Pietro was dreaming again. He knew it immediately.

  Lately, since the bombs dropped and Yelena had been making him accompany her on her jaunts out into the wasteland to bask in the glow of the radioactivity, their Auras hungrily drinking up all the residual energy from the most poisoned parts of the city's ruin, his dreams had been taking on a material quality, tangible and almost viscous. It was at the point now that they were so vivid that he immediately became aware of the fact that he was dreaming, dropping into a lucid state almost the instant he fell asleep.

  Which was often. Between the horror of venturing out into the graveyard of what used to be a perfectly nice place to live, and the exhaustion that accompanied the great effort of all that energy absorption, Pietro had become borderline narcoleptic, and was spending, what he estimated, well over sixteen hours a day asleep.

  Dreaming.

  Up until today these dreams had been largely formless, soups of color and emotion and the sensation of movement. They had congealed, tonight, however, into something actually recognizable: laying before Pietro, projected as if he were hovering in its midst like a ghost, was a spartan wooden cell.

  Within the cell, curled near-fetal on a cot, lay a young woman. She was bone-thin, and her hair long and matted, splaying well past her waist where she lay. She was shuddering, clearly in the midst of a dream of her own, murmuring something indistinguishable in her fitful sleep.

  Pietro, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the sensation of hovering over this unwitting woman, watching her sleep without permission, tried to move away. He found he could drift softly higher and lower in the air, could rotate in place, but could hardly move much more than a few feet in either direction before a growing inertia forced him to a halt.

  And so he hovered, sheepish, over the foot of this woman's bed as she slept.

  Pietro busied himself with observing other, less invasive details of the room. Even now, he maintained his eye for cleanliness, and felt a swell of inner judgment at the shabby conditions here. There was nearly no furniture to speak of, other than the cot itself, an end table, and a stool over in the corner, beside what looked like some sort of ceramic pot. The floor was unfinished wood, splintered and uneven. There was a single window, maybe a foot tall, slatted into the wall at an inconveniently high vantage; if Pietro hovered high enough, he could catch a glimpse of a field outside that sloped off into the horizon, a single footpath cutting through what looked like rows of crops early in their growth. He was trying to puzzle out what those were when a sudden pounding at the room's door startled both him and the sleeping woman.

  The woman mumbled something and, with an economy of motion that seemed practiced, folded herself up into a sitting position on the corner of the cot and faced the source of the clamor.

  The door swung open, and a scruffy, tall man loped in. He set a plate of something unappetizing and gray on the table, poured a cup of steaming water, and faced the girl.

  He muttered something in a language Pietro couldn't place. Russian? Romanian? There was a slant to the words, a hardness to the consonants that made him think of Eastern Europe.

  The man's voice was hard and quiet, direct. He spoke quickly and without stuttering, as if he was saying something he'd said many times before.

  The young woman's reply was fragile, almost inaudible, but something affirmative. The man reached over to her, snatched her wrist, felt at the bone there. He frowned, returned with another helping of the colorless food, and shoveled it onto her plate.

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  He pointed hard at it, jabbed with a gnarled finger, and issued a two-syllable command. The woman nodded. The man cast a look outside, frowned at the plants swaying there, and then left, slamming the door behind him.

  The young woman studied the food for a few moments, face blank. She perked up slightly when a voice called outside, and she heaved from the bed to shuffle over to the window. She stared out, craning on her tiptoes, and Pietro hovered over to watch.

  Two girls were walking down the path, lost in conversation with each other. One was chattering, excited, piling on to some joke that was making the other laugh harder and harder.

  The young woman's face sagged as she watched the two pass. Pietro saw something in her expression that he immediately recognized, and he swelled with pity for the girl.

  Then she turned, and looked directly at him. She cocked her head, eyes narrowing, as if studying some feature of the room she hadn't noticed before.

  Pietro felt his heartbeat race, surprising him. Could she see him? Were they about to talk? Who was she? What in the world could he possibly tell her?

  Her eyes widened, suddenly, and she fell backwards onto her bed, paling a shade. Pietro reached out to comfort her, began to explain that he wasn't a ghost.

  And then he woke up.

  Pietro had awakened from nightmares alone before. In his bare, spotless furnishings, the apartments and townhomes across the country that M Corp had set up for him and left him to wither alone in. Every bad dream that he could remember having, stretching back to his very first memory of waking up alone in the earliest apartment he could recall, had been one he'd faced alone.

  This, more than anything, had always hammered his loneliness home hardest. The waking up to the cold, empty space where human comfort could be, it was worse than the nightmares. Sometimes, he'd been driven almost to sprinting outside, into the streets of whatever city whose murders he'd been assigned to silently clean, and grab the nearest stranger and scream at them, at anyone, to be with him, to see him for just a moment.

  But of course, that wouldn't have been allowed. That would have violated his anonymity as a Mop. He would have been in breach of his contract, and the consequences would have been-

  "Did you have a nightmare?"

  Pietro was shunted from his stewing, and from the muddled confusion of half-sleep, by Yelena's cold monotone. She'd materialized in the dark of the corner of his makeshift room. Had she been there, watching him, the whole time? Pietro was surprised to find that the thought didn't make him shiver.

  "I- Yes," Pietro stammered. "I did."

  "Oh." Yelena crossed the room in two soundless strides and sat on his bed. She laid her hand on his, the coldness of her skin both eerie and oddly soothing. "A pity. That you should suffer so for your gift's emergence is necessary, but I find that necessity often makes for cold comfort."

  "I- Thank you?" Pietro felt the urge to snake his hand out from under hers recede. His heart rate was slowing. "My 'gift's emergence?'"

  "Your sight." Yelena's eyes were huge, glinting in the moonlight that hazed in through the room's ruined curtains. "It's beginning to stretch backwards as well as forwards."

  Pietro lacked the energy to decipher that. He'd been asleep for hours, and he felt so tired, on a skeletal level, still. He rocked forward a little, to lay his head in his hands. Yelena rubbed at his back.

  "Rest. Your efforts are valiant, and I'm sure they tax you. The strain will lessen soon, and you will be all the better for it. We both will."

  Pietro nodded dumbly.

  The last thing he felt, before he dropped back into sleep, was faint gratitude. He realized he quite enjoyed the cold sureness of Yelena's hand on his back.