Buildings next to buildings, askew or aligned...

Strong walls, concrete and steel fortifications that circle all we hold dear...

A city of madness, and a city of terror. All they've ever known. Broken cities crafted by broken minds.

We live a life amidst the twisted yet familiar. We live a life amidst the grim spectre of war.

If we're going to survive this, we must conquer the madness and terror in our own hearts. We must exist with hope in the face of despair, and refuse to give in to the worst within us.

We're coming. We're coming to do battle for what is right.

We're coming to make our stand with lucid eyes that will see forever.

Are you ready?

Are you ready?



//025: Dreamweaver

In the still of a hot Atlanta night, the temperature remained nice and chilly in the facility. Despite the creaky old air conditioning which had to have been installed during the Nixon administration at the latest, the atmosphere remained coolly still. No heated discussions between the few doctors left on this dead-end project, no trigger-happy and extremely bored security guards looking for minor infractions to lean on.

You wouldn't even know that the facility represented one of the CDC's oldest and most secret projects, from the atmosphere of workaday dullness about it all. Even the act of brain-scanning a patient who had been in a coma for a hundred years without aging a day had become a mundane act. Eight in the evening, like clockwork, and Patient 23 was being studied intensely.

The scanner showed vague images of the city being generated by the resonant frequency of her heartbeat and central nervous system. It couldn't see fine details, unless it snagged on some focal point—nobody could agree if that was interference or just the janky experimental machinery they were working with—leaving them only with a vague idea of what was going on.

Things were getting exciting, though. A considerable layover of patterns between Patient 23 and Patient 12 had been occurring lately. Patient 12 had been poking around in other heads as well... resulting in the death of Patient 7. That made for some very interesting data points.

Doctor Jack Hayes liked very interesting data points. They were better than the endless cycle of repeating data points, the same ones he'd been collecting for years without fruit. A dead end job for a dead end man... or so he thought.

Curiously, one part of the trinity within Patient 23 (always there were three focal points, they'd found, from increasingly higher resolution scans) had gone missing. It took some time before Jack found it... inside the patterns from Patient 12.

One of the freaks of 23's subconscious had jumped ship. The entity they knew as "Bedlam" was still kicking around in there, as was "Echo." The third they had no name for; it was elusive, apparently now to the point of crossing dreams. Very curious...

And then there was the not-so-small matter of Patient 31. The Sleepwalker, the one who woke up and escaped the facility long before Jack was born. He'd been parked in the middle of Patient 12's "Citadel" for some time. A related phenomenon, perhaps...?

Jack made note of any fluctuations in his data scans that night. With any luck... this would be his ticket off this project.

A hundred years of mad science, with no progress to show for it. No idea how the flu vaccine had induced this coma of immortality. No way to reproduce the effects, thanks to that bastard Bates turning himself into Patient 31 with the last of the vaccine. No way to reproduce, replicate, mass-produce, weaponize, or any of the things various government branches had wanted to do with it over the years. By this point the CDC was just keeping tabs on the patients out of a slim hope that they'd do something new and interesting...

Patients interfering with each other, that was new and interesting. The increasing strength of 23's signal, that was new and interesting. Perhaps with enough study, Jack could crack the code... and earn himself a promotion out of this hole and onto something which didn't have him living like a hermit in the Ozarks.

As the girl who was Patient 23 slept, a portion of her mind existing five doors down the hall in the brain of a war veteran... Jack took notes. While not truly understanding the importance of anything, anything at all.

She didn't understand why any of this was happening.

How many days had it been? How many days since they kicked down her door, gassed her, and dragged her off to this hell? No clue. Half the time they kept her blindfolded and cuffed... sitting in perfect isolation, blind and deaf and floating in nothingness. Only touching her own cheap prison jumpsuit convinced her that she was still awake and alive. The cruelty of it made her weep; the tears welling up inside the blindfold stung at her eyes every time.

Vivi Wei almost wished this torture had some purpose. If there was a reason behind what she'd been suffering, perhaps it would be easier to swallow.

Nobody spoke to her. Nobody knew sign language, and the few times she was able to lip read, it was incidental and disconnected speech between other people in the room. None of it made sense.

Some days, they'd just leave her in a cell between feedings. Sometimes they'd skip the feedings. Or maybe they didn't, as time was difficult to track. Maybe it just FELT like she'd go a day without any of the disgusting soup they poured down her throat.

Some days... they'd do the strangest experiments. One day they locked her in a room with a dozen old radios of various makes and models. She couldn't hear them, of course, but she couldn't tell them that with the handcuffs on. Not that any of them seemed to know what her hands would be saying. For hours they'd make her listen to the radio, as if expecting something to happen. Nothing ever did.

Some days... they'd haul her out into the daylight. Those were good days, even if she was being pulled out in front of a booing, jeering crowd. A man at a podium would shout angrily, gesturing to her now and then, as if she'd committed some heinous crime. And then people would throw things at her.

If she was lucky, it was the age-old cartoon trope of tossing rotten produce. If she was unlucky, it was rocks and half bricks. Usually the security forces that accompanied her everywhere stepped in when things escalated; she was valuable, for some reason, and they wanted her alive. Not that it stopped them from letting her take a few blows. Bruising or cracking a rib. Things like that.

Again and again, strange experiments with radios, strange moments of becoming someone's social pariah. No explanation. No reason. No purpose.

Eventually she decided to occupy her time by deriving answers, since none were being provided.

She'd picked up bits of the conversations between her guards, doctors, and other assorted keepers. For starters, this wasn't the City of Angles... she'd been moved to something called "The Citadel." Penelope had sat Vivi down some time ago, in an effort to reveal all the little secrets she'd been keeping to those she trusted... including the secret that her home town was a dream inside Penelope's head. It wasn't too much of a stretch to guess that the Citadel was someone else's dream. Someone else's nightmare.

Next, she figured out her place in it all. She'd caught words like "perfect copy" and "resistance mouthpiece," which took a few iterations of guessing before she felt confident enough she was reading those words correctly. If the Citadel was militarized to this extent... people who wanted to fight back would emerge. Again, it wasn't a stretch to guess.

In fact... it gave Vivi a tiny flicker of hope to know that some person who looked just like her was fighting against these monsters. And a tiny flicker of dread, knowing that odds were good she was a piece of public relations fodder and bait, being trucked out in public to decry the Resistance and lure it from hiding.

Once she realized this she started looking into the sea of shouting faces at those rallies... looking for the ones who weren't shouting. Who were studying the formation of guards, looking for opportunities that never came. Vivi wanted to shout to them, to tell them to leave her and not get caught in the honeypot. As much as she craved rescue... she didn't want it to come at that expense.

Which meant that even as the horrors went on, day after day, Vivi realized they would likely never end. Nor did she want anyone to die in her name.

Finally... last night, as she was cuffed down to sleep... one of the guards who had become increasingly physical while moving her from prison to prison decided to have a few lingering touches over her body before slamming the cell door behind him.

By that point, Vivi Wei wondered if she was ready to die. The answer was still no, but it was getting harder to say no after realizing the inescapable pit she'd fallen into.

She believed in life. A full life, well led, with friends and family and hope and faith and love. They were out there somewhere... her sister, her soulmate, her allies. And if they tried to rescue her, they'd die.

Once...

Once, she was trapped in a cell, pumped full of drugs, and forced to watch as her sister was tortured. That day she found something wild and dangerous and filled with fear inside her heart, and it broke free from bondage. Vivi had tried to tap into that again, but... she was too far removed from the event, from whoever that version of her represented. Couldn't do it. All that was left was to endure, for however long she could...

That night, the guard hadn't blindfolded her. Probably so she could get a good eyeful of him as he enjoyed the prisoner at his mercy. Which meant when someone threw open the door of her cell to finally rescue her... she could feel a full mix of joy and confusion.

At first, she assumed this was yet another strange radio-based experiment.

The woman who entered her cell had an ancient tape deck under one arm, the reels slowly turning within, old plastic PLAY button depressed and locked in place. Weirdly, she also wore what looked like a black motorcycle helmet, with strange black boxes crawling across the surface of the visor...

...and out in the hall, much to Vivi's horror and her delight and her horror at that delight, she saw the guard who had fondled her. He wore a blissful smile, a pistol still between his lips, body slumped against the hallway wall.

Without turning off the boom box, the woman set it down near the door. She moved quickly to Vivi's prison bed, undoing the cuffs and chains using a key handed over willingly by the grateful dead guard.

As a matter of explanation, the woman offered a slip of paper once Vivi's hands were free. The message had been pre-written, in sharp and tight handwriting.

I'm Miranda Walker, formerly of the Department of Safety, and I'm getting you out of here. Transport is waiting to take us to the new TroubleSolvers. Stay close to me, and I suggest not looking at anything, because odds are I had to make a mess and I'll be making more of one on the way out the door.

After the third blissful suicide they passed, Vivi decided not to open her eyes again. Despite reminding her far too much of the blindfold days, it beat the alternative.

A truck awaited them, on the other side of the horror. Now, Miranda finally turned off the audio tape reading "B.E.P. SAMPLE #7" before approaching their allies.

Before approaching Cass, in a waiting vehicle. A familiar face, at last.

She couldn't sign, not with her hands at two-and-twenty, but Vivi could read her lips in the rear view mirror.

"We're headed to a safehouse," the poet spoke. "They'll never touch you again. Sorry we couldn't save you earlier than this, but the TroubleSolvers have had a pretty shaky start."

TroubleSolvers... now, there was a word Vivi had almost forgotten about, in the long dark of recent days. Cass could read the surprise on her passenger's face.

"Yeah, I know. Crazy, huh? Not exactly the same TroubleSolvers we had back home, but we're still doing what we do best. And once we can figure out where she is... we'll have Penelope on our side, as well."

Nothing in or around the sink. Nothing in her personal kit, the one she thought she'd tucked away securely in her footlocker. No sign at all.

"Anybody seen my toothbrush?" Penelope asked the other girls.

With an assortment of smirks, they pointed the way to the last stall in line. Her cute little pink toothbrush was in there, floating amidst the floaters.

It wasn't surprising anymore. It wasn't even disheartening anymore. This was simply how things were at the wonderful educational facility that Penelope Yates had come to know as Nazi Hogwarts.

