#Ashworth student portal

[sandersgrey]

A Study in Greys

Eventual Kit/Ty Endgame, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Psychological Trauma, Kit Herondale Has ADHD.

First. 3. Next. 5. Sixth. Seventh. Fic also available on ao3.

Wordcount: 4k.

A/N: Thanks again to Jynx (@jynxlovesluck), as without their beta work and constant, unwavering support, this would be a much poorer story.

Another huge thanks to Fae (@thechangeling) as well, who has tolerated my various rants about this fic and also generously allowed me to borrow their OC Alyssa.

Hope you guys like her! Trigger warnings for this chapter: Implied emotional manipulation. Open prejudice. Ty punches a wall, but not with the intent to hurt himself.

Second Chapter: Waters Run Deep

It starts so gradually that even Ty doesn’t quite notice it at first. 

They pair him off with Anush for all of the three days it takes for the higher ups to realize that they’re actual friends, and then no longer allow them to do joint assignments together- not by outright forbidding them, which would have been too obvious, but by always, always pairing them with others in missions. 

It’s only then that Ty realizes they were meant to hate each other. No one, it seems, had paid any attention to their student days. There isn’t even any shortage of new centurions who do hate either or both of them. 

None of them ever come out and say it, of course— Ty would have respected it more if they had— but it’s become obvious with time. 

Ragnor never tells him about the complaints made when he was allowed to wear his headphones in class. He didn’t need to. Despite popular belief, Ty could still hear them just fine. 

He’d made sure to strike harder the louder they got. 

It had worked, at first. Ty wasn’t the strongest in their year, but he had quickly become the fastest, rising through with sheer single-minded commitment to his skills. He’s good at what he does. Early on, before he knows anything else, he knows this: that they can’t afford to lose him. 

Maybe that’s why they go for Anush, then. 

Anush, because he — even though they’d never say that’s the reason — he, unlike Ty, doesn’t know the Consul. Because no one important would notice if he wasn’t there. 

Ty has noticed. But Ty himself isn’t anyone important, is he?

“Don’t get in trouble while I’m out”, Anush says. “It’s not worth it.”

Mayhew laughs shrilly behind them, bragging to Jones about always being able to snatch a promise of vacation during the worst patrol time, Ashworth’s vocal disapproval of their excitement not enough to make them shut the fuck up. 

She’d grinned while giving Anush the assignment. Ty visualizes wrapping his hands around her neck and squeezing. 

“Be careful.”

“It’s not exile. I’m just-”

“They’re just sending you off on an international mission for six months.”

Anush sighs, hikes his bag’s strap higher on his shoulder. “Listen. You can’t be caught complaining.”

I could just go home. Ty knows he won’t- doesn’t want to see the expression on Julian’s face, doesn’t want people to laugh because he couldn’t make it, to prove them right . Some days, though. Some days. 

“Write to me while you’re there.”

“They said no contact.”

“I know”, Ty says. “Write to me anyway.”

That gets a smile out of Anush, but he doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head. As he watches his friend disappear into the Portal, Ty lets himself pretend that’s a yes. 

He does go home. A week’s break, to see Helen and Tavy back in LA- his requests, he’s  noticed, always take much longer to process than most of his fellow centurions’, Mayhew’s most of all. They still eventually come. He tells himself that’s good enough.

It only takes one look at him for Helen to frown. “Are they treating you alright back there?”

No. “I’m jet lagged”, he says, because it’s true. 

She lets it go.

His room is the exact same as he left it. The only difference is the sky, with the sunlight coming through a window at a slightly different position from break. Ty draws the curtains shut and pretends that the dark doesn’t bother him.  It’s where he can see Livy the best, after all. 

She stands on top of his dresser, hands on her hips, like an explorer viewing familiar territory after a long decade at work. There’s a saber mounted on the wall that he’s never even touched.  

“Helen and Aline are talking in the kitchen”, Livy tells him. “I think they’re worried about you — you should tell them.”

“They have enough to deal with”, Ty says. 

Livy shakes her head, but floats back down without another word. 

In the end, he’s not sure what it is that convinces Helen and Aline not to push it. Maybe the fact that they get it. Maybe it’s the way he keeps muttering battle plans under his breath and losing himself in some of the reference books that can only be found in their Institute.

Or maybe some part of them can feel Livy, phantasmal and resplandescent, every inch as furious as he is.

In the middle of the night, Ty wakes up to her staring out of the window with the strangest expression on her face. 

“Is everything alright?”

Livy doesn’t turn to look at him. “I’m not sure.”

(Oliver Konman, they learn when they get back to the castle, is dead. One of the castle’s ghosts is simply — gone. And no one has a clear explanation as to why.) 

This is the worst possible time for Kit to be added to the equation. 

So of course he’s here. 

Even with Livy’s whispered warning, his hands are still slick with sweat and slippery around the doorknob. Fuck. Of course he doesn’t get to hide in his dorm room. Of course Zacharias has to intercept him. There’s a brief moment in which the itch to pulls his headphones over his ears and pretend he didn’t see them is almost feasible, but-

“Blackthorn.” There isn’t a single hint of respect in Zach’s voice. That’s alright. Ty is used to this. “Look what I just brought back from the London Institute.” 

What he isn’t used to is this: Kit at the Scholomance, framed by the grey walls that have become Ty’s own chrysalis. 

“Devon, actually.”

Zacharias has a proprietary arm around his shoulders, keeping him tucked into his side with a grin Ty cannot help but interpret as smug. He knows what he’s doing. He must know. Despite all of Ty’s best efforts, or perhaps because of them, the rumors about the Herondale necklace hanging over his heart is mostly common knowledge. He knows.

Fuck. Kit looks so small next to him. 

Hands tucked in the pockets of a well worn denim jacket, the slightest movement under the fabric that suggests his fingers are inquiet, shoulders hunched under the weight of what passes for Zach’s affection. (Petty.) A Fortitude rune peeks out from under Kit’s collar, drawn in the shaky hand of someone who’s not used to wearing angel marks.  

Still. Under all of that, Ty can tell he’s taller. Broader at the shoulders. The constellations of his freckles have all changed over the expanses of paler skin than he remembers, stretched over muscles he doesn’t think Kit used to have, hadn’t realized he could have gained. even though maybe he should have.  

