The Moon's Choice

I didn't notice it at first.

People looked at me fairly often anyway. Sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes people who simply let their gaze linger on a stranger's face a little longer than usual. There was nothing remarkable about it. Over the years I had grown accustomed both to the attention and to the city itself-to its wet streets in the evening, the warm glow of small res-taurants, the narrow façades reflected in canals and puddles, and the cy-clists who seemed to materialize out of nowhere at the exact moment you decided it was safe to cross the road.

I liked it here. The city had stopped feeling foreign a long time ago. I knew where to get the best coffee, which route would take me around the evening traffic, which shop sold decent bread, and where not to go after three on a Saturday unless I wanted to spend half my life standing in a queue. I had a job, a familiar route home, favorite places, and a life that was, for the most part, comfortably settled.

That was precisely why I began noticing the strange looks. They weren't ordinary.

Over the past few weeks, the same thing had happened several times. A complete stranger would meet my eyes-in a shop, near a car park, at a crossing-and for a moment seemed to drop out of their own life. They weren't assessing me, smiling, or trying to strike up a conversation. They simply looked at me as though they recognized me.

At first I found it more amusing than anything else. Then it began to irritate me. That evening, for the first time, it made me uneasy.

I stayed at work much later than I had intended. By the time I closed my laptop and finally stepped outside, the idea of cooking at home had lost whatever appeal it might once have had. So, before leaving the of-fice, I ordered dinner from one of the most popular places near the city center and stopped to pick it up on my way home. My plans for the rest of the evening were extremely simple: eat, take a shower, and go to bed, preferably without accomplishing anything else heroic.

A fine drizzle hung in the air. Under the streetlights, the wet pave-ment gleamed almost silver, shop windows shimmered in the dark asphalt, and the few people still outside hurried toward whatever shelter they could find. The evening was cool but not unpleasant-the kind that made the thought of getting home, closing the door, and knowing you didn't have to go anywhere else feel especially good.

Inside, the restaurant was warm and noisy. The air smelled of hot bread, spices, and roasted garlic. A short queue had formed at the coun-ter, and I joined the end of it, pulled out my phone, and automatically checked the time.

A man stood in front of me. I paid no attention to him until he turned around. At first I assumed he had heard something behind me, but his gaze stopped directly on my face.

He was older than I was, perhaps fifty, maybe a little more. An ordi-nary dark coat, short graying hair, a calm face. I was absolutely certain I had never seen him before.

He looked at me as though he were equally certain that he had.

He wasn't studying me, and he made no attempt to hide his interest. There was something entirely different in his expression: first a flicker of disbelief, then shock, followed by such strange certainty that I straightened without meaning to.

I waited a couple of seconds.

"Excuse me. Do we know each other?"

The man said nothing.

"Have you mistaken me for someone?"

This time he blinked, as though he had only just returned to the room. Someone behind the counter called out an order number. He flinched, turned away, collected a paper bag, and stepped aside.

I watched him go and immediately became annoyed with myself. So a man had looked at me. It happened.

The queue moved forward. The girl behind the counter kept calling numbers, someone nearby laughed at a message on their phone, and a man with a small boy was trying to zip up his son's coat while holding two bags at once. The ordinary bustle of the evening quickly reduced the whole incident to its proper proportions.

When my number was called, I collected my dinner, thanked the girl, and headed toward the exit. For some reason, I glanced back just before reaching the door.

The man was standing by the wall, still watching me.

Our eyes met immediately this time, and he slowly inclined his head. It wasn't quite a bow and not quite a greeting-too brief for the first, too deliberate for the second.

As though he were acknowledging me.

The skin between my shoulder blades tightened unpleasantly.

I stepped outside. The rain had almost stopped, and the air smelled of wet stone, freshness, and something sweet from the bakery next door. Somewhere in the distance, a bicycle bell rang. A car passed along the road, leaving behind the soft hiss of water beneath its tires.

