Merlose’s compass was broken. Not dramatically broken. Not shattered or sparking or doing anything that would justify the face she was making. The word on its face had simply stopped changing. It said LOST, and it had been saying LOST for three days.

  “It’s not broken,” she told Charlie as they walked through corridors he’d never seen before. “It’s stuck. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Broken means I need a new one. Stuck means I have to visit the Fixer, which is worse.”

  “Why is it worse?”

  “Because the Fixer treats me like I treat you.”

  “That’s a bad thing?”

  “For a forty-year-old woman? Yes.”

  They descended a staircase that curved the wrong way. The walls here were softer than the rest of Terminal Hypnos, less like stone and more like paper that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be yet. Sketches appeared and disappeared in the plaster. Half-formed shapes drifted near the ceiling like soap bubbles made of blueprints. A tiny mechanical bird flew past Charlie’s ear, circled his head twice, and then dissolved into graphite dust.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Merlose said. “Seriously. Last time Hellstorm touched a prototype, he had compasses for hands for a week.”

  “Compasses for hands?”

  “They pointed north. Both of them. He couldn’t pick anything up, but he always knew which direction he was facing.”

  The staircase opened into a space that Charlie couldn’t describe because it kept changing. It was a workshop one moment, a library the next, and then briefly a greenhouse full of plants made of wire and light. The only constant was the woman at the center of it.

  The Fixer was small. Smaller than Charlie expected. She sat cross-legged on a workbench that floated three feet off the ground, surrounded by objects in various states of existence. Some were finished: polished, gleaming, real. Others were see-through, flickering like a television losing signal. A few were just outlines, pencil drawings hanging in the air, waiting for someone to believe in them hard enough.

  She looked up when they entered, but she didn’t speak.

  Instead, a small paper airplane launched itself from her workbench, circled the room, and landed in Merlose’s hand. Merlose unfolded it. Inside, in handwriting that was somehow irritated.

  Stop breaking my stuff.

  “Nice to see you too,” Merlose said. She held up the compass. “It’s stuck.”

  The Fixer held out her hand. Merlose tossed it to her. The Fixer turned it over, held it up to one ear like it was a seashell, then set it on the bench beside her. A magnifying glass on a mechanical arm swung down from nowhere and began examining it. The Fixer ignored it and looked at Charlie.

  Another paper airplane. This one landed on Charlie’s shoulder. He unfolded it.

  So you’re the tunneler.

  “Yes…?” Charlie hadn’t meant to say it as a question, but it just sort of came out that way.

  A third airplane, already waiting in the air like it had been folded in advance.

  You need to eat more and get a haircut.

  “My mom used to say the same thing.”

  The Fixer almost smiled. Then she turned back to the compass, and the space around her shifted. Tools materialized and dematerialized. A pair of tweezers made of light. A screwdriver that hummed. Something that looked like a tuning fork crossed with a kaleidoscope. She worked in silence, her hands moving with a precision that made Charlie think of a surgeon, or maybe a watchmaker.

  “She doesn’t talk,” Merlose said quietly. “Never has. Everything she wants to say, she makes.”

  “Is that a choice?”

  “It’s who she is. The Director says the Fixer communicates more clearly than anyone in the building. She’s not wrong.”

  A woman stepped out from behind a shelf that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She was older than Merlose, with deep brown skin and gray streaks in her hair. She wore a simple dress and no shoes, and she carried herself with the quiet certainty of someone who had been in Terminal Hypnos for a very long time.

  “Callo,” the woman said, her voice warm. “I thought I heard your skepticism from two floors up.”

  “Eleanor.” Merlose’s tone softened in a way Charlie rarely heard. “This is Charlie. Charlie, this is the Medium.”

  “Eleanor is fine,” the woman said, extending a hand. Charlie shook it. Her grip was firm, and her palm was warm, which surprised him. Most things in Terminal Hypnos ran a little cold.

  “The Medium?” Charlie asked.

  “It’s a title. I’m on the Board with the Director and our Fixer here.” She gestured around the workshop. “We all have our roles down here.”

  “What do you do?”

  Eleanor smiled. “I bring things to life.”

  She held out her hand, palm up, and closed her eyes. For a moment, nothing happened. Then something shimmered above her palm, like heat rising off asphalt. A shape began to form. Small at first, just light and suggestion, but then it solidified into a bird. Not a mechanical bird like the ones the Fixer made. A real bird. A robin, brown and red-breasted, that tilted its head and looked at Charlie with bright black eyes.

