We reached Monderlow’s scrubber headquarters with little event despite the scene we just left. I barely recall seeing anyone out on the streets, but I do not know if that was because word had already gotten out somehow or if there was just little traffic to be found elsewhere on the day of the queen's execution. Certainly, the city must be scrabbling to evacuate, but it would be slow in the chaos and more concentrated from where the queen was rampaging and where those present could have spread out from. There were likely many that had still been in their homes blissfully unaware of the horror that had been unleashed in the capital. In time that would change, those in charge of Monderlow would send out soldiers and officers to move everyone from their homes and outside of the city’s perimeter, but how would they know whether the queen would remain inside Monderlow by that time?

  For that matter, I had wondered to myself, how would the inform the country of what had taken place this day? I had a hard time believing they would immediately send messages through the ether ways when the subject itself was some form of demonic entity born from them. It wasn’t just intuition that made me think the ether ways would be avoided, it was the fact that when we arrived at headquarters they were barren despite them being the most reasonable place to search for a source to the anomaly as I had surmised. I felt it was likely the scrubbers of Monderlow were right then evacuating with everyone else and I could have hardly blamed them for that.

  The headquarters of the capital was bigger than the one I had known, with the cots and the lab kept in separate rooms, and I spent a long moment rifling through cupboards trying to find the materials I needed. Nothing was premade and I didn’t understand the brewing process as well as I perhaps should have, but what we needed was the simplest tonic to make.

  “Here Douglass.”

  Karen handed me a bag she pulled out of a drawer and inside it was tiny blue fuzzy leaves. These were kurzmints and when concentrated they could induce short bursts of fitful sleep. I pulled a rolling press out of another drawer and stared crushing a small pinch of them into a fine blue dust as Karen put a kettle on as if she were going to brew tea, but added a spoonful of rocky crystals into the water. When she was done I put the dust into the bottom of a thumb sized cup and she poured the water in. We took the napping tonic into the next room where the cots were held and prepared to lay down into the dream.

  “Paula, I want you to stay outside the dream and wake us if anything dangerous come our way. Just shake us and run, don’t stay around to wait for us.”

  “O…okay.”

  “Don’t worry Puala, we won’t be gone long, and that…thing was headed in another direction. Whatever we find in the dream, if we can’t do anything, we’ll just run away like everyone else. We should be closer to a safe gate now than if we had just ran away randomly.”

  “I..if you say so sister. I...I’ll trust you.”

  We downed the drink in one gulp and before long we had once again manifested inside the tunnel of the ether ways. What we found when we opened our eyes to the dream was…nothing, but it was a nothing the was inextricably different from what we would have normally found.

  “It’s clean. It should be clean. Before everything happened the scrubbers would have cleaned it this morning, but even so…it’s too clean.”

  It was brighter somehow, not in so much as the amount of light, but more from the quality of the shade, as if a clear bright film had been placed over the scenery. The illumination made in clear. Imagine a cleanly mopped floor. That floor wont hold any stains, but if you peel your eyes it won’t truly be perfectly cleaned either. There will be pockets of dust, grains of dirt, and small marks that didn’t get removed. In the same fashion, while we would never find lines or splotches at this time of day, we would be able to find small remnants of filth that the eye would normally pass over. If we looked hard enough we might have even been able to see the phantoms of filth waiting to form by morning, but even if it would be hard to see before nightfall, there was a sort of essence that made it clear that it simply wasn’t present or so I had thought.

  “No Douglass, there’s a line right by you. It has…confusion.”

  I looked towards her and saw a light green line orbit around by head like a hallow before dissolving. She stepped towards me as it dissolved to get a better look and blue light splashed at her feet raising up into the air and dissolving like sea spray. My eyes locked with hers, and red lines danced around me then violently faded out. She adverted her eyes after looking into them.

  “There was shame in them wasn’t there.”

  A sinking feeling shot through me and an icy blue splotch formed beneath my feet.

  “I’m sorry Karen. I…”

  “…You’re sorry for what?”

  A sickly yellow splotch formed on her forehead for a moment that showed me her moodiness, but I hadn’t really needed it.

  “For running…I, everything I was holding in just became too much and…it was wrong though, it was all wrong.”

  She turned away and began walking as splashes of blue filth erupted from her steps. She was smiling but I wouldn’t describe her movement like dancing as I normally would have. That day it was more like slinking even while remaining light as a feather.

  “You should be. I…I never told anybody about that, but now isn’t really the time is it?”

  It was true. We should have been trying to find a solution to this anamoly, but, I questioned, hadn’t we already found our answer? We were ordinary civilians now as far as the filth was concerned and how we were going to continue our lives was exactly what people like us should have been thinking about.

