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  Tovah forced her gritted jaw to relax before she answered. “Ben’s a better shaper. I get it, Spider. Ben works hard. Ben’s a good guide. Ben can make the Eiffel Tower out of a couple of toothpicks. Yeah, I know.”

  “You could do it too. If you wanted.”

  “Well, I don’t want!” she shouted. “I don’t want to be a guide. I don’t want what Ben wants, or you want, okay? I don’t go to sleep at night with dreams of helping the world finds its way, all right? I just want to find my own!”

  She glared at him, but it was next to impossible to determine Spider’s expression. He rubbed a leg over his head. She’d seen him do the same in the waking world, run a hand over and over his hair, rumpling it.

  “I just worry about you, that’s all. If you’re wandering around and things go wonky—”

  Tovah waved a hand. “It’s no different than anything else here. Yes, sometimes things get scary here. But I know they’re not real. I know it’s a nightmare. And I get out of it. I’m not a sleeper.”

  “Sleepers have nightmares. Shapers don’t.”

  She sighed. “Fine. So sometimes things get…out of control. Sometimes someone with a little too much desire makes it ugly for the rest of us. Just like in the waking world. The difference is, in here, I can control what happens to me. It’s not real.”

  The light around him went out. All she saw were the glinting rubies of his eyes. “Dreams are just as real as anything else, girlie. When’re you gonna learn that?”

  A smart retort rose to her lips, but too late. Spider had vanished. He’d been in the Ephemeros a long, long time. Tovah didn’t have the skill to find him if he didn’t want to be found.

  Dreams were as real as anything else. Four years ago she’d have laughed at that. She’d been married to her college sweetheart and trying to have a baby. She hadn’t known the Ephemeros existed. Spider had been the one to introduce her to this second reality, and now guilt singed her for snapping at him.

  Tovah pushed through the door and the club laid itself out before her. The edges were blurry, formed by the desires of those closer to it than she, or those with stronger shaping skills. That didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to build a world, nor destroy one. She was only here to enjoy it.

  The music was loud, the lights flashing. While there were oddities here and there—a clock that ran backwards, a sign upon which the letters kept changing—those were common quirks of the dream world and as comforting in their own way as proof she really was in the Ephemeros and not something darker, like insanity. The patrons here seemed more interested in manipulating themselves than the environment, which was fine with her. Tovah preferred a setting that mirrored her normal reality more closely than, say, a dance floor set above a volcanic pit.

  Not that it couldn’t shift at any time, depending on the whim of one strong shaper, or the collective desire of many lesser ones. But for now it looked like any other club, albeit with a few patrons whose unusual appearances were not merely cosmetic.

  One of the first things most people learned to do in the Ephemeros was represent themselves as something different than their natural appearance. After all, what was the fun in looking the way you did in real life when you could be taller, thinner or sexier? Representation was about how you felt, not necessarily what you were. She passed a woman with gleaming red eyes and a set of onyx wings cascading to the floor. The woman gave her a once-over, sliding a red tongue along glistening lips, but didn’t approach. She was probably a middle-aged man in her waking life, Tovah thought with a small grin. Ah, well. To each his or her gender-bending own.

  Tovah had always represented pretty close to her true appearance, with one small exception. Compared to the people around her, some who sprouted fangs or wings or fur, she felt it wasn’t dishonest to represent as whole when in reality she’d been damaged. And yes, that was an issue her therapist would’ve spent hours on, back before she’d discovered the Ephemeros and still needed therapy. Tovah didn’t care.

  Here, in this world, she didn’t have to put on a face for anyone. She didn’t have to do what anyone else wanted or expected her to do. She answered to nobody. In the Ephemeros, Tovah could be sexy and free and selfish.

  She could dance.

  Someone had shaped an oasis in the center of the club. A small fountain. Some trees. Soft white sand. Tovah recognized the shaper’s touch and moved toward it.

  Ben sat on the fountain’s tiled rim, dabbling his fingers in the water until he caught a shimmering goldfish and pulled it from the water where it wriggled and splashed. It mustn’t have pleased him, because he tossed it back and looked up as she approached. The water he flicked toward her became diamonds in midair and fell, clinking, to the sand. There they became rivulets, like mercury, flashing silver until they disappeared.

  “Tovah,” Ben greeted her with a nod. “Did Spider find you?”

  “Yes.”

  Behind her, the club pulsed and flashed, tempting her to move her body to the music. In front of her the oasis was a study in peace and calm. Tovah stayed on the edge, in between both and part of neither.

  Ben glanced over her shoulder and smiled slowly. “The club scene? That’s challenging.”

  It was actually much easier than what he’d done, since in the club she had only to shape her own space and leave the rest to the collective will of those who sought the same nightscape she had. Here in Ben’s oasis, he was both creator and sovereign. The club could encroach, but not overtake, what he’d done.

  “This is nice,” she told him. Her boots touched the edges of sand shading into the club’s concrete floor.

  “You can say it. Nice, but boring.”

  “Depends on what you’re planning on doing in it.” Tovah lifted a brow.

  Ben laughed and looked around. “Not what you’re planning on doing out there.”

  Ben didn’t need to dream the same sorts of things Tovah did. She didn’t ask why he needed to create an oasis, or water, or the fish he was always looking to catch. She wished he had as much consideration for her privacy.

  She looked over her shoulder at the club, which had gotten very far away. She pulled it closer with an effort that shouldn’t have taken as much will, but did. Ben’s oasis was stronger than her dance club. Ben was stronger.

  “I like to dance,” she said simply and left “What’s it to you?” unspoken.

  Ben apparently heard it in her voice, because he smiled and stood. He represented as he always did, a tall man with sandy hair and regular features, eyes the color of sun-faded denim and a long-legged, lumbering gait. He wore the same pair of worn brown cords and blue button-down shirt every time she saw him and, like his need to shape a space of quiet in the midst of chaos, Tovah never asked why.

  “I like the sound of flowing water,” he said as though she’d spoken aloud. The fountain tinkled a little louder. “I find it very soothing.”

  “Dancing is a great tension reliever.” She drew a line in the sand with her toe. “Dare you to try it, Ben.”

  Eight months ago Ben had shown up on the edge of a meadow Spider had been encouraging her to shape for practice. At first she’d thought he was a sleeper, so befuddled had he looked. In moments it had become clear he was a shaper when he turned her meadow into the seashore, Spider into a sand-crab and Tovah into a mermaid. He had a lot of power right away and clearly no knowledge of how to use it. Or of etiquette. She’d been the same way the first time she realized the Ephemeros was a real place, not just a part of her sleeping mind.

  Eight months ago he’d been brand new to shaping, but he’d passed Tovah’s skill and now rivaled Spider. Ben worked hard at shaping. At making details. And he wanted, as she did not, to be a guide.

  “I don’t dance.” His words were easy enough, without sting.

  Tovah let them bounce off her without flinching. “That’s too bad.”

  She’d never asked him why he wanted a mermaid so badly, or what that had meant to him. Or if he’d been disappointed to discover