  It chirped.

  Charlie stared. “That’s an apparition?”

  “A simple one.” Eleanor opened her hand, and the robin hopped onto her finger. “The Fixer makes permanent objects. Tools, devices, and things that serve a function. I make things that are semi-sentient and stick around,” she smiled at Merlose, “until someone like Callo accidentally retires them.”

  “That was one time, and I thought it was the egg I was hunting.”

  Both the Medium and the Fixer smiled at the handler.

  The robin flew to Charlie’s shoulder. He could feel its weight. Its tiny claws gripping his shirt. It felt completely real.

  “The trick,” Eleanor continued, “is memory. The more detailed the memory, the more vivid the apparition. I once brought back a woman’s childhood dog for her. She remembered everything: the way it smelled, the sound of its bark, the specific way it used to press its nose against the back of her knee. The apparition was perfect. Indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “As long as I could hold the thought.” Eleanor’s smile faded slightly. “That’s the rule. Apparitions exist as long as someone is actively maintaining them, or until the dreamer wakes. I’m stuck here along with the rest of the board, so I manifest the help apparitions we use for travel and communications. The permanent ones that are made by regular folk are the rogue apparitions that persist on their own; those are different. Those are dangerous. What I do is controlled and always with consent.”

  The robin on Charlie’s shoulder began to fade. Its weight disappeared first, then its warmth, and then its shape. It was gone before Charlie could miss it.

  “Could you…” Charlie hesitated. “Could you make a person? Someone specific?”

  “That’s most of what I do. Agents sometimes need a partner who won’t wake up under normal circumstances. They’re great for pushing paper, and some instructors use apparitions for training exercises. The Director occasionally asks me to reconstruct people for certain dreamers.” She paused. “But you’re asking about someone for yourself.”

  Charlie didn’t answer.

  Eleanor studied him with an expression that wasn’t pity. It was recognition. “The answer is yes. I can manifest anyone you have a strong enough memory of, but there’s something you need to understand. The apparition can only draw from what the dreamer already carries. Your memories, your impressions, and your understanding of that person. It can’t surprise you. The apparition would wear whatever face you could describe, but it would just be me behind it. It’s the same if you created it. It can’t tell you something you don’t already know. It’s a reflection, not a resurrection.”

  The Fixer looked up from the compass and launched another airplane. Eleanor caught it, read it, and laughed.

  “She says to stop boring you with details and let you learn on your own.”

  She crumpled up the paper and threw it at the woman examining the compass.

  “I’m not boring,” Eleanor said. “I’m explaining.”

  Another airplane. Eleanor read it and rolled her eyes.

  “She says the compass is stuck because you keep using it while stuck in Terminal Hypnos. You’re straining it by trying to pursue something out there while you’re assigned here.”

  Merlose had the decency to look slightly guilty. “I like to check in on Harwick.”

  The Fixer held up the compass. The word on its face flickered once, twice, and then settled on READY. She tossed it back to Merlose, who caught it one-handed.

  “Thank you,” Merlose said.

  A final airplane. Merlose unfolded it, snorted, and pocketed it without showing anyone.

  Charlie was still thinking about what Eleanor had said. A reflection, not a resurrection. His mother’s face was in his memory. Her voice and laughter. The way she sounded when she sang over breakfast. He could pull her into his dreams.

  “There’s a mirror in the Encryption wing,” Charlie said, partly to himself and partly to the room. “Behind it, there’s a door that says ‘The Puzzler.’ Is that… another board member?”

  The Fixer looked up sharply. For the first time, her expression changed from mild disinterest to something else. She launched an airplane with more force than the others.

  Charlie caught it.

  That’s my husband. Mind your business.

  “Your husband is the Puzzler?”

  Another airplane, this one folded into something more complicated than a plane. It unfolded in Charlie’s hands into a shape that resembled a pointing finger.

  And the anti-puzzle that made you dizzy is just his doorbell. Focus on your studies. Listen to your handler. Stay out of that wing.

  She looked at Merlose, and something passed between them. An understanding that seemed like an agreement.

  Then the Fixer did something Charlie didn’t expect. She laughed. It wasn’t sound exactly, but the whole workshop rippled with it. The floating blueprints shook. The half-formed prototypes wobbled. A drawer opened, and a tiny brass trumpet played three descending notes that somehow conveyed amusement.

  Charlie felt his face go hot. The ultimate puzzle, the thing that had kept him at the SCA when he’d been ready to leave, the mirror that broke the rules of reflection, was someone’s front door.

