She’d dreamt of Chu’s Knot again. Perhaps her dreams of the Knot were an objective correlative for her subconscious attempts to tease out the optimal plotline of her ever-more-intricate Wheenk. So intense was the dream work that some mornings Thuy felt she’d gotten no rest. In her dream last night, Thuy had been surfing a glowing ribbon of spaceways connecting the unfamiliar southern constellations, her lambent wakes forming a not-quite-complete image of the long-sought-for Knot.

Mulling over the dream as she stared over the Pacific, Thuy realized that the dream constellations had been diagrams of the individual scenes of her metanovel—up until this moment, she’d never seen the narrative so clearly.

It would be satisfying if her Wheenk character Thuy Nguyen could decisively defeat the Wheenk character Jeff Luty. And she was beginning to see a way to make this work. Jil Zonder was the key. Jil knew the ExaExa buildings well; when Jil was younger, she’d worked at ExaExa for years, posing for product-dancer shoots in every part of the compound. Jil would help, if Thuy could find a way to get her off sudocoke. Never mind Jil’s affair with Jayjay, never mind her insults, Thuy admired the woman. Jil wasn’t herself now. Thuy felt sorry for her. Jil had gotten a raw deal. It was just a matter of rewriting Jil’s most recent scenes. Thuy’s metanovel, her life, the Knot—all the same. Could real-life Thuy assassinate real-life Luty, if it came to that?

Enough scheming for now. Let the scenario beezies do their work, trust the muse, merge with the cosmos, enjoy the sea air. A tiny, natural ant picked its way through the grass; sheep grazed on the rolling rocky slope. Little star-shaped yellow flowers bloomed among the grasses. Looming up next to Thuy and Jayjay’s resting spot was the worn dark monolith of a long-nosed moai carved from bumpy volcanic basalt. He had long ears and thin, pursed lips; over the last thousand years he’d settled back as if to stare up at the stars.

Thuy felt a little sore from the car banging into her on Valencia Street yesterday. What a day that had been. And today was gonna be another. She stretched and did some bends, working out the kinks. It was so unreal to be on Easter Island.

Thuy and Jayjay had the hillside of moai all to themselves this morning—thanks to teleportation. Thuy was beginning to get the feeling that soon she’d be able to teleport on her own without Jayjay helping her. The missing piece was Jayjay’s interpolation trick for making the target scene look so very real.