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Grace had always liked to sleep, because she liked to do everything she did. Her parents said, “It’s your job to be happy right now.” Grace knew when she was older she’d have a real job, but being happy and keeping a smile on was easy. She didn’t have much of anything to be upset about.
She likes to sleep for a different reason too, though: in her dreams there’s music.
It must be music. It sounds enough like the things her Arithmetic Educator plays for her class for Grace to remember some of the patterns, plussing the numbers in her head. (Math is hard. Grace is only five, though. She knows she’ll get better at it when she grows up.)
The music in her dreams didn’t work like that. Sometimes she couldn’t count any of it. It’s nice most of the time.
There are colours she dreams, too, like nothing she knew. In the City the streets were black and the floors were black, and the walls were white, and the buildings were gray, and sometimes the sky was pale colour like the insides of some people’s eyes, but that was basically it. Except for the people, the City looked very… quiet. The colours in Grace’s dreams were loud.
She knows she should tell her family’s doctor. Non-licensed music is illegal. Illegal means dangerous, or bad, and not for little girls like her. Her parents might get into trouble and her teachers would be disappointed in her. Secrets are illegal, too.
Grace doesn’t tell anybody. She likes the music even though she doesn’t understand it.
She likes the music even when the other parts that comes with it are scary. In her dreams there are people she doesn’t know, explosions and sometimes pain. She’s too young to know what they mean, but still they pass over her in waves. Sometimes they’re just sadness but other times they feel like someone’s talking to her, or over her, asking her for answers she doesn’t know how to say.
She wakes up crying, her head ringing. Her parents hug her and say nightmares, nightmares, but it’s not nightmares at all. Grace can’t explain it.
Her doctor gives her a sleep aid that washes everything out to white noise.
*
Grace leaves Battery City when she’s ten years old. It feels like it happens so fast even though it takes days. But then she’s in the desert, having lost everything precious in her life except one. Hope clings to her side, both of them crying but Grace trying to hide it. She holds onto her sister’s jacket as they run down the dizzying hills and along the empty roads, not looking behind them.
They’ve never seen sand before. Suddenly it’s almost all they can see. The sand is red and orange, and the highways are grey, and the buildings are in pieces, and the sky is either so blue it hurts to look at it or so dark and full of stars it makes Grace afraid.
The first night, the two of them hide in a drainage tunnel. Grace lays down curled up against the side, as far away from the weird sludge residue at the bottom of it as she can manage. (Not very far. It gets all over her shoes.) She gives Hope the better spot, closer to the opening, so she doesn’t have to be near the residue at all. Hope is only six, it’s only fair.
Grace isn’t expecting anything when she closes her eyes. She’s more tired than she has been her whole life. She just wants a few hours of rest.
Instead, the dreams come back.
The music comes back.
She’s standing in a place where stars upend themselves above her, and bigger stars roar like large cars and glitter like they’re made of metal. The noise doesn’t scare her. Around her feet, landscapes form and then dissolve and then reform. It steadies on the desert, but a different place than the stretch of deserted highway where Grace and her little sister had gone to sleep. At first the sand is calm, the sky dusted and cacti flowering. Grace feels—peaceful. She’s always been here.
But that isn’t right at all: Grace is angry, terrified and hurt, totally lost. Within seconds a thin wind is howling like the animals she’d heard in the dark and the sand whips around her feet in waves. The stars explode in the sky with sounds like guns going off (she hates that she knows the noise) and then drip down around her, fizzing when they hit the earth.
For a second, the whole world blurs. The howling continues until it--- shifts.
Grace looks up towards nothing, there isn’t any kind of sky above her anymore. The nothing she’s standing on is concrete coloured and doesn’t feel like anything. The wind is doubled, one part howling and one part something she can’t explain, but it feels like—like a long time.
Grace realizes, distantly, that this kind of sound has a name and she knew it a while ago but she can’t remember. There’s math in the noise, patterns, like heartbeats but bigger.
Grace likes them. She wants to hear more, and when she thinks that, the panic shriek of the animals eases out. The pattern shifts again, and this time it sounds like a question.
The nothing-blur below her eases a little. Its shape now is familiar. The desert.
Grace gets the hint. She closes her eyes—it feels like double-closing, somehow, like closing a door and locking it too, but that doesn’t matter—she pictures the road. The one she slept under. She pictures the road, and the drainage pipe, and the hills that her and Hope almost tripped and tumbled down and broke their heads open on. Around her the landscape solidifies again. Sand. Road. Pipe. Hope, small beside her, and the feeling of her hands like an anchor that’s on fire.
The wind-sound is more steady, less high-pitched, but the sand is still.