  “Come on,” Merlose said, steering him toward the exit. “We got what we came for.”

  “Goodbye, Charlie. And good luck with your studies,” the Medium waved politely. The Fixer snapped her fingers and waved the Medium over.

  Charlie waved and followed Merlose, but his mind was already somewhere else. A reflection, not a resurrection. Memory and belief. He could picture his mother so clearly. The loose ponytail. The flour on her hands. The way she hummed when she was happy.

  He could bring her back, not really, and he knew that. Eleanor had been clear, but maybe he could see her again. Hear her voice. Feel her hand on his shoulder, even if just for a few minutes. Even if she could only say things he already remembered.

  Was that enough?

  Charlie already knew the answer, and he already knew he was going to try.

  *

  He found the room three corridors past the training wing, in the part of Terminal Hypnos where the architecture got bored with itself. The hallways here were half-finished, walls trailing off into sketches, ceilings that forgot to close. Most agents avoided it. Charlie liked it because nobody came looking for him here, and the rooms were small.

  This one had been a storage closet once. Maybe still was. There were shelves along one wall holding things that didn’t have names yet, objects the building had started manifesting and then abandoned. A drawer that opened into another, smaller drawer. A lamp that cast shadows but no light. A clock with no hands that somehow still ticked.

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  Charlie closed the door behind him.

  He stood in the center of the room and breathed. The ticking clock was the only sound. He closed his eyes and did what Eleanor had described, though Eleanor hadn’t described it for this purpose.

  Memory first. Vivid, detailed, specific.

  The ponytail. Loose, the way she wore it when she was cooking. Strands escaping near her temples, curling from the heat. The blue apron with the faded sunflowers. The way she stood at the stove, always slightly on her toes because she refused to use the step stool.

  Belief second.

  Charlie believed. He believed harder than he had believed in anything since Sharpe’s class, harder than the flashlight or the encryption in the Board Games arena. He believed because he had eight years of proof that this woman existed. He knew how she moved. He knew how she smelled. He knew the exact pressure of her hand on the top of his head.

  He opened his eyes.

  She was standing by the shelves, examining the shadow lamp with mild curiosity.

  “What a weird little thing,” she said, turning it over in her hands. “Your grandfather would love this. He keeps every piece of junk he finds.”

  Charlie couldn’t speak.

  She looked at him. Her face was exactly right. The lines around her eyes, the tiny scar on her chin from the time she slipped on ice, the way one eyebrow sat slightly higher than the other when she was amused. She was amused now.

  “You’re staring,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” She set the lamp down and walked toward him. Her footsteps sounded real. Her weight on the floor was real. When she reached him, she brushed the hair off his forehead. Her fingers were warm.

  “You need a haircut,” she said.

  Charlie’s throat closed.

  “I like it long,” he managed.

  “I know you do.” She smiled. “I like it too. Don’t tell your grandfather.”

  She pulled him into a hug. He let her. She smelled right. Not a specific smell he could name, but the right one. The one that didn’t exist in any bottle in the house anymore. His grandfather had packed her things into boxes years ago, quietly, one shelf at a time, and the smell had gone with them.

  She held him, and he held her, and for a full minute, Charlie let himself believe it was real.

  Then he pulled back.

  “Mom.”

  “Yeah, bug?”

  “What do you think of the SCA?”

  She tilted her head. The amusement was still there, but something behind it was searching. Her mouth opened, then closed. Then opened again.

  “You’re too skinny,” she said.

  “No, I mean…” Charlie swallowed. “The people here. The agents. What I’ve been doing. What do you think?”

  Her eyes were warm. Her smile was warm. Everything about her was exactly as warm as he remembered.

  “Eat more,” she said. “You’re a string bean with hair.”

  “Mom. Please. I need you to…”

  “That’s my job.” She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “That’s what moms do.”

  Charlie stepped back. The room felt smaller.

  “Tell me something new,” he said. “Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me what you think about who I am now. Tell me if you’re proud of me. Tell me what you would have said on my tenth birthday, or my twelfth, or yesterday. Tell me anything.”

  She was smiling. The same smile. The exact same smile from every memory he had of her.

  “Hey, bug,” she said. “You want blueberries or chocolate chips?”

  “Both,” Charlie whispered. Not because it was the right answer. Because it was the only answer she would accept. The script was written, and she couldn’t go off it, because the script was him.

