Chapter 3

By morning, the world looked perfectly normal, which was almost insulting.

I woke before the alarm and lay still for a few seconds, listening to familiar sounds gather around me. A car door slammed outside, tires whispered over wet pavement, and somewhere on the floor above, the pipes gave a brief low hum. Ordinary life was reassembling itself with such confidence that the silver lake, the little dragon, and the man who knew my name might truly have existed only in a dream.

The first thing I did was look toward the foot of the bed. The cat was asleep exactly where he had settled during the night, curled into a compact black ball. No silver glow, no suspicious intelligence, nothing at all to connect him to the winged creature from the lake.

I nudged him carefully with my foot. “Good morning. I have one simple question for you. Are you going to show me your eyes?”

One ear turned in my direction.

“Don’t pretend. Last night you were considerably more communicative. With your eyes, at least.”

The cat heaved a sigh as though he were the one burdened with a psychologically unstable human, lifted his head, and looked at me.

His eyes were green. Ordinary cat eyes—deep, attentive, and entirely free of the silver light that had made me question my sanity only hours before.

Relief came so quickly that it almost annoyed me.

“Excellent. So yesterday I was simply exhausted, you remain a cat, and I stop asking you questions that normal animals should never be expected to answer.”

He yawned and lowered his head back onto his paws. I decided that would be my final departure from normality for the day.

The decision lasted until the shower.

Under the hot water, the dream returned—not so much as a sequence of events as a collection of sensations. The cold of the lake around my legs, silver mist, the dragon’s silver eyes, and a low male voice that had sounded far too close.

And the man himself.

My body, apparently, had no intention of forgetting him.

I closed my eyes and remembered with uncomfortable clarity the way he had approached me. He had not touched me, and that was precisely the problem. He had stopped close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body, raised his hand, and left the final inches between us untouched, as though what happened next depended entirely on me.

There had been no contact, and yet my body remembered the absence of it almost as vividly as if there had been.

I shut off the water and reached for a towel.

“Wonderful, Alice. Now you have a man from your dreams to think about in the shower. Excellent timing.”

I urgently needed work.

Coffee, clothes, makeup, keys, bag—the familiar sequence quickly returned my thoughts to something resembling their usual order. I liked routine not because I was especially pedantic, but because it saved energy and created the pleasant illusion that at least one part of life knew how it was supposed to behave.

By the time I reached the kitchen, the cat was already sitting beside his bowl.

“How do you manage to get everywhere before I do?”

He gave the empty dish a pointed look.

“Of course. In this household, I ask the questions and somehow every answer works in your favor.”

I filled his bowl, finished my coffee, and left for work.

The car started only on the second attempt. The first turn of the key produced an unpleasant metallic sound from the engine.

“Don’t even think about joining in. I have more than enough mysticism in my life without involving a mechanic.”

On the second try, the engine came to life.

“That’s much better.”

The city quickly restored my sense of reality. People hurried to work, buses pulled in at stops, and cyclists somehow managed to violate every imaginable rule at once while continuing to survive.

The first traffic light turned green just as I approached it.

The second did the same.

By the third, I started paying attention.

The light ahead was red. Traffic was slowing, and I eased my foot off the gas, but as soon as I came closer, the signal changed to green. The next intersection did exactly the same.

I stopped smiling.

There was, of course, a perfectly ordinary explanation. Modern traffic systems adjusted to the flow of vehicles, created green corridors, reacted to congestion. Right now, hundreds of people were probably driving through the city with exactly the same luck and not once suspecting the road infrastructure of taking a magical interest in them personally.

I liked that explanation considerably better.

I turned up the radio and stopped counting traffic lights.

Work greeted me with glass, metal, the smell of coffee, and the familiar hum of the morning. Everything here obeyed schedules, deadlines, and numbers, which was why the office had always had an almost calming effect on me. There were no prophetic dreams in my department, no dragons, no men appearing in the middle of silver mist. There were projects, budgets, meetings, and people capable of turning a three-sentence email into a problem that lasted a week.

Those were things I knew how to handle.

I had been running the project department for two years and knew my job well enough not to need constant reassurance that I was competent. A promotion had been the next logical step, and until recently, I had considered it only a matter of time.