The car park wasn't far. I shifted the bag into a more comfortable grip and walked faster than usual. Not because I was frightened-at least, that was what I told myself.

I knew this street well. A row of old houses with tall windows stretched along my right; on the left, the wet windows of closing shops gleamed beneath the streetlights. Everything was familiar, too familiar to let my imagination get out of hand. And yet, after a few dozen metres, I had the distinct feeling that someone was walking behind me.

I didn't turn at once. Instead, I looked into the reflection in the nearest shop window.

The street was almost empty: a woman beneath an umbrella, a cyclist, a couple standing near the traffic lights. No one keeping pace behind me.

I kept walking, but the feeling remained.

When I reached the car, I finally stopped and spun around.

No one.

For several seconds, I stood beneath the last scattered drops of rain, feeling rather ridiculous.

"Wonderful, Alice. You picked up dinner and somehow managed to invent your own personal stalker."

Sarcasm usually restored my common sense. This time, it only worked halfway.

I unlocked the car, put the bag on the passenger seat, and slid be-hind the wheel. The door closed with its familiar soft click, and I imme-diately felt calmer. Everything here belonged to me: my bag on the back seat, the bottle of water in the door compartment, the takeaway beside me, the familiar smell of the interior.

For a few seconds, I simply sat there listening to the occasional drops tapping against the roof. Then I looked into the rear-view mirror.

My heart gave a harder beat.

A man was standing behind the car.

The tall, dark figure was distinct enough that I turned sharply around.

The car park was empty. No man. No movement.

I looked back into the mirror.

Nothing.

"That's it. You're just tired."

I exhaled and reached for the key. I wanted to go home. Eat, shower, sleep. Preferably without strangers, bows, or people appearing in mirrors.

I was about to start the engine when my gaze dropped to the reflec-tion again. This time, I saw only myself-tired face, damp hair, eyes far too tense.

And something flashed inside them.

I froze.

A warm silver gleam appeared deep in my irises. At first it was faint enough to dismiss as the reflection of a streetlamp, but a second later thin silver threads brightened and slowly spread around my pupils.

I turned my head.

The light moved with me.

I leaned closer to the mirror.

It was inside.

Inside my eyes.

"Oh, to hell with this."

I blinked, and the silver light vanished. My ordinary reflection re-mained.

For several seconds, I sat perfectly still. Then I checked the side mirror, the rear-view mirror again, the street, my own hands. Everything was normal, and for some reason that irritated me more than anything else.

The man in the restaurant might simply have mistaken me for some-one. The bow might not have meant anything at all. The dark figure be-hind the car could have been a reflection, exhaustion, someone passing by. Even the silver light could be explained if I tried hard enough-headlights, streetlamps, overwork, God knew what else.I started the en-gine.

"Home. Food, shower, sleep. Tomorrow I can decide that tonight I finally worked myself into hallucinations."

It sounded like a good plan.

Almost convincing.

I pulled out of the car park and, a few minutes later, was driving along familiar streets, making myself focus on the road. But the feeling wouldn't leave me. It wasn't exactly fear. It was more like the irritating certainty that something had happened that evening and I simply hadn't managed to see it properly yet.

As though, for a few minutes, the city I knew had shown me another side of itself-and then hidden it again.

And somewhere behind me, among the reflections in wet shop win-dows and darkened glass, someone already knew something about me that I did not yet know myself.

By the time I closed the apartment door behind me, it felt as though the day had lasted at least a week. The evening's strange events refused to settle into any kind of reasonable pattern. Normally, I was good at dealing with things that could be broken down into causes and consequences. Today, the causes seemed to exist on their own, the consequences some-where else entirely, while common sense had apparently decided to take the day off.

Home greeted me with silence and a black cat sprawled in the mid-dle of the room as though he were the one paying the rent and my return was an unwelcome intrusion into his private life. I stopped just inside the door and looked at him.