  He sat on the floor. She sat next to him, close enough that he could feel her warmth. She started humming. Something soft and tuneless, the kind of song that wasn’t really a song at all. He’d fallen asleep to it a thousand times when he was small.

  She couldn’t tell him if she was proud of him. She couldn’t tell him what she thought of Merlose, or Teddy, or Gwen. She couldn’t tell him whether he was making the right choices. She couldn’t tell him anything about the six years since she died, because Charlie didn’t have those years with her, and he never would.

  She was perfect, and she was empty, and she was the best he could do.

  Charlie sat with her for a long time. The humming filled the small room and didn’t change, because it had never changed, because he only remembered it one way.

  Eventually, he let her fade. Not all at once. He let the details go one by one. The warmth of her hand first. Then the smell. Then the humming, note by note, until the room was quiet and he was alone with the ticking clock.

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Then he thought about his father.

  This was different. There was no ponytail to remember, no apron, no smell, no hum. Charlie had photographs. A box in his grandfather’s closet, the one Grandpa didn’t know Charlie knew about. Pictures from before. A tall man with broad shoulders in a flannel shirt. Brown hair like Charlie’s. Holding a baby that must have been Charlie, though he couldn’t remember being held.

  In some of the pictures, the man was smiling. In others, he was looking away, toward something outside the frame. In all of them, he was young. Younger than Charlie expected a father to be.

  Charlie built him from the photographs.

  Imagination first. Tall. Broad shoulders. The flannel shirt Charlie had seen in a photo once. Brown hair. Hands that hung at his sides.

  Belief second.

  What did Charlie believe about his father?

  He believed the man had left. He believed the man had looked at a toddler and a wife and a life and decided it wasn’t enough, or that he wasn’t enough, or that Charlie wasn’t enough. He believed the man’s absence was a choice, made every single day for twelve years, every morning the man woke up and didn’t come back.

  The apparition formed in the corner of the room.

  It was tall. Broad-shouldered. Flannel shirt, but the face was wrong. They didn’t sit right together. The features were assembled, not remembered. A collage of frozen moments pretending to be a person.

  The man looked at Charlie. His expression wasn’t blank. It was hard.

  “Hi,” Charlie said. His voice sounded very young.

  The man didn’t answer. He just stared at Charlie with an intensity that felt like a weight on Charlie’s chest.

  “I don’t…” Charlie started. “I just wanted to see…”

  “You’re the reason.” The voice came from somewhere far away, the same distance it had come from in the nightmare. An echo with no source.

  Charlie flinched. “The reason for what?”

  The man stepped closer. His hands weren’t relaxed at his sides anymore. They were fists. Not because the photograph showed fists. Because Charlie, deep down, in the part of himself he never examined, believed his father’s hands were always ready to leave or to push away. And the apparition couldn’t be anything Charlie didn’t believe.

  “You’re the reason I left.”

  It wasn’t true. Charlie knew it wasn’t true. His grandfather had told him a hundred times that his father leaving had nothing to do with Charlie. Therapists had told him. Teachers had told him. The rational part of his brain, the part that solved encryptions and cracked puzzles, understood that a grown man’s decision to abandon his family was not a toddler’s fault.

  Knowing something and believing it are different things. And in this world, belief is what becomes real.

  The man lunged at him.

  Charlie stumbled backward. His shoulder hit the shelf, and the shadow lamp crashed to the floor. The apparition grabbed him by the front of his shirt and lifted. The collage face was inches from his, the assembled features twisting into something that looked like rage but was really just grief turned inside out.

  “You’re the reason she’s dead.” The voice was closer now. Not far away anymore. Right in Charlie’s ear. “You were never enough. You’re still not enough. You’ll never be enough.”

  Charlie’s hands scrambled at the grip on his shirt. The man was strong, impossibly strong, because Charlie believed his father was stronger than him, believed it the way he believed the sky was blue.

  “Let go,” Charlie choked.

  “Make me.” The face leaned in. The eyes were photographs. The mouth was a wound. “You don’t even know what a person is supposed to be. How did you possibly think you could make a version of me?”

  Charlie’s back hit the wall. The ticking clock fell and shattered. The man held him there, pinned, and Charlie realized with a sick, vertiginous clarity that he couldn’t unmake this. He had built it with belief, and the belief was too old and too deep and too true to take back. Every time his grandfather changed the subject. Every time someone at school asked about his dad, Charlie said “he’s not around.” Every birthday without a card. Every Christmas without a call.