The cold light paints grey what little of Kit isn’t hidden in Zach’s shadow. (Don’t think about it.) His lips are reddened and swollen. (Don’t think about it.) 

(Don’t think about it.)

“Oh, sweetheart. You know that place barely counts.”

Kit presses his lips together, but doesn’t say anything. The fabric of his pockets bunch like he’s holding his hands into fists. Ty remembers- figure it out, then- Ty remembers a Kit that looked less cowed with a dagger to his throat.

There are four throwing knives on Ty’s belt. One regular dagger. His staff is tucked between the crook of his elbow and his body. Stele in his jacket’s left pocket. There are exactly zero witnesses in this room, besides Kit, who at his worst has never been a snitch-

Someone clears their throat.

“Centurion Zacharias”, Ty greets him, belatedly. Zach’s smile stretches wider:

“I’m sure you know my boyfriend, Kit?”

Ty tucks his hands in the pockets of his hoodie- doesn’t want Zach to see them shake. Doesn’t want to be tempted to grab the dagger. Seven of the nine doors in this hallway are locked, anyway. The three left are just abandoned classrooms.

Nods at them. “Hi.”

Zach just- stands there, smiling smugly down at Ty, who allows himself to stare blankly at the wall. The stone has been there for centuries. It will be there for as long as Ty lives. There are seventeen horizontal lines, nine horizontal ones. The rock Ty is staring at has twelve dark spots. 

Zach still doesn’t say anything. The smile just keeps getting wider. 

Finally, Kit sets his jaw.

“Hey.” Tugging on Zach’s sleeve, he smiles up at his- his- boyfriend? Fuck. “We should probably finish that tour you promised me before the rest of the classes are out, yeah? I don’t think a walk through the crowded hallways is quite what you had in mind for that.”

There is this to be said in Zach’s favor, as much as Ty hates it: he fully turns his attention to Kit as soon as he starts speaking, like a flower to the sun.

It’s awful. Kit keeps smiling sweetly, the way he never, not once, smiled when he was actually happy back in LA, and- Zach just softens, like there’s nothing wrong with the way it looks so picture-perfect it has to be practiced.

Maybe there isn’t. Maybe Ty is overreacting again. Wouldn’t be the first time he’s been told so. 

“Alright, sweetheart”, Zach acquiesces easily. “I’ll even show you my room if you like.”

Ty breathes in. Doesn’t breathe out.

The hand slides from Zach’s sleeve down to his hand, squeezing it. “See? More interesting things to do”, Kit says to nobody in particular, although Ty can’t help but feel like that’s a jab at him.

It should be funny, to see Zach being towed out of the room by someone who’s a whole foot shorter and barely exerting any effort. Allowing himself to be moved by someone who would have no chance of moving him otherwise.

It should be, Ty is sure. Maybe it’ll come to him later. 

(It won’t.)

Pressing his back to the wall, he lets himself slide down into a crouch. Lets his forehead rest on his knees, just for a moment, just so he can feel himself breathe. 

Ty hits the wall behind him with the bottom of his fist- once, twice in quick procession, not hard enough to hurt himself but hard enough to feel it ringing through his bones. Fuck. A part of him almost wishes he’d let himself punch the wall hard enough it breaks. 

For once, the temperature drop goes unnoticed.  Until it doesn’t.

“Well,” Livy says. “This went… alright.”

“It didn’t.”

She floats down, down, until she’s crouching close enough to him that Ty can feel his own body temperature drop. Her white dress goes through the ground, a glitch in the universe, until she gathers its skirt around herself and tucks it under her thighs. 

Ty doesn’t realize how tense his shoulders were until they drop back down, leaning towards her. 

“Are you okay?” 

He turns his hand so she can see the damage done. It’s red, that’s all. He’s been careful not to break anything.

“That’s not what I meant.” Livy peers down at it anyway. “How are you feeling?”

It’s at times like this that Ty wishes he were better with words. He used to have other people for this, to make up for where he lacks, but- no one else can see Livy anymore, and no one else knows him as well as she does. No one else can help. At least, no one he’d trust.

Except for. Except. Except,

“I don’t know.”

The way down the mountain is made shorter by a Portal. Ty is pretty sure Ragnor has a bit of a soft spot for him; enough, at least, that he’ll help him visit his best friend. 

“Fucking finally! I thought you’d just forgotten about me.”

“Sorry. Just busy.” Shedding his coat at the door, Ty lets himself get dragged down to the couch. Alyssa’s hand on his shoulder is a familiar weight he only accepts because he knows he’s allowed not to. “I’ve got a lot to tell you this time.”

“Well, go ahead, then.”

He does. 

Alyssa does not like it.

“I’ll kill them for you”, she promptly offers. “ Please let me kill them for you.”

Ty ducks his head, lets a little bit of a smile escape through his lips. He’s always hated being coddled, but this isn’t that- never has been, with Ali, in a way he doesn’t quite know how to express. The words aren’t there. They don’t need to be.

Still- 

“Please don’t”, because it still feels like it needs saying, even though Ty is pretty sure she’s not being serious. 

Ali aggressively pouts at this, which Ty didn’t even know was a thing before they met. She sticks out her leg to poke his thigh with her sneaker, makes sure he’s properly warned before dropping both legs on his lap, a slightly smug expression on her face. 

He curls a hand around her ankle. Allows himself to tap a slightly manic rhythm on the bone. They’re not at the Scholomance- she’s safe in this worn living room, and her parents are out anyway. He doesn’t have to pretend to be normal here. Not with her.

“You can be mad at him, too, you know?”

At this, Ty shrugs. 

His best friend tilts her head, stares at him with what he’s learned to interpret as a concerned expression when it’s on her face. The same frown in other people tends to mean anger. Usually. People’s individual expressions vary more than they’d let you know; Ty has long given up on most of those intricacies. He can grasp the basics. More than that is a fool’s errand.

Then again, maybe he is a fool.

“He’s fucked you up before”, Ali points out, “and now he shows up to your space, of all things, when things are weirder than ever? He knew you were gonna be here. He did this on purpose. We should beat him up. It could be, like, a thing.”

“He can go wherever he wants”, Ty says. It doesn’t feel good. 

(Because Ali is right, and this is Ty’s territory. No one else should be in it. It’s one thing to share it with colleagues and guests, which has already been growing harder the more they shove him out, but-)

“You still can be upset about it! You should be!”

