HYPNOTICA

Enter the mind-bending world of dreamwrights—mages who craft surreal musical performances in grand, shared dreams. Dreamwrights split their lives between the waking city of Senkaku, populated by the living, and the dreaming city known as the Yoshiza, inhabited by ghosts whose hunger for entertainment is only matched by their taste for cruelty.

A dead-heat night in the circular streets of the Yoshiza, where light drips off rooftops and collects in people’s eyes. Above the steam rising off the paving stones, the smell of melting chocolate and fried sugar, and the hysterical laughter of the night-people, climbing upwards like the steps of an amphitheater are more and more streets, filled with bathhouses, theaters and candy shops. At the very tops are the cobalt-blue towers with sloping roofs where revelers go to look out from the balconies and watch the other glowing, ringed districts of the city orbit around them in the dark, each hub connected by spindly wooden bridges like the arms of an octopus. A parade is crossing one of the bridges, full of blue lanterns and figures in masks, with tall ghosts rising out of the crowds like slow-moving monoliths, dressed in their flowing silk robes. 

As the parade flows off the bridge and into the district, one pair of sandals splits the sea. His mask is smooth and expressionless, with the lips parted as if they’re whistling. Its surface has the shifting, oily rainbows of a conch shell, reflecting the lights of the Yoshiza. His pupils are jittering in their sockets like moths against glass, and there are no feet in his sandals, just air. In his left hand, he holds a silver tuning fork. They call him NO-FOOT.

The Yoshiza only exists in dreams, and there are breeds of magicians here that only exist between sunset and sunrise. The most famous ones, the ones only the Yoshiza can make, are the dreamwrights, who perform for the ghosts and the dreamers alike.

Through the crowd of masks coming off the bridge, NO-FOOT spots another pair of jittering pupils. The mask is a porcelain one, bright red, with two small eye holes and the fang-toothed smile of a monster, the brow furled in pain, but the cheeks pushed up to the eyes as if caught in the middle of a laugh. The eyes lock on him and their owner begins pushing his way closer. The two meet in the mass of people and throw their arms around one another in a quick, fierce hug. 

When they pull apart, the man checks NO-FOOT’s eyes silently, the grotesque, ceramic smile hanging in the air between them. They call him GRIN. With a flourish, he pulls up both of his sleeves. 

Tattooed onto the flesh of his arms are interlocking tessellations of hexagons, squares, and isosceles triangles that form dark blue nets of ink. It’s a living web of spells—thousands of tiny symbols flow along his skin like river systems, interlocking in labyrinths that never stop moving. NO-FOOT’s eyes run over the twenty-four long parallel lines on GRIN’s upper arms—they’re music staves of three octaves, sprawled with immaculately neat maps of tonics, intervals, flats, sharps, and time signatures. On the backs of GRIN’s hands, a pair of black and white compass roses stretch and contract, reflecting the balance of bass and treble in the street noise. With trepidation, NO-FOOT realizes that GRIN’s output could deafen him and everyone else in the street.

NO-FOOT lifts his sleeves next. Like GRIN, he’s spent weeks preparing for tonight. His skin is a kaleidoscopic mirror of the street around them: warped masks and bodies slide over his flesh, collapsing in on themselves and blossoming in other places. NO-FOOT tilts his head and the scene changes its angle, so that GRIN is looking at a warped parody of his own mask. He laughs.

They start walking up the street with the flow of the crowd. NO-FOOT’s heartbeat is pounding blood into his head, and he can see GRIN’s whole body shaking with excitement. On either side of the street, every door is splashed with their names in white paint—advertisements for tonight. The doors in the Yoshiza lead into dreams, but once he and GRIN say the word, all of these doors will open into their show. Tonight, night of nights, this show will be their magnum opus.

They stop outside one of the doors and GRIN fishes around in his robes for his tuning fork. NO-FOOT watches him. His darting eyes are wide, anxious. He doesn’t want to lose his high too soon. GRIN rolls his shoulders and pulls his fork out, then cocks a finger and flicks it. 

