Sleep gathered around him slowly, thinning the room first at the edges and then at the center. The ceiling stayed above him for a long time, the crack still visible, but it began to lose its authority. The walls flattened, the window darkened, and the sounds of his mother moving in the kitchen became soft, distant, impossible to place. Fiab tried to hold one thought steady: Livia Serra, her hand pulling from his, the pressure inside him and the flash of pale tiles, a metal railing, a courtyard seen from above, a door open just enough to suggest darkness behind it.
He wanted to follow that trace, although he did not know how. His body grew heavy beneath him, and this time he did not fight the heaviness immediately. Fear waited, as it always did now, but curiosity waited beside it. He remained between the two until his breath seemed to belong to someone else, and when he opened his eyes again, he was standing beside the bed.
His body lay on top of the blanket, still dressed, one arm bent near his face. The sight disturbed him less than before, which disturbed him in a different way. Something impossible was becoming familiar. He turned from the bed to the desk and looked down at the names written on the page. Thor. Nafthia. Borghesi. Livia Serra. The ink was dark and precise, but when he reached for it his fingers passed through the paper without moving it. Even in the dream, the names remained.
He left the apartment more easily than he wanted to admit: through the door, down the stairs, through the entrance glass into the street. Each passage felt less like a miracle and more like a bad habit. Outside, Lanomt had changed again. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets polished and black so that every lamp appeared twice, once above and once beneath his feet. The sky was low and colorless, without stars. Buildings rose on both sides with most windows unlit, their facades severe and still, and there were fewer people than there should have been.
Not emptiness. Something more deliberate.
A man in a long coat stood under the awning of a closed hotel, smoking without smoke. Two women crossed the avenue together, dressed too elegantly for the hour, their faces turned away as if being recognized would have been vulgar. A black car passed slowly with no engine sound, its windows reflecting only streetlamps. Farther ahead, behind the glass of a private club or restaurant, warm light touched red curtains and figures moved inside with the controlled ease of people who had never needed to hurry. The city looked less like a place where people lived and more like a place prepared for them.
Fiab walked through wider avenues lined with old apartment buildings, bare trees and balconies like dark lace. Shop windows displayed watches, gloves, perfume bottles and silver objects, but the interiors were unlit, and the reflections in the glass showed him nothing, not even himself. Every sound seemed to come from far away: a car door closing three streets over, a heel on pavement, a low voice under a portico, the weak buzz of a sign that did not quite illuminate the street beneath it. Here, the whole city seemed polite. Here, the whole city seemed dangerous.
He thought of Livia again. Pale tiles. Metal railing. Courtyard. For a moment something answered him, a delicate pull like a thread brushing the inside of his mind. He turned toward a side street and saw, between two buildings, a narrow passage that had not been there during the day, or that he had never noticed. A row of yellow lamps ran along one wall. At the far end stood a small gate, and beyond it he thought he saw pale tiles.
"Not that way," said the old woman behind him.
Fiab stopped and turned. She stood beneath a streetlamp on the opposite side of the avenue, small and curved in her long black coat, white curls arranged around her face with impossible care. She was not wearing sunglasses. One hand rested on a cane he had not seen before, though he could not tell whether she needed it or simply enjoyed the authority of carrying it.
"How did you find me?" he asked.
"I did not find you," she said. "You are making yourself easy to notice. You were following a trace."
Fiab glanced back at the narrow passage. "Maybe. It felt like Livia's."
At the name, the old woman's expression changed slightly. It was a small change, but with her small changes mattered. "A girl from school?" she asked. When he nodded, she continued before he could explain. "You touched her. More than a second."
"Yes. I saw something. Tiles, a railing, a courtyard, a door."
The woman closed her eyes briefly, as if containing irritation. "Then you will not go there tonight. If she felt you as well, she may be waiting, and if she is not waiting, someone may be waiting through her. You do not follow unfamiliar traces until you know who owns them."
"Is she dangerous?"
"Everyone is dangerous when you do not know who owns their fear," the woman said, then turned and began walking as if the matter were settled. Her cane touched the pavement without sound. "Come. If you insist on learning by disobedience, at least learn in the direction I choose."
