She stands in a desert she knows too well. Home. The crags of old mines in the distance, the faces of inhospitable bluffs casting deep shadows across the blasted land, around her the struts of ancient metal as monuments to human industry. The familiarity of the environs wakes the nostalgia in her marrow. That ache. A loneliness. She turns, thinking of finding the town and its twisty alleyways reeking of sewage water. She longs for the reef she grew up in, where Mother and her warm arms wait. Misery has barely dreamed of Mother since she died, a situation she’s grateful for—why torture herself with things that can never be? But right now she wants Mother. Wants to tell her she was right all this time. Let her see what her little pickle has become.

But dream-Rootsdown is not like the Rootsdown she remembers, and there is no way out of the desert. She walks in the direction of her hometown, only to find herself back where she started. So that’s how it is. Ozone on her tongue, in the back of her throat: this isn’t a dreaming where she’s in control. Her worldmap is locked and she has an objective to head to. And she already knows what—or who—she will find.

She crosses the burning gulch, letting that acrid taste guide her forward. Her destination lies deep in the mech graveyard. The sand eats her footsteps as she walks. Strangely she feels no apprehension, no anxiety. Her mind has been armored by the Grace of the Larex Forge, and she has nothing to fear. Not void, not delusion.

A figure stands in the shelter of the constructor mech she named Daisy in the real world. She recognizes that shape: slender, loose-robed, sandy hair billowing in the ersatz wind. Jericho. She falls toward him as though he has developed gravity.

He’s fixated upon the shape of the dead mech and doesn’t turn when she steps into the radius of his body heat. “This is where you grew up, isn’t it? It’s a harsh land.”

“Shit’s hard in the boonies,” she says. “It is what it is.”

“You’re a survivor. You’ve fought every step of your way here.”

“I’m glad for it. It made me what I am.”

Jericho turns. Studies her with hooded eyes. “You seem different,” he says. “You’ve been gone for a while. Did something happen?”

Of course he would know; he lives in her head, after all. “My eyes were opened,” she says. “I’ve learned the truth about myself. About who I’m supposed to be.”

“The seraph test went well, then.”