"I see you've settled the question of who lives here without consult-ing me."

The cat opened his eyes and stretched lazily. He had appeared a month ago, simply sitting outside my door one day-black, fairly large, and not remotely like some miserable lost animal in need of rescuing. I brought him water, then tried to send him away. The next day, he came back. After my third attempt to explain that the apartment was already oc-cupied, I began to suspect that, of the two of us, I was the one having trouble understanding the obvious. By now, he had apparently stopped considering himself a guest altogether.

"Fine. Stay. But don't complain about the service."

The cat blinked slowly, and somehow it looked less like gratitude than an acceptance of terms.

I took off my shoes and went into the kitchen. His presence was un-expectedly reassuring. It was difficult to convince yourself you were completely losing your mind when an insolent animal was lying in the next room, clearly of the opinion that your emotional crisis did not merit interrupting his evening. I made tea and stood at the counter for a while, warming my hands around the cup, but the image of the car mirror kept returning: the silver around my pupils, bright and impossible.

I went to the window and studied my reflection carefully. My eyes looked perfectly normal. To make sure, I turned on the lamp and checked again.

"Wonderful. So either I imagined it, or my supernatural abilities only work in parking lots."

The cat opened one eye.

"Don't look at me like that. You've occupied someone else's home without permission, and now you're going to assess my mental health too?"

One ear twitched. I chose to interpret that as an admission of guilt and stepped out onto the balcony.

After the rain, the city seemed cleaner and quieter. Wet rooftops re-flected the streetlights, and ordinary evening life glowed behind the windows of the neighboring buildings. Somewhere a car passed, a door slammed, laughter drifted from an open window. Everything looked so familiar, so firmly rooted in the real world, that the strange events of the day were already beginning to lose some of their force.

Then I looked up.

The moon hung above the rooftops, enormous and clear, flooding half the sky with cold silver light. I had always loved moonlight. There was nothing mystical about it; a few quiet minutes were usually enough to steady my thoughts, let the noise of the day recede, and make the world feel manageable again.

Tonight, it didn't work.

The moment I looked up, something tightened beneath my ribs-not pain, not exactly anxiety, but the sensation of a fine thread drawn from somewhere inside me straight toward the silver disk above the city. I tightened my hands around the cup. Moonlight lay across the wet rail-ing, slid over my fingers, silvering my skin, and gradually the same feeling returned that I had experienced near the man in the restaurant.

Recognition.

Except this time, it felt as though I were the one being recognized.

"No. Don't even start."

Talking to the moon was ridiculous enough to restore at least some perspective. I went back inside-and stopped again.

The cat was sitting on the windowsill, looking up as well. Not lazily, not with ordinary feline curiosity. His front paws rested neatly side by side, his tail curled around them, and his head was lifted toward the win-dow with such intense concentration that it seemed as though something familiar to both of us was out there.

"Don't tell me you feel it too."

One ear turned toward me.

"Actually, no. Better not say anything at all. If you answer me now, I'm moving out."

His tail swayed once.

"Good. We understand each other."

I went to bed earlier than usual. Exhaustion finally proved stronger than my need to understand what was happening, and my last rational thought was that by morning, all of today's absurdity would surely seem much less convincing.

Then I opened my eyes in the middle of a lake.

Cold water reached almost to my knees. Silver mist drifted all around me, hiding the shore, if there was a shore at all, and above the motionless water hung an enormous moon-the same one I had been looking at from my balcony only a short while before. There were no houses, no trees, no road, nothing I could use to place myself anywhere familiar, and yet the place did not feel entirely strange.

I didn't remember it, but for some reason my body did.

That was considerably more unsettling.

I turned and saw a man standing several yards away, waist-deep in the water with his back to me. He was tall, broad-shouldered, motionless. The mist blurred everything around him, yet somehow seemed unable to touch him; he remained too distinct, too solid, as though he were not standing inside my dream at all, but the dream itself had formed around him.

