“Where’d you get a light?”

  A young boy’s voice, high-pitched but weighted with eager curiosity—and a severe dose of exhaustion. It was exactly what Lucy expected to hear after gazing at his face and seeing the bright beam of childhood inquisitiveness struggling against the dark bags under his eyes. Even in the limited lighting, it was clear that he and his companions had not slept in days, or more.

  “It’s from my sword,” said Lucy, looking first at the boy, then to each of the others in turn with a gentle smile. “It’s…a special kind of sword I brought here to let me see in the dark. It lets me see, and protect myself.”

  “You certainly look like a protector,” said the woman, eyeing Lucy up and down, her gaze lingering on her illuminated sword and the cape spreading out from Lucy’s back. “Are you like some kind of superhero?”

  “Whoa, really?” said the girl, looking up at Lucy with stars in her eyes. “That’s so cool!”

  “What kinda question is that?” said the man, shooting the woman a skeptical look. “She’s just a girl in a fancy costume, holding a fancy flashlight.”

  The woman put her hand on her hip and rolled her eyes, her gaunt and malnourished face making this casual gesture feel much more significant from the exhaustion she exuded. “Could you think of the kids before you say stuff like that?”

  Lucy peered at the two younger companions and sure enough, the boy was staring down at his feet while the girl pouted, eyeing Lucy more critically. Lucy would find the situation disappointing for herself but also a welcome bit of levity, were it not for how grimy everyone’s clothes were, how thin their faces and arms looked, and the long shadows that stretched out from behind them as Lucy held her illuminated blade up in the middle of everyone like a sole lantern keeping the darkness at bay.

  “What?” said the man in a defensive tone while raising both palms up in an exaggerated shrug. “You see the kind of situation we’re in, don’t you? Rather not give these kids false hope. That’s cruel, you know.”

  “Oh, put a sock in it with that cynicism,” said the woman. “Is it so bad to have hope now that one good thing finally happened? Look.”

  She gestured to the light from Lucy’s blade, then to the four of them.

  “We can finally see each other!” she said. “Not that we were missing much in terms of your ugly mug, but it’s still an improvement.”

  The man sighed, shaking his head. “Very funny. We got a real wise one in this death factory.”

  The two children snickered, bringing a warm smile to the woman’s lips. Lucy found herself smiling as well as she watched this unfold. Although she had just met them, she could already tell that the woman did her best to look after the children, so now she could only imagine how relieving it must be to not only hear the two youngsters in good spirits, but actually see the smiles on their faces after an interminable amount of time where the darkness had completely robbed her of being able to see their likenesses.

  The woman caught Lucy’s smile and fixed her with a different, amicable smile, tilting her head in light curiosity and comfort as if she were catching up with a good friend. “That sword and that armour, they’re real, right? They sure don’t look fake. So you really have come to save us, right?”

  “I…”

  Lucy tried to decide how to even begin her response, but she was cut off by the man stepping forward and putting his hand out to her in a gentle dissuading gesture.

  “Please,” he said, “you can be honest with us. Don’t feel like you have to go along with what she’s saying. If you’re just another lost sap like us, that’s cool. Unless…” His eyes, which had been weary and doubtful this entire time, suddenly lit up. “Unless you know how to get out of here.”

  Now everyone was staring at Lucy intently, such that she didn’t know where to focus her light and gaze. On one hand, she felt the right thing to do would be to follow the man’s suggestion and come out clean: she wasn’t actually their protector, nor had she come here specifically to save them. But if she went that route, he would likely press her about her true purpose for being here, and in that case the truthful response would be that she was here to find the Dreamer, rescue them, and put an end to this Final Dream.

  Putting aside the fact that she would have to explain all these terms like “Dream Knight” and “Dreamer” and “Final Dream”, did she really want to divulge all that information to them? It would answer the man’s question about whether she knew of a way out, but the honest answer would only cause all of them suffering and likely break down the harmony and solidarity that had kept them strong through the darkness all this time. For if Lucy were to succeed in rescuing the Dreamer and making the Final Dream fade out, these four people who were part of that Dream would surely fade away with it…

  Unless one of them was the Dreamer she’d been searching for all this time. But how could she figure that out? In Kenneth’s Dream, the other Dream Knights had already brought him into their fold by the time Lucy joined them. And in Cole’s Dream, she and him were seemingly the only two people in the middle of a barren ocean. In that case, Lucy had inferred that Cole was the Dreamer using the one piece of information the King had given her: that the Dreamer was always in the immediate vicinity of her return point.

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  Was Lucy’s assumption that the Dreamer had been swallowed by the machine even correct? She supposed it depended on what “immediate vicinity” meant, specifically. Perhaps the ceiling, obscured entirely by darkness, wasn’t as high as it appeared, and right now she was standing one floor directly beneath where she had started.

  “Cool lady, why’re you staring at nothing?”

