Zeke was dreaming again.

For someone with such an active imagination, his waking self often thought, his dreams really were boring. There were no ghosts or monsters, no supernatural adventures; he was never in any cool sci-fi or fantasy settings or even living the plots of his favorite movies. Instead, the world of his subconscious was every bit as mundane as the waking world he could only bear with a generous sprinkle of the unreal.

Right now, he was dreaming of mountains and woods and animals, but they were all behind a screen. He was sitting curled up in his childhood bedroom in Brighton, except for some reason he was sure it was his room at his dad's place; and in any case he was an adult here, but he still couldn't leave. He just sat there, watching video after video on YouTube, occasionally picking up his guitar, but he never remembered what he played. Every so often footsteps would come shuffling towards his room, but every time he turned around and waited for the door to open, no one was there.

On the screen, the mountains and woods from earlier spread out, vast and inviting and soul-crushingly pixelated. Someone was narrating the video, but he couldn't tell who or where he had heard that voice before. Zeke looked down at his phone. He'd gotten his first one at seven, waited till eleven just to figure out that no one would call. By fifteen, it had slowly dawned on him that no one would text him either.

But just as he was about to put it back down and focus on the videos once more, the impossible happened.

The phone started ringing.

"Zeke?"

He groaned and stirred. The phone…he had to pick it up. It was probably important. Or a scam call. One or the other.

"Zeke!"

He opened his eyes.

The phone was still ringing.

"Here," Neo told him, waving it in front of his face. "Take this. I can't hand with one drive."

"I understand all these words separately," Zeke replied, but he took the phone from Neo's hands. "I can't believe I'm asking this, but are you okay?"

"I'm awake!" Neo burst out at once. "Not tired. I'm…not tired."

"Not what I asked."

"Whatever."

Shaking his head, Zeke took a glance at the caller ID and finally picked up the call.

"Hey, Roxy," he said. "What are you doing awake?"

~ ~ ~

Elsewhere, at a slightly more reasonable time, Angelo and his men were at their wits' end.

"Not in L.A., not in any hotels, not anywhere," Luca burst out, pacing back and forth in the lobby of the only semi-decent hotel they had found in the area. "Where are these people? And more importantly, where is the suitcase! At this point I can only guess that they either went to the police or drove off a cliff into the Grand Canyon—Angelo, are you listening?"

Angelo, who had draped himself over the couch with his phone in his hand, barely looked up. It wasn't that he was deliberately hogging the couch while the others sat squeezed together in the armchair; it was simply that no one had dared to sit next to him when he had plopped down, and now here they all were. "Listening, listening," he said absently. "Do you have anything helpful to add?"

Luca opened his mouth, then abruptly deflated. "No," he admitted. "I was hoping you could—you know." He motioned vaguely in Angelo's direction. "Since you're always on the phone."

Angelo still didn't look up. "Absolutely nothing," he said.

"But I thought—"

"Think less, help more."

"I think," Pietro spoke up, raising a hand, "we could use their contact information to try and—"

"Shut up, Pietro," Angelo and Luca said in unison.

He threw up his hands, nearly smacking the kid beside him in the face. "Why not?"

"Well, what would you have us say?" Angelo replied, finally putting down his phone. "'Hello, yes, sorry to disturb, but I think you rented a car with a suitcase full of my money that I worked hard to earn, please don't take it or call the cops, just bring it back to your friendly neighborhood criminal and we can both pretend this never happened. Have a nice day!'"

Pietro sat back down. Beside him, the kid furrowed his brow, looking deep in thought.

"We could call them pretending to be regular people," he mused. "If they haven't noticed or opened the suitcase yet, they'll give it back to us if we play our cards right. But if they have," he added, "it'll give us away, so maybe it isn't worth it."

Angelo furrowed his brow. This boy wasn't half bad, he mused. Smart.

"Also," the kid added, "it's late now, so they probably won't pick up the phone before tomorrow."

Angelo pondered that.

"Hey, kid," he began.

The boy sat up straight. "I have a name—"

"Later, boy," Angelo cut him off. "You're smart. Can you think of a way to find out if they went to the police without giving us away?"

The kid thought again. "Give me a few hours to think," he said at length. "I'll have a plan by the time they wake up."

