Borrowed Dreams

Rook Ashwell hadn’t slept well in fifteen years.

He sat in his darkened chamber beneath the Night Market, a vial of refined Aether glowing purple in his trembling hand. Outside, the city pulsed with its usual chaos, but down here, in the depths where memory thieves did their work, silence reigned.

Tonight’s target was a Silvertongue accountant who’d embezzled funds from the wrong people. Kade wanted to know where the money had gone before the accountant vanished for good. A simple extraction—find the memory of the transaction, copy it, leave. Rook had done hundreds like it.

But as he applied the Aether dose to his temple, feeling the familiar burn of the substance sinking into his skin, he wondered how many more he had left in him.

Thousands of memories, he thought. And fewer of them mine every day.

The Aether took hold. His consciousness loosened from his body. And Rook fell into someone else’s dreams.

---

The accountant’s dreamscape was predictable—columns of numbers floating in void, ledgers stacking infinitely, the abstract anxieties of a man whose life revolved around figures. Rook navigated the familiar territory with practiced ease, searching for the specific memory thread that would lead to the stolen funds.

He found it near the dream’s core: a door marked with golden coins, the accountant’s subconscious representation of the transaction. Rook opened it and stepped through—

Into a child’s bedroom.

The shift was jarring. Dream logic rarely followed consistent rules, but this felt different. The bedroom was small, modest, filled with toys that had seen better days. A boy of perhaps eight sat on the bed, crying.

Rook froze. This wasn’t the embezzlement memory. This was something older, deeper—a childhood trauma that the accountant’s mind had buried beneath layers of numbers and financial obsession.

Get out, the professional part of him warned. This isn’t what you came for.

But something held him there. The boy’s tears. The emptiness of the room. The absence of something important.

Then he saw it—a photograph on the nightstand. A woman’s face. The boy’s mother, from the resemblance. And next to the photo, a small vial of medicine, empty.

Ah, Rook understood. He lost her young. And he’s been trying to count his way out of the grief ever since.

The memory wasn’t relevant to the contract. But it was relevant to the man. And despite everything Rook had become, he couldn’t help but see the accountant differently now—not as a target, but as a child who’d never stopped crying in some deep, buried part of himself.

---

He found the embezzlement memory eventually, copied it as requested, and prepared to exit the dreamscape. But as he moved toward waking consciousness, another presence stopped him.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

Rook turned. A woman stood in the dream-void—not the accountant’s mother, not a memory at all. Something else. Someone else.

“Luna Veil,” he said, recognizing her from their occasional encounters in dream space. The Veilwalker dream weaver, whose abilities ran parallel to his own.

“Rook Ashwell.” Luna’s dream-form regarded him with curiosity. “I felt your intrusion from two blocks away. You’re usually more careful.”

“I got distracted.”

“By what?”

Rook hesitated. He’d never discussed his work with anyone outside Nocturne—certainly never with a Veilwalker. But something about Luna’s presence felt safe. Perhaps it was their shared understanding of dreams. Perhaps it was exhaustion breaking down his usual walls.

“I saw something that reminded me why I hate this work,” he said quietly.

Luna nodded slowly. “The grief memory. I sensed it too—like a wound that never healed, bleeding into everything else this man dreams.”

“You can feel that from outside?”

“I build dreams for a living. I know when they’re haunted.” She moved closer, her form flickering slightly as dreamspace bent around her. “You carry that weight, don’t you? All the memories you’ve stolen. They don’t just leave.”

Rook’s hands trembled—even in the dream, the physical habit persisted. “I have protocols. Rules about what I won’t take. But the things I do take… they stay.”

“Have you ever let anyone help you carry them?”

The question cut deeper than any blade. Rook had spent two decades building walls around the memories that weren’t his, burying other people’s traumas beneath the weight of professional necessity. The idea of sharing that burden felt both terrifying and desperately appealing.

“There’s someone,” he admitted. “Someone who understands what it’s like to have power over minds. But I’ve never—”

“Told her how heavy it’s gotten?”

Rook met Luna’s eyes. “How did you—”

“Dream logic.” Luna’s smile was gentle. “Your subconscious is louder than you think. You should talk to Vespa. Before the weight crushes you.”

---

Rook woke in his chamber, gasping. The extracted memory burned in his mind—numbers, accounts, the location of stolen funds. Contract complete. Payment secured.

But the child’s bedroom stayed with him. And Luna’s words echoed louder than the accountant’s secrets.

He found Vespa in her laboratory an hour later, surrounded by the elegant apparatus of her craft. Purple vapor curled around glassware as she refined some new compound, her long black hair caught back in a practical style that didn’t diminish her grace.

“You’re early,” she said without turning. “I don’t have the compliance compound ready until—”

“I’m not here for business.”

Vespa turned, her perceptive eyes reading something in his face. She set down her instruments carefully.

“Rook? What happened?”

He told her. Not about the contract—that was Nocturne business—but about the child’s bedroom. About the grief that defined a man without him knowing. About Luna’s words and the weight of borrowed memories that pressed down harder every year.

Vespa listened without interruption, her expression shifting from professional assessment to genuine concern. When he finished, she moved to a cabinet and poured two glasses of something amber and medicinal.

“I remember every person my compounds have killed,” she said, handing him a glass. “Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight if you count the man last month, though technically that was heart failure. I keep a ledger.”

“Quality control?”

“That’s what I tell myself.” She sat across from him, cradling her own glass. “We carry things that would break most people, Rook. The memories you steal. The lives I end with a perfume. It’s easy to pretend we’re just professionals doing a job.”

“But we’re not.”

“No.” Vespa’s voice softened. “We’re people who’ve found ways to function despite the weight. And sometimes—” She reached out, her chemically scarred fingers brushing his trembling hand. “Sometimes we need to remind each other that we’re not alone in carrying it.”

Rook looked at their hands—his pale and shaking, hers scarred and steady. Two people whose work involved power over minds, sitting together in a laboratory that smelled of flowers and poison.

“Luna said I should talk to you,” he admitted. “Before the weight crushed me.”

“Luna Veil gives surprisingly good advice for someone who lives in dreams.” Vespa’s lips curved in her characteristic elegant smile. “And she’s right. You don’t have to carry it alone.”

Outside, the Night Market stirred with its usual dangerous energy. But in the laboratory, for a moment, two broken people found something like peace.

Rook’s hands stopped trembling.