And then the wind itself pushes her forward. She flies with the ends of her sneakers just skimming the ground, like a cloud. She holds her arms out and that lets her turn. She isn’t afraid.
The world opens up. The wind carries her far: up hills so huge they’re like office towers, past burnt corpses of trees, but everywhere still the sand and sand and sand. She floats, and she looks down. An entire real-world map is folded out underneath her.
She feels someone behind her, looking over her shoulder like a teacher checking to make sure you understand. She waits.
They point, and she looks down, and she sees it. A half-broken building like so many others she’d seen, covered with bright letters and rude spraypaintings with an metal branch of antenna growing out its roof. It’s singing, reaching invisible arms out towards her in buzzing waves. Home. Home. Home.
Grace wakes up with half of her puffy hair gummed-up and stuck to the side of her head, her mouth tasting like acid and her stomach growling. Her heart starts to speed up and then jackhammer. Without thinking she tightens her arms around Hope, who’s somehow still asleep.
She notices a little detachedly that she’s crying. But she isn’t sad. That’s never happened before.
When Hope finally opens her eyes Grace has pulled out the Meal cans from the messenger bag she carried and popped the tops, putting one to the side for her sister to eat. After a quick breakfast she makes Hope wash her face with a bit of water from one of the bottles, and then they crawl up the hill back onto the road.
Grace takes her sister’s hand, and she starts walking. The road in the mountains, and more importantly the buzzing welcome it gave, fills her entire head. She doesn’t have words for how she’s feeling but it’s a good thing.
Someone’s been with her this whole time.
Quiet, but not gone, and now they’re trying to find her.
She isn’t alone.
*
In the daytime she tries to relearn how to live. It’s hard, especially when it’s all so different from anything she’d known the firsts ten years of her life, and when suddenly dreaming feels like coming home. But Grace has someone to look after so she has to figure this out. Fast.
She does.
As she learns new things some of the old stuff in her head fades away. She forgets the angles of the streets from the corner supplier to her apartment building, and the names of all her classmates vaporize. She doesn’t forget math, but different kinds replaces the ones she knows. She decides to call it “running math”. In the Zones, run means survive. Grace uses running math to remember that there’s two battery packs per gun that have seven shots each, so she has to be able to dive fourteen times to get away from nobodyfaces when they show up crawling out of dunes to bust up a party. Hope helps her count sometimes.
She’d asked her sister if Hope had dreams like she did, but Hope seemed confused. Maybe she’s too little for them.
In the nighttime, Grace tries to concentrate. Sometimes she becomes whoever’s dreaming with her. She looks down and sees shoes that aren’t hers, or a wheelchair, which also isn’t hers. She’s pretty sure that they’re an adult, whoever she’s dreaming with—the world looks taller when she stands up as them. She can’t ever stand up for long though, which she guesses explains the wheelchair.
They show her places but she doesn’t know how to get to them. Maps don’t make any sense; Grace doesn’t have anything to compare them to. She imagines the place where she and Hope are, and sometimes that helps, but it’s slow work. It’s a little frustrating.
Frustration is a bad feeling. In Battery City, they gave her medication to let her never be frustrated again once she knew how to name the feeling. Grace kind of misses it. But there’s not any here, so she just has to deal. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
Grace doesn’t give up. She can’t. Once she finds her dreammate, it’ll all be easier.
Her and Hope look during the day because the nights get too cold. It’d be easier if Grace could just ask, but she has no idea how. Grace can’t write in the dreams, and it’s weird but she can’t read anything either. It’s only the sounds. Plus she’s dreamed less since she came out here: when she was little and had a soft bed and no sleepy-time medication, the dreams were almost every night, but now it’s harder. You can’t sleep unless you’re well-hid in the Zones, and hiding takes time. Most nights, or so it seems, Grace sits up and watches over Hope. She gets ready to pull her sister awake and bolt at any noise.
No one in the City ever talked to her about sharing heads with somebody. In the dust, everyone talks all the time. It takes a while for Grace to filter the nonsense signals out.
After long enough in the Zones that Hope has gotten noticeably browner, and she tells Grace that she’s gotten browner too, a junk punk at a fair tells Grace something useful.
She related it offhand while building something with wires and clicking metal parts. “Y’ can’t see reflections when you’re asleep. Doesn’t matter if it’s waters or mirrors or just plain metal,” the junk punk said. “Your brain doesn’t hold you in it at the same time as it’s working. It’d be like tying a knot in another knot.” The junk punk had poured something fire-smelling and liquid into the mess of wires and gears. “Watch out now, roadbaby.”
Grace had stepped wide of the would-be engineer and tried not to get too upset. How would she find who she was looking for if she didn’t see them?
