Pietro ran a hand over his scalp, feeling for stubble. Smooth, he decided. All done.

  He backed away from the bathroom mirror, stowed the razor he'd found in the medicine cabinet. The faucets produced no water, hadn't in days now, so he fished cupfulls of water from a bucket he'd brought with him, fastidiously sweeping the thin dusting of hairs he'd left down the sink.

  He ran another hand over his scalp, did it again, again. It calmed him, reassured him that at least this was under his control. He didn't know why he didn't just let it grow out; there wasn't an M Corp around to reprimand him anymore, as far as he was aware. Following a rule felt good, sticking to his Mop's training and protocols centered him. It was the only familiar thing he could glean from the howling chaos that his world had turned into.

  The deep exhaustion gnawing at his bones metastasized into something deeper as he glanced out the bathroom window. The street outside was blackened, empty. The sun was setting, but the streetlights remained off, casting the line of thin, canted townhomes in a sinister half-shade. Off, somewhere distantly, a dog was barking.

  Pietro crept back into the hallway, reflexively soundless, and made his way back to his room. His first few days living here, he'd lived in a constant state of anxiety about bumping into Yelena, somehow catching sight of her papery skin or giant's frame or toothless grin before he'd steeled himself for it.

  Now, he was more disappointed, absently worried, that he saw no sign of her. She hadn't been home in three days.

  Pietro lowered himself into bed, nestled his freshly shorn head into the pillow. He probed at the gaping loneliness in his chest like a sore tooth, poked and prodded it, terrorized himself with the dull ache of it.

  He'd be rid of it soon, he knew. As soon as the exhaustion took him.

  Soon he was asleep, and the world was a kaleidoscope wash of vibration and color that took a few moments to solidify into a scene, from gaseous blur into physical surroundings: that desolate, undecorated room he'd become so familiar with, that single window peeking out toward a grey field of wheat, the occupied cot tucked into the far corner.

  He'd gone to this room in his dreams several times now. The girl was always there, nearly always sitting in the bed, occasionally hunched up to the table, picking at the gruel she subsisted off, sometimes leaning up against the window, watching the breeze outside with the resigned longing of a person far past used to being imprisoned.

  Normally the dreams went peacefully: Pietro would watch her, would study the girl as she went about the tedium of what counted as her day. He kept her company. He floated at her side during the brief visits made by the furious man, leant her his sympathy as she cringed away from his frustration. She seemed to know he was there. She'd glance his way, scrutinize the space he happened to be occupying, face screwed up in concentration. He'd tried yelling out to her, waving his hands, flying into and through her, but his efforts rarely evoked much more than a shiver, or a bewildered shake of the head. If she could perceive him, it was inconsistently, blearily, as if he were an optical illusion that became less distinct when looked at head-on.

  Still, it was the happiest he'd been in a long time. The knowledge that she was there, that she was making even a bewildered attempt to see him, that she was tolerating his presence; it was the closest thing to a connection he'd experienced in weeks. Months, maybe.

  Once, after the man Pietro presumed to be her father had stormed out of her room after a particularly intense screaming match in their inscrutable language, she'd looked back over her shoulder, toward him, had searched the corner of the room for some sign that he was there. She saw it, presumably, noticed the slight shimmer or odd flicker that betrayed his presence, and she'd smiled. A fractional, weak smile, more an expression of fragile relief than anything resembling joy, but a smile nonetheless.

  It had buoyed Pietro's spirits for a day straight. It had won her his undying loyalty forever. He needed to see that smile again.

  Immediately the scene struck him as wrong, this time. The light coming in through the window was a livid yellow, sickly and flickering. There were shadows shifting through it, as if the sun were being occluded by jagged little clouds, fast-moving and thin. The air looked fried. Pietro couldn't smell anything in these dreams, but he felt as if the room must have smelled of soot or fire.

  The girl was nowhere to be seen. Pietro swiveled in the air, briefly panicked, before he found her: she was pressed against the room's only door, wrenching at the latch. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot. Her thin arms flexed and bent at painful angles as she put the entirety of her meager weight into the effort.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Pietro felt a jag of worry in his throat, drifted over to her. After a moment of consideration, he tried drifting through the door; no good, he bounced off the surface. Ghost rules didn't entirely apply, apparently.

  The girl scrambled away from the door, stumbled to the window. Pietro followed, looking over her shoulder at the scene she was now fearfully studying.

  The field outside was burning. In the distance, several plumes of noxious-looking smoke towered. The ground, shook, then, under some unseen impact. Pietro heard a distant, sinister rattling break out, staccato and violent.

  Just barely visible, the house next door was fully engulfed in flame. The roof caved in as Pietro watched, crumpled inward with a heaving groan, sending a fresh cavalcade of sparks and ash mushrooming upward.