Officially, it was the McNamara Command School for Patriotic Youth. Attending this school was the highest honor a teenager could aspire to; it meant that on your day of legal adulthood and mandatory enlistment, you weren't headed directly to the frontlines to throw yourself onto enemy bayonets. Instead, you were being taught how to direct those who threw themselves onto enemy bayonets.

Attendance was limited to a select few; only those with either the natural skill and talent for command, or someone who vouched for their skill and talent with a large sum of money and/or favors from a prestigious family. To be here meant you were somebody important, one way or another... someone to be respected, and feared. Someone who was going places.

Penelope Yates, according to popular consensus of her peers, was not going places. She didn't deserve to go places, not when they had either busted their asses to get in here or earned their spot by being born to the right bloodline. She wasn't from the Citadel, they knew. She was an Angle. She didn't know what it meant to be in Command School, to fight for her home, because this wasn't her home. She didn't belong.

At first, she'd hoped for some support from her fellow female classmates. Women were quite underrepresented; only one mostly-full dorm for them compared to five packed with the Y chromosome. Her sisters here in the women's dorm, they'd support Penelope, right?

In a move which honestly shouldn't have surprised her given her best friend's experiences with cyberbullying... nope. The women were just as bad as the boys. (Not men. Silly boys, all.) They had their own positions to defend, and ostracizing the outsider was a terrific way for anyone to rally.

This meant she had no toothbrush, and would have to make do with a mouthwash which tasted like industrial floor cleaner for now. If anybody complained about her breath... well, it'd be almost funny, compared to the other complaints they had about her.

More than once, Penelope considered leaving.

She could leave anytime she wanted. She could break these walls down, reconfigure them, make this strange city dance to her tune. Penelope felt the pulse of the pavement, now... ever since the night she closed her first bleed, she'd been more accepting of her Lucid nature than ever before. Smash down the walls, build a fire escape, walk right out of this gated prison compound of higher education. Walk away from it all...

...right into a firing line, odds were. Or into a city she knew nothing about, lost and alone, directionless. Basically the same deal.

Out there, people were dying. People from her home were being thrown into a war, against their will. Every minute of inactivity by Penelope Yates was another minute of suffering. But... she had to be practical about this. What else could she be doing right now? She had a goal, not a plan. Without a plan, all she'd do is get herself killed.

Her father would be patient. He'd wait with infinite patience, coiled like a serpent, until he saw an opening for attack. Gregory Yates, the real Gregory Yates, moved with direct and efficient purpose. He didn't lash out at his enemies, no matter how angry he was. No matter how angry Penelope was.

No. No point leaving, not when there was nowhere to go and an incredible risk involved in going there. Besides... toothbrush or not, this school could help her develop that master plan. The goal was to destroy "Commander" Yates, by making his dreams come true. That meant studying this Citadel and its war. Where better to do it than Nazi Hogwarts?

So she endured the toilet brush, she endured being stared at and glared at, the muttered utterances of "that Angle bitch" and more. Penelope returned those glares with glares of her own, got in their faces quietly, before moving on. Too proud to bark out at them, but too angry to let it go. Using the anger to focus her singular purpose.

Not that she liked being this new, angry person. She wasn't used to being angry... but ever since her best friends and her father were shot to death by these bastards, well, anger was happening. Best get used to it.

Back to the women's dorm, and into her cadet uniform. Not that she bothered keeping it spic and span, fully buttoned up, perfect and flawless. The first few days she did her best to fit in, before realizing she simply couldn't. Now, she didn't care enough to make the effort. If some upperclassman like Adam wanted to smack her with demerits, then she'd take them. Didn't matter.

"Cadet Smith!"

(That would be her. Penelope Smith. She had the option to enlist as Penelope Yates, but decided not to. That name was dead in this city; only when she set foot on her home asphalt would she be a Yates again.)

She took a few seconds to stand at attention, as a good First Year Cadet does when a Fourth Year Cadet barks your name. The 4Y in this case being Adam Wincott, lead distributor of demerits.

Adam. Perfect crew cut. Perfect grades. Perfect command of any situation, commanding respect. Well... commanding fear, mostly. Nobody wanted to cross the star of the school, the one destined for high placement. Bad for your future career to annoy the golden boy, when the golden boy might one day have the power to send you to your death.

"Button up your uniform, Angle," he ordered. "You're a disgrace. And your breath could kill the Enemy at fifty paces. Don't you have any self-respect?"

So, Penelope buttoned up. The rest didn't deserve a reply. Lack of reply required a reply unto itself, in her superior's view.

"You think the Commander granting you special placement in this program makes you special, Cadet?" Adam asked, invading her personal space by a good six inches. "It doesn't. The Commander demands results, and from where I'm standing, you're a sad disgrace to his good graces. Don't you have a class to attend this period? What're you doing loitering in the hall?"

"I was headed there before you stopped me," Penelope informed him.

"And you think arriving just in time for the bell is good enough? Should've gotten there way earlier than this. Consider that free advice from me to you," he continued. "You give this one hundred and ten percent or you wash out and go hit the frontlines. ...or in your case, you open your legs and pop out someone who will do better than this. You ever want a volunteer for that... it's a duty I'm quite used to."

Ahhh, right. That would be the insane sexual politic of the Citadel, in action.

It's why Adam and boys like him tossed their weight around in a swagger: the burning need to perpetually replenish the population. The reason men outnumbered women five-to-one in Command School was because women had another path they could take on reaching the age of mandatory enlistment... mommyhood. Get one of these young studs to make you Teen Pregnant™ and you could avoid the frontlines. No marriage required or even desired, given the menfolk had poor life expectancy anyway.

Or, be like the girls in Penelope's dorm and try to push your own career ahead of the death curve instead. The women's dorm was unified and driven to succeed... and unified against Penelope, unfortunately. Avoiding the Adams of this world, retaining their independence in a world dominated by fighting men; that's something an Angle never had to deal with. How could a hardened Citadel woman possibly be friends with a spoiled little Angle girl?

With no allies to back her, Penelope had to deal with "senpai" noticing her all alone. A senpai leering away at innocent-and-vulnerable little Penelope.

Innocent-and-vulnerable little Penelope was tempted to warp the building's superstructure to make Adam his own comfy little windowless, doorless closet. She was an anime magical girl at this point, after all, and had the power to make even her ugliest dreams come true.

Or she could simply walk away, enduring his meaningless slings and arrows. His words were ultimately sound and fury, after all. Don't provoke him; just go with it and get on with the long day ahead...

Two paths. Instead she chose something in the middle.

"I'll arrive earlier next time, if only to avoid you," she said. "Thanks for your wise counsel."

And gone, before he could object. The door to her first period class wasn't too far away; a quick dash and she could be inside and away from his harassment.

First period would be Military Tactics. Surprisingly little useful information to be found, there... she was hoping for a more in-depth study of the Enemy, the faceless thing that tormented this dream endlessly. Instead, she got drilled on weapon usage and other useless things. If this problem could be solved with a gun it'd be solved by now, so Penelope didn't pay that class much mind.

Only one other person in class was worse at field-stripping rifles than Penelope. He took most of the heat from their instructor as a result, leaving her to quietly finish her work unnoticed.

Second period was supposed to be Enemy Intelligence, which also sounded useful... and was also quite useless. Each day they had a new propaganda filmstrip to show about the Enemy and how evil and bad and terrible they were. These movies started the same way... grainy footage of slaughter, handicam shots of an Enemy raid, carnage upon carnage. This would invariably be followed by a dramatized brave charge by hardy men in uniform who blew away waves of Enemy scum, to demonstrate how the Citadel would eventually win this war.

Penelope knew the point of these movies... terror. They were like the Department of Safety's dire warnings issued during the Dougal years, to beat the drum of terror and spread fear through the room. In the end, humanity's triumph would be held up, but the smiles of pride she saw around the room after each movie were thin and tight.

Only one other person in class wasn't smiling, after these films. Penelope snuck glances in his direction during the films, once she realized the pattern... he was studying them. Studying the enemy movement intently, much as Penelope was. Perhaps he drew the same conclusions, that this malevolent force wasn't something you could beat with an army...

Third period, the last one before the mercy of lunch break, would be history class. Here, Penelope took extensive notes, every time. The trick was to cut through the obvious grandstanding by her instructor, a woman with a booming voice and a deep wellspring of pride in the Citadel's victories. Dig through and pull out the facts... then check them against previous lectures, to see where the discrepancies lie.

"Can anyone tell me what year the age of consent and legal adulthood was lowered to fourteen?" the teacher asked, a generic prompt to encourage class interaction.

One of the girls who threw Penelope's toothbrush in a toilet launched her hand in the air immediately.

"1943, ma'am!" she declared.

"Indeed! And can anyone tell me the year of the first great frontline surge...?"

Same girl.

"1957, ma'am!"

"Indeed. Now, the question is... what do these numbers have in common?" the teacher asked, walking between aisles of desks. "The answer is a difference of fourteen years. The key was the Wilson Bill, which launched alongside the lowering of legal age. The bill granted special citizenship rights to those who participated in the great population surge efforts of 1943. Fourteen years later... the first crop was ready to harvest, and the Enemy faced an army one full third stronger than they'd ever fought before!"

Chalk clacked against an old-school green board, as the teacher jotted down "1957." Students faithfully copied the year down in their notebooks, accordingly.

"This strategy is still in use today," she continued, as she scratched out more numbers. "The second great population surge of 1973... and the recruitment efforts in the City of Angles today."

Snickering, from the associated students. They knew an Angle was sitting in the room with them, after all.

"Now, don't mock the strategy. It's sound, proven time and time again," their instructor spoke, to settle her class. "Surges to crash head-on into the Enemy are effective. Our glorious commander believes that the latest surge, in addition to fresh blood from the City of Angles, may be enough to tilt the war in our favor!"

But the destroyer of toothbrushes had doubts.

"The Radio says we should be cautious," she pointed out. "Not to put our faith in false hopes, but strength of arms and resolute will."

The teacher nodded, in agreement. "The Radio is wise, indeed. This is a strategy, not a wish. It can fail and we should be prepared for that possibility. But... if it DOES work, imagine the opportunity! A turning point could allow new strategies—deployed by the brave young men and women of Command School—to push back the tide farther than ever before!"

Smiles, all around. Just like the end of one of those gory filmstrips, where the Enemy tore men apart on camera. Victory was the future, without a doubt...