I should have been frightened. Instead, for several seconds, I simply looked at the line of his shoulders, his dark hair, the water surrounding his body, until I finally remembered that unfamiliar men standing in un-known lakes generally called for at least a few questions.

"Who are you?"

He turned.

I had never seen that face before, and yet my heart struck hard as though it had recognized him before I did.

He was handsome, but that was not the whole of it. There was noth-ing soft or immediately inviting in his face: defined features, a steady gaze, the restraint of a man accustomed to occupying his place without needing to prove anything to anyone.

He simply looked at me, while my body chose, with spectacularly poor timing, to decide that the distance between us mattered. The cold water, the damp air, the sound of my own breathing-everything sudden-ly became too vivid.

I did not like that.

Especially because the man himself appeared completely at ease.

"You came," he said.

His voice was low, slightly rough, and so startlingly real that I felt it almost against my skin.

That was simply unfair.

"Where, exactly? And before you answer with a riddle, I should warn you that I've run out of patience for today."

Surprise flickered in his eyes. "You don't know where you are?"

"If I did, this conversation would have started much more produc-tively. So let's try this in order. Who are you, and what is this place?"

He studied me more closely, as though searching for something in me and not finding it. "You don't recognize me?"

"Have we met?"

The pause lasted a little longer than a simple answer required.

"No. Not like that."

I exhaled wearily. "Excellent. We've already failed the first question. Where am I?"

"For now, I can't explain that to you."

"The second one too."

The corner of his mouth shifted almost imperceptibly. For some reason, I wanted to see what his real smile looked like, and that thought irritated me nearly as much as his answers did.

The man took a step toward me, and the water parted softly around him. I raised a hand at once.

"Stop. I still have no idea who you are, so I'm perfectly comfortable with this distance."

He stopped without argument. He did not try to convince me that I was worrying for nothing or tell me I had no reason to be afraid. He simply stayed where I had asked him to, and for some reason that made me look at him more carefully.

"I won't hurt you."

"You do realize that men a woman meets at night in the middle of an unknown lake don't automatically receive the benefit of the doubt?"

This time, he really smiled. Only slightly, but the severity left his face so unexpectedly that something warm stirred inside me.

"A sensible rule."

"I'm generally a sensible person."

His gaze moved across the silver mist. "I'm beginning to have doubts."

I narrowed my eyes. "Are you making fun of me in my own dream?"

"Are you certain this is your dream?"

My smile disappeared. He said nothing else, and suddenly the water felt colder around my legs.

"Fine. Let's assume I'm not certain. I still want to wake up."

"Then wake up. I'm not keeping you here."

There was no challenge in his voice, and somehow I understood immediately that he meant it. He truly was not keeping me. I could leave, turn away, tell him not to come any closer-and he would stop.

The trouble was, I did not want to leave nearly as much as I should have.

And that was far more dangerous than the dream itself.

I took a step back, then another. The mist thickened behind me.

"Alice."

I stopped.

The way he said my name was worse than everything else. Not as a question, not merely to get my attention, but as though he had known for a long time exactly how it sounded.

I turned slowly. "How do you know my name?"

He never had the chance to answer.

Something moved beneath my foot. A sharp, indignant sound broke the silence, and I jumped back so quickly I nearly fell.

"Damn it! What is that?"

A small dark creature thrashed in the water. At first I saw the gleam of wet scales, then a slender tail and two wings. It scrambled into the shallows, shook itself, and lifted its head toward me.

It was about the size of a large cat, with an elongated muzzle, scales silvered beneath the moon, and folded wings.

And silver eyes.

Very angry silver eyes.

"No."

The creature made a sound remarkably like outrage.

"I didn't step on you on purpose."

Judging by its expression, that did absolutely nothing to excuse me.

The man came closer. This time I noticed him moving but did not stop him. He remained beside me without touching me, leaving enough space between us, yet I felt his warmth immediately even in the middle of the cold water. I focused on the creature instead. That felt safer.

