184

******

The path was long, and the weight was heavy; those were the facts of the environment that stood out the most to Alden even as he passed by things that would normally have made him pause and wonder.

The route curved and curved, winding deeper into the soil until the walls towered above him and Yenu-pezth. There was one place where the fading light of the day reached them through a thousand glass shapes embedded into the corridor, and in another, water fell in trickles through a curtain of vines. For an unknowable while, they sat together on a rock that jutted out from the soil, and Yenu-pezth explained to him how she thought their sessions should go.

It would be therapeutic, but in many ways, it wasn’t like any therapy he’d had before. And one of those ways was very important—some outcomes could be guaranteed.

“You’re young,” Yenu-pezth said, “and you shouldn’t have experienced too much significant pressing or alteration of the mind.”

Her ringed toes were stretched out in front of her, wriggling against a patch of ground carpeted with short, springy grass.

“When you are sure something within reach of your mind would be better if it were different, stronger, or absent—and when I agree that the alteration will not harm you—it will be changed.”

“Anything?” Alden asked.

“Anything,” Yenu-pezth said, “that we are sure of. You aren’t severely damaged or . You are someone who knows himself well enough to know he’s unhappy. I am someone who can easily push you in a new direction. The only thing that stands between us and what you might want for yourself is our .” She chuckled. “And maybe a little more slowness than usual since you are my first human. I’ll be your mind with additional care.”

She pulled her feet back toward her and straightened on the rock. “So you must decide what you want, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. In your case, you should choose the hurts you are most sure you understand and want gone, instead of the ones that ache the most.”

“Aren’t they the same usually?”

“Sometimes,” said Yenu-pezth. “Not always. We’ll find out when you find out.”

She was on her feet. Alden couldn’t quite remember seeing her rise, but he stood to join her. Her hands went into her pockets. She said, “What sufferings are you sure your life would be better without?”

And the weight increased again.

He walked beside her. Or stood. Or followed her instructions to spend a while running his hands over a pattern of knobby protrusions on the wall that were maybe answers to a question he’d had or puzzles to give him even more questions to mull over. The world around him blurred more as his own thought process filled his attention.

The possible answers were all there. Only a few of them were perfect. All of them mattered.

“It’s so important to me,” he said, hands still brushing the pattern on the wall. “That what I do matters—that my yeses make a difference, that my noes do. Our choices shouldn’t just ripple a little and then disappear. That’s been important to me for a very long time.”

Sometimes, he found he felt an urge to say things aloud that weren’t responses to what Yenu-pezth had asked. Realizations or memories got shaken loose, and some of them were too meaningful to him to remain comfortably hidden. He would have worried about his ability to keep his most dangerous secrets. He would have wondered about whether or not the things that felt important to him in this way would matter to anyone else, or if speaking them revealed him to be someone deserving of an eye-roll or two.

But the deeper they traveled down the inward path, the more his emotions became like ripples themselves. He felt like he was able to observe all but the worst ones from below the surface in the quiet heart of a lake.

Below the surface like that...it would feel like when Lind-otta slowed the water.

There was something he wanted from that thought and couldn’t find, important but obscured. He had bumped into it a few times—the moment when everything went still and Esh-erdi’s hand pulled him from the water, from drowning, into the air again. He kept looking at it and admitting it wasn’t for now.

For now, he was finding the thing he was surest about changing, and he’d almost narrowed it down.

Yenu-pezth was right. Surety and quantity of suffering weren’t necessarily going hand-in-hand. The lake rippled like crazy when he thought about running across that damn moon. It practically escaped its banks when he thought about standing on that rooftop—so, so recently—and saying yes to her and being told no in return and being swept under.

But those weren’t necessarily things you asked to forget. Or alter. At least not until you understood how everything inside you was fitting together, and he was beginning to understand how hard understanding yourself really was, even here in this place that was designed to help you do it.

“I have a nightmare,” he said finally. “It comes back over and over in slightly different ways. I want it to stop.”

“Tell me more about this nightmare.”

He told her about the whistle and how no matter which way he ran, he couldn’t find Kibby. He told her about how he often ended up standing there in the rotten grass, right before he woke up, realizing he’d have to go through it all again. Completely alone.

