A stolen address, a borrowed dream, and a room none of you walked into.
Three doors were sitting in front of you when the last night ended — the silo, the mansion, the magic shop — and you never voted. This time, the choice picked itself before you even got there.
Randall came flying out of a moving car's trunk and landed on the sidewalk in front of Susan, hands bound, gagged, rattled but unbroken. The people he owes money to had apparently gotten tired of waiting. Susan, mid-sentence about the notepad's answer — your adversary is fate — just stared at him for a second before saying what you were all thinking: there's no such thing as coincidence anymore. Not with you five.
So: the shop. The Ace of Wands, on Outlook Boulevard — somebody swore they'd seen Pete there.
It smelled like cheap incense and felt like every new-age shop that's ever existed, and the woman behind the counter was warm the second Paulie described a friend who sounded a lot like Pete. Warm, right up until she noticed Janine waiting outside. Something in her face changed — just for a second — before she smoothed it back over. She never said why. While Paulie kept her talking, Susan found the address book behind the counter and walked out with Pete's home address, and she never noticed a thing. Outside, keeping watch, Johnson clocked a gaudy, driverless van cruising past the shop more than once. Nobody's explained that either.
The address led to a quiet bungalow on an unremarkable street — empty, undisturbed, no sign anyone dragged him out of it. Just left. His cardigan was still hanging in the closet. Paulie stood there a long moment with that, and it hurt more than either of you expected it to.
Searching the house, Billie found a dreamcatcher — an old one, hanging in a back room — and used it the way you'd use anything of hers: as a way in. Threaded through it, she could see the last months of Pete's life playing out like a filmstrip — him at home less and less, more and more time spent somewhere underground, at some kind of control panel, until the last image was just him, asleep on a cot, somewhere that wasn't home at all. With a Polaroid of Paulie and Pete together to sharpen the signal, Susan's file cart went hunting through the house on its own and dug up a paper trail pointing to a place everyone's calling "the Asylum" — with a map.
You could have driven there. You didn't have to.
Because Pete was asleep, right then, somewhere out past the edge of town — and Johnson didn't wait for daylight. Wearing a shape none of you had seen on him before, he walked all of you through the shadows and straight into Pete's dream. Pete was there, at that same control panel, except in the dream it was an organ, and the whole thing had turned into some half-remembered night at the Glass Slipper — lights, a crowd, Paulie in full Miss Foxy regalia stepping onto a stage that wasn't really there. And Pete didn't know any of you. Not at first. He looked right at Paulie and asked who you all were.
Paulie pushed — hard — to make him remember, and it cost something to do it; for a second, his own reasons for being there started to slip away too, some fog trying to talk him out of caring. He held on.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Paulie finally said the thing out loud that's been sitting unsaid for months.
"I love you."
Johnson ended it. Still wearing that borrowed shape, he did what Papa Legba does — cut through — and the dream came apart around all of you like smoke pulled through a door, back out along the same shadow-path he'd walked you in on.
You didn't wake up back at the house.
You woke up standing over Pete himself — real, breathing, in some small, undecorated room, deep inside a place none of you have ever actually been. He looked up at all of you standing there and said the first thing he's said that sounded like his own voice in a long time:
"I remember."
That's where it stopped. No alarms. No one came running. Just Pete, awake, confused, and the five of you standing in a room you didn't walk into — with no idea, yet, how you're all getting out of it. Or where you left the car. Or where Little Sherm and Janine ended up, back at the apartment, waiting on a car that isn't coming back for them tonight.