“Where are we going to hide?”

  Lucy’s voice came out hoarse, worn down by exhaustion from having already sprinted at top speed for at least a full minute, alongside a headache-inducing cocktail of abject fear, disappointment over having her small victory overturned, and seething frustration at how the Dreamer had wilfully held information back instead of letting Lucy know before the Dream Knight had inadvertently made their predicament even worse.

  The proof of things getting worse was steadily and untiringly chugging along right behind them. The System seemed to have gotten more wheels and more horsepower for its engines, as the entire titanic mass of machinery was barrelling forward at a notably faster pace than before. And this served to consistently close the distance between the two young women’s backs and the wide net of blades that promised to swallow and chew them like flies caught in a Venus fly trap should they slow down for even a moment.

  “Hello? Are you going to answer me?” Despite the question, Lucy’s voice was far from nice, letting her anger and exhaustion carve her words into a sharp tone that said she was done with the Dreamer’s annoyingly nonchalant attitude and complete non-answers. How could she still show a complete lack of basic empathy even in a situation like this where they were literally running for their lives?

  “Don’t worry,” she said, looking over at Lucy with an unfazed smile while continuing to sprint at Lucy’s pace, “I was waiting until we got somewhere narrower.”

  “Narrower?”

  “Yup! ‘Cause we’re gonna hide in the walls.”

  “The walls?”

  Lucy remembered—but she wished she hadn’t. That collage of entities, all compressed into one another but bursting forth, a supernova of the cycle of all existence. Just picturing it gave her a headache, and that was all the more reason why she shot the Dreamer an incredulous look.

  “Here!”

  Lucy had no time to react before feeling a surprisingly strong, vice-like grip on her wrist.

  “Follow me!” The Dreamer giggled and practically pranced over to the side, where indeed a wall stood only a few feet away. She showed no sign of strain even as she dragged Lucy and her heavy armour with her—but not for long as Lucy shook herself free.

  “You’re crazy!” Lucy yelled this with the utmost honesty, her mind still reeling from how this girl could skip over to walls that seemed to have devoured all of existence while laughing and prancing like Little Red Riding Hood. It was difficult, but Lucy had to admit to herself that even her own Understanding had limits, and this Dreamer’s nonsensical and frankly unnerving behaviour had pushed far past what Lucy could comprehend.

  “Idiot.” The Dreamer spat this in a low voice that carried through the air with surprisingly clarity despite the rumbling and clanging not far behind them. “If you’d prefer to die right there, be my guest.”

  Lucy was stunned by her complete change of demeanour, but her gaze instinctively flitted over in the direction they had come from. The System wasn’t slowing down, its insurmountable size practically dwarfing the darkness from which it emerged, its blade-toothed maw opening and closing to puncture through the air at every angle.

  And, in a brief flash, Lucy pictured all too clearly it was herself being punctured by that murderous maw.

  Her body moved on instinct without conscious thought. She didn’t notice the Dreamer’s self-satisfied grin. Before Lucy knew it, she was standing merely a foot away from the wall and was already mid-stride to follow the Dreamer into the wall. Lucy would have registered how ridiculous this was, with the best case scenario being that they got a little bruised from the collision, if not for how her sight was overloaded by the very walls she had tried so hard to avoid looking at.

  Chimpanzees on unicycles. An airport receiving a passenger carrier. Thousands of people kneeling and bowing their heads to the floor. Fields and fields of corn. A man being shot point-blank by an assailant. Roses and rhododendrons. A carnival. Dogs. School children.

  It was unbearable, as though Lucy’s brain was rapidly swelling up like a cyst and knocking on the edges of her skull. She wanted to vomit and scream and laugh and cry all at once. There was too much, far too much, too much for a single life to possibly ever contain—and then, just as suddenly, there was nothing, a detachment from everything, like a balloon floating up into space and watching the Earth shrink down into a tiny dot until fading out of visibility and significance.

  “Now you probably regret doubting me.”

  It was the lilting teasing voice of the Dreamer, standing next to Lucy—or rather, flaoting next to her. The two had actually crossed through the wall, somehow, and ended up on the other side.

  If a pure white void of nothingness even counted as a physical “side.”

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  It hurt Lucy’s eyes, having been in the dark for so long, but even then the sheer blankness of it all kept her eyes wide in shock. It was her heart that wanted to give up, as this space was something out of a surreal nightmare, like a torture chamber stretched out into a full reality with Lucy right smack in the middle of it.

  Lucy opened her mouth, intending to ask, “Where the hell did you just bring me?” But some small part of her still held onto rationality, the same small part that kept her grip on her Ideal instead of dropping it into the voice in shock. And so Lucy actually asked, “What exactly is this place?”

  “Oh, nothing special,” came the Dreamer’s unassuming response as she held her arms out to her sides and spun around. “It’s everything.”

  “Everything?” Lucy was going to rekindle her bitterness at the Dreamer’s snide attitude, but now she had to hold back a chuckle at this response that sounded so childishly delusional. “Maybe I’m not seeing what you’re seeing, but this looks like a whole lot of ’nothing’ to me.”

