“Skapi, skapi…”

  A distant, gentle voice caressed James’s ears.

  This is nice.

  “Skapi…” The voice became more insistent and slightly higher pitched, and it was now accompanied by a gentle shaking sensation. Then a pair of lips softly caressed James’s own. Just a quick peck, then back to “Skapi” and shaking him.

  This pattern continued for almost a full minute before James blinked and began to come more fully awake.

  “Oh, hey, Mina,” he said sleepily.

  James looked up at his wife, sitting beside him on the bed. She leaned over him, watching his face closely.

  “I came to wake you up, my love,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you were already preparing your dream meeting, but it is about that time, I think…”

  James nodded, fully awake suddenly. “Good decision, Mina. What time is it?”

  “Just half past ten,” she said.

  He frowned. That’s actually a little earlier than I would have imagined we’d have the meeting. People don’t necessarily go to bed that early, especially since the System appeared. We all need sleep less than we used to. I would have given it another half hour or an hour at least.

  “I also brought you some dinner,” Mina added.

  “Oh, I get it, you woke me up a little early,” James said. He opened his mouth to say something else, and his stomach let out a loud growl.

  They both froze for a moment, then shared a laugh.

  “So, that’s a ‘yes’ to dinner, then,” Mina said. She slipped off the side of the bed, bent, and picked up a bowl and a plate. James saw a sandwich on the plate, and he could not see the contents of the bowl, but he smelled them.

  “Grilled cheese and tomato soup?” he asked.

  “You like that when you’re sick,” Mina replied. “That hasn’t changed, right?”

  James grinned. “Never.”

  The next half hour was spent in Mina feeding James by hand, spoon feeding him soup interspersed with sandwich bites. It was at once slightly infantilizing and intensely sweet.

  Somebody will love me even if I’m a cripple for life, James thought. What did I ever do to deserve that?

  While she fed him, they discussed plans for the meeting, and Mina asked him if there was anything else she could do to help him prepare.

  “Could you grab me that spider on the wall?” James asked, looking in Hester’s direction. “She’ll want to be there for this, and I can take her with me. And for that matter, I assume you will want to come too?”

  Mina nodded and smiled.

  Over the next few minutes, they finalized preparations. Then James closed his eyes, Hester resting on one of his hands, Mina lying down nestled against his other side, and he used Dreamwalk.

  “Whoa.” Hester’s voice rang out next to him. “I was dreaming of catching flies, I think. And now here I am with you, boss.”

  James turned to look at Hester, floating in the void of Dreamspace alongside him, one leg in contact with his shoulder. She was in her giant form, which seemed to be a preference of hers when she was in the world of dreams.

  “And you,” Hester added, tilting her head at something on James’s other side.

  He felt a hand on his other arm, and he twisted to look at the person he knew would be on his other side—and he was surprised by the face he saw.

  It was Mina, as James had expected, but not Mina as he had seen her a few minutes ago.

  In the void of Dreamspace, she had the same face she had always had before Race Evolution. The subtle changes were more obvious now.

  You really are almost a whole different person, James thought. He tried not to let the sadness show on his face. His wife was more beautiful in the real world now than she had been before Race Evolution, on an objective level. Her eyes were brighter, her skin was smoother and softer, her lips were slightly plumper—she was more attractive in a number of ways.

  But he would be lying if he said it didn’t feel a little weird, especially now that he could directly contrast the image he had just seen with the image before his eyes now.

  It’s almost like I remarried to a younger trophy wife or something. The thought was slightly uncomfortable, and James saw Mina’s lips twist slightly with recognition.

  “You can tell me what you’re thinking, skapi,” Mina said softly.

  “Back in the real world,” James replied.

  When we’re alone, he thought.

  Mina looked down at her own hand on James’s arm.

  “Oh, my old self,” she said quietly. “I see.” She looked up at James. “You know, when you came back from Orientation, you were different too.” She smiled weakly, then brightened and winked. “I didn’t end up minding, after a little adjustment period. Just—a thought.”

  “Never mind, then,” James said.

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  You’re literally the only person who can read me like this now.

  “What do we do, sir?” Hester asked. “I don’t really know why you brought me here, but as I have said before, I am eager to learn from you and become a more useful spider.” Her tone was cheery. One would never know that she had told James, not too long ago, that she had a limited time left to live.

  “We’re hosting a meeting,” James said. “I’m going to pull in people from various dreams, but I want a space we can all gather together. My own mind will be the setting, so maybe I can leave the two of you to set up?”

  “That should be no problem for us,” Mina agreed with her usual enthusiasm and obvious sense of self-efficacy.

  “Riiiight,” Hester said, much less confidently.

  James created a blank pocket of space with clear boundaries around them—a small, featureless dream for the two females to work within.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said. Then he began gathering the members of his council.

  He reached out with his mind and found that he could sense their presences. Almost every one of them was asleep. The last two seemed to be drowsy, drifting toward sleep, so James simply decided to leave them toward the end.

  Focusing on the others with his mind, their dreams stood out like little stars forming a very abstract constellation. It was easy for James to reach out and pull on their suggestible consciousnesses, tugging them along with him, pushing their dreams into a tight orbit around the dream setting that Mina and Hester were building.

  When the last two dreamers were properly asleep, James pulled them into the orbit too, and he ducked into the dream Hester and Mina had been working on.

