She felt warmth when she opened her eyes. She was lying on a field of grass, looking up at clear blue sky. By that alone, she knew she was in Henry’s mind, not Mattias’s. She didn’t think a man raised within an enormous cave would dream in blue. The contrails were another clue. White streaks across the sky, evidence of airplane and humanity’s overreach.

  She sat up.

  Henry was laying beside her, blinking up at the same blue sky. He sat up slowly, as if stiff, and looked around with amazement. There were people playing in a nearby field, most of them children in play clothes, bordered by a round of women in gingham dresses. It took a few minutes of watching for Hawk to realize that they were ill-defined people. Clothing was first one pattern, then another. Faces were little more than a suggestion of features on bases running the spectrum from pale to bronze to deep mahogany. Trees danced in patterns no wind could account for. And there were kites on the horizon, too brilliant, elaborate, and large to be real. Colors like that existed only in a fever…or a dream. There was something oddly familiar about this place, this lawn, this border of trees, but Hawk couldn’t place it.

  Shadow was awake and standing. His night-hair flowed in the breeze, he had the mail and robes he had discarded on the battle field back once more. And he was watching, not them, but the skies and the people around him.

  “I know this place,” He whispered. “Not well, but I know it.”

  “Of course you know it,” Henry said. “Everyone knows it. It’s Central Park. New York City, baby.” He also climbed to his feet. He wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt that was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, only with Godzilla blowing fire at the skies. “I grew up near here. Spent most of my childhood either trying to get here—my parents wouldn’t let me go alone—or trying to get my parents to take me to the Bronx so I could go to Yankee Stadium. One of my biggest fantasies was going there when it was empty and spending all day just…playing in the stands.” His smile was delicate, almost happy.

  Hawk finally got to her own feet. She glanced down at herself and saw a T-shirt and jeans. To an outsider, they’d be non-descript. But these were her Anting Season pants and shirt, the clothes she wore when she went hunting new Queen ants in high, hot summers. “Sounds like a pretty good childhood,” She said.

  “Well, yeah. My parents didn’t take me to either Central Park or the Stadium half as much as I wanted to, but all my best memories are either here or there.”

  Shadow nodded abruptly. “That’s why we’re here, then. I thought we would arrive in Mattias’s memories, but clearly Henry is running the show.”

  “Well, we’re here. What do we do now?” Hawk said.

  “I taught Mattias that you create the entry of the mind, populating it with pleasant memories so that any invader gets lost in the joy. Unpleasant memories will lead to the center of the mind-maze.”

  Hawk said, “That kind of sucks.”

  “Well. If Nasheth or Argon were trying to probe your mind for information, they wouldn’t want to follow the memories of you shoveling shit, or something similarly unpleasant. They would presume that nothing important could be attached to such a memory. Henry, what is the worst—”

  “We’re going uptown.” Henry didn’t even need the question to finish. He gave an address without hesitation. He was quiet a moment, then added, “That’s the building where my parents died.”

  ***

  Shadow told Henry to hold the address in his mind, and they began to walk forward through the park. They passed children playing with kites, the winged plastic glorious and brilliant with shifting colors, the children’s faces as blurred as a bad photograph. After they’d walked nearly a dozen paces, Shadow then said, “Hawk, take Henry’s hand. I’ll take the other. Now, all three of us should close our eyes and keep walking. Think of the address, Henry. Hold it in your mind.” A pause. Hawk kept her eyes firmly shut. “That’s good. Now, we walk forward. Do not open your eyes until you feel something change.”

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  She obeyed, eyes closed, and put one foot forward. The children’s laughter continued against a backdrop of constant traffic. Two steps. The traffic sounds were eternal, unending, coursing across asphalt like an eternal prayer to the machine gods. The children’s laughter stood against this backdrop like the last, brave knights, banded together against an apocalypse in chrome. Three steps. And now the laughter faded away, and there was just the traffic sounds, roaring hostile in dragon tongues, growing ever louder, ever higher, ever—

  Crash!