Penelope wasn't smiling. She was squinting at her own terrible handwriting. (She hadn't picked up an honest-to-God pencil in years, not before coming to the Citadel.) 1957, 1973. Those years felt familiar... but a quick flip through her notes found no matches. She could swear they were important, that she'd heard them in one of these awful lectures before, but...

As the teacher returned to her chalk work, Penelope looked up from her page. Row after row of smug smiles, confident in their Citadel's brilliant strategy.

Except for one. He wasn't smiling. He was leafing through his notes, too. Not distracted, not bored... focused. Just as Penelope had been doing.

He was awful at taking apart rifles. He didn't enjoy the cinematic bloodshed. And now, he was studying history with just as much intent as she was. It was like the old PBS shows her father sat her down in front of, at an early age: one of these things is not like the others...

The clatter of the lunch bell signaled an end to today's history lesson. Just fine by Penelope... she had her own homework assignment, now. And it started with that boy.

Lunch was more than simply ramming calories down your throat for a full hour. It was a show of alliance between like-minded students. You sat with those whose goals and methods matched your own; the choice of who you sat with declared to others a mission statement, as well as a warning of who they'd have to go through to get at you.

Eating alone, however, wasn't entirely uncommon. Obviously Penelope ate alone, but so did many other "lone wolf" type students. After all, if you ate on your own, it meant you didn't need anyone else. In a city that valued strength, this could be a statement onto itself.

Or it simply meant you were unpopular, which was the case for the mysterious note-taking boy.

Given the girls and boys spent their off-hours at their dorms with little crossover (flirting and liaisons were for people who wanted babies, not people who wanted a command position) Penelope felt the best time to reach out to him would be lunch.

After getting her square meal, which fortunately did not have anyone's spit in it today, she directly moved to the table where he was sitting and consulting his notebook.

"Hey," Penelope greeted, with a smile. "Is this seat taken?"

The boy took a moment before looking up at her.

"No...?" he tried. "No, it's not. Did you need to take it somewhere?"

Assuming this meant Full Speed Ahead, she plopped herself down in that seat. The dingy metal lunch tray hit the table next, clattering slightly.

"I was hoping I could bend your ear a sec about history class," she started. "See, I was thinking about—"

"Whoa. Hold up, okay? I didn't say you could eat here," the boy replied, backing away as far as he could without falling out of his chair. "I just said you could take the seat. Take it somewhere else. ...I can't be seen with you, okay? I get enough crap already."

"Everybody gets crap from somebody or another around here," she suggested. "What's a little more? C'mon. It's boring eating alone, isn't it?"

"Boring and safe. I don't know you and you don't know me—"

"I'm Penelope Smith. The 'Angle,' yes, yes, it's very funny. I'm an okay person, though, I swear."

With a sigh of surrender, the boy leaned himself back upright. Mostly.

"Quinn Qureshi," he introduced in turn. "Yes, it's a funny name. I'm aware of how funny it is, thank you."

"Hey now, I wasn't gonna make fun of your name..."

"And I wasn't going to make fun of you being an Angle, but you felt you had to defend yourself preemptively," Quinn pointed out. "Not surprising. That's what this place does to people; teaches you to be on guard for weak points. Defensiveness is a survival skill. ...if you don't mind, I'm going to pick up my tray and move to another table, so everybody sees me rejecting you. You do in fact seem to be an okay person, it's honestly nothing personal, but I'm not opening any more weak points to the likes of Wincott."

"Adam? C'mon. He's just a blowhard bully," Penelope dismissed. "He's destined to be yet another shouty Leftenant, one day. I'm guessing you know already that another shouty Leftenant isn't going to win this war. I've seen you analyzing every word in our classes..."

"Correct. But, at risk of generalizing... you're an Angle. You don't get how the Citadel operates yet; blowhard bullies are exactly what the Citadel wants, even if it doesn't actually work. They selectively breed for blowhard bullies. That means if I enrage those guys, my life becomes hell, because they're the ones who always get the power. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, that's just how it IS. If you're smart, you'll learn how and when to roll over and submit to the shouty Leftenants."

"Sheesh. Cynical much...?"

"Cynical enough," Quinn corrected. "Now, I'm going to raise my voice so I can get some attention going and earn some points by telling you off. I'm genuinely sorry I have to do this, but—"

The loud scrape of his chair on the cheap tile floor cut through the typical lunchroom background radiation.

"Push off, Angle," he declared. Not loud enough to make it clear he wanted to be heard, but loud enough to clearly be heard.

And off he went, to the farthest unoccupied table. Leaving Penelope wondering what the heck just happened, a wave of snickering from her fellow students drifting in Quinn's wake.

Days like these, Penelope certainly didn't feel like a magical girl heroine. Pretty Soldier Sailor Angle-chan wouldn't be this powerless and unpopular by day, right? Maybe she could adorably trip over things with an "Uwah~!" noise to garner sympathy...?

Or maybe she didn't want sympathy. Not from these self-centered fools. Not from the intelligent ones who should know better but still bought into the system, like Quinn.

That was infuriating. She'd honestly been expecting that Quinn might be a friend... two outcasts pushing back against an unjust system. She'd known clever girls and brave boys all her life, willing to throw in on the right causes simply because they were the right causes. The TroubleSolvers had swirled around her, making her the focal point of a righteous stand for what must be done... but in this world, this Citadel, the clever and the brave weren't interested. Not unless there was something in it for them.

Penelope Yates, the Lucid child, the focal point of so much chaos and hope and struggle. She wasn't a hero here. Wasn't the center of anything. Wasn't anything at all, really...

Back in the women's dorm, surrounded by attractive young go-getters who were on an upward journey through the Citadel's ranks, Penelope quietly poked through some awful teen vampire romance novel. For lack of anything better to do with her time. Her wasted, wasted time in this wasteful place.

She should probably be researching those dates from history class. Maybe there was something there; couldn't just be a random firing of neurons, she had remembered something related to 1957. But... honestly, she couldn't focus. Saving the Citadel from itself was critically important, and she didn't feel like putting one foot in front of another to do it. Not after today.

In the end, she drifted off to sleep with the open book on her chest, and a bitter taste in her mouth. At least in sleep, she could be something other than the stupid little Angle girl.

This was the Citadel, boiled down to its absolute essence: Fear.

Fear of the Enemy. Fear of the state. Fear of death. Fear of losing a loved one. Fear of everything falling apart, everything crashing down, at any moment.

The fear lapped like waves at the walls, empty-eyed figures with skeletal grins that sought nothing more than the most awful things imaginable. The Enemy... corruption incarnate, incapable of anything but the worst acts of inhumanity that humanity could dream of. At least Bedlam believed in her City, even as she tormented it. The Enemy was anathema, pure and simple...

The fear flowed across the airwaves through modulated frequencies, perpetually affirming the status quo of endless war. The Radio. Penelope knew the accent on that voice, even if anyone born here did not. It was British and paternal, always kind, always concerned, always severe. It spoke and people listened, taking the words to heart, letting it chill what little hope they had left...

And... at the heart of this city, deep within the central military hub known as the Bulwark, was... was...

...something. Something dark and twisted and wrong. Not malevolent, not at all, but lost so deep down the rabbit hole of fear that no light could escape its gravity. In a lot of ways, something worse than the Enemy could possibly be.

The Lucid child soared through the Metadream of the Citadel, studying these three loci of fear. Here, in dreams, it all made perfect sense to her. Sometimes she could carry the shape of it into the waking day... but once it got mixed in with social backbiting and educational propaganda, losing that shape was quite easy.

On the first day, Penelope had carved out a little bus stop and bench for herself, to act as a waystation during her slumbering journeys into the dream. But she didn't need that crutch now, did she? Once she refused to stray beyond the single streetlight she'd provided for herself. Now... she soared, in and around and through the rigorously constructed representative building-metaphors of this Citadel.

She could feel it all, just as easily as she felt her own City. In fact... her own City wasn't that far away, was it?

It came as a shock, when she realized how close the City of Angles was. It made sense, of course; if the bleed could join worlds, then concepts like "distance" or "discreet whole integers of self" were meaningless here. Possibly, very possibly, she could journey back home. Clumsily. Awkwardly. Could she damage both cities in the process? Maybe. So many unknowns, not worth the risk. No. Besides, the Citadel was her focus now...

Invisible eyes swept across the sea of the metadream. On one side of the interface, the Citadel. On the other, the City. On other sides... other dreams. So many sides to it all. Why couldn't she see them before? Was she really so blind, unable to accept who and what she was? Was she losing her physical self in the process of becoming more in tune with her dream, as Echo had warned...?

Tonight, she delved deep into that sea. By waking light, she'd gotten absolutely nowhere. Alienated a potential ally, flailed around uselessly in data points, lost her toothbrush. Tonight, Penelope would damn well make some progress, even if it tore at her mind in the process. She would find something new, a new angle to consider, or else. Or else...

The sea of the metadream had many surfaces. She could come up for air anywhere she liked, if she was willing to risk that the air was poisonous. There had to be surfaces she couldn't or wouldn't see before. Like that one, for instance.

Pulsing, inviting. Interesting. Yes, upward, swimming upward, to see what she could see. Hear what she could hear...

There was a beep. Like a hearing test, the faintest of beeps, as a doctor checked to see at what decibel level you could detect the sound. Now, she could detect what was there all along, couldn't she? That beeping, yes, that pulled at her, upward and upward...

Voices. Good, she could listen to voices, understand what they had to say.

A woman, speaking, trying to draw someone's attention.

A doctor.

Doctor? Doctor. Look, look, she's waking...!

Light from above. Faint beeping. If only she could focus on it, could bring herself around, she could—

—be pulled by the shoulder, dragged down and away from the lights and sounds.

Which made no sense, since she didn't have a shoulder. This was her dream-self, a floating perspective, yes? But when she first started coming here, she kept her self-image with her. It had a shoulder. Someone was grounding her back into that self-image, and all the rules that governed it. Dragging her back from the surface of the water... and pushed firmly onto a bus stop bench.

It took an endless moment for Penelope to feel the weight of being herself again, as opposed to her ideal. To realize she wasn't alone in this personal corner of the metadream.

He was... indistinct. Cloaked mostly in shadow, standing directly under her street light. A heavyset figure in a bulky coat, his scarf dangling behind him in unfelt winds. Round glasses reflected the light in contrast, two plain white circles that blocked the eyes. And his hand... the burn mark, the number 31...

