Is this flesh I feel?

  Gradie nded ihe offid found Michael already waiting, wearing the same weird white quasi-kimono he had worn to the briefing, and standio Lucy, who looked like a snow demon photoshopped into the soft light of the office. She held her hand out, smooth as a gss doll.

  “The please.”

  Gradie tossed it to her, and it floated through the air like it was moving in zero-g. She caught it, rolled it over with a smooth swipe of her blood-humb, studied it with her neon eyes, which glowed for an instant, then slipped it into her pocket, or somewhere between her form-fitting silk dress and her marble skin.

  “All right, look at me.” Her voiaked through his mind like he was thinking the words himself. She waved a hand across her fad his eyes sunk into her neon violet gaze.

  “Take off your mask.”

  He did.

  “Remember the first thing you saw when you woke up two days ago in your house, just before Sam picked you up.”

  And he did, and in an instant it all rushed out of some dark previously hidden part of his memht before his eyes, the hours, the days, Sam looking at him and everything they had said and the mother fuckers shooting at him and his feeling of victory and the crushing ui of failure and uselessness and all the fear and the smells of gunfire and gore and then she was dying again right in front of him as he faded away uhe impossible breath-crushing gravity of Propofol.

  For an instant, that other him lingered, just long enough to cry out to him, and he felt, suddenly, that he was on the verge of a revetion, a re-realization of something that had bloomed into being, beautiful and pure, sometime after the drug had put him down.

  Then it passed, and he felt he had missed something that he would be looking for forever.

  “ime try and e out of the Dreamworlds straight into the office,” Lucy said, her voiow just another sound, her eyes now studying again the that she had brought out of nowhere. “Your Self’s memory was already half gone.”

  And with that, she dropped through the floor. Michael smiled and cpped his hands around Gradie’s still outstretched - arm and shook it.

  “gratutions. Job well done.”

  “Fuck yes! I was so bad ass!” Sam’s voice struck him like another bullet as she walked in, drink in hand the color of molten lead. Luke and Lindsey came in behind her, and they had all shed their mortal skin. The flesh on their faces would never age. It glowed in the light of angels, while their eyes gred like stars, their clothes moved as if in water, their hair fluttered as fiments of distilled color, their movements like those whot gravity with every step.

  Sam looked Gradie up and down and smiled at his outfit, which he only now realized was somehow the same kit he had worn to his grave in the warehouse, and bounced up to him waving her drink near his face.

  “Are you gonna go shoot up the Allclub or—”

  He grabbed her by the waist and kissed her, like a man desperate to devour the st of a dream before it ends. Echoes of the days before had fred up at her voice, and he reached out for the girl who had saved him in the rain, mocked him over take-out, smiled at him over her coffee.

  When you see a dream e true, right in front of you, you be sure it’s not a trick of the mind? Like Déjà vu, a retroactive predi? Wouldn’t you want to be sure?

  She shoved him hard with her fists a himself float away.

  Her face was twisted into surprise and fusion, and she tried to cover it with an ahat wouldn’t quite respond to her call.

  “What—”

  “I saw you die.” He felt the tears float away from his eyes. One passed in front of him, and he saw it was blood.

  “Well, deal with it! Dying is our job.” Her voice cracked. Fingers of razor-sharp ice moved outward through his chest. Had any of it been real?

  “Gradie, don’t kiss your co-workers,” Michael said. Joking. Trying to lighten the mood. Hoping he would just get over it.

  “I know it be fusing,” Liarted.

  Gradie threw his mirror mask on over his weeping traitorous eyes and turned his ba them and kicked across the room. He heard it ione, saw it in their eyes. This was no big deal, happens all the time. Just another newbie freaking out after a job.

  “Gradie, it's normal to—” Michael called after him, his tone parental, patronizing. Gradie wao shoot him, but he was stuck here in a world where guns didn’t kill and you only bled if you wao.

  “Fuck! Yourself!” he yelled, thehrough the wide frosted window and shot out into the Allcity, theraight up until he found the silent darkness. He screamed out into the void and the sound died inches from his face. The dots of light flickered at him. The orb of the great p seethed like an optical illusion.

  Could he imagine all this? Maybe everyone did. A massive dream that felt like it sted all night, but was really just some trick of the brain, a process that had never been studied or expined because it was never remembered. Other people probably went to some kind of paradise, or an ideal version of their real life, but he dreamed of a shared dreamworld and a team of quantum phantoms with a spot just for him. Typical. He overthought his Dreamworld till his braied it, denying himself happiness even here.

  “Michael’s wrong, you know. It isn’t natural,” Kra said. He wao deny her existence, but her voice proved her reality. It felt impossible to imagio predict her. They all felt like that, whehought about it. Was that what scared him? Not thinking it was a dream, but fearing that it might be real? That she might be real?

  “Throwing yourself bato flesh, living as another version of yourself. Seeing your whole life only as a dream. It’s a lot to ask. It’s a lot to take.”

  “They all do it.”

  “And they all suffer for it, in one way or another. You may not see it, because they’ve faced it and e to terms with it, but it’s there.”

  He felt her hand on his shoulder, and wheurned, she was floating there. Smiling.

  “You don’t have to do it. There’s a whole world out there.” She gnced out at the bck. “More than you could ever see.”

  “It’s not the same. I’d rather be in a Hardworld.” She had a way of getting the truth out of him. It would have scared him if she wasn’t so warm.

  “Then don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about the way you do it. If you had listeo everyone else, you never would have found the .” She wi him and disappeared.

  “Thank you.” He thought.

  “Any time.” She said from everywhere, and her presence left his head. She knew just how much to say, just when to leave, and it occurred to him, through a more ical voice than he wao hear, that she probably had a lot of practice dealing with the emotional osciltions of Hardworlders.

  Hardworlders…

  That’s what I am now. That’s what I’ll always be. A Hardworlder.

  He tried to remember what it had felt like, at the end of the job, to give up their ways and jump with his whole weight onto his own, to risk it all, to find the right where he had expected, but he could hardly remember where he had found it at all. It had only been minutes ago, theoretically, but seemed so far away, like it had happeo someone else.

  It was the saddest feeling in the world.

  His unicat out like an old Nokia phone. God dammit, now?

  “Hello?”

  “You done g?” Philip said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Yeah, fuck me. Anyway, the team’s going out for a celebration, something about one of the twins running a party o Sol, whatever the fuck that means. I think they’re about to go looking for you. Probably apologize and tell you its ok that you threw a big tantrum and invite you along.”

  “I’m not going, tell them…” Gradie was already looking around the bck frantically, wishing he had any idea how to get to one of those stars.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell them you need some aloime to figure out all your problems a a really gooing.”

  “Fuck—”

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway, my ships h above the Allclub, right over that club with all the waterfalls and whales and shit. You remember how to use the trols?”

  “To get to the HQ?”

  “Yeah. Lucy already has the mem of the job loaded into the bank. I wanna show you iail how you fucked up before Michael gives you the kiddie gloved version.”

  Gradie was already halfway around the ball, flying faster than he ever had, his tears long fotten, his thoughts full of highways and gunfire.

  Kra says they have all e to terms with their strange fractured existence. Do you think she's right? ime, the final chapter of The Bounty, lost souls are found, and something moves in the shadows. episode, Mid Maya.