There was no sky in the mirror-world Lena stepped into. At least, not in the way that sky usually existed; there was only a ceiling of dull, liquid silver stretched taut over a world built from echoes and unfinished thoughts. Sound moved strangely. Steps came a moment after the foot. Words felt like they were spoken into water, rippling, distorting, returning to the speaker with meanings slightly altered.
Marcus's face was illuminated by a light that had no clear source. He looked like someone carved from the memory of a person rather than the person himself. It would have been comforting if not for the fear in his eyes.
"Don't move," he said.
Lena froze, not because she trusted him—she did and she didn't, that was the problem—but because the darkness that had surged across the library still lingered here like a shadow that thought for itself.
"What was that voice?" Lena asked. "The one that said—" She hesitated. It was hard to repeat the words as if saying them gave them weight.
"Do you remember whose dream this really is?" the voice had asked.
Marcus's jaw tightened. "You're hearing it early. That's not supposed to happen yet."
"I keep being told I'm early or late," Lena said, sliding anger into her voice because it was easier than fear. "Maybe I'm exactly on time and your rules are old and wrong."
He almost smiled. "That sounds like you."
"You say that as if you know me."
"I know a hundred versions of you," he said, and the sadness in him was as ancient as the silver ceiling. "And I loved most of them."
Lena didn't let her face show what those words did to her chest. "You said we weren't lovers. You said we were something worse."
"We were," he said. "And are. And will be."
"That's not an answer."
Marcus looked over his shoulder, then back to her. "We don't have time for all of it. The mirror is the last safe threshold between remembering and knowing. Once you cross, you can't cross back the same."
"Then why bring me here?"
"Because I'd rather you hate me for leading you into it than hate yourself for finding your own way and thinking no one tried to stop you."
Lena moved past him, and the mirror-world shifted with her, edges redrawing. A reading desk materialized beneath her hand—its wood familiar, its grain a map she'd traced a thousand times in a place she had never been while awake. She looked down and realized her hand—the marked one—had left a faint scorch on the wood.
"It's feeding," Marcus said quietly.
"On what?"
"On the parts of you that refuse to accept it. On your disbelief."
Lena pulled her hand away. The symbol on her palm hummed, brighter now, as if it had found a power outlet and plugged itself in.
"Tell me what we built," she said. "Tell me what we did."
Marcus took a long breath as if he were about to dive. "We were Dreamwrights," he said. "We found a way to stitch dreams together until they held like cloth. We thought—fools that we were—that if enough people believed in the same dream, we could make it permanent. A refuge from a world that was burning. A place where the worst could not follow."
"A utopia," Lena said, tasting the old argument in the word.
"A cage," Marcus corrected. "Because we didn't account for the weight of unspoken truths, the rot beneath certainty. We didn't account for the mind's hunger for what it denies itself. The dream learned that hunger. It learned it from us."
The air seemed to thicken, and for a moment, Lena had the sense of standing inside the chest of something huge, listening to it breathe.
"We called it the Somnolum," Marcus continued. "We anchored it with symbols—compasses—etched into the skin of those who entered willingly. Guides. Keys. We told ourselves there would be safeguards. We forgot that every key can also lock."
Lena glanced at her palm. "And now?"
"Now it wants you back," Marcus said. "Because you were the one who taught it how to want."
The silver above them rippled as if in agreement. A sound like distant thunder skittered along the shelves, and in the hum of it, Lena heard words that weren't words: hunger, return, mine.
"If I made it," Lena said, "why don't I remember it?"
"You do," Marcus said gently. "Your body remembers. Your fear remembers. Your mark remembers. But you tore the knowledge out of your waking mind and hid it where you thought you couldn't follow. Then you made me promise to keep you from it as long as I could."
"Why would I do that?"
"Because the first time you remembered fully, you tried to pull the whole world in with you."
Lena's mouth went dry. "You're lying."
"I wish I were." He stepped closer. "You did it out of love. You said, If everyone can live in the one moment where nothing hurts, then no one has to hurt. But the dream can't hold everyone's one moment. It collapses into the deepest want. And the deepest wants are not kind."
Lena thought of the library lamps flickering out, of the darkness rushing at her. Of the voice that had sounded almost—hungry.
"What does it want now?"
Marcus's eyes flicked to her hand. "It wants you. It thinks you'll finish what you began."
"And you? What do you want?"
He laughed softly, without joy. "I want you to forgive me for being the coward who keeps trying to save you instead of letting you be what you are."
Something moved at the edge of Lena's vision. She turned and saw a figure down the aisle, where the mirror-light thinned into shadow. A woman, perhaps, but wrong around the edges—like a sketch that had been erased and redrawn too many times. The figure tilted its head, and where its face should have been, there was only a blur of features that snapped into place and then blurred again, as if choosing.