“If I keep being upset”, Ty says, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop.”

The room goes silent. This, she understands.  

(Four throwing knives. One dagger. One stele. His staff was left behind, but he’s still dangerous without it. Zach never quite managed to win in any of their drawn-out spars. His only hope was to overpower Ty quickly, and-)

(And none of this matters, because this isn’t a battle Ty is allowed to fight.)

“Still. Let me know.”

Despite everything, Ty finds it in himself to affectionately bump his knuckles against the side of her leg. “I will.”

They are everywhere now .

Which makes sense. The Scholomance is big, but not that big. Ty is pretty sure Zach is deliberately trying to show off his new arm candy anyway. 

Anush had made a comment, a few weeks before he went on that mission, that Kit is… actually, kind of a sought-after status symbol, nowadays. When he can be found, which doesn’t seem to be all that often. Ty wishes he’d paid more attention back then.

“He’s the only Herondale that isn’t already publicly taken”, Anush had told him, “and Jace was already kind of spoken for when his identity got revealed, so it wasn’t like this. People assumed it was a lost cause. This time no one is aware of any ties beyond, like… you know, and you’ve already said it’s not like that. There’s a lot of people who’d love to be dating a Herondale. Now they think they might have a chance to.”

Ty had already hated it back then- the idea of people seeking out Kit because of his last name, as though the first didn’t matter. Herondale as more of a title than a surname. Kit as more of a trophy than a boyfriend. 

He hated, above all, that he could kind of see the logic in it: their world is ruled by nepotism, and a name can open many doors that’d previously been walls. 

It had still felt awful.

This is worse. 

“Give it back”, Zach says, almost pleasantly. 

Ty doesn’t look up from the old tome sprawled on the table. For a moment, he considers putting his headphones on and pretending this isn’t happening- quite honestly, he doesn’t have the time for this. It’s a brief daydream.

He sighs. “Give what back?”

“The necklace, of course.”

His body freezes; the stillness after a mistake, when the shards of glass are on the floor and time cannot be rewound. The heron pendant feels warm on the skin over his heart. Ty, he realizes, will fight for this. 

“Has Kit asked for it back?” Ty manages to say, after a too-long pause.

He lets his expression go blank, and prays that the fear strangling his lungs doesn’t show. Zach scoffs:

“Does he need to?”

“That’s not an answer. Has he asked?”

Zach shifts on his feet, hands clenching and unclenching. 

“Does he even know you’re asking?”, Ty says, suddenly curious. 

“You’re not a Herondale”, Zach spits out. “And you’re not dating one, so why should you have it?”

Carefully gathering his things, Ty gets up.  

A smile stretches the skin of his face in unfamiliar ways. His lips are dry enough to split and bleed if he’s not careful, but it’s worth it, Zach almost vibrating with anger at the sight of Ty’s expression.  

“Maybe because Kit actually wants me to wear it.”  

Zach lurches forward-

“ There you are, Zach! I’ve been looking for you- oh, hello, there, who are you?”

“Oh, you’re so pretty”, Mayhew coos, and Ty finds himself looking up one more unadvised time as Zach’s head snaps up. “Look at your eyes!”

As a matter of fact, I usually don’t. Their little streak of mutual avoidance has gone unbroken. 

Kit — because of course it’s Kit, who else could it be? — blushes prettily under the attention. From this far, the pink hides the smaller freckles on his face. It’s really fucking annoying. A few years ago, Ty had known them well enough that it wouldn’t have mattered. 

“Thanks, they’re all natural.” His gaze still finds Ty and Zach despite the distraction, honing in on the proximity, and Kit frowns. “Darling, I thought you’d said you’d introduce us?”

The disappointment in his voice cuts deep as a knife. Ty winces.  

Having seemingly forgotten all about him, Zach makes his way over to them.  He tucks Kit under his arm and drops a kiss on top of his head, which Kit huffs at, lips twitching, but allows. Ty looks away.

“Sorry, babe, this is Mayhew. That’s Kit- Isn’t he just a beauty?” he brags, as though speaking of a pureblood horse or a particularly well trained hound. 

Jones raises an eyebrow: ”Where have you been hiding a Herondale , Zach?”

Devon, snarks the little Kit in his mind. 

The real Kit shifts under the possessive hold Zach has on his waist and smiles. It’s that same smile as before, the one that just feels off. It makes Ty chew on the inside of his cheek, nervous, as though something bad is about to happen. It isn’t. E̶v̶e̶r̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶e̶.̶ ̶E̶v̶e̶r̶y̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶l̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶.̶ Everybody is safe.  

“He was languishing in a small, downworlder-infested city. How could I not rescue him?”

From here, Ty can see Kit take a deep breath. “I wouldn’t say rescue-”

“Did you really bring your boy toyto tbe castle?” says Ashworth, her tone reproving. “This isn’t a vacation destiny, it’s an institution of learning.”

Kit bats his eyelashes at her. “Yes, and I’m learning a lot,” he says, sickly sweet. Her upper lip curls.

“Aw, Heather, don’t be so hard on the boy. He’s at the very least easy on the eyes.”

“Aww, thank you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

It’s not that funny. Mayhew laughs: 

“Not like our Zach here, huh?” She teases, squeezing the bicep of Zach’s free arm. He flexes indulgently. “These aren’t for nothing- a lot of effort must go into this!”

That or steroids, Ty thinks, but it’s an unkind thought. The kind of joke Kit would have made Before.

This new, strange Kit just laughs along with Zach’s self satisfied chuckle, like she just told a joke. “Well, I sure as hell can’t complain about the results”, and tilts his head so that the kiss Zach bestows on him finds its mark. 

Ty walks out.

Mayhem smiled as she sent Anush away, he imagines himself telling Kit. It doesn’t feel right. Mayhem’s uncle humiliated Helen in front of the Academy. His niece is just like him. Why would you…

Freeman Mayhem. Have you heard of him? But why would he have?

Kit has spent the last three years running from everything that might brand him as a shadowhunter. (Including Ty.) Why would he know anything about them? He doesn’t care. He never has. 

(Except.) 

Kit has spent the last three years running. He has spent the last three years running- then why is he here? 

What are his motivations? Ty doesn’t know— it aches not to know, when once he’d thought he knew him well. His mental map of Kit has been stretched out and skewed over time, like tectonic plates, and he itches to correct it.

