I wanted to tell myself it was better than them killing each other, but any scenario that ended with them dead was ranking low on desirable to me. Weird how once you’ve given up your life for a pair of people, their survival becomes so significant.

“It is fortunate for you that we found you here, Mr. Wren,” One said. “You would have died without our aid. And we still need you for your translating abilities.”

If I hadn’t already known I was dreaming, that would have confirmed it. I looked up at her and laughed. “To translate Ameng? Don’t you know you’re speaking it?”

The corners of One’s eyes tightened. “Four,” she said, and the Green Minister came over, dark ringlets around her face. She knelt in front of me and pulled out a medical scanner.

“Not speaking in the Light language, huh?” I asked her sympathetically, while she ran the scanner over my head and torso. “Probably because the AI doesn’t know it.” Which would explain why I could speak Kystrene, but my hallucinatory Indigo couldn’t.

The scanner beeped, and Green read aloud off the screen. “Severe brain damage in his auditory and visual cortex.”

“Meaning?” said Number One.

“He might see things that aren’t there, and hear things differently than they are.”

“A dream will say anything to stay plausible, won’t it?” I remarked to One.

“We don’t have time for this,” she decided. “Stand him up.”

Red pulled me upright. I let him do it, because honestly, at this point, why not? “Where to now? Lab 17?”

Even in a nightmare, One’s stare was piercing. “Lab 17,” she agreed.

There was no surprise in her voice. The real Number One had been hellbound for Mara Zhu’s office, but this dream of Ultraviolet knew everything that I knew, including the location of the Stone. As a group, we moved through the server room and directly to the little room where Indigo and Tamara had hidden. There was an ache in the back of my skull now, to go with the gritty itching of my eyes.

“So is this it?” I asked my hallucination of Number One as we walked through the little room—no bloodstains this time! The AI was slacking—and towards the door marked LAB 17. “The lesson the universe was trying to teach me? About how I should give up and I’m alone and everybody is terrible?”

One turned and looked at me. My vision warped, the way it had the first time I’d opened my eyes since the Dreamer had infected me, and instead of One’s lovely inhuman face I saw fathomless black eyes like the Children had, and gnashing metal teeth like Dreamer-bots in formation, humming out of a human mouth.

Then it was just One again, looking more human than usual out of sheer contrast with the nightmare visage I’d seen. She gave me a remote mountain-top look, and said nothing.

Lab 17 was exactly where I’d left it the last few times. Red slid the door into the wall and in we went. Benny and Quint got shoved to the side as soon as we entered, and I got summarily tossed in with them.