“What else?” Yenu-pezth said again.

And again.

Several times, until Alden’s thoughts were all on the dream and the layers of it.

“I was scared to go help her,” he admitted finally. The lake was rocking. “On the day it happened, I was afraid I couldn’t even save myself. And when I heard the whistle I didn’t want to be responsible for another person. I was scared of what I’d find if I went that way. I stood still for too long while she was alone and terrified.”

“This memory bothers you often?” She was watching him from right beside his elbow now. Her ashy purple hair had a little cup-shaped flower caught in it from the trip through the curtain of vines.

“She thinks I rushed to help her as soon as I heard. I would rather die than tell her I didn’t.”

Yenu-pezth moistened her lips with her tongue. She opened her mouth, paused, then said, “I’ll talk to you about that when your mind isn’t softened by the weight of the path. This dark dream sounds to me like a very good place to start...”

She took her hands out of her pockets, and Alden noticed a decrease in the weight.

“You can take the nightmare away?”

“We’re going to change it,” she said. “When we’re sure. You need to steep for a while now.”

******

She took him back up the path, and he realized the distance they’d come was shorter than he’d thought but far more packed with attractive or interesting sights than he’d realized. He had just enough space in his head now to wonder if he’d noticed the particular things he did on the way down because they’d all been part of helping him sink deeper into his own thoughts, or if he just subconsciously liked vines.

“Did we make it almost to the end of the path?” he asked.

“No.” She smiled at him. “You didn’t need it. You’re a very good patient.”

He was glad he was good. He was unclear on what exactly he was good at, though.

He was also unclear on how his suitcase came to be inside a small cave that had been dug out of one of the walls and lined with smooth stone the same foggy green as the path that led to the House of Healing. But there it was, stuffed into the space beside a dip in the floor that held clear liquid.

Yenu-pezth called the place a and told him it would be his steeping spot while she went to find Stu-art’h and check the color of his ears. Alden went inside obediently then turned to face her, his neck bent awkwardly because the ceiling was so low.

“How long do I stay?”

“That depends on you,” she said. “As long as you need to or until it is time for you to leave this place and rest without the weight of the path on you. To fix your nightmare, here is what we should do...”

He imagined he was going to be very frustrated about that over the coming days, but for now...maximum serenity. He ate a large savory cookie-thing Stuart had left on a plate for him and went to take a shower. Unsurprisingly, the shower at the cottage would do everything short of scrubbing your body for you if you knew how to adjust the settings. Alden had kept it simple the last time he was here, and he did this time, too. But, absentmindedly, he kept changing the pressure to be a little harder and the heat a little hotter, until he was standing, eyes closed and back pressed to the wall, in a shower that felt like the one he’d used at the lab.

It took him a while to realize he’d done it. As soon as he did, he turned the water off and stood there dripping. Not supposed to be thinking about the lab shower. How is that going to help me rewrite the nightmare?

The nightmare started before he ever made it back to the lab with Kibby. The grass, the whistle, the first hours of the chaos—he needed to fix it from there. For both of their dream selves.

Find Kibby. Get us to the lab again safely, I guess. That’s not much of a fix, though, just a nightmare that really happened.

He swallowed.

If it really happened again, I’d be able to do a little more. Like, I could at least...wait...could I...?

So many of the memories he’d taken close looks at yesterday, and the fears, drifted through his mind. He was still staring at the shower wall minutes later, piecing together something so astounding that his heart had begun to race.

Not quite. I don’t have enough information. I need to know a lot of things.

And he needed to know them right now.

All thoughts of serenity and a calm morning forgotten, he flung himself from the shower. He had windows open on his interface, and his tablet was out of his bag before he thought to grab a single stitch of clothing. He stumbled through the bedroom, yanking on his silk pajamas with one hand and trying to make a feature of the tablet he basically never used work with the other.

I think we could almost do it.

Almost isn’t good enough.

******

When Stuart arrived a few hours later, he was carrying two cups of grain tea and being followed by his ryeh-b’t.

“You stayed,” he said when he entered the cottage. His smile was excited. “We can sit together and discuss our thoughts if you...want...to do that.”