  “It because it’s now that I think we should…no, maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the time at all, but I feel like I need to speak now. Something happened to me after I ran away yesterday before everything else. I feel like, for the first time in a long time I’m able to look at things I’ve been adverting my eyes from. I don’t want to waste this chance. I don’t want to let the momentum slip past me.”

  “Well, that must be very great for you, isn’t it? But what are you going to use this newfound willpower to tell me? I thought you had accepted me. You had been so comforting and open, and then in just one moment I find out you didn’t feel that way at all. I…I understand it might not have been the best time, I should have gone about it better, but to just run away! What…was I just…was it a lie?”

  “…It was.”

  Our emotions were flashing around us as filth, making it clear to each other we meant every word we were saying, but the stark honesty only made it all the more painful. It hurt to be given that insight, but it might also be the reason she didn't slap me right then and there.

  “It was a lie, but it was a lie I felt I had to maintain. I had meant to maintain it forever, well as long as things worked out between us, but the guilt destroyed me when I learned everything that was behind that lie.”

  “…But why? Why lie? It couldn’t be to play me. Why would you commit to moving in together for that? Why would you try to maintain anything?”

  I took a deep breath.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “In the last conversation I ever had with Bennie, I made a promise to try taking you on a date. I always kept myself distant from everyone and he wanted me to change that about myself.”

  Her eyes widened and deep purple splotches formed beneath them. In those splotches I had felt a completely unfathomable emotion.

  “Then…okay but….what can I even say to this. What would that even make our relationship. I just don’t…what am supposed to say Douglass? Why is it like this? Why did you even agree to that promise? If this was a lie, then just what is the truth?”

  The truth. The time had finally come for me to speak it. Time to speak words that weren’t hollow, but were maybe worse than hollow.

  “The truth is that the lie had been within me the whole time. Who I had acted as was who I wanted to be, but my mind called it a front, and it hid away all the words that person needed. So, without the real words he became a lie after all, because without my real thoughts he could only exist as a shadow of an ideal. What I’m saying is. What the truth is. The truth is that the moment I first saw you, sleeping at Duskhovel headquarters, I had likely begun falling for you, but simultaneously I had been completely horrified by your smile.”

  The purple filth had returned with an even deeper hue.

  “My…smile. Of course.”

  “It’s true. I wasn’t able to look past it at all, and the more sincere I found out you were the more it ate at me. I understand now. Seeing someone able to smile in the ether ways showed me it was possible. It showed me that it was my own fault I couldn’t anymore, because I had given up. That horror, it never came from you, I was never even looking at you and that was terrible of me. I want to try though. I want to try for real, slowly this time. Not because of my promise, but because this…this is what I want.”

  “You!”

  Her smile looked malicious and I believed she had been ready to tear into me, but then she saw the filth around me and her eyes became uncertain. Her smile had wiggled strangely, it had shivered, and then at last, for the first time since I met her, it fully broke. She rushed forward with splashing filth and hit her fist into my chest then dug her face in just beneath my collar.

  “Damn you.”

  She spoke with a muffle.

  “That smile you say showed you people can still smile in the ether ways, it’s fake you know? Just plastered on.”

  I hesitated then placed my hand on her head

  “Is that really true? You don’t just smile with your mouth. You smile with all your words and actions. That isn’t all a lie, is it? Don’t you think that maybe, somewhere down the line, all of that fake smiling taught you to smile at the world?”

  Her shoulders shook and she looked up.

  “Can I really believe that?”

  She was pointedly not looking at the filth around me.

  “I’ll make you believe it. Slowly this time, I’ll let you get to know every part of me I’ve hidden away, and when you can finally see me, you’ll know I’m speaking with sincerity.”

  “Okay…but you’re going to have to prove it. Show me anything fake again and I’ll tear that mask right off your face and I won’t promise it won’t be painless.”

  We still had some time before we would naturally wake up from the dream. We walked down the endless tunnel with no destination or purpose. We spoke at length on both our feelings and stories from our pasts. I spoke unreservedly my opinions often conjuring irritated filth like four throbbing lines on her temple for my cheekiness. I was, after all, a lot less polite at heart than I usually pretended to be.

  “You know when you were humming sky dress I was making a parody of it in my head.”

  “You didn’t! And after everything you said.”

  “To be fair I wasn’t just making fun of it. I like making dark parodies of songs. It helps calm me down.”

  “Pshhhhhhhhhhh, are you serious? Alright, let’s hear it.”

  We didn’t discuss the queen or the filth in the real world. It wasn’t like before, we weren’t adverting our eyes, we simply had nothing to say about it and those matters, now far beyond the scope of our lives, didn’t fit the strange mood we had found.

  “Is there any other rude inner thoughts you want to share?

  “I was honestly thinking in a dismissive manner when I first met your sister…I didn’t really mean it though. I was never intending to actually pry into your affairs so I was treating the situation like it didn’t matter.”

