“Why?”

  Lucy said it to Keilani at first, but then wheeled around—her eyes darting, momentarily but sharply, to the bakers’ bodies and their growing pool of shared blood on the floor—to meet Diana’s unflinching gaze.

  “Why?” Diana spat back. “As if we need to explain. But of course a Standie like you would choose to be dense like that.”

  Lucy’s disbelief and disgust were shattered by utter confusion. “A ‘Standie?’”

  Before anyone could say more, loud knocking sounded from the front of the bakery.

  “Hey! What’s the holdup?” The voice was muffled by walls and doors, but there was no mistaking the sharp, demanding tone of one of the armoured troops that had chased them only moments ago. He sounded alive with fury, so it was true that they had been resurrected by whatever dark force commanded them.

  “Get back here this instant or we’re obliterating this door!” he shouted with yet more door pounding.

  “Wait.”

  Lucy barely had time to register Keilani’s calm but definite voice before a rush of air blew past her, the back door creaked open just a sliver, then swung open. Keilani appeared seemingly out of thin air beside the open door, her light panting the only indication that she had run absurdly fast rather than doing outright teleportation.

  “Coast is clear,” said Keilani. “Everyone, through here. Hurry.”

  She went through the door, phasing back into near-invisibility with her speed; Lucy figured she was taking the lead so she could scout ahead. Diana followed after her, sparing no glances back at the people she had killed nor the bakery they were leaving in disarray. Ricardo went over to Kenneth, kneeling down to take his hand, but the boy was frozen stiff, his eyes wide like the moon.

  “Go ahead!” Ricardo called over his shoulder at Lucy, who had also gone still watching everything unfold. “I’ve got Kenneth. Trust me.”

  Without any conscious thought, Lucy’s right hand found its way to the handle of the Ideal at her hip, and that firm sensation brought urgency back to her mind. She nodded and bolted through the back door as fast as she could, clutching onto her still-injured arm.

  The bakery’s back door led to a narrow alleyway much like the one Lucy had emerged into earlier, though this time she saw regular folk in dirty, earthen-and-ash coloured tunics standing on their balconies, peering down with frightened but curious eyes at the commotion happening below. When Lucy looked at one of them—a man with an almost comically round, ball-like nose, like something out of a children’s picture book—he ducked down and yelled, “Heretic!”

  Lucy stopped, her stomach dropping. If these onlookers kept shouting at her like that, they were sure to draw the royal guard’s attention to the Knights’ escape route. Frantically, she looked through the alleyway, finding Diana and Keilani speaking about something, nodding, then breaking into a run in the opposite direction from the road they had travelled earlier.

  It made sense: going back the way they had come was a surefire way to run back into their pursuers. Better to put distance between them like Diana and Keilani were doing. Lucy was about to follow after them, but she heard slow, dragging footsteps, then looked back at the doorway to see that Ricardo was still dragging the near-catatonic Kenneth out of the bakery.

  “Wait!” Lucy shouted through the alley. Diana and Keilani stopped and looked back. Lucy waved at them to come back, and after several moments of hesitation, they returned.

  “What is it?” Diana said the moment she was within earshot of Lucy.

  “We need to slow down,” said Lucy. “Kenneth’s not doing so great, and Ricardo can only lead him around so fast.”

  Diana slapped her forehead. “Oh, for the love of…”

  Keilani glanced at Diana, then locked eyes with Lucy with an urgency in her gaze. “I appreciate you looking out for Kenneth, Lucy. Really, I do. But if Ricardo told you to go on ahead, he meant it. Worst comes to worst, he can literally carry Kenneth. He’s just trying to calm him down first.”

  “Oh…” Lucy saw now that Ricardo was periodically turning his head toward Kenneth and saying something lightly, and as they came through the doorway, Ricardo knelt down in front of Kenneth to let the boy climb onto his back.

  “’Understand’ now, Standie?” Diana glared at Lucy, her voice dripping with disdain and impatience. “All your shouting did was put us in more danger. Now, shut your trap and run.”

  Letting out an exasperated sigh, Diana turned and broke into a run down the alley. Keilani shot Lucy a look that said she had no hard feelings, then followed after Diana, catching up with her in an instant.

