To say that Sami was patient was a simple and obvious statement of fact, redundant and unnecessary. She was a creature of meticulousness and pnning. She kept lists for everything, and was exacting with results. She loathed spontaneity, at least from herself, and never committed to something new without double and triple checking everything that needed to be done.

  So she waited. Kershaughn was blindfolded and gagged, and then chained to a stake under the shelter of her rock. She burned the bodies of the other would-be svers, not out of any particur desire to see them left to rest, or to remove their remains, but for the next part in her pn. Rua had expined that one needed to draw protective runes on oneself while meeting with a Dreamer, and Sami had no access to mud or cy. She would need to rely on ash to get the job done.

  And the fire served a secondary purpose. It gave Everett a signal to follow. She just hoped no one else would be drawn by it.

  For sanitary reasons, she did not cook a meal over the fire, but instead divided up some of her rations between two pieces of cloth id out on a rock. She stripped down, and with a piece of rock, dipped it in the still warm ash and began drawing the protective symbols from the screenshots on her body.

  Everett found her, nude and covered in swirling patterns of grey, and moved in for a hug before she waved him off.

  “You’ll ruin my work,” she said with a rare smile. “But I’m gd to see you.”

  “What’s all this?” he asked, gesturing at her.

  “I managed to get the Dreamer’s ritual transted. I’m going to form my Pact.”

  “Already? Is it safe?”

  “Most definitely not, from what Otter said. It’s why I’m doing it first, and not you.” She handed him her rock. “Pull up the screenshots and do my back, will you?”

  He gave her a look that said he didn’t approve, but he didn’t voice his opinion and took the rock from her. While the two of them had never been intimate with each other directly – although they had shared Il-Su between them on occasion – they were more than accustomed to touching one another and nudity. In a way, the bond between Sami and Everett was closer than the bonds they’d once shared with Otter or Il-Su. Not for the first time, Sami mented that Everett was gay, but their retionship was fine as it was, and perhaps it was just as well. She was willing to overlook a lot of things in a sexual setting, but she wasn’t sure she could ever bring herself to have sex with a dragon man. It just wasn’t her particur kink.

  “So, how’d you get this transted?” Everett asked.

  Sami gestured to the bound and chained Kershaughn. “I made a friend.”

  “Is this a happy fun friend, or a not-so happy fun friend?”

  “He’s chained and imprisoned, dear.”

  “And I know your appetites, Sami. Remember that time I came home one day with friends to find you’d suspended Mayumi from the ceiling with your fucky-fucky ropes?”

  “It’s called shibari, and it’s more an art than it is a sex thing. Although it is also a sex thing.”

  “Fucky-fucky ropes.” He traced the rock along her back, careful not to press too hard. She worried that the lines wouldn’t be clear enough. “What do we do with him after the Pact business?”

  “That entirely depends on whether it works or not. If he lied to me, I imagine I’ll be displeased.”

  “So, we let him go, if it works?”

  She wasn’t sure they could afford to. She knew she couldn’t afford to let this game of Holt’s strip her humanity from her. But at the same time, that sounded like a luxury. She couldn’t let a potential enemy loose to return to bother her ter. Especially now that she and Everett were reunited.

  “That will likely depend on him,” she said in a tone that brooked no further discussion.

  He took it in stride. He recognized that while they were equals, she was still the leader. His soft heart might do him no favours in this world and be a hindrance to her, but she would gdly take on the burden of protecting it by making the hard decisions for him.

  When they were done with the designs, she set Everett to guard their prisoner, and keep a lookout for enemies that might be alerted to their earlier fire. She doubted this desert was so poputed that she’d draw in a second band of enemies in such a short time, but there was no point in taking chances.

  She stabbed a sword into the ground beside her, more for her own comfort than out of any thought she’d need it. She doubted it would be any good, given Otter’s half-attempt to expin the divinity of the Dreamers. Even so, it was a small comfort.