(Of course, flat maps are never fully accurate unless they apply to a flat surface.)

(Not even the Earth is inherently positioned the way people envision her to be in their mapa mundis. In space there is no up and down.)

(Even a compass user has to account for the space between the magnetic pole and its geographic neighbor. Magnetic fields shift over time. The Earth spins on an angle. Things are never as simple as ink and paper make them out to be.)

(God, Ty wishes they were.)

Still. Here are the facts.

Backlash against downworlders and downworlder-affiliated shadowhunters has been steadily rising in centurion ranks over the past year.

Oliver Konman died just three weeks ago under unexplained circumstances around the same time ghost activity rose in England. Also: at the same time Livy had felt something , all the way to LA. 

His family, as far as Ty knows, never came to recover his belongings. 

The last Scholomance ghost has grown increasingly more inquiet, as Livy reports. Like rats in a boat as they feel the storm approaching. 

Kit has arrived. 

(Kit can see ghosts.)

“To be fair”, Livy says, “how would he know ? I sure as hell didn’t tell him about it.”

Ty has no answer for her, so he doesn’t say anything. Allows the sound of his impatient tapping of fingers on the cold stone floor. and just… keeps staring down at the myriad of documents on his lap, most of which he’s managed to sneak out of the classified part of the archives. The evidence he needs must be here somewhere. 

Livy is a good spy, a great one, even, but- she can’t be a witness for anyone but him. So he has to find physical proof. 

It’s already bad enough that no one is willing to talk about Oliver’s death. It was already bad enough when Livy burst into Ty’s room, ranting about what the other centurions had been whispering, again, like no one fucking learned from the last war, and even Helen being safely back in LA and Mark, by Kieran’s side, didn’t stop the fear from clutching Ty’s heart in a freezing fist. 

Now Kit is here, too, one more person Ty has to protect while somehow avoiding. One more person he has no idea whether to trust. It’s not fair. Kit was the one who left.

( So did Watson, a part of Ty says, and there’s very little Ty can do to stop it. But he still came back.)  

( Kit didn’t come back for me , he argues back.)

( Don’t think about it.)

“Stop moping”, Livy tells him, “let me take a look at that. I think I recognize that dagger.”

Ty raises the paper for her. “It was Oliver’s, his main weapon besides the mace. Weird choices. I remember he never went anywhere without at least one of them.”

“Not even the showers?”

Ty glares. She giggles, a sound completely out of place in the stony dorm room, and squints at the pixelated image. Somehow, despite all of their supposed competency, very few of the centurions know how to navigate mundane technology. 

(If Kit were here, he’d say: almost like the higher you climb, the more they isolate you from the rest. But Kit isn’t here. It goes unremarked upon.)

“Yeah, that looks familiar. Do we know where it went?”

He shakes his head, shuffling the papers in place. “No. I’m sure the documentation for where it was moved is somewhere, but it’s like they’re making it harder to find on purpose.”

“They probably are”, Livy points out. 

Ty scrunches his nose. “That would mean someone high up. I really don’t want to think about that.”

“Tough luck. The whole point of this investigation is that there’s something off.”

She’s right. Ty hates it, but the world doesn’t seem to care much either way. “I don’t have enough time to look through everywhere there could possibly be the evidence for this.”

“You know, I bet Anush could help-”

“He’s on his mission right now. I can’t distract him.”

“I bet he’d be happy to help, anyway.” Livy argues.  “And you know we need it. Alyssa doesn’t have the authorizations and I can only do so much.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

It’s enough that Ty got him assigned to that mission. Anush doesn’t need to be involved with this.  And — Ty doesn’t want to think this, because Anush is his friend, but — this might be a little too personal for him to risk relying on somebody else. 

Anush used to be in the Cohort. Best case scenario, even if he’s willing to help, it might be too personal for him. It’s an awful thing to think, but Ty really doesn’t want to have to be doing damage control the entire time. Anush is different from Alyssa, anyway. They don’t just click. Ty’s efforts might be entirely wasted. 

“Kit, then?” Livy tries, because she’s been on the side of attempting contact for the past three years. “He’s already here. You even think he’s aware of it!”

“I suspect he does. All the evidence is circumstantial. If I’m wrong… “

( If I’m wrong, he might leave again.) 

“It’s just easier to do this alone”, Ty says.

Livy bumps her shoulder through his, a shiver wracking through his frame, and leans over to double check the calculations on one of the closest documents. He’s never quite gotten the hang of math the way she does. It’s nice to have her sharp eyes as backup. 

“Well”, she reminds him gently. “Not completely alone.”  

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3. ROI -

How much money you make from your investment is referred to as "return on investment." This refers to the benefits you receive in exchange for your investment and the amount you recover. A great return on investment is a guarantee of an online MBA degree, but only if you pick the right university. Your career can be secure if you select a reputed college with a solid placement track record based on your expertise and criteria.

For example, if you enroll in a college with a tuition fee of less than 3 lakh rupees and receive a CTC of 6 lakh rupees as a placement package, you will receive a return on your investment in the first year. Because offline MBA program fees might reach 20 lakh rupees and average placement packages vary between 15-20 lakh rupees, getting such a high ROI in the first year is uncommon in offline full-time MBAs.

[that-thing-that-feeling]

Do you have any excerpts from the reviews of sp2 that require payment in the US to read? If so, can you share any comments on Charlie’s part? (BFI, The Telegraph, etc)

Hey sure! I linked to the times uk one bc someone asked for it but it wasn’t good and didn’t mention Charlie. Which BFI one—sight and sound or something else? I’ll put the whole telegraph one behind the cut—it’s a fun, descriptive review that loves the film, but it only has one line on Charlie in it (“animalistic one night stand”), altho it does talk abt Patrick’s film. Anyway here it is behind the cut (does have spoilers from part one):

How much can art ever help us heal? There’s no straightforward answer to that question, which is why The Souvenir: Part II never stops posing it, readjusting the viewfinder, and switching angles. A British heavy-hitter in Cannes, this sequel to Joanna Hogg’s cinematic memoir of two years ago has a dizzyingly playful and prismatic quality. For a film overshadowed by terrible loss, it’s remarkably elating and light on its feet – at once a comedy of filmmaking egos, a multi-layered exercise in creative therapy, and a grippingly honest confessional.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Part II is its sheer buoyancy as a companion piece, springing off the earlier film’s strengths and finding ways to circle back, to reconsider and even critique them. Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

As we neared the end of the 1980s in Part I, film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) was confronted with the shock of her young life, as her boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) was found dead from a heroin overdose in the Wallace Collection’s toilet, having concealed the extent of his addiction from her over several years. Part II picks straight up from there, with a bedridden Julie wasting away in the Norfolk stronghold of her parents, played by Byrne's real-life mother Tilda Swinton and a brilliantly cast unknown, one James Spencer Ashworth, whose droll incomprehension typifies Hogg's deft touch with both seasoned actors and brand new ones.

