My fist slammed into the pond water, sending up a shower of purple droplets, but it sliced through his face like it wasn’t there.
Dad sighed, not even noticing. “Guess that was a long shot. Just gotta keep moving forward. Keep on trucking on.” He sniffed hard and picked the letter back up with trembling hands. “If you can hear me, bud, I love ya. Take care of your mom for me ’til I get there.”
Ripples spread out from the geyser of droplets my fist had sent up, erasing Dad and his cell and leaving behind the long, flowing purple and white fins of a human-sized fish.
The fish swam to the surface, but as it came out of the water, the thing’s head and body morphed into a girl’s face, narrow shoulders and wide hips, all sparkling with variegated purple-and-white scales. Where the angel of death was beautiful and Kest was cute, this girl was the kind of exotically hot that hurt to look at. Impossibly hot. Untouchably hot.
But that untouchable effect was spoiled a little when she blinked and her eyes didn’t move at quite the same time. The dark brown one moved a little faster, and the pale blue one lagged behind, like she couldn’t figure out how to do them both at once.
“Grady,” she said, grinning.
I opened my eyes, and she was lying on my pillow, her nose two inches from my face.
With a surprised shout, I fell backward off the mattress and hit the floor.
“What the heck?” I fought my way out of the covers and stood up.
No sign of an incredibly hot mermaid-girl in my bed. Just Sushi swimming over the pillow, laughing at me like falling on the floor had been some kind of slapstick routine.
I scrubbed my hands across my face. Obviously that had been one of those dream-within-a-dream moments.
I was too tired for this crap. My eyelids felt like they were made out of sandpaper, and my whole body was exhausted. A look at my HUD said I’d been asleep for less than ten minutes. I started to climb back in bed, but someone knocked on my room door.
Sushi stopped mid-swoop, then darted behind my head. I could feel her fins brushing my shoulder.
“Open up, grav,” Warcry yelled, thumping the door again, harder, in case I hadn’t heard him the first time. “We gotta talk about that fish, yeah?”
That zapped the last little bit of sleep out of my system.
“Just a sec,” I called back. I hurried up and pulled on a clean shirt and my raggedy jeans from Earth, then opened the door. Rali and Warcry were both there.
Rali took the easy chair this time. Warcry limped over to my bed, still leaning on the walking stick, but not packing his prosthetic anymore. He plopped down and propped his stump up with my pillow.
“That thing’s a nuisance,” the redhead said, stabbing a finger at Sushi. “Nobody on this floor’s getting a lick of sleep because of it.”
“Maybe they can’t sleep because somebody keeps yelling and pounding on people’s doors,” I muttered.
Rali leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I had the dreams while we were camped out in Bogland, but I stopped having them when we moved in here—until you moved into the room directly above mine. Today, Biggerstaff’s people moved me up to the starter level, and they stopped again. But Kest would say even that could be a coincidence. What isn’t a coincidence was what we saw Sushi doing while those knots of contamination were being worked out of your side.”
I was not following at all. “What are you talking about?”
“I meant to ask if you knew what she’d been doing, but things got out of hand so fast, and then we were headed for the Contrails’ location...” Rali shrugged.
“Get to the point,” Warcry growled. “That fish’s showing us stuff that ain’t possible, keeping everybody tossing and turning and waking up.”
“Stuff that isn’t possible?” I frowned. Like Gramps hugging Dad? Like Dad apologizing to me?
I craned my neck until I could see Sushi just behind my shoulder. She scrunched down farther, just barely peeping up at me.
Purple and white scales, just like her life point, just like the lights that were always blinking in my dreams lately...or the droplets on the pond, the fish swimming in the water, the exotic mermaid girl...
“Where’d you learn my name, Sushi? Everybody calls me Hake. Where did you hear Grady from?”
“Gramps,” she whispered.
“How do you know about him? He’s not even in this universe.”
“You think the distance matters?” Warcry crossed his arms. “She can make anybody crop up in our dreams—they’re bleedin’ dreams, grav.”
“Dreams?” Sushi shook her head, fins flowing behind the motion. “No. No dreams.”
“What do you mean no, fish stick?” Warcry snapped. “They ain’t reality. That Nameless slag ain’t pining away for me, she’s counting her money and looking for some other thick-skulled clown to give her a Name.”
“No dreams,” Sushi insisted. “Reality.”
Gramps and Dad hugging at my funeral, Gramps calling him on the phone, Dad and Gramps both talking to me like they felt I was there... Technically, those things were possible. Neither one of them was dead yet, so they could always make up, even if I wasn’t there to see it. They could be moving on, just in the world I wasn’t part of anymore.
Rali was staring at Sushi thoughtfully.
“Your Spirit type, Lost Mirror,” he said.
Sushi nodded. “Lost!”
“My lost family,” I said, “Warcry’s lost girlfriend...”
Warcry stabbed a finger at me. “That trick never was mine, no matter what she said.”
“And my lost way,” Rali said, ignoring him. “You’re showing us things we’ve lost.”
“Or maybe where those things are now?” I suggested.
“Now,” Sushi agreed.
Warcry glared at her. “Some of us lost that trash for a reason. We don’t want it back.”
Sushi swam around to face him, confusion on her weird little face. The air around her shimmered purple, then the image of a silk fan materialized over her head,
