That night, the dreams started.
They weren’t nightmares. Nightmares have something in them that wants you. This had nobody in it at all for the first three nights, and that turned out to be worse.
It was the gate. I’d close my eyes and be standing in front of the green light in the Chilterns again, as I’d left it.
The ring marks in the dead grass. The heavy cold pressed flat against the back of my neck.
Except in the dream, the marks were brighter. Fresh. It looked like someone had been back to redraw them while nobody was watching.
The dream never let me walk toward it. That was the other thing. I could turn my head, and I could look at the trees, and every time I tried to close the distance to the ring I arrived at the same standing place I had started from.
By the third night I had stopped trying and started using the time to read the marks instead, which is a sentence I didn’t enjoy thinking afterwards.
There were more of them than there had been. That was the thing I kept bringing back with me and couldn’t prove.
The ring I had stood inside had one row cut round the outside of it. The ring in the dream had two, and the second row sat inside the first, closer to the light, and it wasn’t finished.
Somebody in that dream was still working. I never saw a hand and I never heard a tool and the line got longer between one night and the next.
I woke up each time with the same certainty and no evidence to back it up. By the second night I’d stopped mentioning it.
By the third, I’d stopped needing to, since both of them had clearly noticed something in the way I moved through the mornings after.
Lisa started making two coffees without being asked, and put the second one down at my elbow without ever once looking at my face while she did it, which was her way of saying she had counted the nights too.
Nox did the other thing. He stopped taking the lift.
He walked up four flights every single time for three days running, and it was only on the third morning that I worked out he was doing it so that I would hear somebody coming up the stairs before I saw them, and I never mentioned it and neither did he.
I woke up on the fourth night sure of something I had no way to be sure of.
You are dreaming about a place instead of about the people you watched die in it.
He said it on the fourth morning, before I had got as far as the stairs.
I have shared a skull with you for three years. I know what your sleep normally does. This is not it.
“Meaning what.”
Meaning I do not think that is a dream, and I do not have a better word to offer you, and I dislike both of those sentences equally.
“We’ve to go back,” I said. I was saying it before I’d even reached the bottom of the stairs.
Lisa looked up from her book. Nox looked up from the post boxes.
Neither of them asked back where. There was only one back.
“Doyle said stand clear of the Chilterns,” Lisa said. She said it like she was reading me a rule off a card, not arguing the point herself.
“Doyle said stand clear when it was a place we visited. It stopped meaning anything the second it sent something to our street.” I sat down on the step below hers.
“Void Order came from somewhere. It said we’d been loud.”
I looked at both of them.
“It didn’t come because of the Chilterns. It came because we were getting close to something.
“The Chilterns is the only thread we actually have our hands on.”
“You think the ground has changed again?” Nox said.
“I think someone’s been back to it. I can’t tell you how I know that.” I could, a little.
The dream had shown me the marks gone bright, three nights running. That wasn’t a reason a person could give out loud. “I just know we’ve been sitting still while it hasn’t.”
“Dreams,” Lisa said, and didn’t make it a question. She was watching my face as she’d watched it at the Edinburgh file.
“I didn’t say dreams.” I hadn’t said anything about dreams to either of them, not once.
“You didn’t have to.” She closed her book for good this time. “I’ve seen you not-sleep before. This is different. This is you waking up already certain of something.”
“She’s right,” Nox said, from the post boxes, not looking up. “You’ve had that same look three mornings running. I was going to give it until Friday before I said anything.”
“Why Friday?”
“Because you’d have either told us or gone by yourself by Friday, and either way I’d have known which one I was dealing with.”
I didn’t argue with any of that either.
You are not wrong. Whatever is being done to that ground was never finished. Things that are not finished get finished if no one stops them. The question is not whether to go. You have decided that. The question is whether you tell your friend with the cigarette first.
I thought about that.
“We tell Doyle,” I said.
“He’ll say no,” Lisa said.
“Then he says no. We’ve it on the record that we asked him and we’ll go anyway.” I leaned forward.
“I’m not doing the thing where we sneak off and he finds out from a body count. We did that once. I’d rather lose the argument honestly.”
Nox almost smiled. “That’s growth.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Doyle said no.
Then he said it again, louder, a lit cigarette pointed at the middle of my chest, close enough that I could smell the smoke over everything else in the room.
“A dream.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“You don’t. If you knew how it sounded you’d have led with something else and worked round to it.” He stayed standing. “I’ve signed off on things with less behind them than this and I’ve gone to two funerals about it, so don’t stand in my office and tell me you know how it sounds.”