  Fourteen years of believing he wasn’t enough, and now that belief had a face, hands, and a voice. It was pressing him against the wall of an abandoned storage closet in a dream world, and Charlie couldn’t breathe.

  The door opened.

  The Director stood in the doorway. She didn’t rush and didn’t shout. She looked at the apparition pinning Charlie to the wall, and her expression wasn’t shock or anger. It was recognition. The tired, unsurprised look of someone who had seen this before.

  “That’s enough,” she said.

  The apparition turned its collage face toward her. The photograph eyes narrowed. The wound mouth opened.

  “You’re not his,” the Director said. Not to Charlie. To the thing wearing his father’s shoulders. “You’re not anyone. You’re a fourteen-year-old boy’s worst thought about himself, and you’re not welcome here.”

  She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t manifest a weapon or a shield. She just walked into the room, and the room changed around her. The walls steadied. The flickering objects on the shelves went still. The ticking clock, shattered on the floor, reassembled itself.

  She walked up to the apparition and tapped it on the forehead. The thing that was Charlie’s father crossed its eyes where the tap had occurred. There was a pause just before it burst into flannel bubbles. They popped against the ceiling.

  Charlie slid down the wall. His legs folded under him, and he sat on the floor, breathing hard. His shirt was still bunched where the hands had gripped it.

  The Director pulled up a wooden crate from the corner and sat across from him. She moved carefully, the way someone does when they know sudden movements would make things worse.

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The clock ticked. The shadow lamp cast its shadows on the wall behind her.

  “Eleanor came to see me after your visit. She said you asked the right questions in the wrong order, and the Fixer agreed.” She folded her hands in her lap. “When a fourteen-year-old boy learns he can manifest people from memory and then disappears into an empty corridor, it doesn’t take the Watcher to guess what happens next.”

  He wiped his face with his sleeve. “Did you see…?”

  “Just your father. Eleanor told me about your conversation. Her techniques aren’t a secret, and you’re not the first person to try.”

  Charlie stared at the floor. The spot where his mother had sat was empty. The spot where his father had stood was just a corner.

  “I made my mom too. She was perfect,” he said. “She was exactly right. Every detail, but she couldn’t…” He stopped.

  “She couldn’t tell you anything new.”

  “Yeah.”

  The Director nodded. She didn’t fill the silence with comfort or explanation. She just let it sit between them, the way someone does when they know the silence is doing the work.

  “The man,” Charlie said quietly. “My father. He said things.”

  “He said things you believe.”

  Charlie looked up.

  “Not things that are true,” the Director clarified. “Things you believe. There’s a difference, and it’s an important one, but I imagine you already know that.”

  “Knowing and believing are different things,” Charlie said. “I’m learning that.”

  “Good. That’s maybe the most important thing anyone in this building will ever learn.” She shifted on the crate. “Can I tell you something?”

  He nodded.

  “When you first broke into Terminal Hypnos, there was a discussion about who should handle you. There were strong opinions. Agent Crispin was the rational choice. She’s brilliant. She’s an encryption specialist, and she would have understood your abilities better than anyone. The Watcher championed her, and on paper, he wasn’t wrong.”

  Charlie thought of Benedicta and the mother who had raised her.

  “But I chose Merlose.”

  “Why?”

  The Director looked at him. Her eyes were the most awake eyes Charlie had ever seen, and right now they were kind.

  “Because Crispin would have trained you. She would have studied you. She would have made you exceptional.” The Director paused. “But you didn’t need to be made exceptional, Charlie. You were already exceptional. You solved the unsolvable encryption in your pajamas. What you needed was someone who would make sure you felt safe. Someone who would tell you a bad joke when you were scared. Someone who would chase you through eleven dreams and not give up, not because you were an asset, but because leaving a child alone in the dark is not something she’s capable of.”

  “You needed a mom,” the Director said. “Not a handler. Not a teacher. You have plenty of teachers in the waking world, and now you have twice as many here. You have Sharpe and Rasputin and Hellstorm and all the rest. They’re great, and I love that staff, but you’re a boy being raised by a grandparent. I thought you deserved someone who would love you the way a parent loves a child, even if she’d never admit that’s what she’s doing.”

  Charlie’s eyes burned. He blinked hard and looked at the ceiling.

  “I know something about that,” the Director said. Her voice was the same as before. Quiet. Not weak, just quiet. “I’m a mother too.”

  Charlie looked at her.