"Don't look at it," Marcus whispered.
Of course she looked.
The figure beckoned. Lena felt the pull not behind her sternum, not in her mark, but in a place so deep she didn't have a name for it. A childhood ache. A grief she'd never claimed. The wanting to step into a room and have everyone already know she was loved.
She took a step forward before she realized she'd moved. Marcus's hand closed around her wrist, hot and real.
"It isn't a person," he said. "It's a promise."
The figure's mouth—whatever served as its mouth—smiled. When it spoke, it used Lena's voice, Lena's most private voice, the one she used in prayer even though she didn't believe in prayer.
"You don't have to be brave here," it said. "You don't have to ask for anything. We'll give it before you know you want it. We'll keep you safe from the moment you become a moment."
Tears sprang to Lena's eyes, unbidden. It took everything she had to turn away.
"How do we kill it?" she asked, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice.
Marcus flinched at the word. "We don't. We unmake it. We stop believing in it in the same rhythm. We untie the cloth."
"How?"
He lifted his arm, and for the first time, Lena saw his own mark—the same symbol, only burned deeper, as if it had been carved into him. "We go to where we stitched the first seam."
"Where is that?"
Marcus stared at the silver ceiling, as if the answer were written there. "In the place you thought you would never return to. The place you built the dream to escape."
Lena felt something inside her run to the edge of a cliff and halt there, toes over emptiness. Her mouth formed the word before she could stop it.
"My mother."
The mirror-world groaned around them, a whale-song of grief that vibrated the shelves. The figure down the aisle flickered, its smile collapsing. The silver above split in a razor-thin line and then sealed, like an eye testing a blink.
"You remember enough," Marcus said quietly. "It will come faster now."
"Good," Lena said, even though her hands shook. "I'm tired of being a guest in my own life."
Marcus looked at her as if she were both a miracle and a disaster. "Then we need to leave this place before it realizes that you intend to refuse it."
They moved together through the aisles, the world rearranging around them like a stage crew changing sets in darkness. When they reached the mirror, Marcus paused.
"When we go back, it will follow," he said. "It can bleed into rooms, into people's dreams. Into theirs." He meant Sarah. He meant anyone Lena had ever cared about. "You have to be ready to let some things go."
"I know," she said, and she did. The knowledge sat in her bones like winter.
She touched the mirror, and the library unmade itself as neatly as a sheet tugged from a bed. Cold shot down her arm. She was standing again in The Somnarium, the air scented with lavender and metal. The old woman watched them with those colorless eyes, unblinking. Sarah was at Lena's shoulder, her hand on her elbow, breath held.
"Well?" Sarah asked. "Are we still us?"
Lena opened her mouth to say yes. Her throat closed on the word.
Because behind Sarah, in the glass of a display case, where reflections ran like trapped fish, something moved. Not a person. Not even a shadow.
A seam.
It slipped along the glass like a zipper being tugged from the inside. A thin silver line splitting the reflection, almost invisible unless you knew how to look.
"We need to go," Lena said, forcing her voice to be calm.
The old woman nodded once, as if she had expected this. "It found you. It will always find you."
"Can you stop it?" Sarah asked her, closed-fist hope in her voice.
"No," the woman said. "Only she can."
They stepped out into the alley. The sky was ordinary there, heavy with the promise of rain. Ordinary noises pressed in again—the distant shout, the hiss of a bus, the laugh of someone who'd been surprised by something good.
"What's the plan?" Sarah asked, not letting go of Lena's elbow.
Lena looked at her friend, at the fine lines around her eyes, at the stubborn, brilliant heart that had dragged her into this without complaint. She tried to say, I'm sorry. She tried to say, Go home. She tried to say, If you stay with me, you'll never sleep the same way again.
Instead she said, "I have to go see my mother."
"Your mother is—" Sarah stopped. The word dead died on her tongue. "Lena—"
"I know." Lena swallowed. The mark on her palm pulsed, not like a heartbeat now, but like a countdown. "I know."
They started walking. The Old Quarter narrowed around them, alleys funneling toward the bus line like veins to a heart.
They were almost to the main street when the air changed. It was a small thing. A subtle rearrangement of weight and temperature. But Lena felt it like a hand closing over her own.
She turned slowly toward the glass of a shop window. In it, she saw herself and Sarah. Saw the alley behind them. Saw the world stitched together in the ordinary way.
And then she saw the seam.
It ran right through her reflection, starting at her scalp and sliding down between her eyes, her lips, her heart. The glass did not break. The world did not shatter. But inside the reflection, the silver line widened, an opening as thin as a whisper.
Something moved behind it. Not a shadow. Not a promise.
A hand. Her hand.
It reached for her from inside the reflection, fingers outstretched, the same faintly glowing mark on its palm—a mirror of her own—burning brighter, brighter, brighter—