaving her to fend all for herself. There was a dream of a living tea-time play-set drowning her in a tub of pink glop. There was a dream of the city streets filled with the corpses of dead pets. But no messages from God.

I kept searching.

“Destiny.” The images changed. We glanced over the results.

I gritted my teeth.

Nothing.

I tried another topic. “Nightmares. Terror.”

I saw a dream where Nina was being hounded by werewolves only to become one, herself. I saw a dream where she was trying to find her little brother, but he was nowhere to be found. I saw a dream where her father cursed her for failing to live up to his expectations.

But I didn’t find any of the things I was looking for.

Concern flashed on Nina’s face. “Dr. Howle,” she said, “maybe we should—”

“—No.” I stuck my arm in front of her. “It has to be here. It has to.”

I grew more desperate. I flicked through so many possibilities, the dream sphere started to whirl around us all over again.

“Hope,” I said.

Nothing.

“Change.”

Nothing.

“Death!”

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

“Dr. Howle…” Nina said.

There was fear in her eyes.

“There’s nothing! Fudge it all!” I ran my hands through my hair.. “There’s nothing! I… I don’t understand.” I turned to face her. “You had powers before you were ever infected. There should be something,” I said. “There has to be…”

“Why?” Nina asked.

“Because if there isn’t, then I have no idea what’s going on, and if I truly don’t know what’s going on, then we are thoroughly screwed.”

A fear took root in the pit of my stomach: what if we’d gotten this all wrong?