She tapped him lightly on the right side with her shoes like a rider guiding her mount with a touch of the reins. He went obediently. The mirrored studio fell behind, and the path led once more into the cold air of the silent desert, but the woman on his back kept her substance and her weight. He kept walking, carrying her as penance and compass.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“Eh?” he replied. “What for?”

“I mistook you—”

“—for the one I am seeking. I gathered that. Don’t dwell on it. You’re allowed a little suspicion and uncertainty when you’re dreaming. Still . . . don’t listen to them next time.”

“What if they’re angels?”

He almost staggered, but he quickly caught and composed himself. “Angels . . . it’s worth it to listen to angels . . . some of them. What have the angels been telling you?”

“They said it wasn’t my time to die.” She relaxed a little as she spoke, dropping her head close enough to tuck lightly between his shoulder and ear. Was it the beginning of trust? He hoped so.

The ground changed to paving stones below his feet, and the wind blew alternately fresh with salt spray and rank with rotting seaweed. Night was turning to dawn. It was a familiar district. The town houses of the City lined the low seawall, the mossy bricks of the wall topped the wave-weathered boulders above the beach, and the boulders edged the thin strip of coarse sand that was all the sea had to offer at low tide.

“Danil’s here,” she said.

Chance stared around him as the light grew, but there was only unpeopled land and empty sea. One of the boulders shifted slightly, gray-brown against gray-brown, and the shape of a man emerged to the eye like a chameleon breaking free of camouflage. He was naked, sitting hunched and hollow-eyed with his limbs and body curled around his lap in what appeared at first to be an attempt at modesty. He turned his head and his head only to stare at Chance with anger and accusation.

“Give me something to wear,” he demanded.

“It’s your dream,” Chance countered. “Craft a garment for yourself.”

Danil looked away, grieved. “I tried,” he said. “Nothing changes.”

He stood up carefully, keeping his back to them. He held a simple length of fabric gripped in his left hand, which he quickly wrapped and knotted about his waist. For a while he stood there, gazing out to sea, looking more like a village fisherman than a resident of the City. Chance was about to voice his confusion when Danil sighed and turned around. A neat oval pierced him through so that where there should have been cloth, skin, flesh, bone, organs, genitals, there was only a small window showing the motion of the waves behind him.