We sleep alone. We dream together.

  It was embroidered in a frame on the wall just above a plastic fish wearing a top hat.

  Charlie wasn't exactly sure how he found himself here, staring at the frame. One moment, he was someplace else, and then poof, he was staring at someone's tight-knit stitching.

  He turned and took in the room.

  The walls met at angles that made his eyes slide off them. Not quite ninety degrees. Maybe eighty-seven, maybe ninety-three. Close enough to look normal until you really looked, and then your brain started to itch. The ceiling was too high in some places and too low in others, like the room had been squeezed by a giant hand and never popped back into shape.

  And the stuff.

  Shelves lined every surface, crammed with objects that had no business being together. A porcelain cat sat next to a rusted bicycle chain. A snow globe filled with sand. A lamp shaped like a flamingo, its bulb flickering orange. Seventeen identical coffee mugs, all chipped in the same place. A taxidermied moose wearing a tie in the corner.

  Charlie stood in the middle of it all, turning slowly.

  He should have been overwhelmed. Rooms like this made him want to fold into himself: cluttered, chaotic, and with too much input. His skin would feel too tight, but here, he felt something else.

  A puzzle. A sense that underneath the chaos, something was waiting to be solved.

  The Rubik's Cube was on a shelf by the window. Faded stickers, one corner cracked. Charlie picked it up without thinking about why, and his fingers moved before his mind caught up. Yellow to yellow. Blue to blue. The clicks were satisfying, each turn slotting into place like a key finding its lock.

  Then the colors shifted.

  Not because he'd turned them. They just moved, sliding across the faces of the cube like oil on water, rearranging themselves into a new configuration. Charlie stared at it. He turned the top row left. The colors ignored him and drifted somewhere else entirely.

  This wasn't how Rubik's Cubes worked.

  He stopped moving his hands. The cube sat in his palms, scrambled, waiting. Charlie closed his eyes and thought about what it would look like solved. Yellow on top. Blue facing him. Green on the right.

  When he opened his eyes, the colors were gliding into place on their own, responding to the picture in his head. He didn't have to turn anything. He just had to know what the answer looked like.

  The cube clicked, settled, and went still. Solved.

  Charlie set it back on the shelf.

  Something shifted behind him. A soft grinding sound.

  He turned. The statue in the corner, a cheap replica of some Greek figure, all white plaster and blank eyes, had moved. Or no. Its head had turned slightly. Looking at him now.

  Charlie crossed the room. The statue's head was loose on its neck, wobbling when he touched it.

  "I wouldn't do that," the statue said.

  Charlie yanked his hand back.

  The statue's mouth hadn't moved, but the voice had come from it. Deep, bored, and like someone who had been standing in this corner for a very long time. Nothing on the statue moved except the eyes, which looked directly at Charlie.

  "Do what?" Charlie asked.

  "Turn my head. You want to turn my head. Everyone wants to turn my head. It never works out the way they hope."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want to be turned," the statue said. "And you can't make me. Try it. Go ahead. I'll just turn back."

  Charlie reached for the head again. The statue was right. The moment he tried to rotate it, the plaster resisted, and when he let go, it drifted back to its original position.

  "Told you," the statue said, with something like satisfaction.

  “Turn back…”

  Charlie looked at the statue. Then at the wall behind it. Then back at the statue. It had said exactly what it meant. Charlie could work with that.

  "What's behind you?" he asked.

  "Nothing interesting."

  "Then why don't you want to look at it?"

  "I didn't say I didn't want to look at it. I said I didn't want to be turned."

  Charlie considered this. "What if you turned yourself?"

  "Why would I do that?"

  "Because," Charlie said slowly, "I bet you've been staring at the same thing for years. The same shelf. The same fish with the top hat. Don't you want to see the shelf behind you? It’s probably the best shelf in here.”

  The statue was quiet for a moment.

  "I bet you’ve never seen one of those before," Charlie said. "You know what I’m talking about? What’s the word for it?"