"Good." Angelo let out a loud yawn, picking his phone back up. "Then I suggest we go to sleep. The cats are waiting for me."

Over in the armchair, the kid not-so-subtly turned to Pietro. "Is that a code I don't know?"

"I have no idea," Pietro replied in what he probably thought was an undertone. "The boss has been acting strange lately."

Angelo heard every word, of course, but the kitten game kept him calm enough to ignore it.

~ ~ ~

"Evening, Zeke," Roxanne's voice came from the speaker, slightly more tired than usual but otherwise as calm as ever. "Or should I say morning? I'm impressed you picked up at this time of the night."

"Then why did you call at this time of the night?" Zeke grumbled, stifling a yawn. "You woke me up, you know."

"Sorry, Sleeping Beauty," Roxanne answered, not sounding all that sorry. "I've been trying to reach you for hours. Rowan was already in the middle of planning your funeral."

"Filing a missing person report," Rowan's muffled voice came from the background. "Not, uh, not planning the funeral. Yet. Anyway, carry on."

"You said, and I quote, 'What do I tell their families when they ask?'"

"That was just in case," Rowan said quietly. "I need time to prepare that kind of speech, I couldn't wait for the bad news. It would've been too late."

Zeke stifled another yawn. "It's okay, Rowan," he said. "Mine wouldn't even ask, most of the time they forget I exist at all."

"…Anyway," Roxanne said into the ensuing silence. "Where are you guys? We haven't heard from you all day."

"Still on the road," Zeke replied. "We're in the middle of, uh…" He peered outside in the hopes of spotting a road sign, but there was none. "Nowhere, Colorado?"

Roxanne sighed. "Good enough," she said. "How long till you get here?"

Zeke looked at the GPS and found that it told him nothing. How long had Neo said it would take again in total? He had already forgotten; he always tended to tune it out when Neo was talking.

"Maybe tomorrow evening? Later today," he corrected himself, glancing at the time. "Or tomorrow morning. Depends on…traffic…and stuff." And whether or not they got sidetracked again, he added in his head, but if he said that part out loud he'd definitely earn himself another lecture.

"Okay," Roxanne replied in a tone that suggested she had very much heard what he hadn't said. "Don't get distracted on the way. Remember, we need you on Friday."

Zeke saluted at the phone. "Yes, ma'am."

"Okay. Good night. Don't crash the car," Roxanne reminded him, then hung up. Zeke gave another yawn and handed the phone back to Neo.

"Why was Rowan with her?" he mused after a moment. "It's after two A.M."

"One," said Neo.

"Your phone says two A.M."

"That's because we're in another timezone, stupid," Neo replied. "It's one A.M. in California."

"Still late at night," Zeke retorted. "So what was he doing with her? Rowan should be—okay, Rowan doesn't sleep," he admitted. "And Roxy doesn't sleep either, you just have to charge her on the wall sometimes like a Roomba."

Neo didn't answer. His eyes were glued on something in the distance, his hands shaking slightly on the steering wheel.

"Hello," Zeke said at length, waving a hand in front of his face. "Earth to Neo?"

Neo didn't flinch. He just kept staring right through Zeke's hand.

"My family," he said after a pause, "wouldn't ask about me either."

Zeke dropped his hand. "What?"

"Or…just my mom," Neo corrected himself. "My mom would ask. My dad wouldn't know I'm gone."

Very, very briefly, it dawned on Zeke that he had just unlocked forbidden information—a secret piece of Neo lore he had somehow never found out in all the years of knowing him. And the realization lasted almost long enough for him to feel something about it—amazement, a sharp kind of triumph—but at the last moment it was driven out by sheer unfiltered annoyance.

"So what?" he said, crossing his arms and glaring. "My parents were always forgetting me at the airport when they had to pick me up. You're not special."

"My dad forgot me at home," Neo shot back. "Forever!"

"My parents forgot me at the airport and at home," Zeke said at once. "Check and mate, drama queen. This time I've had it worse than you!"

"This isn't a competition, stupid!"

"You're just saying that 'cause you lost."

Neo shrugged. His hands gripped the steering wheel harder, but not even that could hide their jitters.

"How much caffeine," Zeke said slowly, "have you had?"

"Not that much," Neo replied at once, speeding up on the empty road. "And you're not my mom!"

"If I were your mom, you wouldn't be invited home for Christmas anymore," Zeke said without thinking.