Fiab followed her through streets he knew and did not know at the same time. Lanomt unfolded around them in cold layers: arcades with black marble columns, shuttered cafes, courtyards glimpsed through iron gates, staircases rising toward doors with brass numbers, windows lit in rooms where silhouettes stood too still. The city seemed almost empty, but the emptiness felt staged. It was as if the wrong people had been removed and the remaining figures placed carefully, each one part of a ritual nobody had announced.
At the end of one avenue they reached a square. During the day, Fiab thought, it might have looked ordinary in the expensive way some districts were ordinary: stone buildings, offices, a bank on one side, a private institute on another, a narrow church pressed between two palaces. In the oniric layer it became colder and more formal. Amber streetlamps weakened before they reached the ground. A dry fountain stood in the center, its stone figures stained black by rain and time. Above the square, a few windows glowed behind red and gold curtains.
The old woman stopped beside the fountain. "This is one of the places where they pass," she said.
"Who?"
"The young ones. The polished children. Heirs, near-heirs, and those useful enough to be tested. The ones your age who arrive at school in silent cars and learn early how not to look surprised."
Fiab thought of Gianni and Elena, and of Livia moving around them without clearly belonging. "Tested for what?"
"For the trials," the woman said. "Secret trials. This year there are more participants than usual: boys and girls mostly from the elite group, some from old lines, some from families close to old lines, and some unaffiliated. Freelancers, if you prefer the ugly word."
"Like Livia?"
"I told you not to chase that trace."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the answer you are receiving tonight," she said. Her gaze moved toward the bank, whose closed doors reflected no light. "There have always been young Dreamwalkers without houses. Most are weak or temporary. A few remain useful. When the families need bodies for certain work, they allow outsiders near the edges, never near the center unless there is a reason."
"What work?"
The woman was silent long enough that Fiab thought she might refuse. Then she said, "Killing malignant spirits."
The words were too plain for the square around them. Fiab waited for her to soften them, but she did not. "Ghosts?" he asked.
"No. Ghosts are what people call the dead when they want them to remain people. These are not that."
"Demons, then?"
"Boys always want clean categories," she said, almost tiredly. "Lanomt produces waste, Fiab. Not only smoke, sewage, spoiled food, dirty water and money washed until it looks clean. Other waste. Fear, shame, envy, humiliation, hunger, desire with nowhere decent to go, violence swallowed instead of spent, lies repeated until the rooms themselves learn them. In a person, such things rise and pass. A city keeps them. A city gathers what is repeated and presses it downward into corners, under floors, into places where light does not insist. In the oniric layer, some of that waste takes shape. Those shapes are what people lazily call spirits."
Fiab looked at the wet stone under his feet. "They are made from negative things in the city."
"Yes. Negative essences, if you want a prettier phrase. But prettier phrases are often lies with better manners. The weaker forms can be cleaned before anyone notices them. Lanomt is efficient that way. There are routes, barriers, collectors, trained walkers assigned to districts. Small formations are dissolved or cut apart. Stronger ones are trapped, driven below, pushed into old tunnels where they can be contained until someone decides what to do with them."
"Below the city?"
The old woman tapped her cane once on the stones. "Service passages, cellars, old stations, drains, crypts, foundations built over other foundations. Beneath those are older voids: natural caves, opened caves, places made by people whose names were worn down long before yours existed. They stretch beyond Lanomt, under the hills and outside the city's ordered reach. Inside the city the systems help. Outside, control weakens. That is where the danger begins."
Fiab imagined the clean streets above and, beneath them, tunnels filled with everything the city refused to show itself. "Why send students there?"
The woman looked at him as if the word students were childish. "They are your age, yes. They are not children in the eyes of their houses. Fear must be trained before adulthood fixes it into the wrong shape. A Dreamwalker who cannot face one of these forms is useless to a family that intends to keep power. The freelancers are tested for usefulness, obedience and limits. The heirs are tested because inheritance without discipline produces weak monsters."
"And they kill the spirits."
"They try."
"Why? Just to clean the city?"
The woman looked at the dry fountain, and when she answered, her voice became quieter. "Cleaning is the acceptable reason. Training is the practical one. The true reason is older. When a malignant spirit is destroyed properly, the matter that held it together is broken open. Fear, shame, hatred, hunger, all of it loosens. Most disperses. Some can be transformed."
Fiab understood before she said the next word, and still the word made the square seem colder.