GRIN listens, his fingers caressing the air around the two prongs. He begins to tease out the oscillations, accelerating them to five, six, then seven cycles per second, until the fork makes a faint ringing sound, like a finger on the rim of a wine glass. With his eyes locked on the compasses on his hands, his fingers twitch, fine-tuning the sound. Finally, he picks up a frequency full of sleepers. GRIN presses the fork to the door like a key. NO-FOOT does the same with his.

The crowds around them slow to a molasses-like crawl as the light seeps out of the Yoshiza. They step through the door, close it behind them, and black out. From there, they drift down to the blankness of deep sleep.

Dreamwrights live and die by the circadian rhythm. Each night, the living drift up and down through the different spheres of sleep over and over, forming a chant every narcomancer knows by heart: anza, derezo, riza, teza, derezo, riza, anza, teza, derezo, riza. The body sings to itself, climbing up and down the scale in cycles: anza is the drowsiness between awake and asleep. Teza is peaceful, semi-dreaming sleep. Derezo is deep sleep, dead to the world. And riza is the hallucinatory paradise of vivid dreams, the peak of the cycle. Riza can last for eight minutes, and the entire cycle can take forty. 

For those who have mastered lucid dreaming, hitting the peak of a riza high marks the end of all limits. In those eight minutes, old memories and personal fantasies can be touched and smelled, twisted and altered like clay. At the end of that eight minutes, it’s gone. 

The dreamwrights aim bigger. They open the doors in the Yoshiza that lead to the dreamscape, and they find sleepers near the end of their cycle, in derezo. They collect them and bring all of them into riza at once, into a single, shared dream, then keep them from slipping out of it until they finish their work. They weave a vision, a world in a soap bubble, set to music. They bare their souls and break down the barriers between ‘you’ and ‘I’, letting memories and emotions intermingle like river deltas.

By the standard of the Yoshiza, NO-FOOT and GRIN are still small fish in a very big pond, but they are a strange new breed of fish: their performances are rawer, more poetic, yet more chaotic. I believe they are the shape of things to come.    

NO-FOOT’s blackout resolves itself into a dim landscape. The silhouettes of hundreds of huge, slow ripples are moving beneath him like ocean currents, making low, humming disturbances as they speed off into the sheer black of the dreamscape. Each of the ripples is the unconscious mind of a sleeper on this band, tuned to the steady hum of derezo sleep. NO-FOOT and GRIN are invisible to one another now, floating in the dark, but in the strange way of a dream, they know the other is there.

NO-FOOT listens as GRIN begins to hum, his vocal cords running through the chromatic scale half a dozen times in a split-second before he finds the right notes. As GRIN hums his tune, the dreamscape erupts into a forest of spikes, radiating outwards in geometric ripples that match the tattoos on his arms.

NO-FOOT bites his lip and sings to himself in his head.

If everybody’s got to die, I’d rather do it in the sky…

When GRIN begins to sing, it’s an eerie warbling that no human throat could ever produce. A single standing wave rises from the dreamscape, shivering as, one by one, its frequency absorbs the ripples bouncing and reflecting across the expanse. Soon, there is one single ripple, its body humming like a caged earthquake while GRIN’s high-pitched note wavers and modulates it. For a moment, the surface of the dreamscape is warped into a crude reflection of his mask. A distorted, high-pitched version of his laughter cuts across the dark, and the image dissolves.

The black dome of the dreamscape’s sky begins to fill with flickering images and feelings—sleepers who are already crossing over into riza. The volume of the hum coming from the ripple increases by one, two, then three orders of magnitude, until NO-FOOT’s teeth are vibrating so hard that he has to clench them to keep from biting his tongue. 

If everybody’s got to die, I’d rather do it in the sky…

GRIN is goosing the ripple now, throwing in quick licks of notes, trying to get the surface tension of the dreamscape to break and cross over into riza. They’re going to shift any second now. GRIN’s fingers begin to snap out a beat, 240 beats per minute, four-four time. GRIN provides the music. NO-FOOT provides the words and the visuals.

If everybody’s got to die, I’d rather do it–

There’s a split-second of cavernous silence, and then the world is in NO-FOOT’s eyeball. Dreams pour in by the hundreds, dripping down his irises in a stream of sensations that whip by faster than any waking eye could follow. But his darting pupils catch every second of it. GRIN’s voice rings out immediately, splitting into two different parts, his melodies unfolding like paper labyrinths in NO-FOOT’s vision. The intro.

