She went to a window and tried to lift the cheap plastic blinds out of the way like a curtain. Plastic shuffled and clicked. She was bending the slats and messing up the cord, but I couldn’t get my brain to work well enough to explain that wasn’t how you did it.
Especially not when I saw the crabapple tree I always had to duck under when I mowed and Mrs. Shawe’s trailer next door with its half a dozen wind chimes and the crumbling skirting her little dog liked to chew on.
Kest shook her head. “I don’t recognize this place.”
“It’s—”
A fist pounded on the front door, shaking the whole trailer. Warcry’s version of a polite hello.
Out in the kitchen came the crackle of cheap linoleum as slippered feet shuffled across it.
“Hell’s wrong with these yay-hoos?” Gramps’s voice drifted back to us. “Break down the door for a magazine subscription. News flash, pal, I ain’t buying.”
I raced out into the hall and made it to the kitchen in two strides.
“Grady, what kind of nonsense are you getting up to?” Gramps stopped with his hand on the doorknob, frowning like he’d have to holler at me for banging around, like he used to when I was a kid.
His coffee cup sat on the table, steaming. Mine was still turned over on the dish towel next to the coffee maker, waiting for me. The morning light of a single yellow sun slanted through the carport and into the trailer house. Everything was right for a totally normal summer day, except Kest was in my bedroom and through the window I could see Warcry standing on our rickety metal front steps.
Gramps figured it out first.
“Another dream.” He shook his head and let go of the doorknob to run a shaking hand through his thin white hair.
Seeing him, everything from the last two months hit me all at once. The prison planet and joining a gang and killing a guy and slaughtering a whole arena full of Dragons and Contrails. I wanted to tell Gramps everything and promise to find a way to make him proud of me again and redeem the family name, but I couldn’t talk.
So I just hugged the old man.
This didn’t feel like a dream. Cold, textured linoleum stuck to my bare feet, and Gramps felt like that combination of brittle old people bones and sturdy barrel gut he’d always felt like.
After a second, Gramps exhaled and squeezed me like he was trying to break my spine.
Warcry thumped on the door again.
“Hang on a second!” I yelled. Then I wished I’d told him to get lost.
Letting go of Gramps, I leaned over and ripped the front door open.
Warcry threw up his hands. “You ain’t even bleedin’ dressed yet! Where’s your shirt? Did you see the time, grav? Warcry Thompson’s never been late for a check-in, and I ain’t starting now.”
“Screw the tournament,” I said. “I’m not going.”
Gramps nodded at the hallway behind me. “These friends of yours, Grady?”
Kest had come up from the bedroom. She was back to wearing her usual welding-burnt canvas skirt and shirt, and her long black hair was done up in messy buns. The lace in her eyes had thinned out until it was barely spiderwebbing against the opalescent white.
“Guys, I can’t find Rali,” she said. “I always know where he is, but I don’t have anything in my HUD or memory about where he is or what he’s doing.”
“Well, he’s...” Warcry faltered. “The big man’s got to be somewhere, don’t he? He’s probably in seclusion.”
Kest shook her head. “He hates seclusion. And he would’ve told me, anyway. Something is very wrong here.”
I looked at Gramps, the coffee mugs, the regular sunny summer day.
“I’m not really home.” I let out a long breath. “None of this is real. It’s just another stupid dream. I need to wake myself up.”
Purple and white shimmered, and Sushi appeared next to Gramps. Not in her dorky little fish form, but in the fantasy-hot mermaid form—narrow shoulders, wide hips, all covered in variegated purple-and-white scales. Long purple hair splotched with white hung around her shoulders, waving slightly like fins in an underwater current.
“Grady!” Sushi grabbed me by the shoulders. “Dream Spirit attacks! Sushi can’t catch Rali!”
“What are you talking about, Sush?”
“Rali!” She shook me like that would help me understand. “Dream attacker takes Rali!”
Kest nodded. “Of course! I’m dreaming. That’s why I can’t remember anything and why...” She looked at me. Black lace trickled down into her cheeks where a human would blush. “It just lines up with something I would dream about.”
I smiled. “Thanks, but you don’t have to cover for me. I know what I was dreaming about. I’ll take the blame for it.”
“This dream ain’t either of yours,” Warcry said. “I’m nobody’s figment, I’m meself. You bleeders are the figments.”
“Oh, come on,” Gramps said like he used to when he was about to accuse me of pulling his leg. “If this is anybody’s dream, it’s mine.” He looked at me. “I been dreaming about you since the night it happened.” He cleared his throat. “I miss you, buddy boy.”
Sushi settled it.
“Dream Spirit is attack on Sushi’s friends!” She laced her fingers through Gramps’s. He squinted sidelong at the alien fish girl, but she didn’t notice. “Sushi uses Grady and Gramps’s Lost Mirror to catch friends. Same Lost Mirror. Dream Spirit attacker can’t reach into Grady’s lost plane. Only Rali slips through Sushi’s fins.”
Gramps grunted. “Musta fallen asleep watching one of them martian movies.”
Sushi’s vocabulary was growing all the time, but in situations like this it was obvious how far she still had to go.
“I don’t understand,” I told her. “Are you saying this dream is an attack?”
“On Sushi’s friends!” She nodded frantically, her long hair floating along behind the motion. Her mismatched blue and brown eyes were huge and panicked. “Save Rali, Grady!”
“How? Where is he?”
“Alone!” She balled her scaly fists in
