Page 26 of Into Ember

No joke. No deflection. Just truth. Like Leif’s answers are true, except warmer.

I should go downstairs. I should be angry. I’m going to be, in a minute, I have it scheduled.

“How long?”

“Years.”

Chapter 9

Rayner

“Years,” I say, because it’s true, and I’ve never seen a good reason to hand her anything else.

Her face does several things. I watch all of them and understand none, which is normal — I’ve watched her face for years and it has never once told me what it was going to do next. That was half the reason I kept coming back.

She goes down the stairs without another word.

I should probably be worried about that.

I’m not. I can’t be. All of me is full of the same two words that have been ringing since she stood up on that bed and pointed at me like I was a fire.

She remembered.

Nobody remembers. That’s the first thing you learn, and the last thing, and every lesson in between. Dreams dissolve. That’s not sad, it’s just what they’re made of — you can guide a child out of a fever dream and hold her hand until the burning house turns into a garden, and in the morning she’ll hug her mother and remember nothing but that the night was long. You can find a hunter lost in a blizzard three valleys from home, walk into the white behind his eyes and turn him until he’s facing his own door, and when he stumbles in alive two days later he’ll call it luck. I’ve been luck for a lot of people.

None of them have ever looked at me across a waking room and said you.

She remembered.

I follow her down to a kitchen that’s already working — Erik at the stove, coffee going, and the smell of it pulls everyone in like it always has. Elara takes the chair at the end of the table like she called this meeting. She did. Erik puts a mug in front of her, milk already in it, and she wraps both hands around the body of it, not the handle.

The mug stops me for a second.

Dream-her holds things the same way. Both hands, around the middle, like everything warm might be taken from her if her grip is bad. I have watched her hold a cup of starlight exactly like that on a rooftop that doesn’t exist, and I never once thought to ask myself why my imagination would invent a detail so specific and so sad.

“Sit,” she says. “Talk. Dream guy first.”

Gunnar drops into a chair with his own coffee. He’s enjoying this. He isn’t even pretending not to. “Yes, dream guy. First.”

I sit down across from her. Where I can see her face. There was never any chance I’d sit anywhere else.

“I’m a dreamwalker,” I say. “Dreams are a place. I can go there.”

She stares at me. “Dreams are not a place. Dreams are — " she gestures at her own head — “in here. Private. Mine.”

“Yours are now,” I say. “Yours are the only ones I’ve ever heard of that anybody could keep.”

“That’s not — okay. Start earlier. Start at the part where you’re in MY head.”

“I was never in your head.” And this is the part I need her to have, so I put the coffee down and give it to her the way I’d want it given to me. “Dreams aren’t inside people. People go to dreams, like you’d go to a shore. Most people can’t choose where, and can’t stay, and can’t carry anything home. I can choose. That’s all the gift is. I can walk in, and sit with someone, and leave, and by morning I’m gone from them completely, like a tide went out. Nobody remembers, Elara. Not their names for me, not my face, nothing. Ever. In my whole life, nobody—”

I stop, because the next word won’t line up.

“Except me,” she says.

“Except you.”

The kitchen has gone quiet around us. Erik has stopped pretending to cook. Brock is watching her, not me, which means whatever’s on her face right now is worth more than whatever’s on mine. Leif leans against the counter with his arms crossed, letting me have this, and I feel him waiting behind it — the bigger conversation, the one with her name at the center of it, sitting in the room with us like weather. Not yet. This first.