"Shouldn't be doing that, not at all," the older man spoke. "Quite dangerous, what you just did..."

"whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," Penelope spoke, trying to remember the physical act of speech.

"I did that, once. Thought I'd pulled my trinity together, unified it, and that would be enough," the man of 31 spoke. "When I regained full consciousness, my mental prison was utterly destroyed. Sleep is what maintains the resonance, you see. Your particular dream is home to so many; I doubt you'd want to see them suffer that fate..."

"whhhhhho are you?" she managed, at last.

Now, a woman's voice. From somewhere over his shoulder, despite having no body attached to it, no lips to form the words.

She needs to find her own answers, the woman spoke. You could simply provide them for her, but not if you want her to truly understand. That is what you'd hoped for when you first visited her dream, yes?

"Yes, I know," the man replied. "It's unfortunate—"

"Who's that woman you're talking to?" Penelope demanded.

"...you can hear her voice?" he replied. "You hear the voice of Redemption? Hmmmm. Interesting. Sensitive enough now to hear my own internal trinity. Yes, very interesting..."

You can't give her the answers she seeks on a platter. It won't help, not in the end; she has to know the shape of it herself. We should return before your absence is noticed.

"I suppose so," he agreed, to the non-corporeal entity that accompanied him. And turned to leave.

"Whoa, whoa! Wait!" Penelope insisted, awkwardly getting to her nonexistent feet as the man began to fade. "You've got answers? Please, please, I'm going nowhere on my own. I have to understand what's happening if I'm going to fix this...!"

"Yes, you do," he agreed.

And gone. The inrush of dream to fill the nothingness he once occupied was sharp enough to blast Penelope Yates awake in her bed, breathing heavily with actual lungs in the actual night of the Citadel.

The very last thing Penelope wanted today was more enigmas to mull over, on top of the existing pile of enigmas. Who and what she was, how she fit into all of this, how the war could be won, what 1957 meant, who this strange man with the 31 on his hand was, everything, nothing, nothing made sense...

Nobody was here to help her sort through it all. No Grandma Scarlett, not even the idea of her. No friends. No father. Just... her.

Technically she wasn't supposed to wander the campus grounds after lights-out, but no way could she get back to sleep after that run-in. Too alert, too awake. Instead, she walked the halls towards the dormitory nexus, the rotunda that joined all the dorms as one. No guards... nobody wanted to leave Command School, not after working so hard to get here. Plenty of locked doors and barbed wire walls on the outside, allegedly for their own safety, but no guards needed this deep into the facility. Penelope had the rotunda to herself.

Herself, and the large bronze statue of Commander Yates.

Try as she might, she couldn't picture that man as her father. Not even for a tiny moment of comfort, to feel like he was with her. All she saw was... him. The murderer. The tyrant. The bully. Everything Penelope stood against, in one convenient package.

Honestly, she was tempted to destroy the statue. She could do it. She could do anything, once she set her mind to it.

She could hear the commotion in the men's bathroom, for instance. Could identify one of the voices, and then, both of them.

It was two in the morning, why would anybody be out here? (Well, she was out here. So other strange activity was presumably a possibility.) Why would they be out here, specifically...?

Could've just gone to bed. The boy made it clear she wasn't wanted, after all. He suggested she mind her own business, guard her weak spots, and get through this. It would be the smart play.

To hell with the smart play. She was in the mood for the aggro play. Especially if her interpretation of those voices rang true, which was proven on kicking the door open and seeing Adam Wincott holding scrawny little Quinn Qureshi off his feet and against a wall.

Despite the predicament, both boys were equally surprised to see five-foot-nothing little Penelope standing there, in silent fury.

Adam was the first to break that silence... by dumping the slightly bruised Quinn, letting him drop to the floor. The boy's feet went out from under him, leaving him sitting there, after banging the back of his head against the tiled wall.

"You realize this is your fault, right?" Adam asked her, happy to engage this new target. "This sad little beta male had the gall to stick up for you, when I asked why he was talking to you at lunch. 'She's probably an okay person.' That's seriously what he said, isn't that pathetic? Couldn't even stand up for you properly. What a sad little white knight you've found, Angle girl. What a waste of a Command School enrollment this weak sissy turned out to—"

"Oh for God's sakes, just... shut... UP," Penelope commanded... fingers tensing and untensing, standing rock still. "Just shut up. Tired of it. Tired of you and your entire deal. I'm never going to get through to you unless I speak on your level, am I? Weakness and strength, pushing people down, pulling yourself up... is that all you respect? Is that all you fear?"

"Oho! What, you wanna fight? Hey, I've got no problems kicking a girl's ass. Here in the Citadel, we remain strong against all comers," the older boy stated, with pride. "You think you're strong enough to stand up to what I've seen? You're not strong. You're nothing!"

"Wrong. I'm a goddamn magical girl," Penelope declared.

Like letting go of a muscle kept tense all week... she poured her anger into the room, and made it a part of her rage.

A series of metallic clacks sounded, one after another, as bathroom stalls unfolded themselves. Doors hinged off of doors, toilets and urinals crashing through tiled flooring. Foam ceiling tiles warped and twisted, segmenting and twisting like fractal units of a kaleidoscope. Within seconds, Adam found himself surrounded by heavy swinging metal doors and gates, stall after stall embedded within stall after stall...

It happened so fast he barely had time to register the way space became... strange. With an increasingly unsteady hand, he unlatched the door that sprang to life in front of him... to find himself in a stall with three more doors. Doors which led to other doors. Which led to walls, which led to sinks, which led to mirrors, mirrors reflecting mirrors, reflecting three of him, showing him the back of his own head...

The scream couldn't be heard beyond this pocket of the Citadel carved by tools of pure loathing. Penelope had no intention of being interrupted during her object lesson.

"What's wrong, Adam?" she spoke, through a mirrored reflection. "Isn't this what you wanted? A good, strong soldier. Capable of pushing even you around. Feel my strength. Feel me tear your world to pieces and put them back together any way I like. I'm the alpha male, now. Not you, no, never you—"

His fist did a great job shattering the mirror, at the cost of harsh lacerations. Howling in pain, he staggered backwards through two sets of stall doors, clenching a bloodied fist. And still, the voice continued.

"You think I'm not hard enough for your Citadel? You haven't seen my City. I've seen Picassos, lost souls thrashing about in absolute despair. I've seen smiling faces swallowing bullet after bullet, and happy to do so because they feel they've lost everything. I'm harder than you can possibly dream, Adam. That's what you want me to be, right? Aren't you proud? Aren't you aren't you // aren't you so // proud—"

And he cracked. Sinking to his knees, wrapping hands around his head, desperately trying to shut it out.

"Stop! Stop stop stop, please, please God, make it stop! PLEASE...!"

But he wasn't the only one doing that particular gesture of desperate submission.

Right next to the space where Penelope stood, Quinn as similarly trying to block out the horror. He'd been caught in the splash radius, after all.

Sound and fury. A blowhard, pushing weight around, achieving nothing.

The bathroom resumed its normal shape, immediately.

When Adam dared to look up... Penelope had unbuttoned her uniform again. So she could tear a strip off from the hem, and offer it as a bandage.

"Your Citadel doesn't need that kind of strength," she spoke, quietly. "Stomping around and screaming and shooting won't get anybody anywhere. If you want to command the people, don't make them fear you more than the Enemy. Get them to respect you more than the Enemy. Take away the Enemy's power, by becoming something greater. Then you'll win. ...do you understand?"

He didn't understand. Entirely Penelope's fault, carrying on like that, blasting his mind out the back of his head. So she quietly sent him off into the night, bandage on his hand, knowing nobody would ever believe his story anyway. Hopefully on reflection, he'd figure things out.

The speech wasn't really for Adam, anyway. She waited until the words had time to settle before approaching the other boy.

Quinn didn't run. He didn't tremble, either. He stood, quietly and carefully, keeping his eyes on her. Caution was perfectly understandable in the situation... and the courage to stand his ground against the unknown and deal with it even-handedly was actually quite impressive.

"Who are you, exactly?" Quinn asked.

"I'm Penelope Yates," she introduced. "I'm the City of Angles."

The easiest explanation was to say she was like a Builder. That was something Quinn understood; extremely dangerous people who could assemble structure from nothing. Penelope could certainly do that, and she was also certainly extremely dangerous.

(Which honestly made her feel a bit ashamed, with the way she sandblasted her supposed enemy. It took seeing Adam's fear reflected in Quinn's eyes for her to realize how totally stupid she'd been.)

Whether he was terrified of her or open to the possibilities, either way, Quinn was willing to hear her out when she suggested a late-night library raid. The correct thing to do would be to report a rogue builder... but whether it was shock or fascination, the boy found himself along for this wild ride.

"This is insane," he felt the need to say, regardless.

"No no, trust me, it makes sense. See, there's gotta be something weird about 1957," Penelope explained, as they broke into the locked library door. (Lockpicking being one of the many fine life skills taught to her by her father, a must for urban spelunking.) "That year sticks out in my mind for some reason... and I'm betting you feel the same, the way I saw you checking your notes. I don't buy that all it takes to beat the enemy is a population surge; there's got to be more going on. And if I'm going to win the war, I need to understand the war."

"First thing, I meant following you around was insane, not... whatever insanity you're currently rambling on about. Second thing, you can't win the war," Quinn stated.

"Why?"

"Because... you can't. You're just one person. —one very strange person, okay, but still one person. You're not immune to bullets, right? —wouldn't matter, it's still a matter of numbers in the end, and singularly directed force of any magnitude against an overwhelmingly vast foe is useless."

"Huh. Very analytical."

"I'm having an extremely weird day. Pardon if I deal with it by over-thinking," Quinn explained. "It helps me relax."

"Look, I'm not saying I can do it all alone. Every time I've been up against the wall, I've needed friends and allies. Same deal here, but I think I've got a good chance of figuring out how to win it. I understand places like the Citadel and the City of Angles better than most. Better than that idiot Commander, anyway."

"He's not an idiot. He's kept the stalemate stable for over a decade now. No major takeovers of outlying districts or anything..."

"Aha! A stalemate," Penelope highlighted. "So you know as well as I do that it's a stalemate."

"Everybody knows that. Nobody wants to admit it, but everybody knows that..."

He dampened his voice now, on instinct. This was the school library, after all. Whispering in the library was a must, particularly when a crazy psychokinetic mutant girl was illegally breaking into it after hours.