Then the new director arrived.

He never refused anything outright. Men like him rarely said no when they could make someone wait long enough instead. Decisions that had already been agreed upon suddenly required further discussion, documents came back with additional comments, deadlines shifted after meetings, and somehow the responsibility for every consequence remained with my department.

Then, twice, he suggested that we continue the conversation in the evening, somewhere with a “more pleasant atmosphere.”

I declined both times.

Soon afterward, I learned that my promotion required further consideration.

Unpleasant, but hardly fatal.

The need to rely on myself had never frightened me. I did not remember my parents, and my uncle, who had raised me, had taught me something simple fairly early: if you wanted your life to belong to you, you had to learn to hold it in your own hands.

I had learned.

Perhaps that was why the events of the past few days irritated me even more than they frightened me. I did not understand the rules, which meant I could neither test them nor determine where coincidence ended and something else began.

“Alice!”

Marinka was coming toward me with two cups of coffee and the expression of someone who had already collected every piece of morning news and was now experiencing a physical need to share it immediately.

“Don’t tell me the second one is for me.”

“Of course it’s for you. Your face says your own coffee failed to do its job this morning.”

I took the cup. “You may now tell me absolutely anything. You’ve bought my loyalty.”

“That’s why we’re friends. You have a healthy system of values.”

We headed toward the elevators. Marinka had worked with me for almost three years and possessed the rare gift of delivering bad news in the tone of someone inviting you to a party.

“By the way, if the entire building suddenly loses power today, I suggest we declare it a day off.”

“Why would the building lose power?”

“Electricity has been entertaining itself since morning. The lights on the third floor have flickered three times already, and one of the meeting rooms went completely dark before turning itself back on a minute later. Accounting suffered a collective tragedy.”

“Because of the lights?”

“You underestimate accounting. Those people get nervous if a stapler is lying at the wrong angle. This is an actual electrical anomaly.”

I pressed the elevator button. “Then we evacuate accounting first. We can’t expose people to that kind of stress.”

“I knew management could be trusted.”

Inside the elevator, Marinka took a sip of coffee and gave me a more careful look.

“Now seriously. What’s wrong with you? You look great, but you’re behaving like you spent half the night arguing either with a man or with your own sanity. I haven’t decided which possibility interests me more.”

“Why does it have to be a man?”

“It doesn’t. But I’m hoping for the best.”

I laughed. “I just had a very strange dream.”

Marinka brightened immediately. “So there was a man.”

“That wasn’t a question?”

“Not anymore.”

“You’re impossible to talk to.”

“But predictable.”

The elevator stopped before the conversation could become any more dangerous. We stepped into the hallway, and the overhead lights flickered several times.

Marinka immediately caught my arm.

“There. That’s what I was talking about. And maintenance insists there’s nothing wrong with the electrical system.”

I looked up. “No power surges at all?”

“None. So we have two theories: either the electricians have no idea what they’re doing, or the building has developed a personality. I vote for the second. It’s more entertaining.”

Normally, I would have answered. Instead, another sequence had already begun arranging itself in my mind. Yesterday, a streetlight had gone out. This morning, traffic lights had changed as I approached them. Now the office lights were flickering for no reason.

Each incident was easy enough to explain on its own.

Together, they were becoming less cooperative.

“Alice,” Marinka said. “You’re starting to worry me.”

“I’m fine. The last twenty-four hours have just been a little eventful.”

“You’re saying ‘I’m fine’ with the face of a woman who doesn’t believe herself.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“Me? Never. But if you start seeing people who aren’t here, tell me immediately. I’d like to know which stage we’ve reached.”

A few seconds later, the joke stopped being funny.

The glass wall of a meeting room ran along the corridor, reflecting desks, pale wall panels, people at their computers, and the two of us walking side by side.

And one other person.

He was standing behind me.

I saw only dark hair and the line of his shoulders, but I did not need to see his face.

My body recognized him first.

Heat swept over my skin, absurdly out of place in the cool office hallway, and for one brief moment the water was around my legs again, silver mist stretched across the lake, and I could feel the warmth of the man who had stood close enough for my body to remember the distance between us.

I turned sharply.