  Lucy stood rooted in place, her mind awash with embarrassment, guilt, and the persistent distaste she had felt toward Diana ever since they had come to the bakery. Yes; she had finally admitted to herself that she disliked Diana and her modus operandi, even if so far she had been right on every account. But what could Lucy say, as the inexperienced greenhorn who was constantly confused and left behind? All she could do was suck it up and keep going so that they didn’t leave her any further in the dust.

  To that effect, she looked at Ricardo, who still carried Kenneth on his back, and nodded. Ricardo did the same, and the two of them began running down the alley—just in time to hear doors being kicked down inside the bakery.

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Ricardo said through his panting. “Diana, I mean. She’s been through more Dreams than the rest of us. Rescued a whole lotta different Dreamers. So when something’s impeding the rescue, she doesn’t take it lightly.”

  To Lucy’s mind, that would certainly explain a lot, though she wasn’t convinced that this excused Diana’s demeanour or her way of taking drastic measures. Still, her mind was more fixated on the question that left her utterly perplexed: “Why did she call me a Standie? What does that even mean?”

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  “It’s a nickname for Understanding Knights,” said Ricardo. “I’ve been called that a few times. Seventy-five percent of it from Diana, though.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Lucy said, a bit put off by how the Understanding Axis could be reduced to such a silly name. “But why does she call me that like…like she means to insult me?”

  “Beats me,” said Ricardo, checking over his shoulder briefly at Kenneth while continuing to run. “She never sounded that harsh when she called me that. Maybe…”

  Lucy looked at him, saw his eyes staring straight ahead while his entire face went stiff as his mind seemed to be simultaneously reeling and regretting and looking for a way out. It was a look Lucy knew all too well: the look of realizing that one was about to say too much, or say it in the wrong way, and immediately putting the brakes on one’s voice in order to re-route the conversation onto a more agreeable, less conflict-stricken road for the two of them.

  A smile flickered onto Lucy’s face, for she felt some sympathy toward her fellow Understanding Knight for almost putting his foot in his mouth. But because she knew what was going on in his mind, she also knew how to break past it, by looking him in the eyes with a grave frown and pressing further: “Maybe what?”

  Ricardo returned her gaze, and it was clear he understood Lucy wasn’t going to let him back out of this one. Sighing, he said: “Maybe she just doesn’t like you.”

  Lucy opened her mouth, but Ricardo spoke up again: “But don’t let that get you down. Diana’s not exactly the type to walk in and have a friendly chat over some drinks. Might be from her experiences in her past life. Might be from her Primary Axis.”

  Lucy considered the implications of that final sentence as she continued bounding, seeing that they were now approaching the end of this absurdly long alleyway that must have been distorted by some sort of Dream physics. When she looked back, the bakery’s back door didn’t seem nearly as far away as it should have been.

  Shaking her head, she brought her gaze forward again as she said to Ricardo: “Are Rebellion Knights hard to get along with?”

  “Well, like wise old Diana said earlier, we can’t put people into boxes and expect them to all be the same. But—and this is just a hunch or a guess or however you wanna call it—maybe Rebellion and Understanding Knights are like oil and water.”

  “They don’t mix?”

  “Kinda makes sense, don’t it? One’s about talking and listening to people, the other’s about socking people in the mouth because talking is useless.”

  “Right…” It would certainly explain the hostility Diana had toward Lucy ever since they were in the bakery, and especially after the confrontation with the bakers. But in that instance, Diana had done something far more gruesome than socking them in their mouths. Lucy couldn’t help grasping her injured arm more tightly, despite the pain, as frustration set in over how Diana had done that in the middle of Lucy trying her hardest to get the bakers to understand. Sure, Lucy had started things off on the wrong foot and exacerbated the bakers’ ire, but that didn’t mean they had to resort to an immediate rejection of the bakers’ very lives. To discard their existence so callously, just because they were in the way of their goal, wasn’t right and would never be right.

  Lucy gulped, feeling a chill run down her spine. She was sure Diana’s actions would never be right, but when she thought back to how easily Diana had used her spear to cut down those angry people that had been yelling at her…

  “Come here! Hurry!”

