Gaby’s mother was on the adjunct faculty at a few local universities, but Gaby’s favorite was a tiny school just off the main road. She often used its library to study; the librarian knew her by sight, and greeted her as she went inside. Gaby felt safe here. Like everything else about the school, the library was small, only two stories plus a basement, but today that meant that Gaby would never be far from a cluster of students. She stood inside the main hall, soothed by its soft, welcoming silence, and took stock of her situation.

She was desperately tired. Excitement and anticipation had kept her going all morning, but now that the spike of fear had dwindled away she was feeling drained and useless. She would need to sleep, whatever her next step was to be, and this was not a bad place for it. But what to do about Will? How was she going to meet up with him now?

She wasn’t worried about his safety. He was as smart as she was, and would certainly not walk through a deserted parking lot alone. Whether he came before or after her, he would see the shadows and make his escape, just as she had. What would he do then? If he was able to move freely, he would go looking for her. Where? He would probably have been able to find her home, but she couldn’t go back there. If it wasn’t burnt down already, it might be at any time, and it certainly would be if any of the hounds tracked her there. Will wouldn’t look for her there. He’d know she was keeping on the move, keeping in open, public places. But not too public: if they were going to find each other, they couldn’t go to a mall or any similar place. He would try the local libraries, she thought, and maybe a park or two. It was just possible, too, that he’d found out where her mother taught, and so it was just possible that he’d look for her here.

It was a slim chance, but worth preparing for. She stepped over to the desk and told the librarian, “I forgot my cell phone, but there’s a friend who might be meeting me here. He’s about my age, with brown eyes and dark brown hair. His name is Will. If he comes, could you tell him I’m up in the Juvenile Reading Room?”

“If I’m here when he comes,” said the librarian, who was always a little bit curt.

“Okay, thanks,” said Gaby, and then hesitated. She had to be careful, she remembered. Somehow, someone had known she would be at the high school this morning; it was possible Will had been there already, and been followed, but it was also possible that more intelligent creatures than the hounds were on her trail this time. “Only him, though. If anyone else comes looking for me, don’t tell them I’m here. I really need to get some work done, and I don’t want to be bothered.” It sounded feeble, she knew. The librarian pursed her lips slightly, and Gaby added, with a little half-shrug, “Sorry, I know that’s a nuisance. Never mind, I can send them away myself I guess.”

The librarian, a very nice lady underneath her brusqueness, looked apologetic herself and said, “It’s no trouble. I know it can be hard to study when you have friends coming around.”

Gaby smiled, and thanked her again. There was still some risk, but she didn’t think she could push it any farther without arousing some kind of suspicion. She went up to the second floor, where the Juvenile Reading Room was. It was her own favorite place to study; people rarely came in, and she could spread all her books and papers out on the long table in the middle of the room. The windows looked out on the open green quad, and the walls were lined with many of the first books she’d ever read, a comforting presence.

Sleep was the priority. She could rest here for a couple of hours, then make a new plan. It was unlikely Will would be sleeping at this time, so she probably wouldn’t be able to find him in dreams, but there was always a chance. And she needed the rest badly, to clear her brain. Nobody would look twice at a student catching a nap over her books. She took out her notebook and pencil for appearances’ sake, then she folded her arms on the table and laid down her head.

She was standing on a road, a road paved with yellow, diamond-shaped stones, each one polished smooth. It sliced in a long, even curve through a dark fir wood. The light of a setting sun fingered through the wood and made the stones of the road gleam golden. Seeing nothing else around her, Gaby began to walk.

It was a dream, of course, but she couldn’t immediately tell what kind. Some dreams were hers only, took place in her own mental space, with characters her own brain created. Some were intrusions on somebody else’s dream-space, herself appearing as a character in what had begun as somebody else’s dream. Sometimes they seemed to be a little of both, or neither. She could often identify her own dreamscapes quickly, and this did not look like one of those, but you could never be sure. So, like an explorer on new ground, she walked.

She walked for a long time, waiting for something new to appear, but nothing changed except the position of the sun. She couldn’t see the sun itself, but the light fell from her left, casting long dark shadows to the right, and as she walked around the curve of the road, it fell to her back, then to her right. The road continued to wind uniformly around, until she had come full circle, with the sun to her left again. She stopped at this point. There didn’t seem to be any sense in walking the circle again, so instead she turned toward the sun—in the real world that would be west, but in the dream-world it didn’t mean anything—and began walking through the firs.

The wood was eerily quiet, with no sound but the tiny snaps of brittle twigs as she walked past and over them. It should have been beautiful, striped with green-black and shining gold, but instead Gaby felt more and more uneasy. The twigs that tugged at her hair and clothes as she passed seemed to be grabbing at her deliberately, and the shadows seemed to be deeper than black. She found herself looking into them, expecting to see something else inside, and when she realized she was doing this she scolded herself sharply. It was imperative, in dreams, not to begin to be afraid. In the real world, being afraid of something wouldn’t make it more likely to happen, but in the dream-world it could. When Gaby had first realized this, as a very small child, her nightmares had gotten very bad: the smallest spark of fear had spiralled quickly into a gripping terror, which then brought forth all the horrors it dreaded. But she had fought those battles long ago, and learned how to win them. She set her sights firmly on the gaps ahead, where the trees were thinning out. After walking for a minute or two she let her gaze wander back to the shadows, telling herself lightly that they were shadows only, and no darker or deeper than a shadow in the real world would be.

She came through the last line of trees to find another road, identical to the one she had left. She turned to look back, but the wood was too thick to see through. If not for the steady direction of the sunlight, she might think she had walked another circle. Not, as she reminded herself, that the direction of sunlight had to mean anything, any more than east or west did. She considered for a moment, and decided to walk another loop of the road. It was easier going than the wood.