  “Everything ready?” he asked—and then gaped. Then he laughed out loud. “Okay, I guess we’re ready.”

  The dream setting was a reconstruction of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” A long table set with simple fare, mainly bread and wine. The design of the room was distinct, despite not being particularly ornate.

  Well, I know where I’m supposed to sit, at least.

  “How did you guys do this?” James asked.

  Mina sat in the chair just to the right of the center of the table—where either John or Mary Magdalene sat, depending on what you believed about Da Vinci’s mindset regarding the painting. She was even wearing the garb from the painting. It was surprisingly becoming.

  Hester stood in a corner of the ceiling in a web, having shrunk down to a spider form the size of a tarantula, a little edit to the look of the painting.

  “It’s really more how you did this, skapi,” Mina replied, eyes sparkling.

  “We took a memory from your own brain, using Mina’s ability to recall experiences the two of you have had together,” Hester explained. “Inside your head, you have a great recall of this painting that the two of you looked at before.”

  James nodded slowly. “All right. Well, I’m going to bring everyone else in here now.”

  And I need to figure out how I want to look. Now that he had seen Mina dressed up like a biblical character, he was reminded that setting was not the only aspect of the dream one could tweak.

  He thought about it, decided on his mental image—selected for his maximum personal amusement—and then reshaped the air around his body into his new getup.

  Then he closed his eyes and pulled on the dreams that orbited around this one, forcefully connecting them all at once so that the figures from his council suddenly appeared all around the table.

  Of course, some normal staple attendees were absent. Alan, Mitzi, Dave, Luna, Duncan, Zora—every person who would normally attend a meeting but was now outside the bounds of James’s territory had not been invited, since he sent his message only to those within his territory at the time that he decided to have the meeting.

  This was deliberate. The people undertaking missions outside of his borders had important tasks of their own that needed fewer distractions than those who still remained within the Kingdom. And frankly, James didn’t want them to be half invested in their respective missions and half worried about the Fisher Kingdom.

  He would either ask his people to come home and circle the wagons, or he would not tell the Royal Fisher Army and the Fisher Expeditionary Force about what was going on with the Panther Queen at all until it was over. That was part of what this meeting was meant to decide.

  But the majority of his councillors were present. Angelina Zuccarini from water, Harry Luntz of agriculture, Steve Luck of construction, Magnar of the Mole People, Leo of the police, and all the rest of the people who were basically responsible for the daily running of the Fisher Kingdom. Rotter, naturally, sat at the foot of the table, looking like he wanted a pad and paper to take notes—only to realize that as they were in a dream, that would be impossible.

  These are mostly not the star players in a combat sense, James recognized, but they’re all really valuable ‘A’ players in the administrative roles they play, at least. It’s funny, if I didn’t have these occasional meetings, I might forget that there’s more to the Fisher Kingdom than fighting and expanding its borders, one blood-soaked acre at a time.

  Everyone was dressed normally, or in a roughly normal way—either in civilian clothes or in combat attire or in pajamas or something similar. Not very imaginative, but it did add to the impression James got of them as all being dedicated and professional in their areas of expertise.

  The attendees were varying levels of oriented toward the dream world, James observed. A few of them repeatedly blinked or pinched themselves as if they were waiting for this strange vision to disintegrate and their previously scheduled dream programming to resume. Others saw James’s face and recognized him—and seemed to recall, from the sight of him, why they were meeting up here. Only a few, like Rotter, appeared to adapt to being pulled into the new setting virtually instantaneously. James guessed that being primed by his earlier announcement made it easier for some people to accept that this was different from the ordinary course of dreaming.

  “Well, we should get the meeting started,” James said. He put a little extra power into his voice as he spoke. He opened his hand and materialized a cigar into it—because why not? He would not get dream cancer from smoking in here, and he thought it would be funny.

  James reached up with the cigar and lit it from the crown of flames that he had decided to don for this event. On his back, he wore a cape composed of spider’s legs. On his front, he wore chest armor of metal plating woven together with golden spider silk.

  None of this was what he possessed in real life, and some of it didn’t even make sense—a magical crown of fire sitting on James’s head could not be stable and remain in place in real life unless James focused a lot of attention, and a fair bit of Mana, into maintaining it.

  But this was a dream world. That was part of the point of these extravagances. To remind everyone of what was possible in this place.

  James put the cigar to his lips, inhaled, and then exhaled in big puffs of smoke that shaped themselves, first into rings and then into various animal shapes. First elephants, then donkeys, then snakes and hedgehogs.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw Mina cover her mouth to keep from laughing at the ridiculous stuff he was doing.

  Now I really do need to get down to business, he thought.

  “I brought you all here,” he said in a serious tone, “because it’s possible we might end up pulled into war at some point in the coming weeks. I want to show you exactly what we’re dealing with. Then I want to get your opinions on what we’re capable of doing to defend ourselves, should that prove necessary. For now, just follow along with the show I’m about to unfold. Please save all questions for the end. You’ll know about as much as I do after you see everything I have to present.”

  With a slight exertion of Will, James dissolved the setting before them and brought them to his memory of the Panther Scout’s experiences. Since he had seen the memories firsthand earlier that same day, this should be an extremely high fidelity reproduction. He had decided not to hide anything from his council about the threat they might face.

  That way, you can give me your best advice…