“Then say no and mean it.”
“I’m saying no and meaning it. That’s the third time and you’re still here.”
Then he sat down and rubbed his eyes. He said the third no again, quieter, and it had stopped being a no somewhere in the middle of it.
“How exactly do you plan on getting past the Association’s cordon, then?” Doyle asked.
I didn’t have an answer ready. Neither, from the silence that followed, did Lisa or Nox.
“The Association’s had that whole site under containment for over a week,” Doyle said.
“Ever since Vaughn’s review put three deaths at it on the record. There’s checkpoints on the access road and hunters on rotation near the site.” He looked at each of us in turn.
“You’re not walking up to a dead gate this time. You’re walking up to an Association cordon with your three faces already in its file.”
“We’ll find a way around it,” I said.
“That’s not a plan. That’s a sentence you’re hoping turns into one once you’re standing in front of the actual problem.”
“It usually does,” Nox said.
Doyle didn’t find that as reassuring as Nox seemed to want him to.
“You understand that if you’re right, you’re walking back toward the exact thing that put a mark on Nox’s shoulder,” Doyle said.
“Yes.”
“And if you’re wrong, you’ve burned the one piece of cover I’ve left. Nobody important knows you three are still poking at this.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re going anyway?”
“We’re telling you we’re going,” I said. “There’s a difference. I’m asking you to know about it instead of finding out after.”
“That difference isn’t going to matter much to the three of you if I’m wrong about how careful you’ll be.” He said it quietly.
“It only matters to me. That’s the part you three keep forgetting when you do this.”
He looked at the three of us for a long time. The cigarette burned down toward his fingers. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Tomorrow,” Doyle said finally. “Not tonight. You don’t go to a place like that, tired and in the dark.” He crushed the cigarette into the tray. “Tomorrow at first light. You check in with me when you arrive. You check in when you leave.”
He stared at me directly.
“If either of those calls doesn’t come, I don’t send a search party. I send everything I’ve. I’ll stop pretending this division is small.” He stood up. “Do you understand what I’m agreeing to?
“I’m agreeing to find out whether I’m about to lose all three of you.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t. But you’ll.” He pointed at the door. “Go sleep. Actually sleep. You’ll need it.”
We left him in his office with the dead cigarette.
✦ ✦ ✦
We went home the usual way.
He is afraid for you, rather than of you, which is what the others manage. I have not had many people be afraid for me. I had forgotten it looks almost like being angry.
“Yeah,” I said. “He does that.”
“You didn’t say anything in there,” I said to Nox, somewhere around the second junction.
“There was nothing to add. You had already lost the argument and he had already changed his mind, and both of those were happening at the same time, which is the only reason it worked.”
“You could have backed me.”
“I did. I stood in the room.” He put his hands in his pockets. “If I had spoken he would have had two of us to say no to, and he only had one no left in him.”
I turned that over for most of a street and couldn’t find the hole in it.
Nobody said very much for the rest of the walk. We reached the building a few minutes later, and the stairs felt much steeper than usual.
“I believe you,” Lisa said, at her door. “About the dream, or whatever it actually was.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Believing you and this being a good idea are two different things I’ve decided to feel simultaneously.”
She went in first, then Nox, both of them settling into the particular quiet of people who’d already decided to do the thing and had stopped discussing it.
I unlocked the door to my room and didn’t bother with the overhead light. I sat on the edge of the bare mattress and watched the streetlamps cast long shadows across the floor.
An envelope had been pushed under the door while we were out. No postmark. No return address. Inside was a single line in handwriting I didn’t recognise.
Stay small.
I didn’t know if it was a threat or a warning. I folded it and put it in my pocket and didn’t mention it to the others.
I stayed awake until my body refused to keep doing it.
The dream was waiting for me.
This time, something was standing in front of the gate.
The figure didn’t move. It had the patience of something that had already won.
Its back was to me, and the dead grass around its feet had gone the same colourless grey as the ring itself, spreading slowly outward the longer I watched.
It didn’t turn around.
I woke up before it could, heart going hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.
My alarm hadn’t gone off yet. The sky outside was barely beginning to turn grey.
I dressed quickly and didn’t wait for my hands to settle.
I found Lisa and Nox waiting in the lobby, looking as rested as I felt, which was to say not at all.
Nox had his bag over one shoulder. Lisa was halfway through her second coffee and hadn’t said a word yet. Nobody wasted time on morning greetings.
We left the building together and took the first train out to the Chilterns.