"Be careful with her," the man said. "She won't forget that."

"Her?"

"Yes."

The little creature spread her wings, as though deciding to spare me any further uncertainty on the subject.

I exhaled slowly. "That's a dragon."

"Yes."

I looked at him. "You say that as casually as if you'd just told me she was a duck."

"I'm used to them."

"Dragons?"

A trace of warmth entered his voice, and the creature snorted irrita-bly.

"See?" he added. "She already thinks we're discussing her with insuf-ficient respect."

I looked down again. The dragon was no longer angry; she was simp-ly watching me closely, and there was something strangely familiar about those silver eyes.

Suddenly, I realized where I had seen that look before.

At home.

On the windowsill.

No. That was impossible.

"Why is she here?"

The man looked at the dragon first, then at me. "Because you are."

"That still isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I have for you right now."

I shook my head. "Do you ever answer a question directly?"

"I do. You simply keep asking questions that are difficult to answer in a single sentence."

"Then let's try again. Who are you?"

This time he did not smile. His gaze deepened, becoming almost personal, and for several seconds the lake, the mist, even the little dragon at my feet seemed to disappear. There was only the man looking at me as though he knew something about me that I did not yet know myself-and my own inexplicable desire to move closer.

I didn't.

Neither did he.

"She isn't just a dragon, Alice."

The little creature moved toward me and stopped beside my leg. There was no resentment left in her eyes now, only quiet, watchful ex-pectation.

"Then what is she?"

The man looked at her, then back at me.

"Your dragon."

I woke so abruptly it felt as though I had actually been pulled out of the cold water. My heart was pounding, my palms were icy, and my body remembered the lake far too well: the cold around my legs, the damp air, the mist and, most irritatingly of all, the warmth of the man beside me.

For several seconds, I simply sat in bed while the room settled back into place around me.

"It was a dream."

The words sounded reasonable. Almost convincing.

The problem was that I remembered it too clearly: the man's face, his voice, the way he had said my name, the little dragon at my feet, and those silver eyes watching me with an intelligence that was far too human.

I covered my face with my hands. "Fine. A very strange dream. A very handsome man. A very convincing dragon. But still a dream."

Something fell in the kitchen.

I went silent.

A few seconds later, soft footsteps came from the hallway, and a fa-miliar dark figure appeared in the doorway. The cat entered the bed-room, stopped at the edge of the moonlight, and looked directly at me.

I was about to ask what he had broken this time when I saw his eyes.

Silver.

Not their usual feline amber-green, but the same deep shade of silver that had been looking at me from the water only moments ago.

Slowly, I lowered my feet to the floor.

"No. Not this."

The cat blinked calmly, walked over to the bed, jumped up with ef-fortless ease, and settled at my feet as though he considered the matter closed.

I stared at him, and for the first time all day, the scattered oddities began to connect-not into an explanation, not yet, but into one deeply unpleasant thought.

If the silver eyes had not been part of the dream, then perhaps none of the rest of it had been either.

By morning, the world looked perfectly normal, which was almost insulting.

I woke before the alarm and lay still for a few seconds, listening to familiar sounds gather around me. A car door slammed outside, tires whispered over wet pavement, and somewhere on the floor above, the pipes gave a brief low hum. Ordinary life was reassembling itself with such confidence that the silver lake, the little dragon, and the man who knew my name might truly have existed only in a dream.

The first thing I did was look toward the foot of the bed. The cat was asleep exactly where he had settled during the night, curled into a compact black ball. No silver glow, no suspicious intelligence, nothing at all to connect him to the winged creature from the lake.

I nudged him carefully with my foot. "Good morning. I have one simple question for you. Are you going to show me your eyes?"

One ear turned in my direction.

"Don't pretend. Last night you were considerably more communica-tive. With your eyes, at least."