Then the wires and gears had exploded into a fireball. The junk punk had let out a low, wonder-filled laugh, while Hope first shrieked and then crowded closer, demanding the killjoy do it again. Grace was distracted but only for a minute.
Maybe she would just know her dreammate, like she knows her own head. They’re out here somewhere. They can’t be anywhere else.
Every runner she meets after that, crashqueen or sunshine or starshine, she looks at them straight-on for a quick second to try and read their face.
You?
No.
Not yet.
*
Right after she loses the last thing tying her to the entire rest of her life, she runs into the crew that calls themselves the Fabulous killjoys. They’re bright, and dangerous, and on some trip-up of sympathy they let her ride in their get-away car from a firefight that’d gone skyward pretty fast.
None of them are familiar to her.
(You?
No.)
She’s never known any people like them before. They don’t know her, either, and neither her or the crew owe each other anything.
Grace could run whenever she wants.
She’s been lonely and small and she hated it. They don’t treat her like someone who needs looking after, but they kind of look after her anyway. She’s never known the parts of the desert they bring her to, the music they play.
The dreams don’t show her anything different. She hadn’t felt much from them in a while; her own sorrow was crowding out all of the static waves.
She stays.
*
In the end, it’s the Fabulous crew that take her to see the doctor.
The radio-pirate of irradiated in-Zones. Disturber of shit, gatherer of needed things. Doctor Death-Defying. He has a lot of names but she doesn’t know any of them as more than a voice on the radio. Until, at least, she sees him.
On the day that the Fabulous ones visit, Death-Defying and his partner Show Pony are set up in an old-ass metal shed in Zone Two that someone’s rigged up as a watering hold slash trade hub. No one’s there that day except the doctor, the crew and some sun spiders lingering in the dust. As soon as her group steps inside the lean-to door and their eyes adjust to the dark she knows him.
He’s older than she expected. He’s in a wheelchair, which she remembered (looking down while asleep, arms too big for her in a chair too heavy for the sand but which moved anyway). He looks up at the new arrivals and blinked, just once, drawing into himself. Grace can see her thoughts mirrored in his eyes.
You?
You.
She can barely believe it.
Death-Defying eased his shock back under the smooth façade of his shoulders, and he nodded at her. “Sugarhead,” he said. “I’ve… heard a lot about you.”
“I know,” Grace said. She felt strange, like the air around her was holding its breath. She felt herself crook a fragile little smile. “You, too.”
Death-Defying’s head bobbed, a couple seconds too long for it to be only an acknowledging-nod. He turned to Show Pony, who’d been standing behind him leaning their hip on the desk. “Give us some space for a couple seconds, starshine?”
Show Pony looked at him and then at Grace, seeming confused. Then they nodded and pushed themself to their full height. “Can do,” they said, before waving a hand at the crew who were standing, somewhat confused, behind Grace. “Everyone out.”
“Why?” Fun Ghoul asked, suspicious to a fault. The Fabulous killjoys would’ve scarpered a long time ago if they had doubts about Death-Defying. Still, Grace is one of their own.
“It’s alright,” Grace said, turning on her heel towards them, just to smooth it over. “I know him. It’s—it’s shiny.”
“Know him?” Ghoul’s forehead wrinkled and he looked from Grace to the radio pirate. “From when?”
“From get out,” Show Pony said loudly, and they hustled the four (non-protesting) killjoys out of the lean-to door they’d only just tramped through on the way in. Kobra caught Grace’s eyes before the whole group got shoo'd out of sight; she nodded to show she was really fine, and moved her arms up to cross over her stomach. She remembered when Kobra had showed her how to fight. (The two of them had gotten good at talking without talking.)
Kobra nodded, signal received. He disappeared into the day with the others.
So her and the radio pirate were alone.
Grace stood like she was in a firefight, her hands at her hips and not far from her gun. Death-Defying sat much the same way. It wasn’t a fight, though, not really; they were both thinking the same thing.
When they spoke they spoke at once:
“How do I know—“
“Sugarhead, how can we make crystal--”
Both of them stopped. They eyed each other down, Grace narrowing her eyes almost comically.
Death-Defying looked like he was calm. He sat back in his chair, looking up at her. “You have a sister,” he said then, calculatingly.
It stung a little; had, she had a sister. Hope was pretty long gone. Maybe he heard it too, the little metallic ‘ping’ off her heart. Something in his face shifted, anyway. “You don’t have any,” she retorted. “Or brothers.” She paused. “You had a wife, though. And younglings. Before.” It was harder to understand those visions. She hadn’t known what they were; except, sometimes, nightmares. “But I’m not any of them.”
“No,” he agreed. “You’re someone different.” He sounded… complicated.