While those two struggle to find the right things to say, Julie herself becomes preoccupied with what, artistically speaking, is worth saying. The main thrust becomes her determination to make a graduation film, which she decides to craft as a kind of memorial to Anthony. This project is so tentative, elusive and personal that it’s regarded with hostile bafflement by the supervisors on her course, who can’t find any through-line with her previous aesthetic and brutally retract their support.

Hogg’s satirical eye on film-school foibles is beadier than ever in such scenes, but there’s a touching esprit de corps among the student body, who may not always understand each other’s work but rally to help as far as they can. Julie, fumbling towards her vision, lacks experience, and the patience of everyone else on a film set is by no means inexhaustible. Her actors (Ariane Labed and Harris Dickinson) get stuck and vent about Julie’s work ethic while she eavesdrops; her huffy cinematographer (real-life d.p. Ben Hecking) throws a strop when she can’t make up her mind about shot choices.

Alongside Julie’s work in progress, there’s another film in production by one Patrick Le Mage (Richard Ayoade, expanding on his brief appearance last time) – an all-singing, all-dancing proletarian musical called The History of Our Youth, which looks absurd, and has just enough in common with the bang-on-period Absolute Beginners (1986) to make Ayoade’s scene-stealing pomposity feel like an insider joke. Tucked away here are some of the most exasperated film-set insights this side of François Truffaut’s Day for Night. The hard graft and impossible logistics of the medium get a thorough going-over. But there’s also a profound sense of the pleasure, and satisfaction, of making something, however imperfect, and however long it takes. For Julie, it’s this film. But Hogg adds in a tiny morality play about getting too wrapped up in your own passion projects to respect other people’s. It comes in the shape of a lumpy sugar bowl – the first fruit of a pottery class Swinton’s Rosalind has been trying.

Byrne deepens her whole take on Julie so movingly, especially in making her need for new intimacy a raw, embarrassing thing. She has one animalistic one-night stand (with Charlie Heaton) but otherwise succumbs to painful romantic drift, crushing on all the wrong people. Joe Alwyn’s emotionally supportive editor has to sweetly let her down by mentioning he has a boyfriend, at which point the camera catches her stricken, and the audience thinks, “oh, babe”. Swinton continues to know precisely who Rosalind is, of course, and flawlessly transmits her essence, with three springer spaniels as her scuffling entourage. The family scenes are perfect.

The Souvenir: Part II is already doing everything you could ask of it, and then it springs a wondrous feat of pastiche-within-pastiche, serving up a kind of dream ballet finale that’s close to indescribable. Suffice to say, the première where all the characters eventually congregate is our ticket not for a literal screening, but a leaping-off into Hogg’s (and Julie’s) wildest hopes and reveries. The sequence is a through-the-looking-glass spectacle which dresses Julie up like a 1940s glamour queen, and takes her through a series of portals – adventuring, as her own film has aimed to do, into the very mysteries of her soul. 

Even beyond this part, there’s a coup de cinéma waiting on the other side, which offers pointedly the opposite closing shot to Part I. It speaks not of any pat redemption through filmmaking, or an escape back into living once again, but of anxiety, and artifice, and selves that have merged to the point where real life and cinematic portraiture are hopelessly intertwined. From a healing point of view, this may not be quite what the doctor ordered. While entertaining us deliriously, Hogg pulls the rug out. Somewhere behind Julie’s camera, shooting into this gilded mirror, is a lost soul.

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 36: Russian Lullaby

Emery moved as fast as she could, but the explosion had torn away the last of her adrenline and her leg ached with every step. Emery pulled out her phone and called Joel.

“Em?” He said, breathless. “Where are you?”

“On our way up to the manor.”

“This is—um—shit—this is freaking me out a little, gotta be honest.” More voices swelled over Joel’s drowning him out for a moment.

“We’re almost there. Is Edgar around?”

“Yeah, I just saw him in the crowd, but—uh—where did you say you were again?”

“Coming up the path in the woods.”

“Uh.”

“What is it?”

“I thought I just saw you, but it’s chaos here—”

Emery hung up.

The path through Fenhallow Woods was lit by the same lanterns that had led the way from the dorms, and green light filtered in through the trees overhead. For a terrifying moment Emery felt like she was back in Klaus’s dream, and the trees swam around her. She reached out for Wes, who put a hand between her shoulders and helped push her forward.

“Only a little farther,” he said. She wanted to hug him for not telling her to stop. He wasn’t doing amazing himself: his steps had gotten sluggish, his hair was matted to his forehead, and bags of exhaustion had formed under his eyes. Though he kept a tight grip on his hammer, it hung lower than usual.

The top of the statue of Eamon Ashworth was the first thing to crest the hill against the green sky. The dark forms of little bats flitted around it. The ground in front of the manor house had been gouged by claw marks and pools of acid; the manor itself stood beyond, lights blazing in its windows like fires inside a face. At the foot of the Fenhallow Manor entrance stood Marcia, wearing full armor and in combat with several green-eyed dogs, swinging a battle axe bigger than she was. The axe swept through all three dogs, cutting clean through them and spilling green blood across the ground. As the axe came around, it shrank to the size of Wes’s hammer.

More dreamhunters fought around the perimeter of the house, fending off bats and dogs and quill-beasts. Veronica Lash speared a porcupine through the stomach with her naginata and chucked it at a tightly-packed group of bats. Isaiah Howard fended off a drooling dog with his sword and shield as his brother Samuel appeared out of the shadows of the house and leaped onto the creature’s back, pinning it to the ground and driving his daggers through the base of its skull. A dark form appeared on the roof, two wicked silvery hammers flashing in her hands, swiping through bat after bat. Wes looked up at her, growling: “Ridley!”