  "Describe it," the statue said. "What’s it look like?"

  "I’m trying to think of the word for it? It's on the tip of my tongue." He snapped his fingers dramatically.

  Another pause. Longer this time.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Then, with a sound like stone grinding against stone, the statue turned its own head. It clicked into a position that hadn't existed before, facing the opposite wall.

  "Fine," the statue said. "But only because I'm bored."

  The head turned until a faint click could be heard, then a wooden panel in the wall slid open to reveal something in a cheap wooden frame.

  It was a giant crossword puzzle, yellowed and never started. Charlie lifted it off the nail, found a pencil on a nearby shelf between a rubber duck and a jar of marbles, and scanned the clues.

  Seven across: What you lose when you wake.

  He filled in the letters without hesitation. D-R-E-A-M-S

  Twelve down: Where you go when you close your eyes.

  D-R-E-A-M-S.

  Three across: What chases you but has no legs.

  D-R-E-A-M-S.

  Twenty-one across: The only place you can fly.

  D-R-E-A-M-S.

  Each across and down was the same answer, but that couldn’t be right. The squares overlapped, but when he wrote it down, nothing conflicted. Each letter was exactly right and exactly where it needed to be. The r was also the d, which was also the m. Trying to solve the puzzle the normal way would have been impossible.

  He smiled to himself and hung the frame back on the wall.

  The television clicked on.

  It was small. The screen was maybe ten inches across, and it was perched on a stack of encyclopedias in the corner. The display filled with static that was gray, white, and hissing. Charlie walked toward it, drawn by something he couldn't name.

  Above the television, another frame. A photograph this time. Charlie, maybe five years old, sitting on his grandfather's lap. His mother stood behind them, one hand on Charlie's shoulder, smiling. She was always smiling in the pictures from before. His father wasn't there because he had already left by the time the picture was taken. His mother had maybe five more Christmases with them after that one. A happier time, but the picture always reminded Charlie that some families just stop fitting together, and some just stop.

  He remembered that television. His grandfather had one just like it, tucked away in a closet. He said he watched the Bears win the Super Bowl on it, and it was good luck. Charlie always thought that was funny because the Bears hadn't won since.

  The static wasn't random. There was a pattern in it. Shapes moving beneath the surface, like fish under ice.

  He looked back at the picture and noticed something he had never seen before. His grandfather's hand was gesturing toward the TV. A small gesture, just an extended finger pointing down, but it was clear to Charlie what he meant.

  And his grandfather was winking.

  That settled it. There was a lot in Charlie’s life that was less than ideal, but Grandpa had never steered him wrong. Not once. Not ever. Intentionally, at least.

  If Grandpa was telling him this was the way, well, then it was the only way.

  Charlie tested the shelf above to see if it would hold his weight, then in one smooth motion, he jumped and slammed his feet into the screen.

  To his surprise, the screen was suddenly large enough to fit his whole body, and he was falling through static all around him.

  His feet hit the marbled tile first, and his first thought was that the room was enormous.

  No, not a room. A lobby. The kind of lobby that belonged in a government building or a very serious bank. All clean lines, high ceilings, and the echo of important footsteps. Then again, the ceiling was too high, impossibly high, disappearing into a sky that shouldn't have been there. And the windows were too large, showing views of places that couldn't exist: a forest made of clocks, an ocean of shifting colors, a city built entirely of staircases.

  Charlie's bare feet were cold against the marble.

  He looked down. Pajamas. He was wearing his pajamas, the ones with the faded rockets on them. He'd had them since he was twelve and should have thrown them away by now.

  People were staring at him.

  Dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. They filled the lobby. Some were holding papers, others were mid-conversation or walking with purpose toward destinations Charlie couldn't see. All of them dressed the same: button-up shirts, ties, pressed trousers or skirts, and sensible shoes.

  And watches. Every single one of them wore a watch.

  They had frozen mid-motion. A woman with her hand raised, reaching for a file. A man with one foot lifted, caught between steps. Two people mid-conversation, mouths open, words abandoned.