  Keilani’s voice echoed down the alleyway as she turned and waved Lucy and Ricardo forward. The two ran as fast as they could to where Keilani and Diana stood just past the mouth of the alleyway. Keilani used both her thumbs to point in either direction. “We ran right into them.”

  Sure enough, to either side of of them along this street, armoured troops neared them in a pincer formation. There had to be at least a dozen of them in total, far too many for the four of them. Or three, Lucy noted, as Ricardo still had his hands full carrying Kenneth.

  As if sensing Lucy’s concerns, Ricardo quickly backtracked into the alleyway, glancing around, likely for a spot to hide Kenneth. However, he cursed and ran back to the other Knights, and once his figure was no longer blocking the alleyway, Lucy could see why: more troops were filing in from through the alley, and they would surely see whatever hiding spot Ricardo would have chosen for Kenneth.

  “If only we’d been faster,” Diana said, looking pointedly at Lucy.

  Lucy gasped in disbelief, then shouted: “I was just trying to—”

  “What poor role models you have, you insolent child.”

  Everyone froze. This included the troops, who then scrambled to assemble themselves in neat columns that faced inward toward the Knights. No, Lucy realized, it wasn’t them they were facing, but the source of that voice—a deep, domineering woman’s voice that wove contempt like a thread in between every word—coming from the direction opposite the alleyway that now seemed so small, so trifling, so beneath the status of whomever this voice belonged to.

  There, on the other side of the road, was a large wooden drawbridge suspended over a wide moat surrounding the grey castle Lucy had seen earlier. Lucy was taken aback; had they always been that close to the castle, or had the alleyway actually been distorted in its length in order to lead them directly to it?

  Regardless of the questionable measures of distance in this Dream, one definite distance was the one being steadily closed by a quartet of troops. On their shoulders, they carried wooden poles attached to a central board with a seat atop it. It was a litter, carrying the throne of whatever ruler presided over these lands. Or, at least, Lucy thought it was a traditional royal throne until they came closer into view and her jaw dropped upon seeing what this seat actually was.

  A couch.

  It was a fine leather couch whose sleek burgundy mattresses spoke of luxury and affluence. But it was still a couch: the kind that belonged in a modern living room like the one Lucy had back home—not on the shoulders of medieval troops who would have been dead for centuries before the first couch had even been manufactured.

  All of this would have been comically ridiculous were it not for the woman sitting atop this couch like it was, truly, a throne of absolute power. She reclined on the couch’s back, legs crossed without a care in the world, her hands resting on the arms of the couch with a grip that was both effortless and unyielding, the way a greedy and complacent monarch might grasp their throne.

  One’s eyes might be ensnared by the miasmic purple robes that flared out wide in every direction like a cloud of enmity, or the tall-spiked crown that pierced the air with wanton cruelty, but it was the eyes that demanded—no, decreed attention. Greener than the primordial aura cast by thick forest animated by moonlight, one might call those eyes striking, captivating, or perhaps even beautiful, were it not for the sheer contempt they carried, emanating out through the rest of her face with hard-set lines and creases and veins that trembled with unrepentant scorn. Their gaze manifested a hatred that went beyond this world, a hatred that crossed the threshold between dreaming and waking.

  A hatred directed at Kenneth’s very being.

  Lucy was vaguely aware of everyone, Dream Knight, royal guards, and Kenneth alike all focusing their attention toward this imperious queen. But when Lucy tried looking anywhere else, her gaze was always drawn back to the queen glaring down at Kenneth from her couch-throne. It wasn’t that Lucy was captivated by the queen, but that some mysterious force literally would not allow her to look away.

  “Nice trick, but it’s useless.”

  Diana spoke out, drawing the queen’s glare toward her. Lucy wanted to look at Diana and see what she meant—and, to her surprise, Diana came into view as she strode toward the queen and her entourage. But what was truly surprising was that Diana looked about freely, even glancing back over her shoulder to give Lucy an inscrutable frown. Lucy’s jaw dropped, seeing that Diana was completely unaffected by the queen’s attention-ensnaring aura, asserting herself as the one completely in control of the scene.

  Was this the power of a Knight of Rebellion?