She pointed at the sphere on the workbench. The blue-white veins pulsed in rhythm with my chest. Two signals calling to each other across the space between.
"The old man in your dream library," Yumi said, and I went cold because I had not told her about the dream library, "didn't design this by accident. Whatever patron grafted that system onto you knew exactly what it would require. Intimacy. Vulnerability. The willingness to let people close enough that losing them would destroy you. Those aren't side effects of the system. They're the primary mechanism."
I looked at Vale. "You told her about the dream."
"I told her about the dimensional frequency spike that occurred during your REM cycle at the hospital. Yumi extrapolated the dream independently."
