The flavor of the apple lingered as a specter on his palate, a gritty, sweet reminder of fact from the orchard. Sleep, when it finally arrived, was not flight from that fact, but entrance to a yet more profound, more troubled level of it. The Glitch, fed by the raw, organic data, did not vanish. It started to tunnel.
Kai’s dream was not a narrative. It was an immersion.
One moment he was floating in the black silence behind his eyelids, the next he was choking. The air was thick with a heat that seared his lungs, acrid and poisonous. Smoke. Not the clean, sterile scent of an electrical fire, but the foul, organic reek of burning wood, cloth, and something else—something horrifyingly like burning hair.
He was standing on a cobblestone street but a street of a historic nightmare. The buil