As proof of how much value the Citadel put in its knowledge base, no guards would be sweeping through here. A locked door was enough to call it secure, after all. Still, whispering felt appropriate, as the two approached row after row of study tables, microfiche readers, card catalogs... and in the distance, shelf after shelf of hardbound books.

With a mild note of shame, Penelope realized this was actually her first time setting foot in a library. (The one in the Sideways where the shelves were Möbius strips didn't count.) She never saw the point of going to one, not when everything she could ever want was online... and given the City of Angles' general attitude towards leaving their homes, the number of public libraries was dreadfully small.

It felt... good in here, honestly. The combined weight of a culture's knowledge, pressed between pages, ready for access to those who knew the mild arcana involved in finding what you wanted to know. Far more open and inviting than anything else in this school, which was designed to close people off in their own little worlds of career advancement.

Penelope nodded in satisfaction, pleased that she was finally making some headway on her plans. And... then realized something.

"I have absolutely no idea how to find anything about 1957," she admitted aloud. "I don't suppose you guys have Wikipedia? I see some computers over there, but they look kinda... janky."

"What's Wikipedia?"

"It's a giant encyclopedia on the Internet."

"What's the Internet?"

Despite being an all-powerful demiurge, Penelope immediately felt crushed by the reminder that she hadn't checked in on her blog or any of her social networks in over a week.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but a good place to start would obviously be the card catalog," Quinn suggested. "Or just hit the shelves. I've got a good chunk of the Dewey Decimal system memorized, makes it easier when I'm prepping for an exam. ...actually, no, forget all that, newspapers are what we need. The history books are too sanitized. Come on."

Penelope was pulled out of her brief pang of webless misery when the boy took her hand and pulled her along.

"Uh..." she started, momentarily puzzled by the sudden human contact. "Wait, uh... wouldn't... wouldn't the news be sanitized, too?"

"Oh, definitely," Quinn replied, glancing back to her as he poked his way past the darkened shelves. "But it rushes to press every day, so sometimes details slip through the cracks. If you're used to the patterns you can read between the lines. Living in the Citadel, well... you get adept at reading the words which aren't there... ah, here we go."

And the two came to a halt in front of a series of wide metal cabinets.

Curious, Penelope tugged open a drawer. Row after row of what looked like tiny slips of clear plastic greeted her.

"Where's the newspapers? I mean, actual newspapers are made out of paper, right?" she asked. "I mean, I've only ever read news websites, but I know what a newsPAPER is..."

"Uh... it's microfiche. No, let me guess, you've never seen microfiche before," Quinn accurately guessed. "Do you City folks all have jetpacks and space vitamin pills and laser guns, too? Grab every sheet tagged 1957 and let's get to work. I'd like to be done with this craziness before sunup."

Two pairs of eyes were better at scanning over endless realms of black-on-white enlarged photocopy. Unfortunately, Penelope barely counted as two eyes.

It's not like she was unobservant. She had a habit of sizing up every locale she set foot in, drummed into her at an early age by her father. Studying body language was also a must. But straight up reading, well... she didn't do enough of that, really. It's part of why she joined the journalism club, back home, to get a better feel for the written word. Analysis was different than writing, however, and Quinn clearly excelled at it.

"I'm seeing a lot of classified ads talking about mason jars," he spoke up randomly, cracking the silence.

"Hmm?" she replied, distracted from the article about weather patterns she'd been loosely reading.

"Month after month, very similar ads. I think it's a kind of code," Quinn explained. He pulled the glass enclosure for the microfiche out, sliding in a fresher looking one, then scrolled through rapidly. "...yeah, I'm right. Mason jars, even in a paper from six months ago. Huh. Must be a Resistance code."

"What's the Resistance like, anyway? You being the resident Citadel expert, and all," Penelope asked. "I haven't heard anything about them in class, not even anti-Resistance propaganda..."

The boy pushed away from his fiche reader, for now. Considered the question, before dropping an answer.

"Unhelpful," he decided.

"Really? Seems like tossing the Commander overboard would be helpful..."

"It wouldn't make a difference. People like the Commander always take power. People like him run the Resistance, too. It's what I was trying to tell you earlier today... the Citadel breeds for that kind of man. That means even the ones trying to put a stop to the regime act like the regime. So, why bother fighting back at all?"

"My... grandmother always told me to be the change I wanted to see in the world. That's worth a bother, right?"

"Adorable, but it doesn't work that way here," Quinn stated, bleakly. "The Adams always take power, no matter what flag they fly under. They keep all non-Adams out of the running, through massive harassment and/or bullets. Still, it's not utterly futile; settle into a mid-tier position of power, maybe you can get some good done while they aren't looking. That's my plan, anyway."

"That's all you're aspiring to? Just... flying under the radar and nudging things along?"

"Best you can realistically hope for," he confirmed, returning to his viewer. "Only cream and bastards rise."

"No. I don't buy it," she spoke, hounding him on the topic. "I say bastards can and should fall. My friends and I have stopped them cold a few times now, and without relying on a bastard's brute force to do it. I mean, the most dangerous phrase in the language is 'We've always done it this way.' So, we found a better way..."

"Must be nice, living in a total paradise where everybody hugs each other all day," he mumbled, leaning back to load a fresh newspaper fiche.

"I didn't say it was THAT, either. ...ugh. Whatever. Let's get back on track. What, exactly, do mason jars have to do with 1957?"

"Nothing. Everything. Not sure yet. As far as I can tell from what's in front of me, 1957 was a year like any other year, aside from the population surge. Look... it's getting fantastically late here. If we don't find anything soon we've gotta get back to our dorms or we'll be MIA. We could already be in ridiculous trouble if Adam comes to his senses and tells anyone you're a rogue Builder..."

Which brought Penelope around to thinking about that moment. After getting caught up in the rush of bloody vendetta, she'd completely forgotten what kicked off the entire chain of events.

"Did you really tell him I'm 'probably an okay person?'" she asked. "Knowing full well he'd maul you for it? I thought you wanted to fly under the radar."

This time, Quinn didn't take his eyes off the news articles. But he did pause to collect his thoughts again. Despite being sharp with a snap reply most of the time... when he needed to make himself clear, he took the time to do so.

"Against all common sense... yes, I did," he admitted. "Wouldn't have mattered if I lied. He constructs his own narrative, builds his own answer before even asking the question. Tell him truth or lies, it won't matter, he can always find a reason in your words to kick your ass. ...but yes, some tiny stupid part of me was hoping he'd ultimately listen to sense and at least back off. We've supposedly all got the same goal, after all."

"Saving the Citadel," Penelope agreed.

She returned to her reading, while mentally trying to put all three of them in the same circle. It was a rough fit, given she was predisposed to loathing Adam Wincott and everything he stood for. But... he did have a strong desire to defeat the Enemy. If anything, that's what drove him to give Penelope his little "advice" tidbits, even drove him to try and beat his own flavor of sense into Quinn. Ultimately, Adam wanted to save the Citadel, and assumed his duty was to whip everybody else into the same fighting shape...

So many deaths, in the name of that cause. The obituary section, which normally covered a quarter of each paper, had scaled up to a third in 1957. Heartfelt testimonials from family members to the heroism of young soldiers who died in battle...

Her fingers paused, before they could twiddle the metal knob that would move a magnifying lens elsewhere.

"Deaths," she realized.

"Hmm?" her research partner asked, not looking up.

"How many deaths are considered... normal, in the course of one year?" she asked him. "I'm seeing a lot of deaths in the paper. Never part of the official reports, they're going on an on about new troop movements and new fronts and the surge, but... everywhere else there's death. It's spread all through the paper. ...wait wait that's it—! I remember, I... hang on!"

In a flash, she was flipping through the drawer of tiny newspaper slides... and came up with the January 1958 paper. Loaded it, and the front page headline said it all.

RECORD LOSSES IN ONE YEAR OF INTENSE FIGHTING.

"It's not 1957 we need to look at, it's 1958," she explained. "Because they waited that long to officially admit it. Yeah, yeah, I remember now! It was from my second day in history class, all about the opening of Memorial Cemetery, how it was built for honored war dead in 1958..."

The boy pushed up his glasses, studying the article in detail. Another moment of silence fell, as he digested the new information. And as much as he didn't want to find a shred of truth to Penelope's mad rantings...

"We need slides from 1974," he realized. "One year after the second state-sanctioned population boom."

A half hour later, and they had all the numbers they needed.

The pattern bore out across the entirety of the Citadel's history. The army pushed, the Enemy pushed back. Troop estimates matched Enemy estimates. Every surge was met with an equal crash, returning the Citadel to a stalemate once more. Even if the government refused to fully admit it... every little bit of information piled up on the edges, showing the true overall shape.

What's more... when the Citadel was taking heavy losses, heavier than ever and forced to fall back... they were met with less Enemy resistance. The Enemy never surged, not unless the Citadel surged. If the Citadel fell... the Enemy fell, as well. A perfect mirror...

The flawless symmetry of it made sense to Penelope, no matter how nonsensical it was. To Quinn, the truth was harder to swallow.

"That's not possible," he decided immediately. "It's Military Tactics 101. When your enemy is crippled, you press the advantage. The Enemy's ruthless! They torture, they kill, they eat the wounded. They're complete animals with no self-control. Why wouldn't they run the weakened Citadel forces down into the ground...?"

"They're not human, Quinn."

"I think I just neatly summarized that point, didn't I?"

"No, I mean, you're thinking they'd act like humans. They don't. They're... a concept," Penelope tried to explain. "A focus point of this dream... this Citadel, I mean. That means they adhere to their concept first and reality second. ...look, let's skip over the why for now. The facts still bear out: it's impossible to beat the Enemy using an army. They're always exactly sufficient to fight an army of any size. Which means..."

"Recruiting from the City of Angles won't change anything," Quinn realized.

"I don't get it. The Commander has to already know that," she reasoned. "He's not a complete idiot. Why would he go ahead with conscripting my people...?"

"Maybe he's hoping they'll bring some new tactic to the table?" Quinn suggested, uncertain.

"...do Citadel people go Picasso? No, no, of course they don't, Bedlam doesn't exist here. They don't know they 'should' go cubist, so they don't. ...and if they don't know they SHOULD be unable to beat the Enemy..."

"Um. What?"