This time, though, something changed. By the direction of the light, she had walked almost halfway around the road when a person came into view ahead of her. She stopped, startled, and then walked forward more quickly. Whether it was a real person, or a construction of her own dream, it would be a change.

The person turned as she came close. It was a young man, black, probably in his early twenties. His face drew together in a puzzled frown as she approached.

“I thought I was alone here,” he said. Based on his surprise, Gaby thought that he was probably a real person. Dream-people tended to take things much more in stride—as did real people when confronted with creatures belonging to their own dreams. It was only when a real person intruded on another’s consciousness that surprise and puzzlement were common. Gaby had learned how to behave like a dream-person, melding as seamlessly as possible with the other person’s dreamings; this made it easier when meeting people she knew in real life, who tended to be unnerved by her appearance in their dreams. But since she didn’t know this person, and he wasn’t the right age to be a classmate of hers, she felt free to behave as herself.

“No,” she said, “there’s two of us here. Maybe more.”

He gave her a sharp look that she couldn’t quite read. “More? Like who?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I was surprised to see you, too. How did you get here?”

“I walked.” He said it as if it should be obvious.

Gaby had to go carefully here. Most likely he didn’t know he was dreaming, and telling someone out of the blue could have uncertain effects. She tried a less direct approach. “How long have you been walking?”

“Since the—the beginning.” He had been about to say something else, but caught himself. Curious.

“And how long was that?”

He shrugged. “About a dozen loops, I think. I didn’t think there was anyone else here.”

“Well, it’s a wide circle. I’m not surprised we missed each other.”

His frown deepened. Gaby continued, “Did you ever try cutting through the woods?”

“No!” he said, startling Gaby with his force. “Why would I do that? Why would you?”

Gaby shrugged. “I thought I might get somewhere different. Why wouldn’t you?”

“You mean you don’t know where we’re going?”

“You mean you do?” Gaby was truly surprised now. She rarely met someone, in dreams or in life, who knew more about what was going on than she did.

“Of course. We’re going to the—” he bit his last word off. “Well. You’ll find out soon enough. Sooner, if you keep cutting through the woods. The path is taking me, faster than I want it to.”

“Taking you…” Gaby trailed off. An realization was taking shape. “This road, it’s not a circle, is it?”

He shook his head, again with that dark, unreadable look in his eyes. “It’s a spiral. We’re walking toward the end. We can’t stop, but I’m stalling as long as I can.”

It was then that Gaby realized they had begun walking again. She had no memory of starting, but here they were walking forward, and the sunlight was in her eyes again. She glanced up at him in alarm, and he nodded. “It happens just like that. I can stop walking for a while, but as soon as I lose concentration, I find out that I’ve started again.”

They continued forward; Gaby did not suggest stopping. The experience of finding her legs moving without her consent or even her knowledge was unnerving. It had been many years since she’d found herself so helpless within the uncanniness of the dream-world.

“What if we walk the other way?” Gaby asked.

“Try it.”

She turned around, and he followed her. It seemed to be working; the road curved away to the left, now, instead of to the right. She glanced at him, puzzled, and he gave a short little nod, as if to say, Keep going. They walked on in silence, and presently she saw what he meant.

The sunlight had been coming from straight ahead just before they’d turned around, and now was at their backs. But instead of coming around to fall from their left again, as it should be if they were walking backward, it was circling around to their right: the same way it had gone when they were walking the other direction.

Hearing her tiny gasp, her companion nodded. “It doesn’t matter which way we walk. We’re always going the same direction.”

“But…” said Gaby, trying to visualize their path in her head, trying to make it make sense. She knew it was stupid, that sense and dreams didn’t commonly go together. But they do for me, she thought. They do because I want them to. Why is this dream so different?

She considered her companion again. From his confidence and understanding of the situation, she would think he was another dream-walker: a luienth, in the language she and Will had created. In fact that word had been the foundation of their whole language, the word that described what the two of them were. A word that had no equivalent in English, because most speakers of English didn’t know they needed one. Will and Gaby had hypothesized that there must be others like them, but they had never met any; none that they could be sure were real people, and not simply figures conjured up by their own wishful minds. Had she finally met one after all?

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Matthias.”

“Matthias,” she repeated. “I’m Gaby.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You said you’d been here since the beginning,” Gaby said. “The beginning of what?”

“Of this,” he said, looking down at the road beneath his feet. The golden-yellow paving stones were quite pretty; Gaby saw nothing in them to merit the loathing in his eyes and voice as he regarded them. She tried again.

“And where were you before that?”

He looked at her strangely. “Before that…?” he repeated, as if the words had no meaning. Gaby nodded, but no understanding showed on his face. If he was a luienth, surely he would know that he was in a dream, that he had a waking life outside this one. After a minute, Gaby sighed.

“Never mind,” she said. If you were going to nudge a dreaming person into lucidity, you had to do it gently, by planting hints and letting them work it out for themselves. The shock to them was very unpleasant otherwise, as she’d found when she’d done it to her father once.

After walking a while longer, so that the light was once again in front of them, Gaby asked, “How do you know what we’re walking toward?”

“It’s obvious,” he said. He looked at her, expecting her to get it. Gaby just shook her head. He turned his head to the front again, and kept walking. After a few more steps, he said. “I suppose it’s harder to see, since you started in the middle. And I suppose it’s only fair that you know what to expect.” The muscles of his jaw clenched and unclenched a few times. “I started at the tail. So obviously, we’re walking toward the head.”

“The tail of what? The head of what?” Gaby asked, though feeling sure she would regret it.

“What do you think we’re walking on?” he said. Gaby looked down at the rounded, diamond-shaped stones.

“A road,” she said. He shook his head with a bitter smile.

“A snake.”