His expression changed as Alden sprang up from the floor, where he’d been leaning over his tablet’s holographic projection of Moon Thegund and drawing lines on it with his finger.

“You’re back so soon!” He leaped toward Stuart and almost slid on one of the sheets of paper he’d ripped out of a notebook a while ago when he was making a list of even more things he needed to know.

“It’s the time I told you I’d be back.”

“Good! I need your help. More of your help. You help with so much, and I feel like I don’t do anything for you in return. Ask for a favor sometime, please. But for now—”

“Are you all right? Do I need to call Healer Yenu?”

“I’m excellent.”

“Excellent at what?” Stuart asked, his voice so concerned now that it snapped Alden out of his frenzy.

He took in the tea. Other Alden had just slipped into the cottage behind Stuart’s ankle, and she was beelining for the suitcase. Stuart was in his school clothes.

“Sorry. I’m excited. I didn’t mean excellent like that. I mean I’m very well, and I don’t need Healer Yenu yet. I’ve realized how I want to change the nightmare, but I’m not sure it will work. I want it to be more realistic than dreams usually are. So I need you to help me figure some things out, if you have time and if you don’t mind.” He smiled. “Thank you for the tea. My manners are bad right now.”

Stuart handed him a cup, then leaned around him to see the globe of Thegund. “Of course I’ll help.”

He still looked worried though. Alden pulled himself together more.

“Come in.” He tried to sound calmer. “Let’s sit down and discuss both of our days. You first, or I’ll just overwhelm you with questions.”

Stuart turned to shut the door behind him. “You can ask your questions.”

“No. Really. Tell me about LeafSong. Or did Emban-art’h end up keeping you from classes again?” He went to move the tablet and some papers, then he sat down on one of the cushions by the floor table and sipped his tea to prove he was a good friend, too.

Stuart came to sit across from him, and after a few more glances around the room and one commanding whistle at the sight of his ryeh-b’t biting a suitcase wheel, he did seem pleased to have been asked about his day. He talked about an assignment he’d been given to achieve an accurate effect from a “successive wand” spell when one of the wands that would normally have been used was missing. Alden didn’t have to feign interest, but he was sorry that all he could do was ask questions. Stuart struck him as the kind of person who would really enjoy an in-depth discussion about magical theory with a peer.

Even if Alden had said, “I altered the results of a flashlight spell!” he wouldn’t have been able to contribute much more knowledge than the fact that it had happened.

Though if I did that, I’m sure the conversation would stop being happy spellcraft chatter anyway.

“You’re frowning,” said Stuart. “Should I explain the effects of yethwood wands again?”

Alden shook his head. “No, I was just thinking I must be boring to talk to when it comes to your school. I can’t have a conversation about it at your level.”

“You’re not ever boring to me,” said Stuart. He took an orange out of a pocket—it was his second hidden piece of Earth fruit since they’d sat down—and sniffed it deeply.

“Oranges smell wonderful,” said Alden.

“Yes! And in your language the color is named for the fruit!”

He had looked up fruit facts for everything he’d received yesterday. Peeling the orange so carefully that Alden was sure he already had a specific plan for the rind, he said, “What about your day and your questions?”

Alden felt a stir of excitement. “I need to know how much a very specific car weighs, and I want to know if a certain kind of sprinkler can pull water from the ground all over Thegund or if they only work in some places. Kibby can answer the first question. I don’t know how to find the answer to the second.”

Stuart blinked. “I’m sure it won’t be too difficult.”

“And,” said Alden, “I want you to help me figure out how to kill a demon with my skill.”

Stuart blinked again. “Why?”

“Just one,” said Alden. “I never even saw it, but it was there. And this morning I realized if Thegund happened today to the person I am now...I might be able to get out with Kibby. I might be able to keep us both alive for as long as it would take to reach people. I almost have the ability to do it. I think. There was at least one big demon roaming around out there that could ruin everything if we ran into it.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know,” said Alden, remembering the trails in the grass. “But I want it dead so that I can leave with her that day. In my dream, I’m going to find her, and we’re going to outrun the corruption together. We’re going to escape. We’re not going to live through it all again.”

******