  “Right…you’re actually a pretty negative person aren’t you. Just how were you expecting to keep that up.”

  “I do plan on working on that part of me first.”

  “Better, and what about the time you ran off with that old drunk leaving Ray to deal with the dreamless? And the rest of the night when we stalked him out for that matter?”

  “…that was all me, I think. I guess deep down I’m more playful than I would have imagined, or more likely you just had that influence on me.”

  “Hmph, speaking of Lullvienna…”

  She squinted at me.

  “You were quite passionate that night. Are you to tell me that was just you going through the motions. I guess it’s just that easy for you huh?

  “Not at all. Like I said before I always kept my distance from people, that was actually my first…well I’d like to think it was my real feelings coming through in the moment.”

  “So you say.”

  “Well…what about you?”

  “About me what?”

  “You know, had you…well, done that before?”

  “That dear Douglass is a maidens secret.”

  “I thought we were gonna be more open with each other.”

  “There’s open and then there’s open.”

  This had continued on for awhile, but before the time came to wake back up someone came for us first.

  “Are you two just having a date in here? I searched you out because I assumed you would be looking for a solution as well when I saw you both sleeping at headquarters.”

  It was Thomas and he was followed behind by Jossette. We showed no real surprise at seeing them and they remained subdued as well. It was like an old book club running into each other rather than people investigating a national crisis.

  “That’s how it started, but I think you’ve seen it as well. There’s nothing for us to do here.”

  “Yes, so why not go on a date?”

  Karen jovially looped her arm through mine to put on a show.

  “Fair enough, but I still think we should think about leaving the city before going into vacation mode, but I guess a bachelor like myself isn’t going to fathom the mentality of a couple such as yourselves. That or you’ve both just lost your minds.

  “It’s definitely the latter, but nothings to say the queen wont be out where we escape to anyway. At the very least she isn’t here. I’m sure she’ll fly off into the countryside for whatever grand scheme the scholar intends her for. We should probably be more concerned with the fact that it looks like the filth will start appearing in the real world. What do you say, want to go grab a mop?”

  “Nonsense. The mops we use in dreams and real mops obviously aren’t the same thing. A bit of water isn’t going to do anything to the filth.”

  “You didn’t have to take him seriously. Well, looks like we’re down shits alley without a map. How about it, Jossette? Let’s join the fools and just go on a date.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t even think about it.”

  The distraction was entertaining, but it had been about time to discuss what came next. Whether we would continue as scrubbers and consider the filth our problem to help solve or if we would keep our heads down and try to weather the storm as we well should.

  “So…why did you come?”

  “I ran at first, but then I thought of Togl and Rachel. I…I couldn’t just run you know? On the way I met Jossette, she was already on the way over.”

  “What do you plan to do now? Are you still gonna look for a way to stop the filth?”

  “As long as there is something I can do, I’ll try to find it. If there isn’t anything well, I’ll just find what I can do to help people in the aftermath.”

  Thomas really had changed. It had been hard for me to believe he was that same oaf I met during the carriage ride.

  “As for me, I just want to find out the truth about this phenomenon. I didn’t really intend to get involved in anything overtly dangerous, but I suppose if it happens it can’t be helped.”

  “And you, Douglass, Karen? What do you plan on doing?”

  “We promised Paula we would escape with her from the city if we didn’t find anything in the ways. After that…honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Getting Paula somewhere safe comes first, then I suppose I’ll just have to follow after Douglass. I have to keep an eye on him you see.”

  “I don’t see, but I guess this means we’ll be going our separate ways.”

  “Sounds like it. Good luck out there.”

  We exited the dream shortly after and shook the other two awake. Before leaving and splitting up we spent some time idling inside the headquarters. It really was like an old book club. After a half an hour I stretched my legs and yawned as if I had just woken up from a long dream and broke away from the others to go look outside.

  In the damp melting snow, filth was already starting to form. I watched droplets fall from icicles and roll off them like oil on water. Of course water wouldn’t just wash it away, I thought to myself.

  I looked into one of the splotches. It wasn’t quite like the filth of the ether ways. I felt more from it. This splotch felt negative, but not in the way of what I had been used to which would normally be indicative of crime and dark desires. It was a feeling of dull lament at a life spent wasted on trivial concerns. Concerns the subject felt they could have just let go of years ago. It hit me like a sympathetic wave, the weight of everything I’d held for the past nine years. Bennies death and my life shut behind a mental door.

  At last, the dam had broken and my eyes watered spilling a tear onto the splotch of filth below me and not a moment later those same eyes opened wide in astonishment as I saw the splotch smudged and erased where the tear fell. Slowly I knelt down and ran my hand through the water of the melted snow and over the splotch watching as it disappeared where the water was directed by my hand.

  ……………………………………………………….