Grace couldn’t narrow it down more than that. She had never heard him talk in their dreams. Grace decided not to worry about it, though, because she’d been right. She had her own parents. She didn’t need any others. (She thought briefly to the killjoys standing out in the sun—they weren’t her parents either, or her dream-mirror. They were her crew. That was its own thing, it was different.) Grace cleared her throat of dust as much as she could. “I need to know something,” she said.
Death-Defying’s eyebrows raised questioningly.
“What does it mean?” She asked. She’d been wondering it for as long as she’d been out under the sun. “Why do we dream together? Where’s—why you?” He must know, she thought. Radio pirates were the beating heart that held all the Fabulous killjoy’s humming blood-system of a Zone together. They knew everything.
It seemed like she was right. “Good asks,” he said, agreeably. He sat up in the chair, leaning a little forward with his arm leaning against the table he was beside. “It means… well, has anyone told you about the Phoenix Witch?”
“Well, yeah.”
He nodded slowly. “Who does she talk to?”
“… people’s ghosts,” Grace said. “When their heavy stuff is buried in the dust somewhere, she tells them where to go.”
“Well-said,” Death-Defying said agreeably. “And the ghosts, where do they come from?”
Grace shrugged. “You get one the first breath you take,” she said.
Death-Defying nodded, then looked to the side of the shack. When he looked back he was almost sombre. “We have matching ghosts,” he said. “Us two.”
“Only us?”
“Negative, a lot of people do. Nobody’s really scrubbed out why.”
Grace paused. It felt… strange, that idea. “Why didn’t I notice--”
“BLI doesn’t talk about it,” he said. “Makes managing everything get too messy.”
“People still have them in the city?”
“You did,” Death-Defying said. He shifted, leaning away from his bad leg to hold his head up on his right palm, putting one of his fingers on his temple.
She had. But she’d never thought about it happening to other people, too, before.
There was a couple seconds where neither of them said anything. Then, Death-Defying sighed. “Sugarhead,” he said, “I’m sorry for causing y’ any grief. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve seen that little eyes shouldn’t see.”
Grace remembered the flashes of light and pain in her dreams, especially when she’d been smaller. She frowned and shook her head. “I’ve seen them anyway,” she said. “And I’m not a little kid. I’ve fought, too.”
Death-Defying considered her for a second, and then nodded, slowly and surely. “That you have,” he said. His voice was like a rumble of rocks under tires.
Silence fell again. Grace wondered if this would be easier if they were asleep—the dreams would sing for them. They could build the world up around them, explain in moving landscapes instead of minced breathings.
“What’s it mean?” Grace blurted out loud, right before the silence stretched into being unbreakable. “The dreams and everything. So our ghosts’ match, it must mean something.”
“Everything’s means a lot of things, motorgoblin,” he said like it was an automatic thing to say, and then he smiled. He had a cool, almost cold smile; like the sun going down over sands. “For us, it means we look out for each other.”
“That’s it?” It seemed too easy.
“That’s a lot to say in small words,” Death-Defying replied after a moment, sounding reproachful.
Grace blinked and shut her mouth, stung. But then she frowned, then stared at the walls of the shack like they had any answers. She thought about how long it’d taken her to get here, and she felt the weight of the blaster on her hip.
The radio pirate was right. Looking out for people was a lot to say in small words: it was way harder than it sounded, and it lasted your whole life. Or their whole life. It meant a lot of work and a lot of trouble. It could also mean shiny things.
Grace had believed that everything would get fixed when she found her dreammate. She didn’t anymore, but it was still good to be near him. It settled something. Not in her heart, but in her feet, which was a lot better. She didn't feel like she needed to be searching all the time anymore. Grace could rest a little.
“Alright,” she said, looking back up.
“Alright?”
“Milkshake,” she repeated, thinking that maybe a different word would help. “I mean— I’ll watch your back if you watch mine.”
Death-Defying smiled again. It wasn’t like being laughed at, like some adults' were. “Then that’s a real deal,” he said. He pushed himself so he was sitting straight-backed in his chair and held out his hand.
Grace walked and closed the handshake.
The doctor’s palms were warm. “My moniker’s Doctor Death-Defying,” he said, his voice an amused rumble again. “Good to meet you, roadgoblin.”
“Shiny,” Grace grinned. Then she paused. “… I don’t really know my desert name, yet.”
“Really?” His eyebrows went up again.
She nodded, suddenly almost shy of talking. “I know it’s been a while. I just. I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s alright, sugarhead,” Death-Defying said after waiting to be sure she wasn’t going to say anything else. He smiled bright at her and it felt like a promise of bright days. “It’ll be just as shiny when you do.”
==