"Nevermind. Let's just say I think I've got this mess figured out," she summarized.

"Well, I'm glad one of us does. You are a very confusing person, Penelope Yates. And... I am going back to bed now, because I'm tired and in enough trouble already."

"'kay. I'll be heading out, I think."

"What, to walk around the compound again? I'm lucky it was only Adam who spotted me when I was getting some air tonight. You get spotted by one of the wall guards and being sent back to your room will be a blessing. Should have the sense not to deliberately chase trouble..."

"I solve trouble, I don't chase it. And anyway, no. I'm heading out as in 'leaving Command School forever,'" she explained, getting to her feet and thankful to be off that uncomfortable wooden chair. "There's nothing more I can learn here. I'd hoped I could get something useful out of it, but if I'm going to win the war, I need new perspectives... maybe the Resistance. Or maybe to find Cass and Vivi, my friends, the ones who stop tyrants. Yeah; I'll hook up with them, and then we'll sort everything out. No problem."

"'No problem.' Really," Quinn repeated, dubious. "And you're going to look up a Resistance safehouse on your Wikiternet or something equally imaginary?"

"I'll figure something out."

"You'll get shot. Just because nobody wants to leave Command School doesn't mean there aren't rules about leaving Command School," he spoke. "It counts as defecting from the army. You can make bathrooms into funhouses, but are you bulletproof? ...ARE you bulletproof, actually?"

"Well, no, but... look, I said I'd figure something out and that means I'll figure something out, okay?"

"You're serious about this, aren't you?" Quinn asked, incredulous. "You're actually going to wander out into the Citadel—a place you know nothing about—looking to find some old Angle buddies?"

"Hey, a tour guide would be lovely, but I doubt I'll be able to find one. ...or are you...?"

"Am I what...?"

He realized what she was implying after an awkward pause.

"No. Nooo no no. No. HELL no," Quinn protested.

"Well... why not? Quinn, c'mon, you've seen the same numbers I have," she pushed. "The war machine simply doesn't work. If you keep playing along like a good little student, fly under the radar, and toiling away beneath shouty Leftenants... you'll get nothing done. Nothing at all."

"That's... not a proven fact. It's just a theory. —I mean, what do you have in mind? What comes after 'walk out the door,' exactly?"

"I've got a plan," Penelope insisted. "I think I figured out how these Citadel aspects like the Enemy work. ...I mean, I've got some of a plan. Some-of-a-plan which will definitely mature into all-of-a-plan, in time..."

"Then send it up through proper channels, and... and they won't listen, Because you're not like them. Right. —but that's still no reason to throw your life away by striking out on your own, or hooking up with the Resistance! The Commander doesn't tolerate betrayal. Penelope, he'll kill you!"

"He already killed my father, and my friends," she told him, with far less passion than her earlier pleas.

"All the more reason not to—"

"My father and my friends were trying to do what's right. That's what they died for. It's worth dying for; better that than to do nothing at all. Now... I'm leaving, Quinn, with or without you. I'm going to fight for what I believe in. I get the feeling some part of you wants to believe in it, too... after all, why are you even here? In Command School. Or even just in this library with me! Why follow me? Why tick off Adam in the first place by sticking up for me? Why do ANY of these things if you're so hell-bent on coasting on the rules of the Citadel?"

"Do you have a plan for getting us out without being seen, at least?" he asked.

"Yeah, that part shouldn't be too hard—wait. Us?"

It took visible effort to move his head, but... he nodded in confirmation.

"Someone has to keep you from getting holes blown in your head, and for lack of a better option, that's going to have to be me," he reasoned.

"Hey, I may not be bulletproof, but I can defend myself. You got an eyeful of that first hand, remember?"

"Actually, I'm counting on the fact that whatever living nightmare you are is something I'd rather have defending me," he explained. "What I'm providing isn't some majestic white knight's shield, no matter what Adam thinks. I'll be providing basic street smarts to a hapless tourist. I mean, it's four in the morning! Do you even know where you can go to safely sleep for the night before you start looking for your friends?"

"...well, uh..."

"Right. So once we're outside the compound, I'll get us to safety. I know a few places. In return, you keep them from horribly murdering me for helping you. Deal?"

With the roles officially reversed, it was Penelope's turn to be hesitant and anxious while Quinn pressed her with stern determination.

Realistically, she barely knew this boy. No matter how intense a moment they'd shared, it was only a moment in time. She asked him to toss everything he believed in by the wayside after only a few hours of collaboration. Granted that was sort of her whole thing, sweet-talking people into raising her banner into battle... she did it purely by instinct, just now. But this was the Citadel. Serious, serious business if things went wrong...

"Uh. Look, I got a little heated there. Maybe I was out of line to push you into this. I mean, you'll be defecting from the army," Penelope felt she had to point out. "You might want to sleep on this. We might want to sleep on this. It's been a crazy night, tensions running high, sooo..."

"The longer we wait, the longer Adam has to collect his wits and decide to seek reprisal," Quinn reasoned. "Even if nobody believes him, he's got enough sway to do some very horrible things. ...I speak from personal experience."

"Okay, but... are you sure? Are you sure about this, Quinn?"

A dark expression fell over the boy's features. He adjusted his glasses, to give it a final thought... and this time, his nod was firm.

"Doesn't matter if I'm sure about it. It is what it is; the army's not going to win this fight. I want this fight won. If you can make that happen... I'm in. If it turns out that you're an escaped mental patient and can't actually do it, well... I'll run and hide and whimper and eventually, I don't know, I'll... figure out how to make it happen myself. Just... screw it. Screw the regime. I don't care about them. I've always been in this for my Citadel."

For all his book learning and data checking skill, Quinn had absolutely no idea what to do with his hands when a girl wrapped your torso up in a big friendly hug. They flailed uselessly at the air, for lack of a better option.

Presumably that would suffice, given Penelope's bright smile when she let go.

"Right. Let's GTFO together," she agreed.

"Yes. Okay. Let's do that, whatever that is," Quinn agreed, uncertain what he was agreeing to.

Command School had a sub-basement, which connected to a service tunnel, which connected to the outside world. At least, it had organically grown all those things as of that morning.

The bricks danced to her tune, now. She could feel the desperation within the materials she shifted around to carve her escape hatch... everything here had been built by a Builder at one point. What little she knew about the Builders, that "fear built strong walls," that was reflected right down to the stones of the Citadel. If anything, the Citadel breathed easier as Penelope rearranged it to her whim. At least someone with a loving touch was building here, now...

It was a relief to her as well, honestly. Finally able to flex her newly found muscles as the Lucid child, and without the rage that blinded her during that bathroom attack. She took great care in flowing with the needs of the tunnel... it was more than digging a hole, had to be more, had to be a civil engineering project onto itself. Moving with the shape and flow of the Citadel, rather than against it. BOMB SHELTER and EMERGENCY signs had popped up here and there, to guide their way... aspects of the Citadel's will flowing through Penelope's will and out into manifest reality.

Only halfway through the tunnel, she realized how much this was weirding out Quinn Qureshi.

"I've never see a Builder in action," he admitted. "I heard they're pants-crappingly scary, but..."

"I haven't been a 'Builder' for long. Well. Not that I knew of," Penelope explained. "I was trying to ignore that part of me for years, but... in the end, I couldn't pretend I was totally ordinary, not anymore. Not if I wanted to save my City. Since then, well... it's a lot easier to deal with it. But I'm still pretty ordinary, even if I can do, uh, this."

"I hope so, considering I've heard Builders drive people insane and pulverize brains into goop and stuff."

"Yeah, I don't do that. I mean, I haven't done that yet. —I won't be doing that, okay? It's cool. It's cool."

On emerging to a quiet street... Penelope saw something she hadn't seen at any other point in her life.

Perfectly aligned and symmetrical city blocks.

Every intersection was comprised of perfect ninety-degree turns. Every building stood in lock step with others, designed by Builders from meticulously programmed blueprints. This was a City which grew from the minds of men, not from the mind of a comatose patient dreaming of wild landscapes; those men had a keen interest in making their Citadel make sense. Which, to Penelope, felt like its own peculiar brand of nonsense.

Her companion noticed the stunned shock, even if he wasn't sure what it represented.

"We should get moving," he suggested. "Gotta get off the road, at least. Sun will be up soon, curfew isn't quite over, and the place I've got in mind is ten miles away. We can wait for daybreak and find a taxi, but we're going to need new clothes first. Can you... I don't know, make normal clothes? Like you make creepy tunnels and scary bathrooms?"

"Uh... I work with buildings, mostly. It's a City thing. I've never tried just... stuff. I could try, or maybe make a clothing shop, but I don't think this is the place and time to experiment..."

"Right. Hmm. How are you at climbing fire escapes?"

"Are you kidding? I'm Magical Princess Urban Spelunker-chan. Fire escapes are for scrubs."

The remainder of the morning blurred together. After all, she was operating on very little sleep and had just rearranged a good chunk of the Citadel with conscious effort; even Magical Princess Urban Spelunker-chan needed to take five after something like that.

Clothing was obtained by skittering up a fire escape, to dangle precariously three stories up while yanking a bunch of civilian duds off a drying line. Wooden clothespins clattered into the alley below, as Quinn and Penelope retrieved ill-fitting garments. Technically theft, so Penelope took mental note of the address, to maybe send them some cash later.

With unsteady feet (from the vertigo and lack of sleep) she stood at a street corner with Quinn, wearing drab and slightly damp clothing, waiting for a taxi that threatened to never come. After sunrise, despite it being now legally A-OK to hit the streets according to the P.A. systems on every corner, few people did. Fortunately, a black cab pulled around to pick up the wayward teens a few minutes later.

She barely registered Quinn's explanation that they were headed to a rent-by-hour hotel, a disreputable place for hookers and drunks and the like. Perfect hiding spot. Mute nods met his words; by this point he was firmly in the driver's seat of this little adventure. Aside from, well, not actually driving the taxi himself.

Penelope wasn't even sure how Quinn paid for the place. She just followed along behind him, up a seven-story walk-up with an obnoxiously spiral staircase. Had to resist the urge to install an elevator herself; exhaustion left her a bit fuzzy, to the point where that sounded like a really good idea.

Finally, ultimately, in the end, at long last... she fell face forward onto a creaky old bed and passed out.

