No, that couldn’t be the case, Lucy said to herself as she shook her head. Perhaps the whirring sound she heard had come from this machine, but whatever had been tailing her was still in full rushdown mode right down to the very moment of her escape. This rather dangerously-equipped machine must have been an unrelated third party Lucy just happened to run past on her way back to the Return Point, a third party that had clearly been smashed to smithereens by an assailant who had now mysteriously disappeared.

  And while all of this made logical sense, it only raised further questions. Chief among them was what this space actually was, to have massive contraptions adorned with saw blades freely roaming around. Perhaps this was some kind of industrial factory with automatons milling about to do work—but then where were the rest, along with the whirring and humming and engine roars of them going about their business? This whole space seemed far too…uncluttered to house such a voluminous machine, especially as Lucy remembered having walked straight ahead for minutes on end without bumping into anything during her first visit to this Dream.

  Perhaps she had just been lucky and walked down a long empty corridor; it was impossible to say what had actually been around her since she couldn’t see anything.

  But now, she could.

  Taking a deep breath, for Lucy was still wary of accidentally garnering the attention of hostile parties, she rotated her wrist to make her beam of illumination move away from the dilapidated machinery and pan out to scan her surroundings like a flashlight. Behind the machine, there was more of that nondescript grey flooring, stretching on and on with seemingly no end in sight nor with any features atop it to break up the bleak uniformity. Looking further to the side, Lucy saw more of the bare floor again, and she was quick to conclude that it just stretched out in all directions completely unimpeded—until she turned all the way to the right and saw the distant wall.

  “What…”

  Lucy couldn’t keep herself from breaking her careful silence upon taking in what was on either side of her. At a distance, they appeared to be walls as basic and utilitarian as the floor at her feet. But one immediately discernible difference was the greater and more varied texture of the walls, so dense and detailed it appeared to be dancing in the shaking light controlled by Lucy’s trembling arm.

  But that was because they were dancing. Or rather, moving and animating in every conceivable manner. And “they” encapsulated seemingly everything. Buildings. Laughing school children. Trees. Suited office workers. Cars. Married couples. The Statue of Liberty. Construction workers. Computer servers. Colonies of ants. Railroad tracks. Flocks of crows. A space shuttle. Chimpanzees.

  It was as though an entire encyclopedia had its pages exploded and scattered and then blown up to enormous proportions so that each and every single image—each and every single fragment of the real world, of reality—crowded together into a tight, undulating mass where everything blended together into an impenetrable wall of stuff.

  Just looking at it was enough to make Lucy’s palms go clammy and her heart begin to palpitate, as if she were being suffocated from the inside out. With frightened hastiness, she darted her light and her gaze away from the walls. This discovery raised even more questions, and in this case, she wasn’t even going to try to pursue them any further lest her brain implode. She sighed, for she knew this meant she would have to avoid these walls the rest of the way throughout this Dream, assuming they were all like this.

  Shining her light down again at the torn up machine, Lucy’s mind was brought back to the Dreamer she still had yet to meet. Those walls weren’t the way they were out of pure happenstance; they had to be related to the Dreamer’s inner mental state, subconscious, and memories. And this dredged up Lucy’s familiar friend, curiosity, who this time wore a silent and terrified expression, like the wide-eyed piercing gaze of a person in danger pressed up against a window before disappearing out of sight.

  What was going on in this Dreamer’s mind to conjure up a Dream of dangerous machinery, a disappearing pursuer, brain-melting walls, and an ever-present, ever-engulfing darkness?

  While Lucy could come up with no concrete theories that explained everything she had seen so far, she shuddered, for whatever the answer was, it was certain to not be a pretty one. But despite their shared apprehension, she and her curiosity agreed on the same conclusion: they would find this Dreamer and come to understand their perspective, regardless of what it may be.

  To that end, Lucy prepared herself to walk away, but her gaze lingered on the heap of broken machinery and she did a double take, staring at it all again. If she were to leave now, there was no telling when she would happen across anything of interest in this space where the sullen grey floor stretched on endlessly. Although the machine was in a state of significant disrepair, inspecting it could still provide her with important clues. Anything that gave her a better understanding of the Dream could give her an important hint as to where to find the Dreamer.

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  And so, Lucy stepped forward, keeping her light trained on the array of disembodied mechanical parts. Her steps were slow but sure, and she felt a cool, soothing wind blow through her as she recognized how starkly different her demeanour was no compared to how she had been trembling and barely able to move just a few minutes ago. This filled her with renewed determination, for she could picture herself as a valiant heroine breaking through scores of darkness without reprieve, her sense of duty and altruism lighting the way forward.

  A piercing white light nearly blinded her.