  “I invoke the Sassian Dreamer,” Sami said. Her voice wavered, but she clenched her fists. This whole thing felt silly, a little too mystical for her logical brain. But part of it was supposed to be rooted in belief. And for what she needed, she was willing to believe. “The Hunger of the Sky, the Unbreakable Backbone.”

  She felt something rumble, and wasn’t sure if it was from the earth itself, the sky above, or within her own body.

  She tried to picture the imagery in the instructions. She imagined the night sky, the moon’s crescent edge, like a bde in the night, as it waxed and then waned, ever changing, but always a guiding light to those trapped in the darkness.

  “I invoke the Herald of the Moon, the Traveller in the Night…”

  Something her mind wobbled. She could see something. She wasn’t sure what. Men. Women. All around a bonfire. Cheering. Celebrating. Praising something.

  “... the Trickster of Realms…”

  And then a woman, tied to a log. Tied to a log and thrown into the bonfire. Her screams were drowned out by the adution of the crowd.

  “...the Radiance in the Darkness…”

  How different the nd had looked then. Verdant green everywhere. Trees. How there had been so many trees in those days. She could hear a creek in the distance, the burbling of water on rocks. Sass had been so beautiful once.

  “... The Lord of Endless Night.”

  She could see it. The beautiful and wild jungle that had once been Sass. And then she saw it. Even as this crowd, just one of hundreds, heaped sacrifice after sacrifice onto the fire, there was a greater fire. One descending from the sky itself. The fury of the stars themselves.

  “I… Yamamoto Samishii, seek to make a Pact. I call on ancient tradition and by blood…” Time to deviate a little. She suspected she would get nowhere with lies. “Though I am not borne of this nd, I am of it. My first steps in this world were here, and unlike those that came before, I can learn from their mistakes.”

  And then, it was like she was falling up, into the sky. Her hands reached out for something, anything, and found the sword she had stabbed into the sand beside her. It availed her naught. It was ripped free and went with her.

  The day turned to night, the sun blotting out entirely as darkness took the sky. Gravity held no sway, and neither did logic. One by one, stars winked into existence, and where once was the sun which beat down heavily upon the sands, was now the moon, in its cold and iron glory.

  She didn’t stop falling, though there was a sense of no longer moving. She hovered in pce, before the moon itself, hanging impossibly bright before her like a new sun. And there, in the centre of it, standing as a bck silhouette, was a woman in a kimono. Sami could make out no detail of her, positioned against the light as she was. She was a bck shape against a white backdrop, but Sami knew two things about her.

  Some part of her brain screamed at her that she knew this silhouette, that it was not strange at all. She knew the form and figure. This was Mayumi. Not as Otter, as she was now, but as the old Mayumi. In shape, but thick around the thighs and waist, a figure of fullness but not fat. Wild dark hair that could never truly be tamed, even though it only came to the nape of her neck. There was just so much volume, just as with every part of Mayumi. Everything always on full bst, no filter. She was the most honest person Sami had ever known.

  And the other thing Sami knew about this figure was that it was smiling.

  She couldn’t expin it. She couldn’t see her face, her mouth, any detail at all, but she knew that woman’s lips were upturned. But there was no happiness in that smile. No. There was something malicious in it.

  “The Shaper wishes to speak with me,” came Mayumi’s voice from something that was definitely not Mayumi.

  “I wish to speak with you,” Sami said.

  The silhouette cocked its head to the site. “It has a voice. It has a will. I knew this, and would know it again, but did not know the knowing now. How curious.”

  “I seek a Pact.”

  “A shadow seeks its body and asks instead for a shadow of its own.” The silhouette tittered, raising a hand to where its smiling mouth would be.

  There was nothing in the instructions about this part. She had no idea what this Dreamer was talking about, or how to respond. She defaulted to what she was good at, logic.

  “What do you want?” she said. “This is a bargain, yes? I come seeking a Pact, and you must want something in exchange. What can I offer you?”

  The stars in the night sky fshed, and suddenly she could feel their heat on her skin. The ash drawings on her skin lit up, and the edges of them began to dissolve into smoke. But what should have burned her eased away to coolness on her skin.