Too tired to even properly wander around the Metadream. The disruption last night had completely wrecked her. Still, she gave it a try... a hazy thing, floating above the idea of the Citadel, through the sea of dreams.

All over the Citadel, people were waking from slumber. Little lights didn't wink out, but they did dim, as they became alert in the "real world." All these little lights, like the lights back home... all the same Metadream, in the end. A dream of dreams, no matter where you dreamed them...

Idly, she hoped to find that strange man again. There was a number burned into the back of his hand, she'd focused in on that when they met, feeling it was important. Thirty-One...

So much I could tell you about what's going out there, back on Earth. Maybe you'd like to know your real name? Or how you ended up this way? Or better yet, how about the great mystery of what happened to Patient 31, the Sleepwalker...?

Taunting words from the lips of a dead man. Jack Hayes, spitting in her face at the collapse of all his plans. Mocking how little she understood.

The Sleepwalker, Patient 31, whatever his name was... he would have answers. He had answers, and refused to share them with her last night. (This night. Whatever.) She could make him talk. She could pull the answers from his head... which of course would be a bloody awful thing to do, so no, she wouldn't do that. But she could, if she had to...

Sadly, he was gone from the Metadream. She tried following the whiff of ash and soot that she'd smelled in his metaphorical clothes, like a bloodhound, but the trail ended above one of the many prisons the Citadel used to stuff unmutual people into little safe boxes. Would Penelope have to break into prison to get her answers...? Well, no, not likely. If he was in there, clearly he could access the Metadream anyway. This is where they'd talk, when it came to that.

For now, it was time to wake. Her body told her as much, even if her internal clock had been smashed with a sledgehammer.

The sun had been coming up when she fell into bed. It was sliding back down towards the horizon, signaling mid-afternoon, when she roused.

First thing she saw, from sideways perspective, was Quinn. Asleep in a chair.

Of course. Because she'd gone and claimed the bed, the instant they set foot in the room. Slept at a funny angle across it, too. He wasn't going to push her out, or creepily spoon up to her or anything. For lack of a better option, he'd done his own passing-out in that uncomfortable looking chair.

Penelope roused him, eager to at least get his neck out of that nasty-looking position.

"Oh. Hey," Quinn greeted, fumbling at the nearby end table for his glasses. "Ugh. What time is it...?"

"Late as butts. I'm starving, too. Can we get room service?"

"What's room service?"

"That's a no, then. Any good restaurants in the area, then?"

First thing Penelope thought of on entering what could only be loosely defined as a "restaurant" was: Milly would be so freaked out right now. No matter how much she (wrongly) idolized her departed friend and the wonderfully normal life she (didn't) lead, it was a failing of the sheltered suburban lifestyle that led to Milly rarely interacting with what could be considered the "seedy" aspects of the City.

Penelope, on the other hand, had explored in and around and underneath every aspect of her City... including places many wished to pretend didn't exist. Places where people lived when they had nowhere better to live. Couldn't turn a blind eye to places like District 23 or Seventh Street, not when your occupation as an urban explorer and role as an urban goddess kept you in direct contact with those locales.

So, much to Quinn's surprise, she hadn't batted an eyelash at the fly-by-night hotel they were staying in, the painted jezebels who occupied its lobby and nearby street corners, or any other hint that this part of the Citadel was a bloody awful place to be. And when they found a 24-hour grill that presumably served up meat cooked to presumably safe standards, she was more than willing to grab even a not-particularly-clean table and have a seat.

"The patrols assigned to this ward tend to slack off," Quinn was explaining, as they looked over the menu of alleged cuisine available for the asking. "You're more likely to find a checkpoint guard in a liquor store or a whorehouse than actually at their checkpoints. If you're hot on finding the Resistance, I figured this was as good a place to start as any. Certainly a good place to hide, at least."

Despite her nonchalant acceptance of the scenery, it did puzzle Penelope. She voiced her concerns while trying to pick between "Turkey" or "Beef" with no further descriptors provided.

"I always figured the Citadel was, y'know, this oppressive terrordrome of goosestepping doom run by law-and-order control freaks. Why would the regime allow a place like this ward to even exist...?"

"Bribes. Apathy. Indulgence. Plenty of reasons," Quinn reasoned. "If the guards don't HAVE to work their asses off busting every violation they see, they won't. Every now and then there's a raid, just to show they're earning their paychecks, but it's rare. Nobody wants to bother taking action if nobody is paying attention. Humans are rotten to the core, after all."

"That's horrible. And it's horrible that you genuinely believe things have to be that horrible."

"I call it like I see it, and I've seen plenty."

A disinterested waitress who couldn't have been much older than Penelope served up two plates of Plausible Meats, interrupting the discussion briefly.

It still shocked her, seeing so much of the population skewing so young. The men especially were rarely outside of their twenties... it was rare to see an old gentleman, unless he clearly was a man of means. Older women, certainly, particularly in the workforce all around them... but by and large, it felt like Logan's Run around here. Right down to the underage waitress.

But... the Citadel got to define its own laws regarding what "underage" meant. Hence the heavy emphasis on getting knocked up in the middle of your teenage years as a good thing. Adding "pedo's paradise" to the list of Citadel sins felt like a drop in a very large bucket, even if it was a hell of a drop to add.

As Penelope tucked into what was possibly turkey, she decided to dig a little deeper. Winning the war meant understanding the Citadel, which meant understanding Quinn's viewpoint. The Sleepwalker had said as much, said she needed to understand... no sense putting that off.

"So, why are you such a Negative Nancy?" she started.

"A what?" he asked, unfamiliar with the phrase. "I'm not negative. I'm realistic. This is the reality I live in; a cornucopia of lesser evils, adding together into a big pile of suck. I applied to Command School because I knew I'd never achieve anything from deep under that pile. I'd just be another dead man. Like my brothers."

"I'm... sorry to hear that."

"Why? You didn't know them."

"I mean in general. Like... nobody should have to die so pointlessly. Can't even say they defended the Citadel, not after... what we found out last night."

Quinn turned his fork twice in his fingers, before speaking.

"Think that's ultimately why I decided to come along on your wild goose chase," he admitted. "I thought by working myself into the command structure, I could make less stupid decisions than the officers who marched my brothers to their death. I could save a couple lives, at least. ...but it wouldn't matter, would it. What's the point? The Enemy can't be stopped; they'll always beat us."

"What? No, no. I think our research proves they CAN be stopped. I'm still trying to figure out the specifics, but..."

"But it doesn't change the fact that my family tree lost most of its new branches," Quinn filled in.

The twirling fork stopped twirling, as Quinn went back to eating his meal between tidbits of dialogue. Like nothing happened.

"So who're these friends of yours that you want us to find, anyway?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh... Cass and Vivi," Penelope answered, having more difficulty shifting gears. "My friend Cass, she's a really cool poet, amazing writing skills. Vivi's a nightclub manager and a dancer."

"And... this helps your personal war effort, how? Are we going to defeat the Enemy with inspirational pop songs or something? Maybe get them played on the Radio?"

Penelope's knife and fork scraped loudly against her plate, as an attempt to cut her poultry crashed head on into her own surprise.

"That's it!" she declared, loudly enough to be heard. ...then settled into her seat, looking sheepish as the other patrons of the diner gradually returned to their food.

Quinn slouched in his seat, partly in an instinctive need to shrug off the sudden burst of attention, partly in depressive horror at the earlier statement.

"...please tell me you aren't serious," he begged. "Please tell me your grand plan to defeat the Enemy isn't to sing and dance at them."

"No no, that's not, it's... I think... yeah. I think... yeah! I think I've got it," Penelope spoke rapidly, interrupting her own train of thought each step of the way. "It all makes sense! Why the Commander's bringing over City folks, how the Enemy reacts to the Citadel, the reason why you say they can't be beaten, the stalemate, the voice on the Radio, the memetic nature of cubism, the spread of the Blue-Eyed Plague... of course. It's all so simple!"

Quinn's horror deepened considerably.

"If you say the next step is to buy a bunch of pushpins, lengths of colored string, and sticky notes so you can map out a vast conspiracy on your Wall of Crazy... I am leaving and not coming back," he warned.

"Okay, look, this isn't going to make sense to you unless I do a LOT of explaining and I... think we've attracted enough attention already, so let's finish eating and bounce," Penelope suggested. "I'll try to explain when we get back to the room. ...you might not like the answers, though. Even less than the other answers you already don't like."

With a sigh, Quinn returned to his meal.

"On the run with a lunatic isn't exactly how I pictured having my first date with a cute girl, but I guess beggars can't be choosers," he commented. "As long as it doesn't end in summary execution, I suppose I'll take it."

And so, the remainder of the food was consumed in silence.

Although now, all those plans for how to end the war were shoved roughly aside, in favor of being silently terrified of the simply stated declaration of her apparent new boyfriend.

Boyfriend. "Friend who is a boy," and yet, so much more packed into that single combination term.

Marcy had a lot of boyfriends, and every single one of them resulted in a painful breakup. Milly had a wonderful and loving boyfriend, and both of them got killed. Vivi... she didn't seem to believe in "boyfriends" of a traditional sense, despite being amazingly sexually active. Oh, and Kut-ya-up Karla had a husband who she routinely injured during highly acrobatic naughty fun...

Not exactly a fine gallery of role models to draw from, in the end.

Not that Penelope really gave it a lot of thought, honestly. Far too busy to make with the lovey-doveys, way too occupied with saving her entire City from one menace or another. She'd often considered herself absolutely horrible girlfriend material, too weird to date, and as a result she rarely gave it a second thought. Well. She had fancied Lucas, for at least half a day, before realizing he was way better off with Milly...

Now she was walking down a street with a "beau" at her arm, as Grandma Scarlett would've put it. One which had directly (if jokingly) talked about their newfound dating-type relationship.

Whoa.

Of course, it was completely insane. They were fugitives on the run from a tyrant, trying to save two worlds from the brink of disaster. Mutually aligned interests and a common foe, that's all, right? Besides, it's not like any sort of relationship between them would have legs. After this mess was done she'd be heading back home to her City, and Quinn likely would want to stay on to try and help his Citadel.

"Penelope?"

Besides, she just met him! It was all moving so fast. (Everything in her life moved fast, why not this?) She was still grieving for her father, anyway. Bad timing. No. No, this was a horrible idea in every respect, and obviously wasn't going to go anywhere. Like all other past fancies, she had to put it aside. The crisis du jour was far more important, and besides, she was awful girlfriend material. Too weird. Too alien. Nice guy like Quinn, he was better off finding a nice Citadel girl. Not some crazy Angle.