  The girl paled a shade, a feat Pietro wouldn't have considered possible, and backed away from the window. She fumbled toward the door again, reached to wrench at the handle, and yelped, pulling her hand back. The handle was glowing, faintly, now. A thin carpet of smoke was roiling under the door, now, a questing tendril inching toward her feet.

  The girl pounded on the door, screamed the same unknowable two syllables, calling for help from people who were clearly gone. Pietro's heart was breaking. His hands felt numb, his head buzzed, he felt drunk with the misery of what he was watching.

  He needed to do something. This nightmare needed to end. He wanted to wake up.

  Pietro shut his eyes, tried to shunt himself back into the waking world. He failed, tried again, failed. The room was filling with smoke, now, a thin stratospheric plane of it was forming on the ceiling. The girl was back on her bed, now, as far from the door as she could get, a rag pressed to her mouth. She was whispering something to herself. A prayer, maybe, or a curse for the man who'd left her here.

  The door collapsed suddenly and spectacularly, heralding a tongue of flame that billowed wildly into the room after it. The girl screamed, and the sound spurred Pietro forward, forced him to act before his ghostly sense of helplessness could stymie him.

  Instinctively, calling back to the skills Yelena had taught him, that hellish night when she'd immolated him alive in his bed, Pietro flew over to the fire, reached out for its marauding heat, beckoned for it, let it into himself.

  His powers worked in the dream. He was shocked and ashamed in equal measure, that he hadn't thought to make use of them until now. The flames winnowed into his incorporeal form, slipped into his being as obediently as a pet walking itself into its kennel.

  The girl watched, mouth slack in shock, as the flames filled out his form, turning him from an invisible specter into brilliant silhouette, writ in flame.

  Buoyed by this, Pietro advanced into the hallway. He paced down its length, shepherding the flames into his body, siphoning them from the collapsing beams and crumbling walls.

  He walked toward the front door, tried to open it, watched as the flickering light that composed his hand swept harmlessly through the latch. Frowning internally, he tried a different tactic, converted the heat that suffused his form into some kinetic force. With a crackling impact, the door was a series of dispersing shards and planks spilling out into the gray grass outside.

  "Tee preez-yah?"

  He turned around to see the girl standing in the burned ruin of her home, studying him with awe. She repeated herself, said those three indecipherable syllables again.

  Pietro tried to respond, to say that he didn't understand. When his voice didn't come, he had an epiphany, and reached into the reserves of energy that now abounded in his form, converted some of them to sound.

  The noise was inhuman, flat, gritty, but he managed to strangle out a word: "Run."

  The girl took a step away from him, reflexive, caught between gratitude and terror. She said something else, shook her head, just as uncomprehending as he was.

  "Tee. Preez. Yah? Pireeztyah?"

  If Pietro had had brows to furrow, they would have. The last word she'd said had sounded eerily like his name. He gathered more energy to respond, but then felt the insistent back-of-the-mind tugging that heralded the end of a dream. He was waking up.

  He backed farther away from the door, gestured firmly to it, jetted an arrow of flame in its direction for emphasis.

  "Run!" He repeated. "It's not safe here!" He gestured toward the open door, stepped aside to let her past. She stayed rooted to one spot, transfixed by him.

  Her eyes, stormy grey-blue irises set in a sea of bloodshot white, met his, and he saw something familiar in them. A fanatic energy, an electric strength, set behind the bewilderment and weakness and fear.

  Then he woke up, panting and sweating. Across the room, piercing out from the shadows engulfing the townhome's hallway, a pair of eyes studied him from seven feet off the ground.

  They were a stormy blue-grey.

  "This may be the last you see of me for a while," Yelena said in her rustling-paper rasp. "I feel the unraveling, now. The end of this long, sad game is at hand, and it falls to me to quicken it."

  "I- there was-" Pietro's thoughts were racing.

  "A house fire? A burning field?" Yelena smiled down at him, her mouth a black gash in a white canvas. "A man made of light?"

  "How did you-"

  "You must away, as well. Collect your things, when your strength returns." Yelena looked past him, toward one of his bedroom windows. She leveled a long arm, pointed. "East of here, a half day's walk, you'll find a hotel. There are people there, who will accept you, who will take you in while the worst of this ugliness unfolds."

  "Who?" Pietro's throat felt clogged by ten different questions at once. "What do I need to do to- with them?"

  "Enjoy their company," Yelena said. "Talk to them. Learn from them. You're alone, right now, Pietro. You have been for so long. It's not becoming for you to face the end of all things, as glorious as the conclusion promises to be, alone. It's a cruelty I wouldn't ask of anyone."

  "Where are you going?" Pietro heard the insistence, the panic in his voice, and felt briefly ashamed.

  "To quicken things. As I said." Yelena stepped back, nearly disappearing around the doorframe. A single eye remained visible, piercing him. "Worry not. You will see me again. You've plenty of dreams left in you."

  Then she said something in a different language. A mumbled, consonant, mournful-sounding language.

  It sounded oddly like Pietro's name.

  And then she was gone.