What is never known and never seen?

  Gradie threw the b off and it dissolved into the darkness. He pulled on one of the gloves and got his pistol in hand. Spotlights lit up the windows and the blinds and curtains glowed like psma. He grabbed his pho left his shoes behind and scrambled over the couch.

  They yelled “police” again as he flew down the hallway. The front door banged iryway, testing the hinges like a tornado was trying to break through. White light ser-beamed through the peephole and streamed through the gaps in the frame.

  He found Sam’s door open and smmed it shut behind him and dropped the bars. The room was silent and dark, and he didn’t see her anywhere. He guessed that she was croug somewhere in the shadows, maybe behind the bed, waiting to surprise anyone who made it through the door before he got out the window.

  Behind him, the banging sounds were joined by the snapping wood sound of the front door starting to give. He moved to the window and groped at cold bare wall for a few panicked heartbeats before he found the cord as it fshed in the sliver of light from the edge of the curtain. He pulled it with both hands as hard as he could.

  The curtains colpsed to the floor and the blinds shot up. Fear crackled up the front of his body as he stood, pletely exposed, before the full length of the window. Across the storm creek and past the grass and sidewalk oher side, two cop cars with their sirens fshing were parked on the main street. The rain fell in a steady roar, and the blue-red light died on the grass in broken patches.

  He put his pistol in his waistband holster and fahe street and wn and rushing foaming creek with the AR, but nothing moved or fired at him. He held the gun in one hand and grabbed the rope with the other a out the window from a squat, shoulder first and taking the s with him.

  The rope came alive in his gloved hand and he was soaked by the time he hit the ground. Before he could move down into the cover of the small ravine, a spotlight snapped on atop one of the cars, just as blinding and pitiless as it had been behind the store, and the cops started shouting. He started shooting.

  His first burst took out the spotlight but he was still almost blind. Somehow he had fotten his NVG. He emptied the rest of the magazine in bursts, aimed in the general dire of shadowy upper torsos, or just where he thought they might be.

  They returned fire and bullets cracked all around, spped into the brick behind him, and sptted off the mud, but the sudden dull punch of a gunshot never came. He jumped down into the creek and the water went up to his hips. He reloaded and the empty mag floated downstream like a leaf. Fshlights and another spotlight lit up the misty windblown air above the ravine. He waited for the bzing bulbs, and the gun barrels attached to them, to breach the edges of darkness, but they stayed out of sight, their beams swinging like pendulums over his head.

  A golden light fshed oer and the beams focused at something behind him. Gunfire cracked agaiurned around and saw Sam’s bedroom light was on. The windoen but unbroken. Panic shook him and the whole world seemed to vibrate. He must have left her inside, missed her in the dark.

  He scrambled up the muddy slope and lost the AR along the way. As gunfire exploded and cracked behind him, his fingers and shoes found the mortar between the bricks and he floated up the wall. The golden square, now foreshorteo a yellow slice of soft light, with a cloud of amber rain fluttering in front of it, came towards him as he was lifted upwards as if on a wire. His chest rolled over the windowsill and the world spun. He nded suddenly on the carpet.

  The room was dry and warm, and the dusty bulbs in the ceiling fan sprayed a vanil-glow ohing. The shooting and the night melted into unmemory. Sam stepped out from behind the bookcase wearing nothing but a towel. She saw him and screamed. He khat this was her real life, and that she didn’t remember him or anything about the job, but he still felt she was in danger. He grabbed a b from the bed and threw it around her. She squirmed inside of it as he held her to him.

  “They’re going to kill you!” he said.

  “I’m going to kill you!”

  He looked out the window. Nothing but bck rain and streetlights wavering in the night. He khat there were no cops outside, and his greatest fear suddenly was the embarrassment of expining to her how he had gohrough her window to escape an imaginary fugitive squad. He let her go suddenly and she pushed him away from her with a scream. He tumbled and fell backwards out the window. The world rolled over him and dark mud spread across the sky.

  A thought broke out of his mind and got between him and the ground ing to crush him.

  “This ’t be real.”

  Aronie rang out from all around, like a chime inside his head. He realized it had been ringing for a while, and he had just missed it in the chaos, dismissed it as some other sound. A car arm during the shooting. An arm clo Sam’s bedroom.

  He remembered it all suddenly. It was the chime EP would py in his earbuds to help him go lucid.

  “It’s not real.”

  He broke through the ground like the world was hollow and brittle. Everything rolled again and he nded on the roof of Sam’s apartment. It was an isnd in a sea of insanity.

  He could see for miles, but it was a different kind of vision. Everything around him was shifting and ghostly, blurry, like it was hard to remember, dissolving into unrealhe moment his focus shifted somewhere else. He tried to find an anchor, to remember what he had been thinking just moments before, to find his way through the writhing world into something solid, but his thoughts had a weight and velocity here more extreme than even in the vault, and they threw him across the ndscape instantaneously, as if distance here was as restrictive as smoke against the solidity of thought.

  He thought of Sam and was in her bedroom. He thought of their drive together and was out in the parking lot. He thought of the SUV and was o it, under bright lights in a sheet metal garage, half of its windows vat and dark. It reminded him of gunshots and bullet holes, and he was thrown into a wood-paneled bedroom that smelled of cigarettes and chemical smoke. A man leaned over an old oak desk, turning the k on a piece of bck metal maery cmped to the end of it, loading rounds the size of his index finger into a belt.

  The king sound remained while the room dissolved and became the sound of a man ratcheting a pallet ja a warehouse. The dust and the echoes took his mind to a tunnel beh the ground, and the darkness and fear he found there whisked him bato the night, standing at the edge of a multistory building, looking out over the glittering city, fearing the fall.

  It had all happened in an instant, and the sensation reminded him of Lucy’s mind stripper. In a panic, he wondered if some unknown Spirit was bing his mind. He focused on the sensation of his feet on solid ground, ted the siren-like chimes in his ears, and tried to steady the dream.

  His mind found something solid miles away, or something solid found his mind.

  A figure, at the edge of it all, looking right at him. He k was watg him. The city betweewo of them shifted like tv static. He khat it knew he could see him, and that it was surprised. A fear broke through everything, a real nightmare fear, the kind that es from knowing with a certainty only found in dreams of a dahat could o ihe fear either gave way to, or was the cause of, a strange anger. He took a step towards the figure, fetting the edge, or knowing the fall could no longer harm him.

  Kra’s voice caught him mid-step, right in his ears ale, and the thing was gone like she had ba. He knew, somehow, that she hadn’t seen it.

  “Gradie, imagine a door with Michael and the team oher side of it.”

  He was stunned for a sed at her using their real names, but it grounded him. He could feel the Otherworld crag open in his mind, and his Spirit reasserted itself.

  “You’re te for the meeting,” she said.

  Have you ever woken up in a dream? Its called a false awakening. They be quite terrifying, and leave you questioniy forever. ime, the team ys out a pn to get the job done food, but you know what they say, man pns... episode, In Dreams.