“Nothing before,” Chris said, shrugging. He wouldn’t tell them about the bonfire, the bugs, the quarantine crew.

“I don’t remember anything either,” Sveta said. She was always quiet, trying to sound gentle and nonthreatening. She said ‘sorry’ a lot, stared at the ground. She went on, “But I dream. I’ve tried to paint it, to take those fragments of dreams and put a puzzle together.”

“Do you dream, Chris?” the therapist asked. Prodded. Pried.

“No,” Chris said. He had nightmares regularly, and even though he considered those ‘dreams’, he wouldn’t share that. It was knowledge that could be used to trace his background.

He saw her scratch words onto the notebook that laid on her lap. She avoided looking at him as she wrote.

“I dream,” Ashley said. “Mrs. Yamada told me that dreams may be important to parahumans.”

“Do you keep a dream diary?” Sveta asked.

And the conversation moved on. Chris was aware of the therapist glancing at him more than she glanced at the others. Her pen rested on the page by the note she’d made.

⊙

Second imperative: migrate.

Surviving meant eating, and eating gave him the strength to walk instead of crawling. He was growing, and the rate of growth made his entire body hurt.

Eating meat was hard, because it required catching that meat, and eating enough vegetation to keep himself going required constant eating, which conflicted with the second imperative.

It also meant that he had to experiment with eating different things. He’d eaten some shoots last night, and had spent his usual sleeping hours enduring stomach cramps and a forced evacuation of everything he’d eaten and then some. Now he was delirious, thirsty, and having to stop because his stomach was contracting and cramping so badly.

He needed to keep moving, both because it was imperative and because he needed water and there wasn’t any here.

He found himself slowing, taking more breaks. To do otherwise would have meant collapse, but stopping and not reaching water or destination meant death or—

Or nothing. There was no alternative.

Five hundred breaths of walking. Three hundred breaths of sitting, resting.

Then four hundred breaths of walking. Four hundred breaths of sitting, resting.

Two hundred breaths to walk. Six hundred breaths to sit.

All measured out. Forward progress was the only option. The weather was wet and cold and he felt like the warmth in him had died some time ago. The plodding forward was monotonous—he no longer looked for danger or for food. He breathed and he marched. The breaths were even, in and out, and they were his clock.

Fifty breaths of walking—he had to stop, his stomach cramping. He lost count of his breathing while gasping in pain. He imagined it was close to a thousand.

A hundred breaths of walking. A thousand breaths of rest.