She froze so thoroughly that Ronan also froze, looking at her, and because he had frozen, too, Bryde eventually turned and assessed.

He simply said, “Ah.”

Unhurried, he reached down into the underbrush by Hennessy’s feet. He straightened, holding a black snake just behind its head. The snake’s muscular body rippled subtly in his grip.

Head cocked, Bryde studied it. It studied him.

“It’s cold for you, friend,” he told it. “Is it not time for your sleep?” To Ronan and Hennessy, he said, “She is not the deadliest thing in this room. In the wild, this black snake will only live a decade or so, and the only thing she will hurt is just as many mice as she needs to stay alive. Elegant. Efficient. Wonderful, really. She is the in-out of a measured breath.”

He offered the snake to Hennessy.

If there was any part of Hennessy that was afraid of the snake, she didn’t show it. She simply took it, mimicking his hold behind its eyes.

The snake twisted wildly, body undulating right by Hennessy’s arm, and Hennessy’s torso twisted, too, bowing out of the way of the grasping tail. Then girl and snake seemed to reach an agreement, and they stood quietly in the undergrowth.

“She’s a fucking knockout. I would paint her,” Hennessy said.

“Look at her,” Bryde said. “Really look. Memorize her. What are the rules of her? If you were to dream her, what would you need to know?”

Ronan, high school dropout, had never been one for school, but he liked this. He liked all of it. He liked taking in the effortless, perfect way the hexagons of the snakeskin butted up against each other. He liked watching how the dry, cool skin seemed armored, inflexible, until she moved and it all contracted and expanded, the muscles moving beneath the surface like an entirely different creature lived beneath the skin.

He liked being asked by a dreamer to think about her in the context of his dreams.

Finally, Bryde took the snake from Hennessy and released her carefully back into the underbrush. He said, somewhat bitterly, “This is a museum to the waking; what would the artifacts of a world of dreamers look like? This is a civilization so sure of its own inadequacy and entitlement that it forever tries to drown out the din of other species with its own miserable white noise of failed ambition and masturbatory anxiety. A few voices cry out against it—what if those voices were the majority? What a world. Now: masks.”

Ronan withdrew his mask from his jacket. The two simple, silken masks had been one of the first things they’d dreamt with Bryde—masks that made the wearer go instantly to sleep. Bryde vastly preferred them to the dreamt sleeping pills Ronan had used before they met.