“Is he awake?” Marcia yelled when she saw them approaching. Her axe stilled in the air, covered in glowing green acid blood.

“Yes!” Emery charged past her, up the manor steps. Students in costumes packed the entry hall and the twisted staircases. Emery shoved her way through, yelling for Edgar, but everywhere she looked there were only frightened faces and confusion, jostling limbs and reaching hands. She and Wes shoved their way through the doors of the ballroom, where even more students were still packed. The refreshments table in the corner had been upended. Two of the ballroom windows had been shattered, the glass scattered across the floor The students lined the outside of the room, staring at Emery and Wes as they walked in. Then staring just at Emery.

In the center of the room, Joel stood alone, still wearing his prince outfit. He held his hands out in front of himself, like he’d just lost something.

“Em,” he said, face pale, voice shaky, “he was right here, Em. She took him. She looked like you, but her hair was—and she just came up and grabbed him from me.”

Emery spun to Wes. “Did they give you DreamLess when they took you to the cells?”

“No. Uncle Ares thinks I’m like him and Marcia—he thinks I can’t dreamform.”

“Make a gateway.”

The eyes of the room fixed on Wes as he stepped forward. Klaus’s storm had pulled the Dream so close to the waking world that its pressure coalesced quickly in front of Wes. He drove his hammer forward into it; the hammer head disappeared through a shimmering veil in the air. Then he ripped it sideways.

The gateway formed in the middle of the Fenhallow ballroom, a perfect black at its swirling center, and on either side of it opened two very real, very large eyes, standing upward on their corners. They swiveled in their nonexistent sockets; their irises and pupils were the same pure black as Wes’s eyes. Several people gasped and pressed themselves closer to the walls and the people around them. Emery, ready to spring through the portal, hesitated. The eyes swiveled different directions to fix on her. The pressure of the Dream followed them, like the Dream itself was using Wes’s gateway to look at her.

She snarled at it, grabbed Wes’s hand, and charged through the portal.

~

Her window waited for them inside the Dream. They stepped through. Emery ignored the view of Moscow, the gently falling snow, the hedges that now rose on all sides, twisted and dark, monsters with gaping maws. She ignored her parents in the ballroom and Wes smashed open the door to the courtyard with his hammer. The entire door exploded into a flurry of snow. Here, too, the shrubs curled upward in dark shapes,  curling together in high arches to create a corridor down the pathway. At the end of the path was the gazebo, and inside the gazebo, Morrigan stood holding Edgar’s neck and bending him over the inert form of his doppelgänger, propped up once again against the bench.

Edgar, tears streaming down his blotchy cheeks, saw Emery and Wes approaching and cried out.

Emery whipped out a Peacemaker and fired.

The bullet sheared through Morrigan's jaw. At Edgar's cry, she'd jerked her head to the side. Dream essence spilled through the wound. Before Emery could fire again, Morrigan had dropped Edgar and darted forward. She moved so fast, Emery didn't shoot at her for fear she'd miss; Morrigan's hand wrapped around her wrist and wrenched the Peacemaker away, and Morrigan threw her full weight forward.

They toppled to the ground. Emery grabbed at Morrigan's hair, yanking her head back. Morrigan's screams rattled the Dream around them, throbbing through Emery's head.

Then gold glinted at the corner of Emery's eye. Wes's hammer swung into Morrigan's side with a thick crunch. Morrigan flew sideways, Emery still in her grips. The two of them rolled across the stones and snow.

“Emery!” Edgar’s voice seemed distant, broken.

"Stay back!" She yelled, just as Morrigan jammed several fingers into her mouth and grabbed her jaw. Emery bit down; Morrigan's fingers were like ice, tasteless and cold. Morrigan whipped them back. Wes appeared over both of them, locking his arms around Morrigan's and heaving her up, giving Emery enough room to reach for her second Peacemaker.

They were too close together, and Wes was right above her. She couldn't angle the gun to shoot Morrigan without a good chance she'd shoot Wes, too.

But Edgar—Edgar stood in the gazebo. Watching. Scared. Edgar was free.

With as much movement as she could manage, Emery flung her gun up into the gazebo. It clattered at Edgar’s feet.

“Shoot it, Edgar!”

He picked up the revolver. Morrigan’s hands came down on Emery’s throat, squeezing. Emery latched onto her wrists and pulled her away.

“Edgar! Shoot yours! Shoot it!”

Edgar's doppelgänger slumped where it was, immobile. Morrigan threw herself back against Wes's hold, slamming her head into his nose. Blood spurted. His grip went slack enough that she ripped one of her arms free and slammed a right hook into Emery's jaw. Emery's head snapped sideways, the world turning white. When her vision returned, Wes had his arms around Morrigan once again, and had pulled her up enough that Emery could scramble out from under her. Morrigan kicked and screamed into the night.

“You’re killing yourself!” She screamed. “You’re killing yourself, you stupid little boy!”

Emery reared back and kicked Morrigan in the jaw, sending a lance of pain up her own thigh, but shutting Morrigan up long enough to yell again, “Do it, Edgar!”

A flash of blue light filled the air, but no sound to accompany it. The struggle stopped as they twisted toward the gazebo. Edgar stood with the Peacemaker raised toward his doppelgänger. 

In the doppelgänger’s sandy forehead was a hole leaking Dream essence. As they watched, a darkness spread outward from the hole, blackening the body, causing it to shrivel and decay the way the Frankenstein nightmare had decayed when Grandpa Al killed it. Edgar’s doppelgänger shrank and shrank until it was nothing but black ash, and the breeze dusted it up into the air, swirling with the snow, off into the night.

The Peacemaker clattered to the floor of the gazebo. 

Edgar collapsed. 

And Morrigan let out a scream so piercing it shattered the Dream around them.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos -------> Chaos)

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 11: The Dream

Emery fell into the Dream.

It was a fall and it wasn’t. There was no forest on the other side of the gateway, but when the light returned, Emery was collapsing back-first onto a pile of…foam? Cushions? She couldn’t see what she’d fallen onto, but it didn’t hurt. She had not come from anywhere. There was no gateway. There were no walls or ceiling or sky. For a moment, after she pushed herself off the surface of her soft landing, there was no ground.

There was nothingness around her in the way that there could be nothingness in a dream: she couldn’t focus on her surroundings. There was something in her brain telling her they weren’t important. She didn’t need to make sense of them.

