27
Quark and Pulse shot upright.
“Quark, I know where she is.”
Quark couldn't tell if the rapid pulses of energy were from himself Pulse that held him. , "Where? How did you find out?"
"The Choir. I can still hear them in my dreams." Their eyes darted around suspiciously. Pulse looked and corrected their volume to a whisper. "She's having nightmares."
"No—Oh no... You don't think Ruin is there, do you?"
“I don't know, but now we know where she is. If we can get there before she wakes up, we can—” Pulse wasn't sure how to finish their thought. Likewise, Quark wasn't sure how it should have ended either.
Nonetheless, Quark knew what they should be doing. "We need to get there. We have to see her again."
He was ready. He was ready to charge as a one-star, cosmic cavalier, but Pulse stopped him. The split second before Quark could ask, Pulse put a finger to their lips before opening the door, peaking around the corner.
“What's going on?” He whispered.
There was a long pause before Pulse was comfortable speaking. “Gamal's hounds are hunting us. We have to be careful if we are to make it to the Nightmares.” They shut the door. “We will have to wait a moment more—”
“But Leo—”
“—We can't save Leo if we get caught. Right?”
“Right...”
“It's only a couple clicks, they sound like they're getting impatient looking around here.”
“Where is ‘here?’”
Quark finally realized the cramped space they were in. Cozy as it was, it left little room to breathe. If it was just Quark, he would have found the quaint and dark space suitable. As always, Pulse was too tall for their own good.
“I don't know,” Pulse admitted. “This was a place you summoned.”
That didn't make sense. “How?”
“You were dreaming, half-asleep at least. I don't know how you did it.”
The books on the wall had swirls and lines on the spines—a language unknown, if it was anything coherent at all.
Picking one up, Quark gambled if there was anything of value within the pages.
As with everything else in this world, anything anymore, it was a confused, random mess.
They were more pictures than words, and even so, the pictures were nothing more than scribbles and blots of ink.
If Quark had cared, maybe he could have found a familiar shape in the splotches, but Leo was out there. She was waiting.
“How are we going to get out of this?” Quark could feel the strain in his head pulling their brows together. “How are we supposed to get to Leo with Gamal on our heels? How would we even find a way out of this place?”
“There must be a way,” Pulse sounded half-confident. “I don't see why not. There must be a logic to it all.”
“You see more than me then. I can't make sense of any of this.” He placed his hand on the wall, intending to lean into it, but was drawn by the peculiar feel of the stone.
'Am I looking at this wrong?' he wondered.
Yes, there was something this world abides by.
He felt it—this was a wish he had. A space of his own.
A little place to call home. He felt it in the marble—back then, there wasn't a picture to the feeling, but now there it was, all shaped together into this room, cramped with Pulse, the source of their dreams from the moment they sang their first notes. He wanted this—wished for it.
“We are in wish fulfillment,” he murmured out loud. “Maybe each department has that aspect to them. That could explain everything too...”
“Explain what?” Pulse inquired.
“Why nothing is meshing together. These are our wishes conflicting with everything else. I can't—I can't say why, maybe because we're not part of the system anymore, but maybe we're confusing whatever machine runs this world and it's trying to make sense of it.”
Quark pressed his head against the wall, willing thoughts into his mind—a plan, an answer, a will, anything to draw a path to Leo.
“I got it.”
“Can you get us out of here?”
“I think so, it's going to be tricky. I don't have the kinks worked out yet.”
“We'll play it by ear then.”
“Yeah, We will play it by ear.”