  She gasped, sucking in a shuddering breath. Even though she’d done nothing, it felt as if she’d just done a mile-long jog.

  “Where is the Shaper?” the silhouette asked in a sing-song voice. “Why did it send a shadow to me, when it knows I will collect eventually?”

  “No one sent me,” Sami growled, pointing her sword at the Dreamer. “I came on my own. I came for a Pact for myself.”

  “It doesn’t know what it wants. It seeks a weapon, when it wants a lover.” The shadow reached forward with one hand, and though there was an impossible distance between them, Sami felt its caress on her cheek. She leaned into it unbidden. “I can give you Mayumi. To love. To hurt. To control. This is what it wants, yes?”

  Sami recoiled away, and suddenly, it was as if there were hands all over her, holding her in pce, gripping her firmly and squeezing, her arms, her legs, one on her chin, another on her breast. The ashen runes on her lit up once more, and the hands loosened, but did not let go.

  “It will be answering with the answers, yes,” the silhouette said.

  “You can’t give me Mayumi,” Sami spat. “And if there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she can’t be controlled, least of all by me, but definitely not by you.”

  One of those phantom hands pressed against her forehead, and ever so briefly, she felt it sink into her skin, into her skull, into her brain, and it was suddenly as if she were reliving every moment with Mayumi, every happy time, every argument, every time they made love, and every time they fucked, and that one time they just id under the stars on a bnket. How she longed for those days back, knowing she would never get them again. Somehow, she’d been the one to screw it all up.

  “It does have will,” the Dreamer said, and the unseen hands vanished as if they’d never been there.

  The Dreamer took a step, and suddenly it was face-to-face with Sami, no longer a shadow, but Mayumi in her full glory, though Mayumi never had eyes the colour of burnished gold.

  “This one can see the future. This one has been there, and will be again. This one knows your path. Do you wish to know it? Do you wish to know the fate of the Fateweaver, if it weaves itself back to you?”

  Her mind said yes, but her mouth said, “No.”

  Any answer given would hurt too much. She didn’t deserve to know if happiness or hurt was in her future. All she could do was what she always did. Shield herself from the outside, wrap herself in armor no one could penetrate.

  “Inspiration,” the Dreamer said. “It is clever, and knows best. It will be going to the Siyan Isnds next, yes?”

  “After I get this Pact. After Everett also gets one. Yes. We go to Otter.”

  “Chaos builds around her. The truth is coming. And it will break you. Do you wish to be broken?”

  The Dreamer leaned in, close, too close, her face nearly touching Sami’s.

  “No. But I don’t run from my problems. That’s what Mayumi does. I confront mine.”

  The Dreamer’s smile widened, and she leaned in closer, her lips quickly finding Sami’s own. She stiffened, unsure of how to respond, and before she could think of an appropriate response, the Dreamer retreated, suddenly appearing shy.

  “My champion,” the Dreamer said. “It has been so long since I have had one. It was clever, what it did, changing the words. Learning from the past. Too many of Sass think they did no wrong. But they did all the wrongs. Vioted all the agreements. It was no longer fun, it was work, having to shuffle all those poor souls into the prison, trying to manage the Flow before it became the Overflow.”

  “What? What prison?”

  The Dreamer tapped her nose. “Spoilers. It will know, in time, yes, it will know the knowing and in the knowing it will know.”

  “Are… are you like this on purpose, or just because you think this is how Mayumi would act?”

  The Dreamer ignored the question, instead wrapping her in a hug, squeezing her tight, and spinning her around in that endless night sky. “My champion, my champion, a shadow is the Traveller in the Night’s companion, it only makes sense, yes?”

  “If… if you say so. So, does this mean I get a Pact?”

  “Of course it does, this calls for celebration, I have a champion once more. I name you…” The Dreamer plucked the sword from her hand and raised it high. The metal rang a pure note, and the stars answered it in kind, a soft chorus of music echoing in the night. The Dreamer leaned in close, and whispered into Sami’s ear, “... Steelsinger.”