Chapter 118: I Finally Dreamed

Penelope walked me back from the Administrative Wing.

She did not offer.

She did not announce it.

She simply fell into step beside me when I came out of that room, and slowed to a pace that I recognized, several minutes too late, as mine.

We did not talk.

The courtyard was full.

Late morning, classes changing over, one hundred and eighty-seven people going about a day that had continued happening while nine of us sat in a bright room deciding things.

Some of them looked at me.

Most of them looked at me.

I discovered I did not have the energy to care, which was novel, and which I suspect is what people mean when they say someone is not themselves.

At the Sanctuary door she stopped.

"Go to sleep."

"That’s the plan."

"That’s never the plan. That’s your excuse. Today it’s the plan." She looked at me properly, and something in her face was doing a thing I did not want to examine. "How long?"

"Twenty-seven hours."

Penelope closed her eyes briefly.

"You’re an idiot."

"That’s been established."

"Alash."

"Mm."

She opened her mouth.

Then she didn’t say it.

Whatever it was, she folded it up and put it somewhere, the same way she had folded up the word she heard me say in the infirmary four days ago and never mentioned again.

"Sleep," she said instead. "I’ll deal with anyone who comes looking."

***

I do not remember reaching my room.

I remember the door.

I remember Dream Haven, which had been carried into a war, an examination, a Headmaster’s office and a formal inquiry, and which had said nothing about any of it.

I remember thinking that I had earned this.

Not in a self-pitying way.

In the flat accounting way.

Twenty-seven hours, a Force detonation eight days ago, three ribs, a boy’s channels, a room full of reasonable people.

Sleep was owed to me.

I lay down.

And for the first time in fifteen mortal years, sleep did not simply take me.

It opened....

There was warmth first.

That is the part I want to record honestly, because everything after it was terrible, and it would be easy to forget that it began well.

It was warm, and it was soft, and it was quiet in a way the mortal world is never quiet.

Not the absence of sound.

The absence of the need to listen.

I understood, somewhere underneath thought, that this was it.

This was the thing.

The thing I had wanted for an amount of time that does not convert into years.

The thing I had watched mortals do every single night, carelessly, for free, while I lay on a silver bed in an empty room in the Celestial Realm and could not follow them.

Dreaming.

I had it.

I was so pleased that I did not immediately notice the gold.

It came up through the warmth the way light comes up through water.

Thin lines.

Spreading outward from underneath me, across a surface that was not a floor, in a pattern I had seen twice now and had stopped pretending I did not recognize.

Five points.

I was one of them.

And I could feel the other four.

Not see.

There was nothing to see.

But I knew, with the absolute unreasoning certainty of a dream, exactly where they were.

Elizabeth, north side of the courtyard, asleep and not resting, because she had gone back to Concord and read for four hours before she let herself stop.

James, in the infirmary, sleeping properly for the first time in eight days because Lena had made him.

Sophie, in Brightvale, dreaming about something that made her happy.

Daphne.

Awake.

Sitting up in the dark in Greywall with her back against a wall, doing nothing at all, at an hour when nobody should be doing nothing at all.

Four points and me.

Gold lines between all of us, thin as thread, running under the ground and through the walls and across four hundred and ten paces of courtyard as though distance were an administrative detail nobody had bothered to enforce.

’System.’

Nothing.

’System.’

Nothing.

That was when I understood this was not going well.

Then, very briefly, somewhere at the edge of it, there was a sound.

It was not a voice.

It was not words.

It was the specific noise a person makes when they are trying not to laugh at something that is not funny, at night, at a campfire, with two other people who are also failing.

I knew it immediately.

I knew it the way you know a room in the dark.

And I turned toward it, in whatever way you turn in a place with no directions, and reached for it with whatever you reach with.

And it was gone.

Not hidden.

Not moved.

Simply not there, in the way that dead things are not there, which I have known professionally since I was eleven and which turns out to mean nothing at all when it happens to you.

I stood in a gold-lined nowhere and I did not think about the Akashic Key or the vessels or the Headmaster or James Vellaroux’s channels.

I thought:

Vessa laughed like that.

And then something looked at me.

I do not have a good description.

I have tried several since, and they are all wrong, and I have settled on this one because it is the least wrong:

You know when you are in a room alone, and you become certain you are not, and then you turn around and you are, and the certainty was nothing?

It was that.

Except when I turned around, the certainty was correct.

There was no shape.

No face.

No presence in any direction I could point at.

The gold lines did not flicker and nothing moved and the warmth did not go anywhere.

Something simply became aware of me.

The way a man at the far end of a long hall becomes aware that somebody has entered behind him.

Unhurried.

Interested.

And it did not come closer, and it did not speak, and it did not do a single thing except notice me for what could not have been more than a second and a half.

Then I woke up.

***

I was sitting upright.

My hands were shaking.

Dream Haven was on the floor, which has happened perhaps four times in my entire life and never once while I was asleep.

The room was dark.

Properly dark.

Deep-night dark, which meant I had slept through the entire afternoon and most of the evening, which under any other circumstances would have been the single greatest achievement of my academic career.

’System.’

[Here.]

’Where were you.’

A pause.

[I was there. I could not reach you.]

’For how long.’

[One and a half seconds.]

Someone knocked.

I did not answer, because my voice was not currently available.

The door opened anyway.

Mira Ellowen stood in the corridor with a blanket around her shoulders, barefoot, hair flat on one side, in the specific state of someone who has come directly from a bed.

She did not apologise for entering.

She looked at me for a moment.

Then she said, "What was that."

"What was what?"

"Don’t."

I stopped.

Mira came in and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall, which put her below me and made it impossible to loom, and which I have since realized she does deliberately with people who are frightened.

"About an hour ago," she said. "I was asleep. Properly asleep. Which I would like on record as being a new and excellent experience and entirely your fault."

"Mira..."

"And something went through the building."

I said nothing.

"Not a sound." Her jaw moved. "That’s the part I can’t do anything with. I have heard every sound in this building for eleven days. I know what the north stairwell does at night. I know which windows whistle. This was not a sound, and I heard it, and I have no idea what that sentence means."

"Where did it come from?"

"Here." She said it flatly. "It came from this room and it went out in five directions and four of them were the other residences."

The dark sat between us.

"You felt it too," she said.

"Yes."

"Was it bad?"

I thought about a thin thread of gold under four hundred paces of courtyard. About Daphne Spinster sitting awake against a wall in the dark for no reason at all. About a laugh I had not heard in over a year and would not hear again.

About something in a long hall, turning its head.

"I don’t know yet," I said.

Mira nodded slowly, and did not push, and did not leave either.

She stayed on that floor with her back to the wall until it got light.

Neither of us slept.

***

( Somewhere Very Very Far Away )

Pride stopped walking.

He did it in the middle of a sentence, which Greed noticed, because Pride did not leave sentences unfinished the way other people did not leave doors open.

"There."

Greed turned.

Pride’s hand was already up, palm open, and the line of absence was turning on it again. Longer this time. Steadier.

"The same?"

"The same."

"How long?"

"One and a half seconds." Pride’s head tilted. "Precisely one and a half seconds, which is the part that interests me, because nothing natural is precise."

The line folded.

Unfolded.

Held.

"Direction," Greed said, and there was something hungry in it now that had not been there in the ruins.

Pride did not answer immediately.

He was looking at nothing at all, the way he had looked at nothing in the dead temple, except that this time his expression had changed, and Greed had known him long enough to understand that this was the most dangerous thing about the entire evening.

"Not just a direction," Pride said.

He lowered his hand.

"It looked back."