There was no one behind me.

Marinka nearly walked straight into me.

“All right. No jokes now. What did you see?”

I looked back at the glass. It reflected only the two of us.

“I thought there was a man standing behind me.”

“Here?”

“Only in the reflection.”

Marinka was quiet for a moment. “The one from your dream?”

I turned to her. “Why did you decide it was him?”

“Because you didn’t look like someone who had just seen a stranger. You looked like you recognized him.”

Sometimes being friends with observant people was extremely inconvenient.

“Maybe.”

Marinka stopped smiling.

“Alice, I’m serious. Maybe you should go home. If it gets worse, I’ll drive you myself.”

“Are you giving orders to your boss now?”

“I’m taking advantage of your temporarily weakened condition, Madam Manager. Opportunities should never be wasted.”

“Very bold.”

“But effective. Besides, in half an hour you have a meeting with our illustrious director. If he asks you to finish another month-long project in four days, I officially give you permission to kill him.”

“I’ll need that in writing.”

“Of course. We’re a serious company. We follow procedure.”

I finally smiled. Marinka studied me once more, still concerned, but decided not to argue and headed toward her department.

I remained beside the glass wall.

Beyond it, ordinary life went on. Someone was talking on the phone, someone else typing, opening files, swearing at the printer. Only a few yards away, people were going about their work without the slightest idea that I was standing in the hallway waiting for a man who, until last night, had not existed anywhere in my reality.

The light above me gave the faintest flicker.

I looked directly into the glass.

“All right. Let’s try this differently. Whoever you are, stop appearing behind me. If you want something, try talking to me.”

My own reflection was the only answer.

I waited a moment, then sighed.

“Excellent. I’m officially negotiating with a pane of glass.”

I had just begun to turn away when the light around me went out.

Not across the entire floor.

Beyond the glass partitions, monitors continued to glow. The far end of the corridor remained washed in ordinary white light, and people moved and talked as though nothing had changed. The darkness existed only around me, several yards of space suddenly separated from the rest of the office by an invisible boundary. The surrounding noise became muted, the air seemed denser, and a silver glow spread across the floor and the glass, though there was nothing outside the windows that could have cast it.

With the light came a familiar sensation—not the lake itself, but its law. Space had changed like this when the man approached through the mist. My body registered his presence before my eyes had time to find him.

I set my coffee down slowly on the small table beside me.

“Is that you?”

The answer did not come from the hallway, and yet I heard it perfectly clearly.

“You can hear me.”

I went still.

In the dark reflection of the glass wall, familiar features were beginning to emerge. First a shadow, then the line of his shoulders, and finally his face, as though the glass were reflecting a man who was not actually standing anywhere in the corridor.

“Excellent. So now my hallucinations are auditory as well as visual.”

I thought I saw the hint of a smile.

“Then our hallucinations are mutual.”

“You can see me too?”

“I can.”

The light above me flashed briefly silver, and his face became clearer in the glass: dark hair, a calm gaze, the same features I had seen through the mist. Except now I was awake, and I knew that with absolute certainty.

Without meaning to, I stepped closer.

“You really exist.”

A trace of amusement entered his eyes. “After the last few days, I could say the same about you.”

The silver light trembled, and his face began to dissolve into the glass.

“Wait. What’s your name?”

He looked directly at me.

“Alice…”

“I know my name. Yours.”

But the light had already vanished. The glass became ordinary again, reflecting the office corridor, the ceiling lights, and me standing there with what was undoubtedly a ridiculous expression on my face. Beyond the invisible boundary that had existed only moments before, work continued uninterrupted. No one looked up. No one seemed to have noticed anything at all.

My hand was still half-raised toward the place where his face had been. I lowered it slowly.

The word dream had finally lost whatever meaning it had left.

I still had no idea where the man was, what allowed us to see each other across an impossible distance, or why the light turned silver whenever that distance seemed to thin. I did not know what connected the lake, the glass, the dragon, or the strange disturbances that had begun following me through ordinary life.

But one thing no longer required an explanation.

He existed.

And as I stood there staring at the empty glass where his face had disappeared, I caught myself thinking something that unsettled me almost more than all the magic of the past two days.

I wanted to see him again.