Zoe nervously drummed her fingernails against the stone brick wall of the secluded alleyway. Last time she had been here, the plaza beyond that led to the enormous cathedral had been empty, but now there was a small – if consistent – level of foot traffic.

Tall, shambling figures she didn’t fancy getting a closer look at picked their way across the wide expanse of stone, filtering from one street to the next and occasionally stopping at one of the elaborately ornate fountains along the way as if to make conversation between themselves.

She glanced up at the distant clock tower, not having noticed it the first time she’d been here, and not even certain now that it was accurate. Twenty past midnight. She’d been here almost forty minutes, and still no sign of her erstwhile saviour.

Compared to somewhere as self-contained as the twisted cathedral in her peripheral vision, the “City” – as Dorian had so vaguely called it – was dense and sprawling. She could have searched every night for weeks by herself and never found a single sign of her missing brother. Aside from the fact that she was certain there had to be a better way, she wasn’t even sure Kit had days left, let alone weeks, given how the doctor had been talking just hours before.

Something about the man’s tone had said “prepare for the worst”, and the empty look in her father’s eyes had confirmed she hadn’t just imagined it.

A small patch of the moonlight illuminating the plaza began to steadily grow in intensity, pale dust caught amidst the descending beams starting to glow and coalesce, eventually taking the shape of a young man with wavy hair and a knee-length coat.

The light faded, leaving Dorian to stumble his way over to the alley, where he wasted no time in leaning himself against the brickwork for support.

Although she’d been about to admonish him for wasting time her brother probably didn’t have, Zoe held her tongue as she saw the boy’s face. He looked haggard. Pale. Dark shadows pooled around his eyes, and breath passed shakily through his cracked, ashen lips. If she hadn’t seen him yesterday, she’d have guessed he hadn’t slept in weeks.

‘What happened to you…?’ Zoe asked, stepping forward within reach of the boy in case he threatened to collapse completely.

‘Small run-in with the wildlife…’ Dorian replied, blinking hard as he fought to focus his eyes. ‘Sorry I’m late… Death’s not quite the setback here it is back home, but I’d hazard to guess it doesn’t hurt much less…’

Movement in the corner of her eye drew Zoe’s attention to another of those strange, glowing butterflies she saw here last night, this one perching atop the crossbar of a nearby lamppost. Was it the same one as before…? It almost looked like it was watching them…

‘You… died…?’ she asked, ignoring the strange insect for a moment and trying not to sound too incredulous. ‘How does that work? I mean, you’re here right now, so…?’

‘It’s… like having your consciousness scattered,’ Dorian replied, starting to rally a little but still looking rather queasy. ‘Then you sort of… slowly come back together in your own dream. Unaware. Playing along: like how dreams usually are, you know?’

Zoe nodded. The whole concept of being aware and conscious in her own dreams was still quite new to her, so the more usual kinds of dreams she was used to weren’t all that hard to imagine.

‘Then you have to “wake up” again,’ Dorian concluded, ‘which takes… well, as long as it takes… Sometimes it’s not too bad. Other times…’

He trailed off and glanced up towards the clock tower before turning his head back to Zoe, still leaning heavily against the wall.

‘It has only been one day, right?’ he asked, to which Zoe nodded, feeling a lot less annoyed about the half-hour wait now she knew how much longer it could have been.

‘So…’ she asked, glancing back to the cathedral. ‘Does that also mean that priest…?’

‘Yeah,’ Dorian nodded. ‘Half a chance he’s already back at his pulpit.’

‘Eugh,’ Zoe grimaced, ‘well, hopefully he at least feels as bad as you look right now.’

‘Doubt it,’ Dorian said. ‘There’s something about those creatures… They don’t just kill you, they… take something from you while they’re doing it…’

He shook his head and leaned fully back against the wall as he collected himself.

‘Maybe they need to do it to survive…?’ he continued, ‘I dunno. But I’ve seen them force their way into people’s dreams. Find who’s inside. Tear them apart. Like living nightmares.’ He paused to turn his head, finally meeting Zoe’s eye with a tired smile. ‘Bet their usual victims don’t feel quite this crap in the morning, though.’

Zoe returned the smile with a small smirk of sympathy.

‘Is there… anything I can do…?’

‘Nah,’ Dorian replied, steadily pushing himself away from the wall. ‘I’ve got some good news though, depending on how you define good news: I’m around 95% sure your brother’s somewhere in the City.’

‘You are?!’

‘Mm,’ Dorian nodded. ‘You and he are both pretty vivid dreamers, for a start. Kind of rare, honestly. Most of the people who live in Holmstowe full time are usually quite foggy and vague. I always assumed it was some kind of defence mechanism to keep the nightmares out, but maybe the two of you have some other natural trait that keeps them away instead.’ He shrugged, eyes wandering in thought.

‘You were both quite a bit harder to find in the first place than the average local,’ he added. ‘Almost mistook you for a tourist last night. But today, I found another empty dream like yours. Unless there are more coma patients at the hospital you’re not telling me about, I don’t see who else’s it could have been.’

‘That’s…’ Zoe nodded, sighing in partial relief. ‘…Yeah. That’s good.’

‘You’re taking this all awfully well in stride, you know,’ the boy commented, cracking another weak smile as he slowly started to recover.

‘I had my doubts, don’t get me wrong,’ Zoe told him, ‘but… that comment you made about tunnels yesterday. My friend and I found one this afternoon. Leading under the old pharmaceutical labs along the northern cliffs, pretty much exactly where you said.’

‘Oh,’ Dorian replied, blinking in surprise. ‘I um… Wow. I didn’t even know what those tunnels were supposed to represent myself. Nice find.’ Zoe shook her head and waved his praise aside, quite firmly aware that – although progress had been made – they were still firmly working against the clock.