"Uh. Penelope. Peneeeelopeee..."

...and he kept insulting her, didn't he? Calling her weird and crazy. What a jerk! Only she was allowed to call herself weird and crazy—

"Citadel to Penelope, come in Penelope."

"What?!" she snapped back, as rapidly as her thoughts had turned sour.

Quinn hopped back a full step, hands up in surrender.

"Whoa, whoa. Peace and love, comrade," he tried, to disarm her. "I was just asking why we walked right by the hotel. To say you're a little distracted is to say the sky is a little blue."

"Of course I'm distracted!" she complained. "You're dating me!"

"I am?"

"You said you were!"

"Uh... you mean the desperate joke I was cracking to help soothe my worry regarding our impending doom?" Quinn asked. "Well, hey, if you WANT it to be a date, I guess it does match up to the classic parameters—"

"And you called me cute," she accused. "How dare you call me cute! I am not cute. I am weird and dangerous and fierce and don't exist within the bounds of conventional reality!"

"I'm not seeing how these factors preclude your ability to be cute, but sure, let's go with that," he suggested, growing increasingly nervous. "You're scary and cute and we were on a date. Is that acceptable?"

"No, of course not!"

"You're going to have to give me more to work with, then, because I'm failing to grasp what exactly you want out of me. Why is it such a huge deal to go on a date or call a girl cute? Seems to me given our situation, a little social fun is a fine way to relax given we've put ourselves directly in harm's way..."

"It's... the... just... I... agh! It's important, okay?" Penelope tried. "You can't just casually call a girl cute or declare something a date. There's... courtship, or something. I'm pretty sure there's courtship. I don't actually know the details but it's not something to take lightly! You're making our life-or-death struggle into something silly—"

"Dammit, Penelope, that's exactly WHY I'm doing it!"

...and again, they were drawing too much attention. Having it out in public. With an eye-rolling groan... Quinn walked to the nearest secluded alley entrance, waving quickly for her to follow.

Only once the passers-by had passed by did he explain. If anything, the moment of enforced silence helped him gather his thoughts.

"Would you mind if I make something of a speech?" he asked, first. "I think it's something that needs to be said. And understand, this isn't me talking down to an Angle, like I know better. It's just... I want to help you understand. Okay?"

"O... okay," she agreed, likewise a bit calmer after the mandatory silent moment.

"Good. Now, Penelope... look around you," he said. "People getting drunk, laughing, having a good time. But it's a desperate good time. We're all dead men, Penelope. One day, sooner or later, we're going to die in this war. That's why disreputable places like this ward exist, and why the regime lets it slide. ...maybe on your world, companionship is this huge deal with multi-step guides in three-ring binders. Here... we've got so little time, we can't waste it. We have to move by our hearts."

Now, Quinn looked out from the mouth of the alley... to the evening crowd, moving along sidewalks, rolling by in taxis. And a bit of pride entered his voice.

"This is my Citadel. We're lonely, we're broken, we're constantly in danger. We joke, and they're sad little jokes. We laugh and it's hollow. We love, and it's often quite desperate. All we can afford are casual relationships, because anything else will hurt too much in the inevitable end. Until this war is over... we have to accept that there's nothing but the moment for us. So... if I'm joking, if I'm calling you cute or talking about dating... understand I'm both sincere and desperately trying to find some light of the situation. And... I'm sorry. I should've been more respectful of your boundaries."

Glad to have that off his chest, Quinn allowed himself a deep breath.

"Besides, I'd be lousy boyfriend material," he declared.

Which is probably why Penelope kissed him. They were both completely awful together, after all.

She probably could've stopped before backing him right into the alley wall and bonking his head against the bricks, but it was her first serious kiss and she was determined to make it work through sheer determination despite her lack of finesse or skill.

Only when he started mumbling something to try and catch her attention did she back off. Leaving the bewildered boy with glasses askew... pointing to a spot just over her shoulder.

"D... didn't you say your... your friend's names were Cass and Vivi?" he asked.

When she finally got her sense back, she turned around to see.

Wanted posters, with familiar faces...

RESISTANCE TERRORIST WATCH

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE FOR TREASON

VIVI JØRGENSEN - CASSANDRA DERSHAM

MIRANDA WALKER - DAVE SMITH - KELSEY JONES

(MAY BE USING ALIASES)

REPORT ANY SIGHTINGS

REMAIN STRONG

Hot kissing immediately flushed from her mind, Penelope dashed across the narrow alley to study the posters in closer detail.

"Holy crap, it's them!" Penelope declared. "It's really them! Wow, even Miranda?! And Dave and Kelsey came over here too? Wow. Wow! And they're with the Resistance, I was right! —they got Vivi's surname wrong and, uh, wow, I never knew Cass was 'Cass Dersham,' but... I KNEW if we left Command School, we could find my friends, we could make this work! We found them, Quinn, we did it!"

"We... found pictures of them, at least," he commented, a bit slower to shift back into gear. "Finding them will be another matter entirely. 'Wanted dead or alive' implies they won't be wandering around in public, which will make this task a tad challenging..."

"Mason jars! In those classified ads you kept finding in those newspapers," she reminded him. "You said they were Resistance code. Well... my friends are with the Resistance now! Can we contact them using those codes?"

"I guess...? I don't know. I mean, it seemed a simple enough cipher, but..."

"It's gotta be worth a try. At the least we can get in touch with the Resistance in general that way, and from there, my friends. Okay! How do we place a classified ad in tomorrow's paper?"

"Call the newspaper, and dump another wad of my rapidly draining savings account on their heads," Quinn spoke with misery.

"Sounds great! Let's do that! Got a phone with you?"

"...why would I have a telephone on my person? The cord wouldn't reach. And besides, think this through, Penelope," he begged. "The Resistance might think it's a trap if we don't entice them somehow. Anyone smart enough could've cracked that code, with enough research. You need a worm on that hook..."

For that, Penelope had an answer ready. One with a little impish grin to accompany it.

"We're placing the ad in the name of the 'Lucid Child,'" she decided. "And she's got some mason jar trouble that needs solving."

Step one was finding a working pay phone; the cheap hotel they were holed up in didn't offer telecommunications of any sort. Placing the ad was a simple matter, after that... Quinn reading off the message he'd encoded, using Penelope's buzzwords to draw the attention of her friends. They'd have results after the presses started rolling in the morning.

With curfew coming down soon, that left the remainder of the evening a blank slate. Still, better to wait in the hotel than to wander around as they'd been doing, even if these streets were allegedly forgotten by Citadel forces. Plus... Quinn had a request of his own.

"I want to know your plan," he said, after locking the hotel room door behind them. "For serious, now. Both the how and the why."

"It's not going to make a lot of sense to you," she warned. "And the background on why I think it'll work, well... it's something you won't want to make sense of. Scary stuff."

"Try me. My terror tolerance has risen considerably in the last twenty-four hours."

So... at risk of losing the trust of someone who may-or-may-not be her boyfriend... Penelope opened up.

It was policy, now. Her allies deserved the truth; hiding details from them for the sake of their own sanity never worked, and frequently left her paralyzed while trying to recall who knew what. Instead, she'd sat all her friends down and told them of the dream, and the dreamer... at risk of blowing their minds out.

Maybe it started with Archie. Good old Uncle Archie, who followed them to the Heart of the City, who learned the truth... and faded away, after that. He couldn't cope with the concept of reality being a dream. What right did Penelope have to inflict that knowledge on others? On her friends, Milly and Lucas, whom she kept in the dark until the darkness came for them...?

But, no. Honestly was still the best policy. And that meant appearing like even more of a lunatic to Quinn Qureshi.

She started with the dreamers, and the CDC. He was a rational boy; opening discussion with the rational side of things, how all of this was the result of some medical experiment gone horribly weird, that would go over well with him. She explained how each world was the creation of a single dreamer. She explained the aspects, how three views worked in concert and conflict to define each dream. And finally, she wrapped with the truth that started her own understanding of it all... her own role as a living aspect of the City of Angles.

To his credit, Quinn took it well. Or at least, he was excellent at hiding his reactions.

"I think... I need to work under the assumption that all of that is true," he decided, in the end. "I'm not saying I fully believe it, but let's say for now that it's a valid interpretation of the situation. With that in mind... what's your plan, and how does it relate?"

"People in my world get infected with cubism because they believe they should be infected with cubism," Penelope explained. "People in your world fight the Enemy to a stalemate because they believe they should fight the Enemy to a stalemate. These are accepted as the rules that dictate how the City and Citadel work. I think that the Commander's realized that, too."

"How do you figure?"

"Simply surging the Citadel population doesn't work. He needs outsiders; he's importing my City people to fight his war because they have no preconceived notions about whether the war can be won," Penelope said. "If he gets enough City conscripts on the frontline, ones which haven't had the pessimism of the Citadel beaten into their heads since birth... it may be enough to break the stalemate."

"It... would make sense, given those conditions. It's a gamble, but the Commander's taken gambles with human lives before," Quinn spoke. "He's fiercely determined to see an end to the war. Other Commanders across history were content with enough minor victories to keep their regime popular. I don't think Yates cares about popularity..."

"I don't think it's going to work, though. I think the negativity of the Citadel will get to them before those numbers make a difference; fear's pumping out over the airwaves, it's drilled into your heads by teachers and Leftenants, it's commonly accepted thinking about how things are here. To the point where even an otherwise clever guy like you buys into that complete stupidity."

"Thanks...? I think. Let's go with thanks," Quinn decided.

"But if belief shapes reality, that cuts both ways; negative and positive," Penelope continued. "Negative, a suicide song spreads across the connection we all share within the dream. Negative, weather patterns follow belief in the weather, and a hurricane prediction causes a hurricane. But... positives exist. A few thousand people thinking 'What if this world could be whatever we wanted it to be?' caused the world to be whatever they wanted it to be. What if we could flip the negative belief that the Enemy cannot be beaten... into a positive belief?"

Quinn's accurate memory recall worked against him, here.

"Oh dear god. You actually are going to defeat the Enemy with inspirational pop song," he realized.

"Uh, no. No. It's considerably more complicated than that, and... I still have the particulars to work out. That's why I need my friends, to pool together what we have and come up with