  All of them stared at Charlie.

  The silence was total. The kind of silence that has weight.

  "I…" Charlie started.

  Then the voices began.

  Not screaming. No, they came in almost as a whisper before they grew to conversational volume. They were just talking. Normal voices at normal volumes, saying normal things.

  Need to file the report before the deadline, or Jenkins will have my head again.

  Told her it wasn't my jurisdiction, but she never listens; she never listens to anyone.

  We need the agent list. They switched rotations last week, but no encryption specialists.

  Can't believe he said that to me after everything we've been through together.

  One voice was fine. Two was manageable, but they kept coming. They layered on top of each other, stacking like bricks. Ten voices. Twenty. Fifty. Each one perfectly clear, perfectly distinct, and all of them inside his head.

  Charlie's knees buckled.

  He hit the marble hard, hands slapping against the cold floor, and pressed his palms over his ears. It didn't help. The voices weren't coming from outside. They were pouring into him through channels he didn't know he had, filling spaces he didn't know were empty.

  Miss the way the light used to come through the kitchen window in the morning.

  Never forgave myself for what I said to him before he went.

  A hundred voices now. Two hundred. Charlie couldn't tell anymore. His vision was going white at the edges. He could feel himself fragmenting, pieces of who he was getting pushed aside to make room for pieces of other people.

  Memories that weren’t his. Fears he didn’t have. Knowledge he didn’t earn.

  He was drowning in other people's lives.

  Charlie looked up, tears streaming down his face, and saw her.

  She was about the same age as his mother, or maybe just more tired. Short hair, practical shoes. The kind of face that had made a lot of hard decisions and stopped apologizing for them. She was walking toward him while everyone else stood frozen, moving through the chaos like it couldn't touch her.

  She crouched down. Met his eyes.

  "Sorry about this," she said.

  Then she hoisted him over her shoulder like he weighed nothing, stood, and walked toward the nearest window.

  Charlie tried to speak, tried to ask what was happening, but the voices were too loud now, drowning out his own thoughts. He caught glimpses of the lobby upside-down. The frozen agents. The impossible ceiling. A woman behind a desk whose mouth was moving in what might have been a shout. And then the window was in front of them.

  It was huge. Floor to ceiling, maybe twenty feet wide. Through it, Charlie could see a sky that was three different colors at once, and below that, nothing. Just depth. Just down.

  The woman shifted her grip on him.

  "You'll be fine," she said. "Probably."

  And she threw him through the glass.

  The fall lasted forever and no time at all.

  Charlie tumbled through the fractured sky, the wind roaring past him. The ground, if there was a ground, was nowhere in sight. He tried to scream, but the air stole his voice. He tried to orient himself, but there was no up, no down, just falling and falling and falling.

  Above him, getting smaller, the window he'd come through.

  And in it, a face. The woman was watching him fall. Her expression wasn't cruel. Wasn't kind either. Just practical. Like she'd done what needed to be done and was already thinking about the next thing.

  Charlie reached toward her, though he didn't know why.

  Then the sky folded in on itself, and the falling became something else, something that felt like waking up feels when you're not ready.

  He gasped awake in his own bed.

  For a long moment, he just lay there, heart hammering, sheets twisted around his legs. His pajamas were soaked through with sweat. His hands were shaking.

  The ceiling above him was its normal, white self.

  He was home. He was awake.

  Just a dream, he told himself. Just a weird dream.

  As the minutes passed and his heart rate slowed, fragments clung to him. A woman's laugh that didn't belong to anyone he knew. A door that filled him with dread for no reason. A word that sounded harsher than any English he'd ever heard. He was certain it meant something, even though he'd never heard it before.

  And a face. The woman who'd thrown him out the window.

  Charlie pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw stars.

  By the time his alarm went off an hour later, most of it was gone. Just a dream. Just a weird dream.

  He got up, got dressed, and went to school.

  Like the first time, he eventually forgot the second time he shared a dream.