I landed hard on the floor next to Benny. He had his handbrace on and was rubbing the skin beneath it.

“Do me a favor, will you,” I said to Benny, who gave me a narrow look. “Take a look. Would you say there’s something in my eye?”

“What the fuck?” Benny said.

The table was where I’d left it, and the Stone in the center. The room around the Stone looked distinctly more like Brigid’s bedroom, but done in darkness and steel, decay rotting metal. If I squinted, I could almost make out where her bed had been.

One reached the center of the room. She plucked the Stone from the table and held it before her eyes, pale Stone, pale face, glimmering.

And then the back door to the room that hadn’t been there before burst open, and the manikins came snarling in.

They didn’t bother with me, or Benny, or Quint. They went straight for the Ministers. There was an equal number of them, six Ministers to six manikins, and when they fought their movements matched, like they were fighting their own reflections.

Matched exactly, in fact. The Dreamer was getting lazy.

The stench of blood and viscera was real enough. It filled the room when all the Ministers and manikins had killed each other, and black and violet blood ran over the floor. The Philosopher Stone had fallen near One’s corpse, and her blood running under cast it a vibrant violet.

“Sean,” said Benny, “grab the Stone.”

“Not you too,” I said, trying to speak as little as possible around the nauseating scents of death.

“It’s the only way we’ll make it back alive,” Quint added, her voice high with fear.

Somewhere in this dream, Indigo and Tamara lay dead on the Nameless. I could only hope that wasn’t true in reality. If I had to be stuck forever in this Purgatory nightmare, the least the universe could do in return was make sure the two of them survived.

“Sean,” Benny said.

“You’ve got legs,” I told him. “If you want it, you take it.”

Quint said, “You don’t want it, then?”

“I don’t want it,” I told her.

She stood, Benny a beat behind, and plucked the Stone out of the carnage. It dripped violet.

The two of them paused at the door. “Last chance to change your mind,” Benny said. He didn’t sound like himself at all.

“No, thank you,” I said.

Some long minutes after they were gone, the corpse on the floor that looked like Number One opened her eyes. They were fathomless and black.

“Let me guess,” I said to that body. “I’ve got something in my eye.”

Blood rippled beneath her cheek when she spoke. “And something in your spine,” the corpse told me.

CHAPTER SIXTY THREE:

Hindsight

I opened my eyes to sunlight and cheeping birds and a scent in the air I hadn’t smelled for eight long years. Kystrene wood and dried flowers. Through the crack in my bedroom door, I heard voices downstairs, talking and laughing.