She grasped at the thought. Dream logic. They did sections of dream logic every year in dreamforming class, and by their final year of school, they would have an entire class of just that. How the dream functioned while a dreamhunter was physically inside it, what it did to their bodies and minds, and the strange and unusual things it did to protect itself. The first rule of dream logic was the will of the Dream itself: the Dream wanted everyone inside to forget where they were, to unravel their memories and their lives piece by piece until they couldn’t leave. A dreamer could exit the Dream by waking up, but a physical body from the waking world, once caught, would rot away there forever.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Emery dropped to her knees and threw her arms over her head. The Dream wanted her to forget, so she had to remember. She had to remember anything and everything she could about the waking world.

Grandpa Al had a special teacup that he only used in his office. It sat beside the nameplate on his desk. Powder blue with cobalt designs and a gold rim. Grandma Juno had given it to him years ago, after they got married and before she was lost in the Dream.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Grandma Juno had forgotten and had gotten lost, and had probably died here. Emery growled and thought harder. Edgar. The sleeves of Edgar’s favorite sweater hung well past his hands. It was a hand-me-down from their father, and Edgar insisted on wearing it every time he watched A Fistful of Dollars.

Why, though?

Why?

Because their father was the one who had shown him that movie for the first time.

The Dream’s oppressive pushing against Emery’s mind let up, but she needed more to keep it away.

Her father could stand in a room full of people and still hide behind his glasses. He was Grandpa Al, but younger and taller and tealess. When she was little, when he still smoked, he gave her piggyback rides, and she felt like she was on top of the world.

Her mother could hide in an empty maze and everyone within five miles would still know she was there. They called her “the Siberian.” She came from…from…Emery cursed. She always forgot the name of it because she was stupid and had never cared enough about where her parents had come from. Khakassia! Her mother was from Khakassia. They’d first come to the Sleeping City from Moscow when Emery was eight, and her mother had let Emery hide behind the protective wall of her legs until Emery had worked up the courage to venture out.

The pressure drained away.

She needed more. Something recent.

Lewis brought Kris flowers for her botany notebook at student council meetings. He’d done it every week for two years, and Emery was no longer sure where he was getting the flowers, but he never missed a week.

Kris wore a different barrette every day of the week, always butterflies on Monday. If she forgot to put it in or wore the wrong one, her anxiety would have her flitting around the student council room in a panic until Jacqueline let her leave to fix the situation.

Joel had found Emery on her first day at Fenhallow. He’d pulled her away from her mother’s protective covering, and he hadn’t even cared that she tried speaking Russian to him sometimes. He liked her before everyone else. He liked her after everyone else. She knew where his family lived in the city, but he may as well have sprung out of the campus ground. There was no Fenhallow without Joel.

Emery thought of Jacqueline standing over her, black hair pulled back in an imperious ponytail, snapping, “Get up, Ashworth. I’d tell you to stop being useless, but that might be too difficult for you.”

Emery got up.

She had her armor and her guns. From the Sandman’s portal she’d expected to enter a forest, but she stood now on a cracked and barren plain that stretched endlessly into the distance. Purple clouds filled the sky, flashing with the threat of lightning.

“Wes?”

Emery turned in a full circle. She was alone. It was a strange kind of aloneness, like standing on an empty arena floor, looked down upon by thousands of spectators. Every mind in the world was connected to the Dream, but the people of the Sleeping City would be the closest. The air around her rippled with half-formed images, there and gone again and replaced by something new. Green fields. Dark oceans. Rooms with blank walls. The insides of homes, the outsides of homes. Schools, planets, pitch black. To her left, a the image of a jungle treehouse solidified and began to move, a window in the midst of her great barren plain, looking onto a whole other world. After a few moments, it trickled away, and Emery had trouble remembering exactly what she’d seen inside it. The Dream oriented its windows around Emery, circling her.

Her mother had always said the Dream was a living thing. It knew when a dreamhunter entered it like a body knew a virus. And like a body and a virus, the Dream resisted invaders. It rejected the waking world.

It had wanted her to forget herself, and she hadn’t. Now, it seemed like it planned to let the dreams of the Sleeping City scare her off.

The problem was, she didn’t know how to get back. The Sandman’s gateway was gone, and even if she did know how to open one herself, she couldn’t leave the Dream without Wes.

Jumping through the Sandman’s gateway had not been her best decision ever. And now that she was out of the moment, trying to catch him in the Dream didn’t sound so appealing, either.

Her first order of business was finding Wes without upsetting the Dream. She had no idea how to do either of those, but standing around wasn’t getting her anywhere.

She looked at her cuff. It had clearly been too much to hope that she could just message Wes. Hey bud, where’re you at? Around the corner from the creepy sunken ship dream-window? Cool, I’ll be there in a sec. The cuff was a no-go. Not only did it get no signal in the Dream, it didn’t even turn on. The Dream didn’t like people, and it didn’t like technology.

“Alright, Em.” She clapped her hands together. “You are in the collective subconscious of the human race. How do you find another person?”

Maybe by wishing really hard.

She snorted. The Dream couldn’t take sarcasm from her.

Professor Lenton hadn’t been any help at all when it came to the Dream. They needed a dreamhunter to teach them these things. Class Twenty got special sessions from the full-time dreamhunters, but two more years seemed like an awfully long time to wait for adequate schooling when they were already allowed out on missions.

Breathe, Emery. Marcia told them to breathe. Yelled at them to breathe, actually. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t breathe, she’d say.

Emery breathed, and thought.

She could track nightmares, dreamhunters, even minor dreamforms in the waking world. All dreamhunters could, because they straddled the line between worlds. Those things felt different, like they didn’t belong. Maybe in the Dream she could track something from the waking world. But that meant she needed to move.

All the directions looked the same—long barren plain, angry flashing sky—so she picked one and started walking. She passed dream-windows as the Dream shifted them to keep its focus on her. Maybe, if this place knew she was here, it would know Wes and the Sandman were here, too. Maybe they would also cause disturbances.

“Wes!” Her voice echoed back to her, as if there were mountains in the distance. The only answer she expected was a slight shift in her mind, that sense she had in the waking world when a nightmare moved suddenly. There was nothing except the heavy, clogging fabric of the Dream pressing in around her. Though the landscape looked arid, the air felt humid.