The cat heaved a sigh as though he were the one burdened with a psychologically unstable human, lifted his head, and looked at me.

His eyes were green. Ordinary cat eyes-deep, attentive, and entirely free of the silver light that had made me question my sanity only hours before.

Relief came so quickly that it almost annoyed me.

"Excellent. So yesterday I was simply exhausted, you remain a cat, and I stop asking you questions that normal animals should never be ex-pected to answer."

He yawned and lowered his head back onto his paws. I decided that would be my final departure from normality for the day.

The decision lasted until the shower.

Under the hot water, the dream returned-not so much as a se-quence of events as a collection of sensations. The cold of the lake around my legs, silver mist, the dragon's silver eyes, and a low male voice that had sounded far too close.

And the man himself.

My body, apparently, had no intention of forgetting him.

I closed my eyes and remembered with uncomfortable clarity the way he had approached me. He had not touched me, and that was precise-ly the problem. He had stopped close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body, raised his hand, and left the final inches between us un-touched, as though what happened next depended entirely on me.

There had been no contact, and yet my body remembered the ab-sence of it almost as vividly as if there had been.

I shut off the water and reached for a towel.

"Wonderful, Alice. Now you have a man from your dreams to think about in the shower. Excellent timing."

I urgently needed work.

Coffee, clothes, makeup, keys, bag-the familiar sequence quickly re-turned my thoughts to something resembling their usual order. I liked routine not because I was especially pedantic, but because it saved energy and created the pleasant illusion that at least one part of life knew how it was supposed to behave.

By the time I reached the kitchen, the cat was already sitting beside his bowl.

"How do you manage to get everywhere before I do?"

He gave the empty dish a pointed look.

"Of course. In this household, I ask the questions and somehow eve-ry answer works in your favor."

I filled his bowl, finished my coffee, and left for work.

The car started only on the second attempt. The first turn of the key produced an unpleasant metallic sound from the engine.

"Don't even think about joining in. I have more than enough mysti-cism in my life without involving a mechanic."

On the second try, the engine came to life.

"That's much better."

The city quickly restored my sense of reality. People hurried to work, buses pulled in at stops, and cyclists somehow managed to violate every imaginable rule at once while continuing to survive.

The first traffic light turned green just as I approached it.

The second did the same.

By the third, I started paying attention.

The light ahead was red. Traffic was slowing, and I eased my foot off the gas, but as soon as I came closer, the signal changed to green. The next intersection did exactly the same.

I stopped smiling.

There was, of course, a perfectly ordinary explanation. Modern traf-fic systems adjusted to the flow of vehicles, created green corridors, re-acted to congestion. Right now, hundreds of people were probably driv-ing through the city with exactly the same luck and not once suspecting the road infrastructure of taking a magical interest in them personally.

I liked that explanation considerably better.

I turned up the radio and stopped counting traffic lights.

Work greeted me with glass, metal, the smell of coffee, and the famil-iar hum of the morning. Everything here obeyed schedules, deadlines, and numbers, which was why the office had always had an almost calming effect on me. There were no prophetic dreams in my department, no dragons, no men appearing in the middle of silver mist. There were pro-jects, budgets, meetings, and people capable of turning a three-sentence email into a problem that lasted a week.

Those were things I knew how to handle.

I had been running the project department for two years and knew my job well enough not to need constant reassurance that I was compe-tent. A promotion had been the next logical step, and until recently, I had considered it only a matter of time.

Then the new director arrived.

He never refused anything outright. Men like him rarely said no when they could make someone wait long enough instead. Decisions that had already been agreed upon suddenly required further discussion, doc-uments came back with additional comments, deadlines shifted after meetings, and somehow the responsibility for every consequence re-mained with my department.

Then, twice, he suggested that we continue the conversation in the evening, somewhere with a "more pleasant atmosphere."

I declined both times.

Soon afterward, I learned that my promotion required further con-sideration.