"Fuel," she said. "Not for the body. For the soul. A trained Dreamwalker can take a portion of that loosened force and turn it inward, making the soul more resistant, more stable, less easily pulled back by fear. With enough discipline, the walker remains longer outside the body, crosses deeper layers, bears more pressure and sees farther. With enough victories, the soul becomes stronger."
"So the trials make them powerful."
"If they survive them cleanly. If they do not, they become contaminated, and contamination can look like strength to people who are already hungry for it."
Fiab thought of the pull that had dragged him from the comic shop, of fear as a limit, and of boys and girls his own age turning the hidden sickness of the city into power for themselves. It made sense in a way that felt horrible: the families did not merely keep the city clean; they harvested what the city produced, turning even its ugliness into inheritance.
"Like food," he said before thinking.
The old woman looked at him sharply. For a moment something passed through her face, not fear exactly, but warning. "Do not use that word carelessly. Words open rooms."
Fiab did not understand, but the sentence frightened him enough that he did not ask why. Instead he looked toward the bank and the narrow church. "Are the trials happening tonight?"
The old woman did not answer, which was enough. He stepped closer. "If Livia is there, if Gianni and Elena are there, I need to see."
"No," she said, and this time there was no patience in her voice. "You are not trained. You cannot defend yourself. You can barely remain calm outside your bedroom, and entering my house by accident has made you arrogant faster than I expected. Do not confuse seeing a door with being ready for what is behind it."
From somewhere beneath the square came a low vibration, almost too deep to hear. It moved through the stones without touching them. The old woman turned toward the bank, and Fiab followed her gaze. A thin line of light had appeared at the base of a side door.
The door opened inward. Several figures emerged from the darkness beyond it. They were young; that was what struck Fiab first. Not robed, not ancient, not shaped like priests from some old story, but students, boys and girls near his age, wearing dark coats over ordinary clothes. Some carried small lamps with covered glass. Others held nothing visible. They crossed the square without speaking, and their silence made them seem older than they were.
Gianni Rosha walked near the front, calm and straight-backed, his hair arranged as neatly as it had been at school. Elena followed with the dark-covered book pressed against her chest. Farther back, walking neither in the center nor outside the group, was Livia. She looked different there: less distracted, less careless, pale but focused. She moved around the others exactly as Marco had described, orbiting without belonging.
Fiab took one step forward. The old woman's hand closed around his wrist, and he felt it. That shocked him more than the force of her grip. In the oniric layer she could hold him, small fingers cold and strong enough to make him stop.
"Do not move," she whispered.
The group passed near the dry fountain. No one laughed, and no one looked at the old woman or Fiab. Livia slowed once and turned her head slightly. Her eyes moved across the square. They did not find him, or perhaps they did and she knew better than to show it. Then she followed the others toward the church, whose door opened before anyone touched it. One by one they entered: Gianni, Elena, the others, Livia last. The door closed behind them.
The square returned to stillness, though at the threshold of the church a trace of darkness leaked outward like smoke and then withdrew. The old woman released Fiab's wrist. He looked from her hand to her face, wanting to ask how she had touched him, why they had not seen him, what waited under the church, and whether Livia had known he was there.
"Later," she said, answering all of it without answering any of it. "You have seen enough."
"I haven't seen anything."
"That," she said, leaning closer until her white curls caught the amber light, "is exactly the kind of sentence that gets boys killed. Go home."
"I don't know how."
"Yes, you do. Be afraid enough."
The cruelty of it made him look at her, but then the darkness under the church door pulsed once, and fear rose in him before he could decide whether to resist. The square blurred at the edges. The bank, the church, the wet stones and the red-lit windows began to fold into one another. The old woman remained clear longer than everything else.
"Remember," she said. "The city is clean because someone decides where to put the dirt."
The pull took him home.
His room returned in darkness. Breath, weight, the bed beneath him, the faint sound of dishes from the kitchen. Fiab opened his eyes with his heart beating hard but not wildly. He had seen them: Gianni, Elena, Livia. The trials were real. The spirits were real. Under the clean streets of Lanomt, beneath banks, churches and old stone, the city was hiding the things it could not afford to destroy in daylight.
After a while, he got up and went to the notebook on his desk. Beneath Thor, Nafthia, Borghesi and Livia Serra, he wrote one more word: Trials. He stared at it for a long time before adding another.
Fuel.
The word looked ugly on the page. It also looked true.