“The hell do you mean?”

  Thunder crashed in the distance, the sudden aural impact amplifying Cole’s shock and disbelief.

  Even so, Lucy tried as much as a she could to calm the tremors that ran through her. What she was about to say would sound crazy, likely because it was crazy. But Ideation was all about thinking outside the box, and though she wasn’t thrilled about how she would expect Cole to react, she clung to the notion that speaking her idea frankly was the right way to play to her alignments.

  “All those arms that keep chasing us,” Lucy began. “Instead of fighting back and scaring them away, you need to reach out. And grab one.”

  Despite the rain that continued the pour and the seawater rushing noisily beneath the boat, Lucy’s words cut through the open air with the blinding clarity of a lighthouse’s beacon. Cole had a reaction like he was struck by such a light, frozen in sudden astonishment before reeling back with his brow furrowed and mouth agape, caught between staring at the audacity of the light and looking away to save his senses.

  When he had finally readjusted himself, the full understanding of Lucy’s suggestion making his eyebrows lower and mouth curl into a vindictive snarl, he said: “Are you crazy?”

  Lucy shook her head. He looked just about ready to pick her up and cast her off the boat, but she stood firm, knowing that she wasn’t the little girl he said she was, that the armour that was now a part of her would keep her from being discarded like that. “This is what I honestly believe.”

  Cole stared at her, still scowling, but evidently he hadn’t expected her to hold firm. “But that doesn’t make any sense! What good would that do? They’ve dragged me down into the water god knows how many times! And they’ll just do it again if I’m stupid enough to do what you’re saying!”

  “Whenever that was happening to you,” said Lucy, “what was on your mind?”

  Cole stared at her, perplexed. “What?”

  “Whenever those arms took you and dragged you away,” said Lucy, fighting the urge to envision what she was saying in detail, “were you thinking of something else, some other memory from the real world?”

  “You really think I could think of anything besides shit, I’m going to die?”

  Cole spat those words with incredulous vitriol. Lucy didn’t know how to respond, but she had a hunch that not responding was the right thing to do here. Much like how she had blindly trusted in speaking her idea, she had to blindly trust that Cole would understand what she was asking.

  A moment later, Cole’s expression softened, and his gaze went distant. “When they grab me…and I go under…it’s just like when I saw his arm sink down, down under the water, and then it’s gone. Forever.”

  Cole spoke the last word barely above a whisper, and his breathing hitched. He continued looking far away across the waves, chest heaving and legs trembling.

  “Okay, okay,” said Lucy. She grabbed Cole by the shoulders, bringing his gaze back to the here and now. “It’s okay. Sorry for bringing that memory back up.”

  Cole looked down and shook his head, as if trying to clear his head-space, to free himself.

  “But…” said Lucy, “you said that they’re your brother’s arm. I know that they attack us, but when you see them…don’t you want to reach out?”

  Cole looked up and gazed right into Lucy’s eyes.

  Lucy breathed evenly, calming her anxiety and uncertainty, aware of her armour and her sword as she added: “Reach out, and help your brother?”

  Cole’s eyes went misty, and his mouth opened wordlessly for some seconds, and then: “Of course I do! Of course I’d do anything…if I could…could have stopped…”

  He slapped his hands hard onto his head and held his face between his palms. Though it was hard to tell in the light rain, fresh tears ran down his cheeks. “God, why was I so useless back then? Derrick, I…I…”

  Seeing his crumpled form, Lucy slowly brought he hand out toward him. She hesitated, recalling how Cole gave many signs of preferring action over support, but she felt in her heart that this was right of her, right of her to reach out and place her hand on his shoulder as he wept. Perhaps it was a strange thing to do, something that crossed the line given that the she and him were essentially complete strangers in the waking world who would likely have never met, but in this Dream where her Understanding carved the path forward, this was all she could and all she wanted to do, in the moment.

  “Thank you,” Cole said lightly, “and sorry for being a mess.”

  Before Lucy could reassure him that there was nothing to apologize for, marvelling at how their positions were reversed now, there came the sound of hundreds of distant splashes followed by sloshing and stirring through the seawater.

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  After the countless times Lucy had driven them away with her sword, she didn’t even have to look up to know that their fiendish and persistent and pursuers had emerged from the waves yet again. Unlike the other times, this emergence felt expected, likely because she had gotten Cole to think about his brother’s arm in such detail.

  “They’re here,” she said, turning toward Cole’s ear and patting his shoulder a few times.

  Wiping vigorously at his face, Cole looked up. Every time he had looked at the arms, it had been with some mixture of fear and frustration. But now, in his eyes that were still wet with tears, Lucy could see him regarding the approaching entities with guilt, repentance, and the distant but also absolutely close gaze one has when reassessing oneself.

  “You really think it’ll work?” he said. “I don’t think you’re lying, but it still sounds crazy.”

  Lucy thought this over for a moment, because in truth she couldn’t say that it was all based on an unfounded hunch and then expect Cole to feel motivated enough to follow through. It wasn’t unfounded, though, and Lucy searched for the words to explain the intuitive belief behind her hunch.

