He’s walking down a road, always the same road, a road he’s traveled in his waking life, but not one he can place exactly. Somewhere near Barstow maybe, somewhere outside Las Cruces. Scrubland, where the plants bristle with thorns and the hot wind never stops blowing, where train tracks slice across salt flats like ropy old scars, and the air is so clear what’s ten miles away looks like it’s two. He’s walking alone on this road, and how he knows it’s a dream is it’s daytime.

He hasn’t been outside during the day in more than seventy-five years. Seventy-five years since he’s felt the sun on his face, seventy-five years since he’s lain under a tree and run his fingers over leaf shadows flitting across a patch of warm grass, seventy-five years since he’s squinted through his lashes to pin a cawing raven against the noon glare. For the past three-quarters of a century he’s lived by night, in the ebon hours when monsters hunt and good folk keep to their houses. Since he turned, every dawn’s been a death sentence, every sunbeam a white-hot razor.

That’s why he’s overjoyed whenever he dreams his only dream, when he finds himself walking that road under the blazing sun, under a few wisps of cloud unraveling across the sky. A bounding jackrabbit kicks up dust. A breeze brings a whiff of sage. He comes upon an empty pop can and gives it a kick. Light and warmth worm their way into the coldest, darkest thickets inside him, and if he never woke again, he’d be fine. This would be enough—the road, the sky, the sun—forever.

“Jesse.”

Jesse opens his eyes. The ceiling is dark. Night has come down.

“Jesse.”

“What?”

“I pissed myself.”

Jesse sits up. His brother, Edgar, is lying in the other bed in his own mess. Even Abby, Edgar’s cat, has more sense than that. At least she was smart enough to jump down to the floor. Jesse exhales his disgust. He doesn’t mean for Edgar to hear it, but hear it he does.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar says, and starts to cry.

“It’s all right,” Jesse says. “You’ve been doing better.”

Ten years have passed since Edgar last had trouble holding his water, and Jesse can’t figure out why the problem has returned. He asked Edgar if he was scared or worried about anything, and Edgar said no, so he supposes it’s simply another of his bad behaviors that’ll keep coming back now and then, like the shoplifting and the lying and the wandering off, something he’ll be training out of him again and again for all eternity.