  Rushing to regain her composure, Lucy realized it wasn’t just any light: it was her own. It had been reflected off the silver sheen of the saw blades she had seen earlier—which were now risen off the ground from where they had been buried under piles of junk and attaching, in mid-air, to a large piece of the metalwork that was also floating.

  “What the hell?”

  Lucy’s murmur of astonishment was quickly drowned out by a torrent of clanging, the sounds of many pieces tumbling to the floor like massive Lego bricks, accompanied by rumbling and clicking and snapping as all of the broken parts shifted and stuck themselves back together. It was a dizzying tempest of sight and sounds and even vibrations from the sheer force of the metal chunks crashing into each other. Despite Lucy having stared at the sheer damage and disarray of all these scattered parts for the better part of at least five minutes, there was no denying what was happening before her right now.

  The machine was reassembling itself.

  Amidst the flurry and confusion, Lucy was struck by a chord of familiarity. She had seen something similar to this not long ago: the royal guards from Kenneth’s Dream being resurrected after being slain. But where that had been orchestrated by threads of dark energy that were likely controlled by the queen, this rapidly-repairing machine did not appear to have any sort of metaphysical “glue” bonding it back together. It appeared not only sentient, but inevitable, like the very fabric of reality was putting itself back together alongside the scattered pieces. Every connection of metal registers, every slotting of cables, every kerchunk of gears falling into place, all of it was like watching the underlying assembly of the world constructing itself according to its preordained, engineered configuration.

  And Lucy, as the intruder to this perfectly uniform system, immediately feared that she would be attacked as a foreign threat.

  Her fears intensified once the last of the machine’s heavy parts—a chassis for an engine, it seemed—was swallowed up into the depths of the overall shell, which was massive and even larger than what Lucy had imagined from looking at the parts. The machine was disturbingly angular and sharp, symmetrical and perfectly balanced but with rails and wings and legs that jutted out at odd angles, and atop its body was something that very closely resembled a human head—until it didn’t. The shape of it was so perfectly matching to that of the head of a shaved adult person, but further scrutiny immediately revealed it to be a hodgepodge of rusted gears and oil-slick belts and bent plates nailed together with no rhyme or reason. Screws stuck out from it in every conceivable direction, making Lucy shiver as she couldn’t help likening them to eyes that observed every iota of detail in existence.

  But what truly exacerbated Lucy’s fears was the front housing of the machine, which was equipped with two very familiar parts: the enormous saw blades. One was situated on top in a horizontal manner, while the one below it was vertical. When forced upon a person, it would shred their head in a separate way from their body and—Lucy had to force herself to stop thinking about that.

  As coincidence would have it, she didn’t need to distract herself, as her attention was seized by a loud hissing sound, accompanied by a huge plume of steam ejecting itself from several valves on the machine’s sides. Then the saw blades, in spite of their size, roared to life rotating at dizzyingly fast speed, producing a whirring sound that cleaved the very air. Hearing this all, Lucy nearly fainted as she was struck by the truth that she had been searching for.

  This machine was her pursuer.

  And she was standing barely two metres from it.

  She wanted to move. She truly, desperately wanted to—no, needed to, before she ended up an even worse mess than the scrap metal the machine had come from. But it was as though a stake had been driven through her heart, making her chest ache with a sharp pain while her entire body ground to a halt.

  Why aren’t you moving?

  Never before had Lucy been so overcome with a broiling mixture of disbelief and anger at her own body. What happened to the knight who had walked for minutes on end through this darkness the first time, let alone the girl who had bravely walked through the sky on conjured clouds?

  The machine inched forward, so slowly that its change of position was almost imperceptible. The sound it made was simultaneously the same and the complete opposite: absent was any scraping of metal or wheels, no was there the heavy thud and clank of all those external and internal parts Lucy had seen being driven forward as a thousand-kilogram hulk of weighty parts. But in place of that expected clamour, there was rumbling, so deep and infernal that it was outside the range of perceptible hearing. Instead, it was felt: in Lucy’s bones, in the sudden shaking chaos that spread through the normally absurdly placid floor, in the shifting and bending of the air and surrounding darkness. Through all this, it was though the machine was not moving through the world, but the world itself was shifting and distorting to bring the machine where it was fated to be.

  Shriekingly dazzling silver grew larger and larger in Lucy’s sights—the saw blades were drawing closer to her, the serrated spiked edges ready to cleave through her flesh. In their gleam, Lucy saw her own face: bug-eyed, pale as an unpainted white office wall, her strong and determined image utterly shattered by the mousy, vulnerable, powerless face of the girl staring back at her.

  That was when her feet finally jolted back to life as she wheeled around and scrambled the hell away.