Kai always made herself hot cocoa before a nightmare. The routine soothed her: heat milk on the stove, stop just before it boils, mix milk and cocoa powder to form the paste, pour the remaining milk, and whisk. Dust cinnamon on top. She needed calm. She needed to stand in her kitchen and forget for a moment, forget Claude and Margot, forget Jace and even Mara. Remember home. Remember soothing candlelight. Remember warm blankets, and towels, and good sex, and pancakes, and the clear sky after a storm.

This was the doublethink of the nightmare telegraph: if you were scared, you couldn’t sleep unless you tired yourself to the brink of exhaustion, and then you might sleep too soundly for dreams, or not soundly enough. Kai couldn’t afford delays. She had to speak with Mara, now.

Kai avoided nightmare communication unless strictly necessary. Too much waited beneath the surface of her mind. The Order used professional dreamers for the most part: asleep gagged and blindfolded in warm caves under Kavekana’ai, scribbling messages on automatically turning scrolls. Suggest short-selling Mithraist Gamma Fund. Will require high liquidity next quarter. Concerned about long-term stability of emerging markets in Northern Gleb. So on, and so forth. When Jace took over he banned the gags, called them inhumane. That first week, a page who hadn’t got the earmuffs memo walked in on a dreamer mid-session. The screams ruptured his eardrums. The gags returned.

So Kai made herself hot chocolate and thought about everything and anything else. Mara’s visit on the balcony, in the blue dress, after it all went wrong. Teenage nights sneaking out to poetry slams, glorying in end, internal, initial rhymes. Emerging from the pool after she remade herself, whole at last in her own body. Her first years with Claude, before the joy bled out.

She carried her cocoa upstairs. Cup rattled in saucer. Bedclothes lay tangled halfway between bed and floor, from where she’d clawed herself awake that morning. She made the bed, smoothed the comforter, piled pillows at the headboard, and changed into her bathrobe. Smoothing the bedspread, she could almost forget what happened here last night, and what it meant.

Nothing, that’s what. You saw him today, and you were fine and he was fine. Use alcoholics’ wisdom: take life day by day.

Another sip of cocoa, and as she swallowed she let herself feel tired. She’d been tired for years, and only felt it now, as if exhaustion had hidden in the hollows of her bones until offered a chance to unfurl. A light turned on in her chest. She lay back. She wished she had a stuffed animal. She used to sleep with a stuffed dolphin. She threw him out before Claude moved in.