  It came with a squeal of tires, malignant and black like cancer. Hawk opened her eyes in shock, completely forgetting the Shadow’s instructions. And they were no longer in the park. They stood at a sidewalk beneath the shadow of a great, glass skyscraper, and in front of them was a car wreck. Hawk knew immediately that this was one of Henry’s truest memories, because every line of the car was sharp. Glass glinted, broken by the fact of its existence. Red flake paint job torn by the crumpled remnants of the car’s outer shell. And there was a trail of slow-pooling red bleeding out of the car. Dark as scars, as loss, as screams. A terrible hitching noise was audible over the sounds of cars and traffic. It sounded like a last breath unable to complete. She started to walk around the base of the car, only to be grabbed and stopped by Henry.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he said. He was pale as milk, swallowing every few seconds. “It’s…bad. On the other side.”

  “Bad?” she said. “Why? What is this?”

  Henry swallowed and looked, not to her, but to Shadow for strength. The Archetype put one violet hand on Henry’s shoulder, comforting. Strengthening. Henry was able to stop compulsively swallowing his own spit. “It’s when my parents died,” he managed, and looked down at the pile of wreckage. He stood there for what felt like an eternity, but what was surely only minutes. Then he said, “It never faded. I thought it would. Memories do that, and I told myself when I was a little older that it’d be okay, eventually. It’d fade like all the baseball games, or like the time I kissed Jessica Moran under the bleachers in school.” He chuckled suddenly, a sick-making sound. “God, talk about your mistakes. Jessica Moran. Shesh.”

  “Where did you go from here?” Shadow asked.

  “Over there,” he pointed at the skyscraper’s entry. The blood was still oozing from his remembered car. It seemed to be more red than one person could account for. It seemed to be flowing towards the building, which didn’t make a great deal of sense. The skyscraper was uphill from the car. “I crawled out of the car on my own, despite what people were telling me. I had to…get away from…” He stopped, swallowed, and took a deep breath. It reminded Hawk of the desperate gulp when drowning men at last reach air. “It was bad, in that car,” He finished. “Dad was crushed, you see. It caved in the roof and he wound up with the engine block on his chest. Mom went partway through the windshield. It cut her on the neck and I think she actually bled out before…before Dad…” he took a gulp. “I could smell it. The blood. I could smell it so strong I thought I could taste it. So I climbed out of the car. I was fine. They told me that I was the only person in the car with my seatbelt on.”

  “So they took you into the skyscraper to wait?” Hawk said.

  He nodded. “They gave me a coke. I still hate coke.”

  “That’s where we need to go,” the Shadow said.

  They walked to the door. Inside the lobby, through the high glass windows, Hawk saw a heartbreaking thing: A small boy, sitting on a stool with his legs drawn up against his chest. A woman stood beside him, her clothing smeared with blood, and used one arm to steady his perch on the stool. There was, indeed, a can of Coke on a counter beside him. A man in a suit whispered something to the small boy, who only shook his head and kept rocking, rocking, rocking. Her heart broke for this small proto-Henry, and she was suddenly sure that going through these doors would be a mistake.

  “Don’t pay attention to what you see,” Shadow said. “It isn’t real. You see ghosts in a dream-state. You see the things you wish you could forget. We cannot afford to be distracted.”

  Henry grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. There should have been a bustling lobby behind this door—Hawk could see it through the window, for god’s sake, with that little boy still rocking, rocking on that tiny stool. Why didn’t anyone get him a better chair? Why wasn’t he embraced, swathed in towels or blankets? Why were the adults who knew better so useless?—but there was only darkness. It opened into a hole as frightening dark as Holia, that even smelled of the musty sick-sweet of Nasheth’s pavilion incense.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Hawk said. “Are we sure this is the way?”

  The Shadow nodded. “I taught Mattias to do this. Make the path unpleasant. Make it miserable. Make the dream-walkers—that’s us—want to turn back to the pleasant fantasies of the surface. If we want to find Mattias, we must continue on.”

  And he stepped into the darkness without waiting for any reply.

  “Fuck,” Hawk and Henry said at once.

  And then they followed him in.