  “This whole storm,” she said, “and the arms, and the whirlpools…They’re all here, and they keep coming back, because of how you couldn’t save your brother. So if you did save him, now, don’t you think everything would clear up?”

  Cole gazed at her silently with that same appraising and thoughtful expression. He glanced over his shoulder a the legion of arms, still fast approaching, then looked back at Lucy.

  And nodded.

  “Sounds so obvious when you say it,” he said with a sigh. “Got nothing else to lose, so let’s have at it.”

  He turned around and changed to a hunkered down stance with his arms out and palms outstretched, as if he were a bear wrestler waiting for his opponent to get close enough for a wrangling. He appeared fiercely determined, but Lucy saw that his legs and arms were trembling.

  Walking up behind him, she said: “I’ll pull you back if they get you. So don’t worry.”

  Looking over his shoulder, Cole smiled. “Thanks. That ain’t the reason I’m shaking, though.”

  Lucy expected him to elaborate further, but instead he looked back toward the impending horde, his movement hurried as if ashamed of what he had just admitted.

  If he wasn’t afraid of the arms seizing him, what could it be, then? He looked primed and ready to reach out to one of those sunken arms, pull it up out of the depths, and finally rescue the arm he had let sink all those years ago. But if he didn’t succeed in doing that, even after forcing himself to live through that same anxious moment of knowing he could do it…

  It dawned on Lucy then, just as the closest of the arms was about to cross into Cole’s arm length. Cole maintained his stance, but he didn’t move—in fact, he had gone completely rigid.

  Upon seeing this, and having a quick flash of the memory of frustration and helplessness from Cole’s recollection, Lucy knew what she had to do.

  “Now!” she yelled, as loudly as she could to make Cole jolt, flinch, jump—anything to get him moving.

  He gave no such dramatic reaction, but he let out a loud breath, one in between startled realization and the deep, full-body exhalation of decades of frustration and loathing—and then the arms before them all went deathly still. Cole did as well. When Lucy looked around him, she saw.

  Saw both his hands wrapped around the wrist of the closest arm.

  The rain abated, the waves stilled to surface waters smooth as glass, and the arms all stood straight facing toward where there brethren had been seized, as if they too were watching with unseen eyes. Everything stopped, all was silent, save for the slow, arduous breathing from Cole’s mouth as he stared at the arm in front of him, his gaze intently focused there but also elsewhere.

  Lucy wasn’t sure what to do. Part of it was the fear that if she startled Cole now, he would panic and accidentally lose grip after finally, finally reaching out where once he couldn’t. But more than that, she felt in the pervasive stillness and overwhelming sense of fate, or destiny perhaps, that this was how things were meant to play out, in Cole’s Dream, and she mustn’t meddle any further. Under such an absolute force as that, what could she do that wouldn’t mark her as a disrupter?

  As she stood there, listening to Cole’s breathing pierce the empty air, she heard the faintest sound of something stirring. It was nearby, but also far away—not out across the ocean, or over the horizon, but…beneath, far beneath where they were. The sound was in the lowest register of her hearing, barely audible as naught but a deep rumbling, a rumbling far below. And then as she listened, she recognized the sound of water bubbling rapidly, of it being moved inward and then expelled. Not in a methodical, unfeeling way as the whirlpool had sounded, but erratically, almost in a panicked state. But behind the sound of water swirling madly about, she heard another element caught up within it.

  A voice, choking and gargling.

  She knew then, what was making that sound, but still Cole was staring at the wrist between his hands and breathing without moving a muscle. Lucy looked at him, not saying a word so as not to startle, to make him lose grasp of this situation, but fixed him with a gaze that asked for his attention and then looked down over the edge of the boat where bubbles were rising rapidly.

  To her relief, this snapped him out of his trance as he gaze downward and saw his eyes go through astonishment followed by the furrowed brow of determination—of knowing, without hesitation or freezing up, what he must do next.

  “Derrick!”

  Cole heaved on the arm, grunting with reckless abandon as he pulled with all his might, but though the arm rose up slightly, it wasn’t enough. As he relaxed and caught his breath, cursing himself, Lucy moved before he could protest and wrapped her arms around his waist from behind.

  He looked over his shoulder and, despite Lucy’s worries about some obstinate refusal to have some help in his most important moment, Cole grinned.

  “Heave…ho!”

  Cole pulled again, and when Lucy felt his motion lock out, she tightened her hold on his waist and pulled back, bending one knee and arching her back. There was the splashing sound of something large emerging from water, followed by frantic sputters and gasps, and Lucy lost her balance and fell backwards, Cole’s back on top of her. They took a moment to gather their bearings, and when Cole got back up and gave his hand to Lucy to help her up, she looked at the edge of the boat to finally see him lying there.

  Derrick.

  He coughed and sputtered violently, and before Lucy could take in his appearance, Cole called out: “He’s gonna choke it all back down if he keeps lying flat! Help me prop him up!”