Unpleasant, but hardly fatal.

The need to rely on myself had never frightened me. I did not re-member my parents, and my uncle, who had raised me, had taught me something simple fairly early: if you wanted your life to belong to you, you had to learn to hold it in your own hands.

I had learned.

Perhaps that was why the events of the past few days irritated me even more than they frightened me. I did not understand the rules, which meant I could neither test them nor determine where coincidence ended and something else began.

"Alice!"

Marinka was coming toward me with two cups of coffee and the ex-pression of someone who had already collected every piece of morning news and was now experiencing a physical need to share it immediately.

"Don't tell me the second one is for me."

"Of course it's for you. Your face says your own coffee failed to do its job this morning."

I took the cup. "You may now tell me absolutely anything. You've bought my loyalty."

"That's why we're friends. You have a healthy system of values."

We headed toward the elevators. Marinka had worked with me for almost three years and possessed the rare gift of delivering bad news in the tone of someone inviting you to a party.

"By the way, if the entire building suddenly loses power today, I suggest we declare it a day off."

"Why would the building lose power?"

"Electricity has been entertaining itself since morning. The lights on the third floor have flickered three times already, and one of the meeting rooms went completely dark before turning itself back on a minute later. Accounting suffered a collective tragedy."

"Because of the lights?"

"You underestimate accounting. Those people get nervous if a sta-pler is lying at the wrong angle. This is an actual electrical anomaly."

I pressed the elevator button. "Then we evacuate accounting first. We can't expose people to that kind of stress."

"I knew management could be trusted."

Inside the elevator, Marinka took a sip of coffee and gave me a more careful look.

"Now seriously. What's wrong with you? You look great, but you're behaving like you spent half the night arguing either with a man or with your own sanity. I haven't decided which possibility interests me more."

"Why does it have to be a man?"

"It doesn't. But I'm hoping for the best."

I laughed. "I just had a very strange dream."

Marinka brightened immediately. "So there was a man."

"That wasn't a question?"

"Not anymore."

"You're impossible to talk to."

"But predictable."

The elevator stopped before the conversation could become any more dangerous. We stepped into the hallway, and the overhead lights flickered several times.

Marinka immediately caught my arm.

"There. That's what I was talking about. And maintenance insists there's nothing wrong with the electrical system."

I looked up. "No power surges at all?"

"None. So we have two theories: either the electricians have no idea what they're doing, or the building has developed a personality. I vote for the second. It's more entertaining."

Normally, I would have answered. Instead, another sequence had al-ready begun arranging itself in my mind. Yesterday, a streetlight had gone out. This morning, traffic lights had changed as I approached them. Now the office lights were flickering for no reason.

Each incident was easy enough to explain on its own.

Together, they were becoming less cooperative.

"Alice," Marinka said. "You're starting to worry me."

"I'm fine. The last twenty-four hours have just been a little eventful."

"You're saying 'I'm fine' with the face of a woman who doesn't be-lieve herself."

"Don't be dramatic."

"Me? Never. But if you start seeing people who aren't here, tell me immediately. I'd like to know which stage we've reached."

A few seconds later, the joke stopped being funny.

The glass wall of a meeting room ran along the corridor, reflecting desks, pale wall panels, people at their computers, and the two of us walk-ing side by side.

And one other person.

He was standing behind me.

I saw only dark hair and the line of his shoulders, but I did not need to see his face.

My body recognized him first.

Heat swept over my skin, absurdly out of place in the cool office hallway, and for one brief moment the water was around my legs again, silver mist stretched across the lake, and I could feel the warmth of the man who had stood close enough for my body to remember the distance between us.

I turned sharply.

There was no one behind me.

Marinka nearly walked straight into me.

"All right. No jokes now. What did you see?"

I looked back at the glass. It reflected only the two of us.

"I thought there was a man standing behind me."

"Here?"

"Only in the reflection."

Marinka was quiet for a moment. "The one from your dream?"

