Cabeswater?
There was no answer.
He didn’t know what happened to him if Cabeswater died.
“Ronan!” Adam shouted. “Are you here?”
Maybe Ronan was only sleeping, not dreaming. Maybe he was dreaming somewhere else. Maybe he had arrived here before Adam and had already been killed in his dreams. “Ronan!”
“Kerah,” moaned the Orphan Girl.
When he looked for her, though, she was nowhere to be seen. Had she come with him, scrying after him into the bowl? Could Ronan dream another one of her into his dreams? Adam knew the answer to this: yes. He’d watched a dreamt Ronan die in front of the real Ronan. There could be infinite Orphan Girls here in this forest. Damn it. He didn’t know how to call for her. He tried: “Orphan Girl!”
As soon as he shouted it, he was sorry. Things were what you named them in this place. In any case, there was no reply.
He began to move through the forest. He was careful to cling to his body back at the Barns. His hands on the cold scrying bowl. His hip bones against the wooden floor. The smell of the fireplace behind him. Remember where you are, Adam.
He didn’t want to call again for Ronan; he didn’t want this nightmare to forge a duplicate. Everything he saw was terrible. Here a snake dissolving while still alive, here a stag in slow-motion pedal on the ground, vines growing up through its still-living flesh. Here was a creature that was not Adam but was nonetheless somehow clothed like him. Adam flinched, but the strange boy was not attending to him. He was instead slowly eating his own hands.
Adam shuddered. “Cabeswater, where is he?”
His voice cracked, and Cabeswater heaved, trying to appease its magician. A rock had manifested before him. Or rather, it had always been there, in the way of dreams, in the way Noah appeared or disappeared. Adam had seen this boulder before; its striated surface was covered with purple-black letters in Ronan’s handwriting.
Adam moved past it as something screamed behind him.
Here was Ronan. Finally. Finally.
Ronan was circling something in the burned-out grass between ruined trees; when Adam drew closer he saw that it was a carcass. It was hard to tell what it had first looked like. It seemed to have chalky white skin, but deep slashes bit through the flesh; the edges of them curled in on themselves pinkly. A snarl of intestines roped out from under a greasy gray flap and hooked on a red-tipped claw. Mushrooms burst through parts of all of it, and there was something terribly wrong about them; they were difficult to look at.
“No,” Ronan said. “Oh no. You bastard.”
“What is it?” Adam asked.
Ronan’s hand hovered over two parted beaks, side by side, both rimmed with black and something purple-red that Adam didn’t want to consider too deeply. “My night horror. God. Shit.”
“Why would it be here?”
“I don’t know. It cares about what I care about,” Ronan said. He peered up at Adam. “Is this a nightmare, or is this real?”
Adam held his gaze. This was where they were now: Nightmares were real. There was no difference between dreams and reality when they stood here in Cabeswater together.
“What’s doing this?” Ronan asked. “I can’t hear the trees. Nothing’s talking to me.”
Adam held his gaze. He didn’t want to say demon out loud.
Ronan said, “I want to wake up. Can we? I don’t want to bring any of it back. And I can’t keep my thoughts – I can’t —”
“Yes,” Adam interrupted. He couldn’t, either. “We need to talk to the others. Let’s —”
“Kerah!”
The Orphan Girl’s thin cry caught Ronan immediately; he craned his neck to see her among the dark branches and pools.
“Leave her,” Adam said. “She’s with us in real life.”
But Ronan hesitated.
“Kerah!” she wailed again, and this time Adam heard the pain in her voice. It was small and childlike and piteous, and everything in him had been coded to respond to it. “Kerah, succurro!”
It was impossible to tell if this was the Orphan Girl they had back at the Barns, or if this was a copy, or if it was a monstrous devil bird with her voice. Ronan didn’t care. He ran anyway. Adam crashed after him. Everything he passed was hideous: a forest of willows sagged into each other, a bird singing a note backwards, a fist of black insects crawling over the stub of a rabbit carcass.
The voice did not belong to a monstrous devil bird. It was the Orphan Girl, or something that looked just like her, and she knelt in a scruff of dry grass. She had not been crying, but she burst into tears when she saw Ronan. As he reached her, out of breath, she held out her arms to him imploringly. Adam did not think she was a copy; she wore his watch with its bite marks on the band, and in any case, this feeble Cabeswater lacked the strength to produce such an incorrupt version of her.
“Succurro, succurro,” she sobbed. Help, help – The arms she stretched to Ronan were coated and spattered in blood up to the elbow.
Ronan skidded to his knees, his arms around her, and it hurt Adam, somehow, to watch how ferociously he hugged his little strange dream creature, and how she buried her face into his shoulder. He stood with her in his arms, holding her tightly, and he heard her saying, No, you did good, it’s going to be OK, we’re waking up.
Then Adam saw it. He saw it before Ronan did, because Ronan had not yet looked beyond the Orphan Girl. No, no. The Orphan Girl had not stopped here because it was all the further she could run. She had knelt there because that was all the further she could drag the body. Body was a tender word for it. Long strands of hair stuck to the largest of pieces; all of it was strung out long like a string of viscous pearls. This was how Orphan Girl’s arms had got painted with blood; this futile rescue effort.