Page 24 of Into Ember

“YOU.”

Rayner blinks at me. Slow. Soft. “…Morning?”

“YOU. You were — it was YOU.”

Leif is already awake. No stirring, no transition — asleep one second, spectating the next, propped on one elbow like this is being performed for him. I see why Muffin did it.

Asshole.

“You were the guy!” My finger is shaking. I keep pointing anyway. “The dream guy! The — " I gesture at all of him, which takes a while — “the STARS guy!”

And here’s the thing. Here’s what I need everyone to understand about my life now.

He doesn’t deny it.

I’m ready for the denial. I have a whole prosecution loaded, exhibits and everything, and what he does instead is come awake the rest of the way, and look at me standing on their floor in a blanket cape, and his whole face —

His whole face lights up.

“You remembered,” he says.

Like I handed him something. Like it’s a gift.

“That’s not — you don’t get to be HAPPY about — " and then the rest of it lands, the whole dream lands, every extremely detailed minute of it, and my face goes supernova. “Oh my god. How much of that dream were you — what parts were you actually — "

His mouth opens. Honestly. He is going to honestly answer that.

“DON’T.” I hold up a hand. “Don’t answer that. Nobody answer that ever.”

I flee.

I’m in the hallway before the blanket has finished negotiating with me, and I’m yelling before I know who I’m yelling for, except I do know, I’ve apparently always known, because the name that comes out is —

“ERIK!”

His door opens in about a second and a half. Erik, disheveled — actually disheveled, hair in six directions, shirt half-buttoned and wrong by one — with a look on his face like he was prepared to fight something.

“Ella? What—”

“Explain your people.”

He blinks. Down the hall, other doors are opening. Gunnar emerges shirtless, scratching his stomach, tattoos everywhere and clearly furious about being vertical. Brock appears looking suspiciously assembled for this hour, which I am also noting for the record.

“Why,” I say, to Erik, to the hallway, to the building, “was I asleep in a pile of men?”

“You reached,” Leif says.

He has arrived in the doorway behind me, unhurried, sleep-rumpled in a way that is doing things I refuse to think about right now. He says it flat and final, the same voice that spent three hours saying soon and meaning it.

“I — what?”

“In your sleep. You reached for us.”

“I was UNCONSCIOUS.” I pull the blanket tighter, which helps nothing. “Nothing I do while unconscious is admissible. That’s — that’s foundational. That’s day one of being a person.”

Nobody agrees with me. This keeps happening.

Why does this keep happening?