I turned to her. "Why did you decide it was him?"

"Because you didn't look like someone who had just seen a stranger. You looked like you recognized him."

Sometimes being friends with observant people was extremely in-convenient.

"Maybe."

Marinka stopped smiling.

"Alice, I'm serious. Maybe you should go home. If it gets worse, I'll drive you myself."

"Are you giving orders to your boss now?"

"I'm taking advantage of your temporarily weakened condition, Mad-am Manager. Opportunities should never be wasted."

"Very bold."

"But effective. Besides, in half an hour you have a meeting with our illustrious director. If he asks you to finish another month-long project in four days, I officially give you permission to kill him."

"I'll need that in writing."

"Of course. We're a serious company. We follow procedure."

I finally smiled. Marinka studied me once more, still concerned, but decided not to argue and headed toward her department.

I remained beside the glass wall.

Beyond it, ordinary life went on. Someone was talking on the phone, someone else typing, opening files, swearing at the printer. Only a few yards away, people were going about their work without the slightest idea that I was standing in the hallway waiting for a man who, until last night, had not existed anywhere in my reality.

The light above me gave the faintest flicker.

I looked directly into the glass.

"All right. Let's try this differently. Whoever you are, stop appearing behind me. If you want something, try talking to me."

My own reflection was the only answer.

I waited a moment, then sighed.

"Excellent. I'm officially negotiating with a pane of glass."

I had just begun to turn away when the light around me went out.

Not across the entire floor.

Beyond the glass partitions, monitors continued to glow. The far end of the corridor remained washed in ordinary white light, and people moved and talked as though nothing had changed. The darkness existed only around me, several yards of space suddenly separated from the rest of the office by an invisible boundary. The surrounding noise became muted, the air seemed denser, and a silver glow spread across the floor and the glass, though there was nothing outside the windows that could have cast it.

With the light came a familiar sensation-not the lake itself, but its law. Space had changed like this when the man approached through the mist. My body registered his presence before my eyes had time to find him.

I set my coffee down slowly on the small table beside me.

"Is that you?"

The answer did not come from the hallway, and yet I heard it per-fectly clearly.

"You can hear me."

I went still.

In the dark reflection of the glass wall, familiar features were begin-ning to emerge. First a shadow, then the line of his shoulders, and finally his face, as though the glass were reflecting a man who was not actually standing anywhere in the corridor.

"Excellent. So now my hallucinations are auditory as well as visual."

I thought I saw the hint of a smile.

"Then our hallucinations are mutual."

"You can see me too?"

"I can."

The light above me flashed briefly silver, and his face became clear-er in the glass: dark hair, a calm gaze, the same features I had seen through the mist. Except now I was awake, and I knew that with absolute certainty.

Without meaning to, I stepped closer.

"You really exist."

A trace of amusement entered his eyes. "After the last few days, I could say the same about you."

The silver light trembled, and his face began to dissolve into the glass.

"Wait. What's your name?"

He looked directly at me.

"Alice..."

"I know my name. Yours."

But the light had already vanished. The glass became ordinary again, reflecting the office corridor, the ceiling lights, and me standing there with what was undoubtedly a ridiculous expression on my face. Beyond the invisible boundary that had existed only moments before, work con-tinued uninterrupted. No one looked up. No one seemed to have noticed anything at all.

My hand was still half-raised toward the place where his face had been. I lowered it slowly.

The word dream had finally lost whatever meaning it had left.

I still had no idea where the man was, what allowed us to see each other across an impossible distance, or why the light turned silver when-ever that distance seemed to thin. I did not know what connected the lake, the glass, the dragon, or the strange disturbances that had begun fol-lowing me through ordinary life.

But one thing no longer required an explanation.

He existed.

And as I stood there staring at the empty glass where his face had disappeared, I caught myself thinking something that unsettled me almost more than all the magic of the past two days.

I wanted to see him again.