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I lie on my camp bed, listening to it. Adam’s quiet snoring from somewhere near the window. Hex murmuring something too low to make out. Felix’s breathing gone slow and even beside Dis.

I hold my broken bunny ears against my chest, as if they might still be good for something. Some small, stupid anchor to hold on to while everything else refuses to make sense. Somewhere in the middle of that thought, without any sense of the join between one place and the next, I stop being in the flat at all.

There’s no ceiling. There’s no floor either, not properly. Just a pale grey nothing stretching in every direction. Mist without edges, light without any source I can point to. It’s the exact colour the sky goes for the five minutes either side of proper dark, when you can’t quite say whether it’s ending or beginning. I take a few steps and the ground holds, soft and uncertain underfoot, like walking on a cloud that’s decided to be cooperative today. It feels like exactly the sort of thing my brain would invent.

I know I’m dreaming. I’ve known I’m dreaming since I got here, that faint background hum under everything that usually means I’m about to have an anxiety dream about missing an essay deadline.

But then suddenly I realise I’m not dreaming alone.

He’s standing a few feet away. Neither of us says anything at all, both of us simply staring like the other one might be a trick the mist is playing.

“Bunny,” he says, finally.

“Oh good,” I say, because apparently that’s what my brain reaches for first. “It’s you. For a second I thought I might be about to fail my finals again. This dream has a very ominous colour palette.”

Something that might be a laugh moves through him, quiet and startled. “You’re here.”

“So are you, which is honestly the bigger surprise, since I didn’t think either of us had a say in what my subconscious does with its evenings.” I look round properly, at the endless grey, at absolutely nothing to hold on to. “This isn’t my usual type of dream. Normally it’s teeth falling out or the coffee machine catching fire. This is new.”

“This is not the Shadow Realm,” he says, turning slowly, taking in the mist with the same careful attention he’d give an unfamiliar room. “Nor, I think, anywhere on your side.”

“So where is it?” I ask.

“Somewhere neither. A place that belongs to no one, built out of nothing but the wanting to be somewhere neither of us was permitted to want.” He reaches out and touches the mist itself, watching it curl round his fingers and reform, unbothered. “I have some skill in this. Walking into dreams. I did not summon this one on purpose.”

Silence falls as I try to process. Is he right? Is this really happening and not a figment of my imagination? We are both actually here, wherever here actually is?

“So we both just wanted this hard enough that it built itself a postcode?” I try for lightness and mostly land somewhere close to it, though my voice wobbles slightly on the last word. “That’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or extremely worrying information about the strength of my own longing.”

“Perhaps both.” Something crosses his face, something that looks almost like wonder. “I have wanted very little in my entire existence, Bunny. Certainly not with enough force to build a place out of nothing.”

I laugh, a bit wetly. That’s apparently where I am tonight. Laughing and nearly crying in the same breath, standing in a dream that shouldn’t exist with a man I’m not supposed to want. Drawn to each other so strongly, we created an entire reality just to see each other again.

“Okay,” I say, and I make myself say the actual thing rather than joking around the edge of it. “Can I ask you something, and you have to actually answer it, properly, no being gentle with me about it?”

“Ask it,” he says.

“Under the oak, I asked if we mistook the prophecy for wanting each other. You said you knew what you felt. And then you left.” I swallow. “I need the rest of that answer.”

He nods.

“Was any of this ever real?” I blurt. “You and me. Or were we just, I don’t know, magnets. Roles finding their opposite number because that’s what fate needed us to do. And I mistook gravity for actually choosing you. And you mistook my flame for something you needed.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. My stomach drops somewhere near my feet. Then he steps closer, close enough that the grey around us seems to dim, like even the mist is giving us room.

“I gave you a short answer under the oak,” he says, quietly. “You deserve a longer one.”

Somewhere far away my heart is racing, even though I’m asleep.

“I have had centuries of existing,” he begins. “In the Shadow Realm I was never invisible. I was Hex’s friend when Hex was a prince. I am Night’s brother. Every person who has ever looked at me was looking at what I am to someone else. A title. A blade. A name to be careful around.”

He looks at me, steady, and doesn’t look away. “I was sharp and cold, and I had no cause to be otherwise. Nothing pulled at me. No prophecy, no whisper that I was meant for somewhere else. Then I was sent to sit in a corner of your world and guard Felix. I am very good at not being seen when I choose it. I made certain of that. And then a boy walked in, shouting good morning to an entire coffee shop. He looked straight at me, where no human eye was meant to find me, and said good morning to me too. In exactly the same voice he used for everyone else. I had no response prepared for that. None at all. I did not move or speak again for two hours.”

Something warm moves across his face. “That is not the moment a prophecy chooses, Bunny. That is the moment a person chooses. I know the difference. I had been greeted as a title for so long that I recognised the first time someone greeted me as a person.”

I feel that answer land somewhere underneath my ribs, and for a moment I can’t say anything at all.

“Two hours,” I manage eventually. “You didn’t move or speak for two hours. Because I said good morning.”