6

Alice woke with a jolt, as if someone had yanked her out of sleep by the collar. Her heart was pounding, her skin hot, the sheet twisted down around her ankles. For a few seconds she lay still, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what exactly had woken her.

The man came back to her first. Not the dragon, not the foreign sky, not even the silver crack in the air — the man.

Alice closed her eyes.

Her palm still remembered the warmth of the water, the exact place where his fingers had almost — almost — closed around hers. She flexed her hand once, testing it, half expecting to find something there.

There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there.

"Great," she muttered. "Just great."

She let herself lie there a few more seconds, listening to her own breathing, waiting for her pulse to slow to something reasonable. A dream. Extremely vivid, extremely detailed, borderline indecently convincing — but a dream, all the same. She didn't have a better explanation, and she'd decided, for the moment, not to consider the worse ones.

She deliberately didn't let herself linger on his face any longer than it took to produce one honest "great." Dreams had an annoying habit of getting sharper exactly when you tried hardest to forget them, and this was clearly not the time to test that theory on herself.

The clock on the nightstand read a little past three. Too early to call it morning, too late to pretend the night had barely started. Somewhere outside, a car passed with its windows down, trailing a scrap of music that was gone before she could place it — the most ordinary sound in the world, and she was almost pathetically grateful for it.

Alice threw off the sheet, got up, and headed for the kitchen for water.

Two steps in, she stopped.

There were drops of water glinting on the floor by the bed, scattered in a loose, uneven line, as if someone — or something — had shaken itself dry right there in her bedroom.

She crouched down and touched one with her fingertip. The water was ice-cold — cold enough that her finger ached almost instantly, a small, sharp protest completely out of proportion to one drop of water. She brought her hand to her face without thinking.

It didn't smell like tap water. Not chlorine, not the usual damp smell of the apartment.

It smelled like the lake.

The recognition settled somewhere just beneath her ribs, immediate and unwelcome — in the same place where, days ago, she had first felt the impossible distance of that other world.

She looked slowly down at her hand. There, where her fingers had nearly met his hand at the lake, a thin silver mark lingered on her skin. It was fading even as she watched, dissolving the way frost dissolves under morning sun.

A few minutes ago. A few hours. Or somewhere else entirely. Alice was no longer sure of any of it.

She held her hand up closer to the nightlight, as if that might clear something up, and sat there — motionless, arm outstretched — long enough for her fingers to go numb. Some part of her — stubborn and frightened in equal measure — still hoped the mark would simply fade like an ordinary scratch, and that by morning she'd be able to write the whole thing off, with a clear conscience, as an unusually vivid dream and not nearly enough real sleep.

She sat on the floor by the bed for a long time, watching the drops dry and the silver disappear from her skin, and letting the apartment's small, familiar sounds — the fridge humming, a pipe ticking somewhere in the wall — fail, one by one, to convince her that everything was fine.

And, for the first time, let herself think the thing she'd been refusing to think until now.

Maybe she hadn't been asleep at all.