  “Well, aren’t you Captain Obvious.” The Dreamer rolled her eyes. “You’re too aware. Too lucid. Try half-closing your eyes. Like you’re squinting.”

  Lucy could only look at her with her brow raised, fighting the urge to ask how that would make any difference. For better or worse, she was one to try someone’s claims before criticizing them. Despite everything, this girl was still the Dreamer she needed to rescue, after all.

  And sp Lucy squinted her eyes—and immediately regretted it.

  Trees fell over her, swarmed her, encasing her in their millions of branches like arms seeking to ensnare her. Water shook and vibrated everywhere, splitting apart into individual molecules so that Lucy could see with all too much the sheer multitude, the endlessness. Then the hands, the arms, the faces, the legs moving in all sorts of manners. Human lives springing up, flitting by in all manner of poses and gesticulations, popping in and out like the most violent of fireworks.

  Amidst this surreal brain-melting mayhem, Lucy understood: she hadn’t walked through the walls, but into them.

  “Aaaaaaaahhhh!”

  Sensory overload didn’t even begin to describe it. In haste, Lucy grabbed at her face, squeezing her eyes shut—but this only worsened her predicament. In the darkness of her sightlessness, the images grew more dense and compact and almost tangible, becoming spectres that haunted her through realms both physical and not.

  While her head felt like it was inflating with helium, daring to explode at any moment, her heart felt like it was being dropped from a thousand-metre tower. She was a Knight of Understanding, a hero who had accomplished all her best deeds thus far by comprehending to the best of her abilities and her patience. But this…this was far too much to bear. For how could she possibly understand everything?

  Everything.

  The word was like a pinprick directly into her eyes, stabbing right through into her brain. She recalled what the Dreamer said just now, that ironic name now appearing all too appropriate. But there was something deeply chilling about how, even with the darkness and the System and its minions to contend with, the most terrifying part of this Dream was everything else.

  “Open up,” said the Dreamer, her sweet voice sounding downright maniacal juxtaposed against the mental onslaught Lucy was suffering. “If you don’t want to literally lose your mind, open those pretty eyes of your back up.”

  Lucy didn’t need her urging in order to do just that. She cracked open her eyes with such force she was worried her eyelids would tear off. It worked: she stared into the harsh white emptiness with great relief. But just as Lucy was about to relax, the images came again, very briefly, like a flicker of light. Then again after a short time, and again.

  The Dreamer must have noticed her flinching as she giggled. “You should probably stop blinking so much. It’s only a little bit of darkness, but you’re basically jumpscaring yourself.”

  “What is…” Lucy had to hold back from outright asking what was wrong with this girl. The apprehension she felt toward her only grew stronger, as it seemed like everything in this Dream was tailor-made to inflict fear and suffering. But Lucy straightened her posture, affirming to herself that venting her frustrations was secondary to finding out more information that could mean the difference between life and death in this twisted Dream. “Why does that happen when you close your eyes?”

  “It’s the same thing in real life, isn’t it?” The girl dropped her smile all of a sudden, her face taking on a pondering look that was almost blinding in how much of a contrast it was to all her previous expressions. In the stark white light, her face was pronounced in all its ridges and valleys, her youthful face revealing all its blemishes as if under a magnifying glass. “Everything looks so…perfectly boring and ordinary when you look at it with office eyes. But if you look at things in a way that’s even a tiny bit different, you see how fucked up it all is. And how there’s so much of it.”

  Lucy backed away a little, her feet moving her backward through the air of the white void. Lucy should have known, should have expected, the moment the King had said she would be traversing the Dreams of all of humanity. Of course there was a good chance she would end up having to rescue a Dreamer who was not mentally sound, or who carried some horrifying beliefs. It was obvious, but Lucy didn’t want to believe that it would happen so soon. Cole and Kenneth had their share of problems, but at their core, the two of them were good reasonable people who had unfortunately been beset by the tragedies of life.

  Perhaps that was true as well in this case, for Lucy believed that no one was born with truly malicious or destructive intentions, but it was all to clear that the mentality here was completely different from other Dreamers as she gazed into the horrifically lucid new expression on the face of this Dreamer—whose name she still did not know. Did this girl even want them to be on a first name basis? Perhaps she saw such a thing as trivial, adding to the existential torrent of pointlessness that assaulted the senses in this maddening abyss.

  “But you know what,” said the Dreamer, smiling again as she stepped toward Lucy to close the distance again, “this is still a hell of a lot better than what’s going on with the System back there. And that’s why you’re going to help me stop feeding it.”

  “Stop feeding it?” Lucy wanted to back away more, but she worried this would only cause the girl to get even closer. “Aren’t all those robots back there, on the other side of the wall?”

  The girl laughed her usual sweet laugh, but in the sterile white light it was all to clear to see that this time, she wasn’t smiling. “Where do you think they come from? Look: one of them’s being formulated right there.”