  A high-pitched voice, which Lucy quickly realized belonged to the young girl, snapped her back to reality where she had turned her chin upward and fixed her gaze on the darkness hanging over all of them. Everyone was staring at her again, this time with even greater intensity, and Lucy felt her arms go stiff and her lips quiver from being put under pressure, from knowing that every single word that left her mouth would be scrutinized. It didn’t help that all those expectant eyes belonged to gaunt, thin faces robbed of their livelihoods from food and sleep deprivation—faces that would almost certainly look to her radiant visage for words of hope and knowledge.

  Think, she said to herself, as she flitted her gaze between each of the four people standing around her like shadows cast from the same source in multiple directions. She was being too reactionary, merely playing to these lost people’s fancies while barely keeping herself afloat. But she could turn things around and use them to get the information she needed. If she were Diana, she would have demanded answers while keeping her weapon pointed at one of their necks. While that would likely be effective—and Lucy hated to admit it—she knew there had to be a way to steer this conversation by finding the right topic to bring up and using the ensuing responses to deduce what she needed to know. This was a combination of the strengths of Ideation and Understanding, and as Lucy lightly smiled while remembering Keilani’s excitable quick thinking, she decided that would be the approach she would take.

  “Oh, I was just thinking,” said Lucy as she looked down at the girl with a warm smile resembling the ones she gave to Kenneth. “Thinking about the last time I woke up and saw something besides all that…nothing. Do you remember the last time you woke up like that?”

  She looked from the girl to the other three in order to open up the question to them as well. Ironically, they all took a similar expression to what Lucy had just moments ago, staring off into the distance with pensive looks of recollection. Lucy waited patiently, holding her sword up so that all five of their little group were illuminated by the softer light of the blade’s glow. Her heart pounded as she hoped that she would get the kind of responses she wanted.

  “It was a month ago!” the girl said with surprising gusto, raising her hand as if answering a teacher during class.

  “No! A week ago!” the boy argued.

  “Nuh-uh! How do you know?”

  “Because you’re dumb and don’t know nothing about time!”

  “Well, you—!”

  “Enough.” The man went between the two children and held his hands out on either side to break them off. “None of us know how long it’s been. We can’t sleep, and there are no clocks or watches. Right?”

  The two children looked up at him and nodded.

  He turned his gaze to Lucy, speaking with the same exasperation in his voice, but with a hint of curiosity: “Honestly, I can’t remember. Everything before this is like a blur to me. If you can still remember, you’re probably new around here, aren’t you? But I don’t see why you gotta ask, unless you mean to rub it in that you still remember.”

  Lucy’s hand and glowing light faltered, as she was taken aback by the sudden accusatory tone in his voice. Had her question sounded too unnatural?

  But before Lucy was forced to come up with a response, the woman interjected: “Speak for yourself, bub.” She looked to Lucy, her eyes open wider than her weary appearance would suggest, showing her genuine engagement with Lucy’s question. “I remember the last day I had before I was brought here. I made sure to never forget. The bright blue sky over Kishwit, that beautiful triangle of moons lingering in the morning…” She looked off into the distance, her eyes dreamy. “It was so freeing, waking up to that. And now we’re trapped here, who knows how many miles from Kishwit. Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound so depressing.”

  “Oh, no apologies needed,” Lucy said, waving her open palm reassuringly. “I’m happy you shared that.”

  She truly was, for this proved an important discovery without a shadow of a doubt. The two children had talked about waking up a long time ago in this world, as if there were no other place for them to wake up. And the man seemed to be the same. But the woman talking about “Kishwit,” a place Lucy was almost certain didn’t actually exist, and then mentioning a “triangle of moons,” all but confirmed what Lucy needed to know: all of them were denizens of this Dream.

  Which meant none of them were the Dreamer.

  Lucy stifled a sigh as she said this to herself. It was disappointing, but it was better that she found out right away instead of making a false assumption.

  “What about you?” asked the woman. “Where were you before you ended up here?”

  “Uh…” Lucy wasn’t quite sure how to answer that, so she decided to stall by asking for clarification: “You mean, where was I before that machine caught me and gobbled me up?”

  Lucy said this casually but with weariness and light frustration, hoping to play to the fact that she had gone through what these four had likely gone through as well and thus earn their solidarity. But instead of receiving a simple answer, everyone’s eyes went bloodshot wide.

  “Machine?” said the man.

  “Y-yeah,” said Lucy, chilled by apprehension. “The one that—”

  “Oh my god, that machine!” The woman cried out, her voice animated and sounding almost forced out of her vocal chords. “No! No! Noooooooooo!”

  “Guys?” Lucy said, her voice cracking as she flashed her beam of light between the four of them rapidly, chaotically.

  The man groaned with pain, and the two children were yelping, while the woman continued to scream. For all of them, their eyes had rolled back, and they were foaming from their mouths. The woman covered her face with a hard grip as if she had just been smacked there, the man bent forward and held his temples in his hands, while the two children had fallen to their knees grabbing fistfuls of their own hair.

  Lucy was terrified out of her own skin, but there was also an intense pressing question of whether she should feel guilty. Had she triggered a kind of nervous breakdown in them by mentioning the cause of their traumatic experience?

  But Lucy quickly found that her fearful ideas were a drop in a lightless ocean as soon as gears and wires emerged from their skin.