  “My daughter was nine when I had the accident. She grew up visiting a woman in a hospital bed who couldn’t visit her back. Not in waking life, anyway.” The Director’s hands were still folded in her lap. Steady. “When she was old enough, the SCA recruited her. She was talented. She could have been a good agent. She came into the dreamscape, and for the first time in years, I could talk to her. Hold her. Tell her all the things I’d been saving up.”

  She paused. Not for effect, but because the next part still cost something, even after thirty years.

  “She lasted six months. She said it was too hard. Not the work. The coming and going. None of this being permanent, and the fact that in the waking world, she felt like her mother was practically dead.” The Director’s voice didn’t waver. “So she stopped. She left the program. She chose waking life and to forget me here. Said it was easier that way.”

  The room was very quiet.

  “I could have fought it. I could have had the Watcher persuade her, or assigned her somewhere she’d thrive. I could have built a world for her in here, a room where we could be together every night, where it felt real and whole. Where it felt right.” She looked at Charlie. “I could have manifested her. The way you manifested your mother. A perfect version that said all the right things and never left.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I let her go. Because she asked me to, and because keeping her here for my sake would have been the opposite of loving her.”

  Charlie thought about his mother’s apparition. The warmth. The hum. The kiss on the top of his head. All the things he had held onto because letting go felt like forgetting.

  “She has children now,” the Director said. “Two. A boy and a girl. The boy looks like my husband.” Something moved behind her eyes, just briefly. “Every few weeks, I find her dream. I don’t go in. I don’t interact. I just… watch. She’s hanging laundry, or cooking dinner, or reading to her kids. Ordinary things. The kind of things I would have given anything to do with her. Sometimes she dreams of me, and I think of stepping in, but I don’t.”

  Charlie remembered the wheat field. The first time Merlose had used the compass, the dream they’d rested in. A farmhouse with glowing windows. A woman hanging laundry on a line.

  He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if the connection was real or if he was imagining it, and some things were better left alone.

  “Sometimes letting go is the hardest thing,” the Director said. “But it might be the noblest thing we can do for the people we love. And for ourselves.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a coin. It was small, slightly larger than a quarter, made of something that looked like brass but felt heavier when she pressed it into Charlie’s palm. One side had an inscription he couldn’t read, letters in a language that might not exist. The other side was smooth except for a single symbol: a door, slightly ajar.

  “I made this myself,” she said. “Not the Fixer. Not Eleanor. Me. I try not to manifest too much. It’s hard to run this place while keeping track of trinkets or critters running around.”

  Charlie turned it over in his hand. It was warm, but not from her pocket. Warm the way Merlose’s smile was, or when Teddy’s compass pointed to Charlie.

  “What does it do?”

  “It brings you to me. No matter where you are in the dreamscape, no matter what’s happening, you flip that coin, and you’ll be in my office before it lands.” She stood up from the crate. “It’s one use. Once you flip it, it’s gone. So choose wisely.”

  “Won’t it just disappear with me when I wake up and fall asleep?”

  “It’ll always be in your left front pocket or sewn into your waistband. I promise.”

  Charlie closed his fist around it. “Why are you giving me this?”

  The Director looked at him. The kindness was still there, but so was something else. Something that looked like the expression Merlose had when she would confirm if she had just told a joke or not.

  “Because you have the most powerful imagination I’ve encountered in thirty years of running this institution. And tonight I watched you use it to build things that hurt you most.” She walked to the door. “Imagination is a gift, Charlie, but a gift without a safety net is just a different kind of danger. Consider that coin your safety net. Good for when your imagination runs wild.”

  She opened the door, then paused.

  “And Charlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t know your parents, but I can guarantee your father never felt that way about you.”

  Charlie’s breath caught, and he nodded.

  The Director nodded once in response. Then she left, and the door closed behind her. Charlie was alone in the small room with a coin in his hand and a clock that ticked in the silence where his mother’s humming used to be.

  He sat there for a long time. The coin was warm against his palm. He thought about his mother’s smile and how it never changed because he only remembered it one way. He thought about his father’s face and how it had been assembled from photographs by a boy who didn’t have enough to work with. He thought about the Director, watching her daughter’s dreams from the outside, and choosing distance over a perfect illusion.

  He thought about Merlose. About the way she’d been chosen for him. Not because she was the smartest or the most strategic, but because she was someone who would make sure he was okay. He thought about how she had never once, in all the time he’d known her, tried to be his mother. She’d just been Merlose. Direct, blunt, practical, and completely unwilling to let him fall.

  Maybe that was the same thing, or maybe that was enough.

  Charlie put the coin in his pocket, stood up, and went to find her.