“Are you part of the Dream, or are you real? Because if it’s the latter– I am so sorry.”

It wasn’t Brennan’s voice he was hearing now, but Saffiya’s. Anand batted away at the smoke until it cleared away enough to see her face.

She looked terrified.

He reached out and took both her hands in his, squeezing them gently. They were slick with sweat. “Saffy? What’s wrong? What are you sorry for?” The beads of sweat forming at his brow reminded him to answer her more existential question. “I am very real! I mean, as far as I know.”

“Oh. Well. Like I said, sorry,” Saffiya said. She was still feeling incredibly guilty of her apparent ability to completely ruin the Dream, but Anand’s presence helped. She gestured to their surroundings. “Welcome to Jahannam. It’s basically hell, but hotter.”

“This? This is nothing compared to summers in Jaipur,” he said, cracking a smile through the rivulets of sweat that made his lie all the more obvious. “Though that does explain the literal lakes of fire.”

He glanced down to see a scorpion crawling across his boot, and casually kicked it away. Then his eyes shot back up to Saffiya as it hit him. “Jahannam? You made this, Saffy?” he asked, incredulous. “Why are we in hell? Let’s go to a cabana on Risa and talk this out over mojitos. You can drink a Dream mojito, surely.”

“It beats having forty children!”

“I’m–” Anand shook his head in confusion. “I don’t disagree, but what?”

“I’ll…” Saffiya shook her head. “Explain later. I first need to figure out how to switch… sets. I could… uh….”

“Woah!” called someone behind them. A Horta-shaped someone. “Look at this! The floor is lava!”

“What the-…” Saffiya looked at Anand. “Is that Qsshrr?”

“That is, uh.” Anand found himself struggling to think under the onslaught of the nearby flames. “That is a Qsshrr facsimile. I guess ‘Horta’ is the hot new look on Varjon tonight. Anyway…”

The sudden incongruous appearance of the Horta in the fiery depths of hell seemed to shake something loose in Anand’s mind, and when he took a step back, his leg hit the edge of a wicker chair. The canvas roof of a cabana quivered under the force of the powerful fan that was now cooling their sweat-soaked faces, and on a low table, the two most tempting mojitos Anand had ever seen were dripping condensation.

The ocean was still covered in filth and fire, but this was a start.

Anand helped Saffiya lower herself into the cushioned wicker chair, and as he sat beside her he offered her one of the tall, cool glasses. “Will this help you think, or just make things worse?”

“Better. Definitely better.” Saffiya reached for the drink, briefly admitting the tiny umbrella that constituted its decoration. “So… how has your dream experience been so far? Before our little ‘pool party’, that is.”

“Ah, well…”

Anand shook his glass just to hear the clinking of the ice, and tried his best to affect the same casual air that was now descending upon Saffiya. He had been specifically hoping to calm her down, after all, but he was still deeply distracted by the question of why she’d condemned herself to the fiery abyss.

“I’ve just been wandering around in a forest, really,” he said, with a forced casualness that even he didn’t believe. “Rather boring.”

“I offered to make it less boring, but he wasn’t interested.”

Anand’s mojito slipped out of his hand as Dream Brennan popped back into existence right behind Saffiya’s seat.