‘I don’t suppose you worked out where Kit might have ended up, did you?’ she asked.

‘Same place as you,’ Dorian responded, ‘the lighthouse on the surface. Must have worked his way down through the cathedral.’

‘Damn it,’ Zoe huffed, having surmised that much herself from the discarded phone and the damaged memorial.

‘That said, though,’ Dorian added, ‘I do have an idea of where the monster that found its way into his dream came from.’

***

Zoe followed along after Dorian at a hasty crouch as the boy waved for her to join him behind the enormous, stately black carriage parked on the other side of the road. Something huge and hunched-over loomed over a heap of crates farther down the street. It was cloaked from head to toe in tattered fabric, but Zoe could only imagine it was another of the City’s seemingly endless supply of nightmare monsters.

‘I thought you said the constructs wouldn’t bother us if we acted like we belong?’ she whispered as she crouched down at the carriage’s rear wheel beside her newfound companion. ‘Why don’t we just go around?’

‘They get more… difficult when one of them is around,’ he stated, nodding in the direction of the cloaked giant. ‘Whatever they are, I think they used to be people… The ones that can speak have names for one another. The constructs are probably theirs in the first place.’

‘Guess that’s why they look so… malformed,’ Zoe nodded, watching one of the unnaturally tall, humanesque constructs as it shambled its way down the road past the carriage.

She flinched as that same, hand-sized butterfly she kept seeing fluttered straight past her face and landed neatly on her companion’s shoulder. She frowned at the boy, noting that he’d noticed, but had barely even reacted.

‘What is that thing?’ she asked, realising as she did so that the insect had six wings, and trying not to let that remind her too vividly of her encounter with the nightmare priest.

‘Hm?’ Dorian asked, glancing away from where he was keeping a careful eye on the creature up ahead to see where she was looking.

‘Oh,’ he whispered, turning his attention back front when he saw she was talking about the butterfly. ‘That’s Faust. He… well, keeps me company, I guess.’

‘It’s…’ Zoe started, frowning down at the little glowing creature. ‘Uhh, he’s your… construct…?’

‘I… never really thought about him that way,’ Dorian answered, glancing briefly down to his shoulder at the suggestion, ‘but… yeah? I suppose he must be. I mean, I don’t remember creating him, but I wasn’t fully conscious for a while when I first got here. He’s been with me from as early as I can remember, and I just sort of knew his name was Faust, so…’ He shrugged, letting his conclusion form itself.

‘You realised you could make yourself a companion,’ Zoe said, trying and failing to resist the urge to tease, ‘so… you made a pretty little butterfly?’

‘Like I said,’ Dorian replied, a mild streak of discomfort in his tone, ‘I wasn’t even properly awake at the time…’

‘Sure,’ Zoe chuckled, ‘but… I dunno, I think most guys would have gone for, like, a dog or something. Even in their sleep.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Dorian exhaled, tilting his head to hide the subtle reddening of his cheeks, ‘I don’t really like dogs all that much. They’re loud and jump up at you. And they usually smell pretty bad, so…’

‘So, a butterfly?’ Zoe smiled, glancing to Faust as Dorian looked away, and giving the unusual insect a conspiratorial wink.

‘So,’ Dorian huffed, pushing himself up against the carriage’s side, ‘I think I see an opening… c’mon.’

The boy waited for the last of the nearby constructs to turn away from the carriage before creeping across the road behind the cloaked giant. Only briefly checking for danger herself, Zoe followed along, not wanting to tarry too long and end up cut off from her guide.

‘Bloody figments…’ the giant growled to itself as they passed along behind, its voice a throaty, twisted alto. ‘How hard is it to make glass that won’t shatter from the slightest knock?!’ Taking the topmost of the crates in both of its gnarled hands, the creature threw it sidelong into a lamppost. There was an almighty crash as the box exploded on impact, followed shortly by the tinkling of glass shards and splinters raining down on the cobblestone below.

Zoe faltered at the sudden violence, freezing halfway across the street as she waited for the nightmare to either turn around or resume its work.

‘Can’t have lenses without glass…’, the creature grumbled. ‘Can’t see the twinkling aeons without the right lens…’ Seemingly satiated with its outburst, it wrenched off the lid of the next crate down and started searching through its contents.

Zoe breathed a shaky sigh of relief, glancing over to where Dorian had taken cover around the corner of the next street and creeping steadily across to join him.

‘Fools…’ the cloaked giant spat, ‘I tell them not to use the sand from the river mouth. I do. Too many bad memories in the sediment…’ Zoe kept her eye on the thing as she neared the junction where Dorian had turned off, warily watching as a construct approached it from behind and handed it across some kind of shimmering object.

‘The tears make it brittle, you see,’ the creature huffed as it snatched the object from the construct, breathing more heavily as it examined it and didn’t seem to like what it saw. ‘But do they listen? Do they ever listen?!’

The construct groaned in pain as the giant struck it hard enough across its deformed, half-melted face that it flew back through the air and landed heavily by Zoe’s feet. Clawing itself back up off the ground, the construct’s glassy, bulbous eyes fell on the girl beside it. There was a moment’s silence where Zoe simply stared wide-eyed at the collapsed construct, unable to think of what to do before – finally – the man-like thing before her let out a strangled cry of alarm.

She felt a hand on her wrist as Dorian bolted back towards her, yanking her hard in the direction of the adjoining street as the cloaked giant spun around from its crates, letting out a ravenous howl of its own as it caught a glimpse of the two of them hurriedly disappearing out of view.