There are versions of me that are not alive / They did not survive because they were not me.

///

We go a long time before one of us mentions his name again.

When M. says it from outside the tent it I can't hear it at first, certainly not over the crackling of the radio or through the wind that picks up along the parapets of the city's walls. The dreamscape steals words like that, sometimes, tearing away at spots of isolated meaning. But we've been together long enough that it hardly matters at all.

"I don't think he ever meant it," I say. "He never apologised either, but that's just how it was."

"Do you think he was angry?"

"I don't know."

In the dark of the tent the little sliver of fire shines through the flaps. Her shadow eclipses it from time to time. The flap opens and her hand passes me a mug of warm water.

I take it. The snowmelt tastes like diluted batteries but it goes down alright. I come out of the tent with the heating blanket around my shoulders and settle down by the fire next to M. She is packing in another fistful of snow into the pot. Above us polychromic stars of the local bubble dot the sky, shining even through the firelight.

"Do you still think about him?" she asks.

"All the time. You?"

"You're lying."

"You're sentimental." I pull up to the fire and warm my gloveless hands. "I want to keep moving."

It wasn't entirely false. All of us have different ways of dealing. I think mine is a grief stuck somewhere in the waking world, grounded in a duality separating the past and the present. K's is, I suspect, grounded in something more material. All things forget, eventually; but the body remembers through practice, and the tongue remembers through speech.

She tries his name, the syllables breaking on her lips.

Look, I want to tell her, There isn't any point in reenactment. We move as tools of the soul but we are not the soul. Dead things can't live on here. I draw myself close to her so that the blanket blocks the wind. Our hands cup the cooling mug. Her gloves are damp from handling all of that snow.

"We were him once," she says. "I think we owe him this much."

The radio crackles. The stars burn. The pot bubbles. We wet our lips with the warm water. The wind works its way through the narrow streets, bringing with it leaves and tattered lace. In the shelter of the blanket we work through the old name together, pronouncing it again and again until our lips are sure they're right. Our breath forms circles in the midnight air.

This is also a kind of motion.

///

We left him in the cave, his body cooling fast. He had always insisted on going his own way and I suppose that caught up to him in the end. This was not born out of rashness but an inherent curiosity about the world riddled with boredom. He had been in here for so long--it had seemed to us longer than either of us had been--that many things had failed to excite him; he never marvelled at the stray flowers or alien constellations or the shimmering things on the films of the bubbles on the edge of possibility; he walked, and we walked with him.

We must have proceeded this way for years and years, but things works differently here. The world we live in is constantly in a process of remembering itself. I think, between the three of us, that he understood this the most. He was the one who was least unfazed by change.

This is why I think M. never took easily to his presence. She always had a habit of seeing beyond things. His placidity was a front and it couldn't have been anything else. We passed through wondrous citadels of jade automata and beaches of undulating clay and every time we took a stop he'd be staring at something a little over the edge of the horizon, just a little bit beyond where we were.

In this time M. once said to me in private: "He's a fucking kid. He'll grow out of it."

I agreed. He was young--he was so young. But I don't think growth works the way we think it does in an empty space. It's residual waking logic. On a granular level if we pay attention to ourselves we will find that we are compassionate one day and incurious the next. The dreamscape despises linearity. But M. disagrees on this point. She thinks it's absurd to let ourselves go like that, to lose ourselves to the wind. I say that M. is sentimental but she is certainly not without intention.

I think in a way he was closer to us both than we realised. Once we passed a field of windmills whose blades were spun with glass. The wind blew slow and did not hurt, we saw ourselves reflected manifold in the crystalline air. Uncharacteristically he paused to pick up something from the ground--some stray shard that had flaked off the main assembly--and he brought it to his tongue, drawing blood. We never knew why he did it. But he seemed happier for the wound. It seemed to prove that he was there.

I see a little bit of that in M. I see a little bit of that in me too.

///

Down by the edge of the city the radio bursts into song.

I call out to M. and we pull ourselves to shelter. The stars beyond the sky are dancing red. Lace and leaves are whipping up all around us and making ribbons of the masonry, mixing up clay and brick and snow. The brown city was falling. In a crawlspace below a shopfront we huddle close around our bags while the dream tears into shreds above our heads.

When it's over, none of us lets go. I'm shaking so violently I can't stand up. We brace ourselves against each other and stagger to our feet. The dreamscape has changed, but we're still here.

"There was a moment," says M., "between the gap of one world and the next. You said it. I heard it quite distinctly."

The back of my neck is hot. The breeze feels quite different here. I'm having trouble stringing my thoughts together. Colours and shapes are blurring. It feels like something has severed. I reach out my fingers and touch dirt. My mouth is very, very dry. I try again, but the word disintegrates.

"It's not true, isn't it?" she says. "About you not caring to remember. We both remembered, if only for a second."

A second's long enough to forgive, I think.

M. says, "You were always angry."

"It never really left," I say.

Two people can move easier than three. We pack up our bags and walk along.