Neo flinched, just slightly, and Zeke's face caught fire. "But I'm not your mom," he muttered, curling up in his seat and decidedly not looking in Neo's direction. "You have a mom. And she loves you. Probably." He crossed his arms. "Lucky bastard."

"My mom would love you too," Neo replied, sounding like he wasn't thinking much either.

Which was why it took Zeke a solid moment to realize what he had said.

"What?" he said.

"What, 'what'?"

"What do you mean, what 'what'?" Zeke insisted, staring at Neo's face with the stubbornness of a toddler trying to read his mother's very grown-up book. "You just said your mom would love me?"

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, I did. What the hell did that mean?"

"Nothing." Neo waved a dismissive hand. "My mom loves anyone. She has shit taste in people."

"Wow." Zeke wasn't disappointed by that response, he told himself, and he had no idea why he should be in the first place. It wasn't like he had expected anything after all. "Then maybe I should get on the next plane and befriend your mom till she likes me more than you."

Neo didn't respond. He was facing away, his hair obscuring his features.

"Go back to sleep," he said at long last.

"Not till you tell me how much caffeine you had," Zeke answered, sitting upright. "I'm not planning to fall asleep just to wake up dead."

"You can't wake up dead."

"Smartassery's my job, jackass." Zeke reached for the steering wheel. "Let me drive already! You're gonna crash the car."

"I'm fine!" Neo protested. "You'd crash the car!"

"I can see your hands shaking from here." Neo gripped the wheel tighter, and Zeke smirked. "Just pull over and let me drive before you have to change your name from Roadhouse to Roadkill!"

"Stop that!"

"Pull over!"

"No!"

A brief scuffle ensued. Zeke emerged victorious, pulling the car over to the side of the road.

"Switch seats with me," he said. "You're sleeping."

He fully expected Neo to protest again, but he only sighed, shrugged, and pushed himself out of his seat. His lanky legs were suspiciously wobbly as he crossed over to the passenger seat. Zeke settled in the driver's spot, adjusting the seat until he could reach the pedals, and Neo was asleep before they were back at full speed.

For some time Zeke kept driving in silence. The road went ever on and on, without much of a landscape to see here in the dark. There were no other cars around either. He was bored. And now he was sleepy.

Why had he agreed to do this again?

Zeke yawned. The road kept going. How much further till somewhere interesting? Probably too far. There weren't even any curves on this stretch. And Neo was asleep and looking weirdly human again, and Zeke couldn't even wake him up to needle him.

The point was, he needed to do something, or else he'd be the one to fall asleep at the steering wheel.

Zeke didn't know how long he had sat there, struggling to keep his eyes open in the driver's seat, when suddenly his salvation arrived in the shape of an illuminated sign pointing the way to a hotel. Without losing another minute he followed it, driving into a small town and stopping in the parking lot.

"Wakey, wakey," he said, shaking Neo. "We're sleeping in actual beds tonight."

Neo groaned, but didn't reply. He just slumped over to the other side and kept sleeping.

"Neo, c'mon. I can't leave you in here," Zeke insisted, to no avail. He sighed. Opening the passenger door, he wrapped both arms around Neo and hoisted him over his shoulder. Not actually a hard task, despite Neo's towering height. More like carrying around a really long cat.

"Two rooms," he told the lady at the reception, then glanced at Neo. "Room for two, actually. I can't wake this guy up." He glanced over his shoulder. "Unless you're out of rooms?"

The lady peered past him, then shook her head. "No," she said. "Why would you think that?"

"There's a guy sleeping in the armchair."

She shrugged. "Yeah, I don't know what his deal is either," she said. "Bunch of foreigners, came in earlier tonight, spent a lot of time discussing something in the lobby. I don't know, I don't speak foreign." She handed him a key card. "Here you go."

Zeke accepted it with a thanks. Briefly he considered waking up the guy in the chair, who had clearly fallen asleep there by accident, just so he could return to his room and continue sleeping more comfortably there. Or at least get out of his suit. Why was he wearing a suit in the first place? This guy looked even younger than Zeke himself. He should be in college right now, or university, or something, but not doing whatever the hell he was doing here.

But he was tired, and he already had his arms full with a sleeping Neo, and so he decided it wasn't his problem.