OKAY, GIRL, GET A GRIP.

Let's be fair. A little staring is probably inevitable.

Lucid dreams are supposed to be for people in touch with their interior lives. Aren't they?

She's been outrunning hers for so long, she struggles to remember what it sounds like. What it looks like; smells like. She probably couldn't recognize it if it was standing right in front of her.

--But she feels confident it was never quite like this.

Vivid. Present. Physical.

So many individuals, all around her. Smelling of their own travels; the sweat and exertion of too many long days on the road, wafting off too many people to count.

Everything is there in exacting detail, every person with their own olfactory profile.

But it's supposed to be a dream. Her dream. Shouldn't her subconscious be supplying something familiar to her?

Or should it? How would she know, one way or the other?

She has the choice to get more information, though, and she uses it; gets the attention of the man in front of her.

He turns to look at her, curious.

What to ask?

"Excuse me, do you, ah-- ...That is, I'm trying to find--"

"Say no more, young lady," the man says. "I know that look by now. Just keep moving--"

"--You'll be where you need to be in no time."

"Even if I have no idea where that is?" Lacey asks.

He grins, as if delighted she'd ask. "Especially if you have no idea where that is."

"I'm-- not sure I understand."

"Oh, don't worry," he says. "That's quite normal."

'Normal.'

Who in their right mind would call any of this 'normal?'

Her fellow travelers, apparently. She's the only one hesitating. Everyone else moves with purpose, towards a white room she can just barely see through the throng of people.

Everything in it is white. Every container, every scrap of cloth, every surface. Like anything that isn't fabric has been encased in porcelain.

No one else thinks anything of it. They're busy chatting with each other; greeting one another. Treating it like a train station.

Is that what it is? Is that why she's carrying--

Oh.

It's not just any suitcase, is it?

She'd just assumed it was one of her saddlebags. Instead-- this. One of the first gifts Irene had given to her.

She nearly drops it on sight.

Last she saw it, it'd been emptied out, its contents burned. She'd hoped to never see it again.

Now-- here it is.

Because of course it is.

Irene.

She followed much the same course as her name.

It was meant for a goddess of peace before Saint Peter's filth got their hands on it. Now, it's merely a perversion of itself.

It took decades for her name to be unmade. For the woman herself, it took three days.

One night, a perfectly healthy twenty year old. The next, not so much. She'd taken ill, struck down by some fever, her body unable to change shape and heal itself.

Then it stopped. The worst was over. And she was never quite herself again.

We know what that means, don't we? The three day fever.

Someone went and made a deal, swore a little fealty, whether she knew it or not. And it's safe to assume the answer is 'not.'

Compound wolves - Lacey's little chapter in particular calls themselves the Northwest Cooperative - have always been stridently irreligious. Ever since the church chased their founders out of Europe, anything that stinks of the spiritual is roundly shunned.

A laudable position to take, where the church itself is concerned, but their dogmatic approach has left them frighteningly ignorant.

Had they retained the knowledge their overseas cousins took for granted, they might have helped her. Recognized the fever for what it was. But they didn't. And she suffered for it.

Paranoia. Delusions. A constant stream of nightmares. Visions of hostile worlds; of countless bleak futures.

For what purpose, it's hard to say. But we're moving well beyond Lacey's frame of reference. She wouldn't have known the details and, in fairness, neither should you.

Irene's frame of reference wasn't much broader. She had only hell as means of describing what was happening to her. So it was of hell and its demons that she spoke.

And, over the decades, people listened.

Wolves aren't built to be ignorant of the supernatural. Neither are their distant, four-legged cousins. They don't have to know what they're sensing to know something is there.

In Irene, they could see, smell, and feel that something in her. Something beyond 'mere' psychosis. And it took her places that would have seemed unfathomable, in those earlier years.

She didn't bring anything to the table other leaders hadn't already. Her fierce isolationism had long been a part the compound's guiding principles.

What she brought - vitally - was a tangible goal, with a deeper purpose.

Hers was not a message of patient fortification; the slow bolstering of numbers, as the founders had naively envisioned. It was warfare. Retribution. Taking the fight back to humanity's doorstep, before the hell she saw in her nightmares came to consume them.

On it, she rose quickly to power, becoming one of three councilors overseeing a population that numbers in the hundreds.

Since then, she's enacted more violence against her own kind than she has against humans. But she's lead successful campaigns to push back potential invaders, which has more than solidified her support.

She is vicious, obsessive, and relentless, with plenty of trusted lieutenants ready and willing to carry out her orders.

Lacey ought to know. She was one of them.

So trusted, in fact, that they had until very recently been quite-- let's say, companionable.

She's seen first-hand what Irene does when that trust is broken. How far she'll go to drag those she sees as traitors back home; how brutal the punishments have gotten. How strange.

To date, Lacey's still not sure that what she saw in those last few 'sessions' actually happened. But-- on the off chance that they did--

She can't convince herself entirely that this peculiar world isn't somehow Irene's doing.

But there's a much stronger chance that it's not. And if it's not-- then she'd be much better off just knowing what she's dealing with. And this nice man seems moderately receptive.

"Hey," she says. "Sorry. Would you mind if I asked another question?"

"Oh," he says, "not at all. Ask away."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Every way she can think to say it sounds absurd to her.

"Sooner rather than later, young lady," the man says, as the seconds tick on, gesturing to the room ahead. "I'm in something of a hurry so you'll have to make it quick."

Her mind must have been wandering for some time. They're right at the entrance.

"Right," she says. "I guess I'd just like to know--" A pause; then, she tries to start again. "I know how stupid this is probably going to sound, but: is this a dream?"

He laughs. "Maybe for you, my dear," he says. "For me, it's another day's work."

"What exactly does that mean?" she says. "'Yes and no?'"

"Exactly, yes," he says, smiling brightly. "It all depends on the route you took to get here. Now-- if you don't mind--"

HOLD ON A SECOND...

...

...

...

...

"Tch."

"This place was packed when we started. How many of you are there, now? Five?

Was it the history lesson? Was that too much for you?"

...

...

...

...

"Fine, fine. The art critics have spoken.

This place isn't really primed for certain gimmicks, so we'll take the boring route, dispense with the mandatory call-and-response, and I will simply ~tell the story.~"

"You lovelies chiming in are, of course, welcome to continue. If I find I need a more lively crowd, I'll just change venues.

And drag the lot of you with me, whether you like it or not."

"Now! Where were we..."

Ah, yes. Our good friend Lacey.

With the literal and figurative baggage on her hands.

She needs to get rid of this thing. That much, she knows.

There's nothing inside of it that she wants. Nothing that will be of any help to her.

It's tempting to just shove it into the man's arms, call it a gift. A tepid 'thank you' for what little help he's offered.

What does she care, if its contents slip into the 'wrong' hands?

She opens her mouth to speak, make the offer, but when she looks up--

--Oh.

--Oh.