[Abram. Open your eyes.]
The words appeared across my sight in whatever place we were standing in, white and absolute, and I opened my eyes into darkness.
Everything about the room was wrong. Not the darkness itself—that was how the room had always been. It was what moved inside it. The drag of feet across old boards. The particular wet rhythm of breathing that isn't quite breathing. Something roaming between the chairs, close enough that the air shifted with each pass.
Venna's hands were still in mine. Locked tight.
I never once thought I might be dreaming. Twenty years on the plain had built that out of me. You don't gamble on the infected being a dream, not even when you're asleep. Not even when the last thing you saw was a woman turning toward a door twenty years and a whole world away.