Nothing to do about it. She’d have to keep moving.

“Wesley Jager, you useless piece of garbage!”

Insults pulled no replies, either. Emery’s boots kicked up little puffs of dust.

“Wes, I’m secretly in love with you. Thought you should know.”

Her sensing-the-waking-world in the Dream theory was probably nonsense. Or Wes was too far away.

How far could he be, really? She’d been holding as tight to him as she could when they went through the gateway. He hadn’t broken out of her grasp before, either, because she remembered a moment of falling through blackness with him at her side, his hammer flashing in the dark.

Her stomach turned. She started to jog.

“Wesley! I am straight up going to have my grandpa fail you if you don’t respond to this!”

The only response she got was a dream-window opening in her face. She pitched headfirst into someone’s mind.

She was on the plain one moment, and in the next standing on a long gravel road in a hazy cloudbank. She started running before she knew why. Sudden, immediate fear pulsed through her legs, clawing at her chest. Something was chasing her. She knew it before she heard it on the gravel behind her, before she felt the change in the air. She knew it the way a dreamer knows it when they drop into that familiar nightmare. The thing was big and had scales and when it caught her—when, not if—it was going to rip her arms out of their sockets.

Her legs sank into the gravel like mud. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. There was no end to the path.

She tripped. Her hands came out to stop her, and she realized she was holding guns. Revolvers.

Revolvers.

The Peacemakers snapped her back into herself. She twisted on the ground. The thing chasing her was lost to the mist, shape indistinct. She aimed for the center of the silhouette.

Her bullets tore through the dream like tissue paper. Instead of bursting in a cloud, the silhouette crumpled to the ground. A dead creature. It was already in the Dream; it had nowhere to return to.

Emery lowered her guns. This creature might have been cute, if it had ever come to the waking world. She would have dispatched it like all the rest, of course, but it might have been shambling and nonsensical and cute. Now it was dead.

The Dream wavered around her. The fear was gone now. The entire span of this person’s nightmare was probably being chased; there was nothing beyond that, so when the chase was done, the nightmare ended. The cloud bank shifted and revealed a patch of cracked and barren earth, angry purple sky. Emery holstered her guns and sprinted for it. She threw herself back into the wasteland.

It was a new area. Or maybe the old area, changed. Low scrub bushes grew from the cracks in the baked ground. The terrain rolled with hills.

She looked at her dead wrist cuff and wondered idly how long she’d been in the Dream. Time flowed differently here. That was what everyone said, at least. A few minutes could last the whole night; a lifetime could be compressed into seconds.

Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since dinner, however long ago that had been, and she was fairly certain a waking world body couldn’t survive on Dream food. Or water.

She wasn’t panicking. She totally wasn’t panicking.

“WES!”

“Emery!”

His voice came from afar, as if echoing down a long hallway. She turned. Another window exploded around her. Wes’s hand caught hers and they fell; it happened so quickly she didn’t have time to be confused. Emery grabbed the hard ridges of Wes’s armor beneath his arms before the force of their fall could drag them apart again, and the handle of his hammer slid across the small of her back, barring her in.

“We’re falling!” she yelped.

The walls—if they really were walls, they were uniform gray and too far away to touch—led both up and down into blackness.

“I’ve been stuck here.” They were close enough that she heard him over the rushing of the wind. His eyes were wide, his expression relieved. “I kept seeing you through the windows in the walls, but I couldn’t get close enough to grab you. I don’t know how to get out.”

“You sound way too calm for this!” Emery’s stomach floated somewhere in her throat. “How much time do you think has passed?”

“A few hours. My cuff is dead.”

“So is mine, but it’s only felt like half an hour for me.”

He frowned. “We have no idea.”

“I do know that we can get out of here by reaching the end of the dream, though.”

They spun as they fell, and Emery’s hair whipped upward into Wes’s face. Spitting, he managed to swing them around until she was on top.

“How do you end a dream about falling?” he said.

“Usually…you wake up.”

Entirely unhelpful. Not only were they not alseep, the dreamer wasn’t around. If they had been, Emery might have been able to slap them awake at the very least. Enough disturbance in their dream space would wake up a dreamer.

Past Wes, a window opened. A slash of bright light against the darkness, directly below them, getting big fast. There was no way to stop and no time to warn Wes, so Emery wrapped her arms around his head and braced for the impact.

They dropped through the window and hung suspended above the cracked wasteland earth for a heartbeat, just long enough for Emery to realize they’d stopped. Then they started again and dropped the last five feet with a heavy thud.

Wes grunted. Emery unraveled her arms. His head thumped against the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine. I think.” He sat up, pushing her back. He shrank his hammer and hung it on the chain around his neck. When he tried to stand, he wobbled and immediately fell back, face green. “Oh. I need to sit here for a second. I was falling for a long time.” He shoved his head between his knees.

Around them, the wasteland had changed again. Now sparse grass poked up in shoots and spurts through the cracks in the ground, and in the distance, skeletal trees created a path down a long hill. The purple clouds overhead had lightened, and in the distance far at the bottom of the hill, she spotted honest patches of green.

Emery rocked back on her heels and hooked two fingers over the lip of Wes’s boot. If she fell through another window, she was taking him with her, Dream physics be damned.

“For a while I thought I came in alone,” she said.

He glanced at her fingers on his boot, then at her face. “For a while I thought you threw me in.”

“I—I mean, I pulled you in, but I came, too—”

“I know.”

Her cheeks burned with humiliation. And she’d thought, before she’d tried to fire off her flare the first time, that Grandpa Al would be proud of her. She hated it. “Sorry. I didn’t think it through.”

Wes was silent for a moment.

Then: “Well, that was better than the last apology.”

She gave him a small rueful smile. He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look angry either, and with him that seemed like a successful interaction.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I don’t really care about the Sandman anymore. How are we getting out of here?”

“I have no clue. A gateway to the Dream can be opened from anywhere, so it seems reasonable to assume that a gateway back to the waking world can also be opened anywhere. I just don’t know how.”

Dream-windows continued to fade in and out around them. Emery watched, wary. She felt Wes tense at the same time she did when one window materialized a little too close.

“We could stay here and wait for help,” Wes said, “but I don’t think the Dream is going to let us.”

Emery snorted. “Really? What was your first—”

A window opened below their feet.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Some Dreams Are Worse Than Others)