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"What? You meanthat?" I point at the carpet. "Yeah. Bed. Singular. There's two of us."

Airos slips his arm back through the sleeve and reties the robe, then fluffs one of the cushions and stretches out onto the carpet. He closes his eyes and folds his hands over his stomach.

I stare at the empty space beside him, frozen like a goddamn deer about to be pulverized by a semitruck.

"Is there a problem?" Airos says.

"Yeah. I talk in my sleep. Loud. I'll take the dirt."

I lie down on the sand.

"Take the bed," Airos says, sitting up. "It will get cold."

"I'll be fine. You take it. Trust me, this soft-ass sand is like a memory foam mattress compared to some of the places I've slept before."

"Jackson—"

"Going to sleep now, Airos."

I roll over onto my side to face the wall and dig my shoulder into the sand. I don't need to be worried over.

The tent goes dark as Airos puts out the lamp, and from the sound of his breathing I know he's already passed out.

Lucky bastard.

Airos

The nights after such a thorough exhaustion are always filled with an endless vortex of dreams and nightmares. The regeneration of Phoenikos energy is like a paddle thrust into the sediment of the mind, churning it up into a choking cloud that can hardly be navigated, and once again, I experience a memory that doesn't belong to me.

I'm in that dark forest, following after a man with my heart racing with expectation for what I'm to find once we reach our destination. I'm excited, but also afraid. I feel like I shouldn't be doing this, and that this place we're going is somewhere terrible, but I can't help myself. Ineedto follow. The curiosity is stronger than any caution I bear, and loud enough to drown out the warnings and furious reprimands that might normally keep me safe.

The world I see exists in both familiarity and the complete unknown, where flashes of recognition come like shooting stars across a pitch-black sky.

Malyi Sorych. The International Vanguard. Drone attack. Chesterfield cigarettes.

Words with no meaning emerge from the haze and attach themselves to other memories and create tiny patches of understanding, like tiles in a mosaic too big for me to comprehend.

McScott.That's this man's name.

We've walked to a blackened stone-like ruin sitting amongst fallen and shattered trees. The wordtankemerges, and I at once understand what this war beast is.

It belonged to the enemy. Destroyed by RPG a week prior, while we were still in Zhovnipol.The thought belongs to Jackson. I hear it spoken with his voice.

The memory shifts suddenly, as though crossing a fissure in time. The man called McScott has his hands on me. He grabs the sides of my vest and pulls me in. I smell theChesterfield cigaretteson his beard as it scratches my face, and then the press of his lips against mine. Warm. Inviting. So wrong.

Flash. Another shift. The trees blur past as I run, and I hear the man's voice shouting behind me. My heart—Jackson's heart—is beating as fast as a hummingbird's wings. Fear and anger are just as sharp as the excitement, and both emotions overtake the dream like a flash flood, mixing into a brackish wash of humiliation and shame.

Then, through the trees comes a flash of fire and a crash like thunder. I feel the ground disappear from beneath my feet as an invisible fist throws me backward and sends the world spinning around me like a wagon wheel.

I wake with a startled gasp. All of the feelings of the dream memory are still racing through my veins, and for a moment I don't know where or who I am. Slowly, it all starts to settle. Isee the ceiling of the tent rippling with the breeze, the light of the desert moon shining through gaps in the weave. And my erect cock strains hard against my robes, so sensitive that just a gentle movement might tip me over the edge. The feeling of need still thrumming from the dream memory is almost unbearable, beyond anything I've ever known before.

I lay still and focus on my breath to calm myself and try to make sense of what I've just seen and experienced. So many different emotions, each one of them so overwhelming, and all of them conflicting. I know with certainty this was Jackson's real memory. Somehow, through the melding of our powers, it's been impressed onto my mind. His reality is even more confusing than I could've expected, not just in the physical features of Earth, but in the very experience that he is living.

In his world, the mating of two men is so unusual it has been designated by a name, like a clan of sorts. Tyler explained this to me when we'd first found Jackson.Gay. That was the word. He'd told us Jackson claimed not to belong to this clan. He'd been adamant about it.

The entire concept was difficult to understand. I'd attempted to adapt my point of view and force my mind into a place where I could imagine a world where one's most natural desires are considered abnormal, but I could more easily comprehend being a fish.

Now, I question whether Jackson had told the truth.