The moment the first measure starts, NO-FOOT’s body is already snapping into place with it, his movements in time with the beats. His skin flows, his legs grow longer, his arms bend into wings, and his neck stretches until his form is slipping between a man and a crane, the words flowing out of his mouth.

If everybody’s got to die, I’d rather do it in the sky

So why not do it in the sky?

The dreams are pouring into his ears and running under his skin. He feels tongues wash over his body, the din of ten thousand voices rising and falling like waves fills his ears, and the smell of fresh fried eggs and steaming hot rice is everywhere. He swallows it all. As the words rush out of his mouth, they become thousands of birds, each one a dreamer caught in the song. The birds are caught up in the cyclone of his dance, turning and banking in an undulating wave made of sound. He snaps his fingers once.

Across the Yoshiza, all of the doors painted with their names now lead to this corner of the dreamscape, their show. Revelers from the Yoshiza, both the living and the dead, begin streaming in, getting lost in the soundscape, giggling and shouting with excitement. They transform into birds and join the whirling rhizome over his head, listening to the beats through the titanic thrumming of their own hearts, the wind filling their bodies with the rush of a hundred-mile-an-hour orgasm. Across the sleeping city of Senkaku, people are moaning in their sleep, biting their lips. In the morning, they’ll remember this. The intensity will be burned into their bodies for days. This is the realest thing they will ever experience. This is what NO-FOOT lives for. 

With his eyes locked on the wheeling birds above his head, NO-FOOT gets ready for the second verse. Just as he begins, I break from the wheeling flocks and descend through the cacophony. My feathers are the color of bleached bone, my wings are covered with ice-blue irises, and I loom over the pair of them like an eclipse. His eyes meet with mine, and we glimpse each other’s souls. As I unfold before him, his eyes trace the intersecting, crystalline geometry, getting lost in the maze of shifting shapes until he finds the center. There, all the beautiful angles and graceful arcs transform into a nest of jagged, undulating needles, spiralling down in endless iterations like a staircase to the abyss. I can see fear ripple his soul, and I hear two words flit across his mind: Teeth. Hunger. 

The words of his song die in his mouth. His terror seeps into the dreamscape, and everything is ruined. 

GRIN’s melody veers into a strange key, then dissolves into high-pitched white noise. From the cacophony, nightmares roll in, broken teeth and glistening black snakes, and GRIN’s scream splits the dreamscape. He’s lost control. Dreamers are scattering like insects, and GRIN’s slumped form rises over the dreamscape like the moon, his palms clutched over his ears, his porcelain lips curled back from his teeth in a piercing screech. 

In the middle of it all, I stand in a cloak of crane feathers and reach up toward GRIN, as if to touch the sun. I try to tell him that he is beautiful, that I can protect him from the terror of death. My ice-blue eyes are wide, pleading. GRIN doesn’t listen.

NO-FOOT’s body is ripped through the spheres of dreaming, and his back arches from the speed. Then the paving stones of the Yoshiza are under his feet again and he’s stumbling forward, his hands coming to rest against the wall of a building. Crowds of people are slipping past him in the street, and the smell of chocolate fills his nostrils. To his horror, he can still hear the high-pitched scream in his ears, like tinnitus. 

He looks up into the window of the building and stares at his eyes. The pupils are still and his riza high is gone, but as he stares at the glass, invisible hands begin groping at his sleeves and GRIN’s mask warps the surface of the window. Looking into his eyes, NO-FOOT can see that GRIN’s pupils are still flickering and darting at high speed. He knows what that means: GRIN is still in riza, trapped in that pocket of dreaming. 

Clutching at NO-FOOT’s sleeves and screaming at him from a thousand miles away, GRIN shouts a street address. Then he flashes out of existence. The keening in NO-FOOT’s ears peaks, and every window in the Yoshiza shatters at once. 

When the sun comes up the next morning, NO-FOOT is already sitting on the edge of his hammock, drenched in sweat. His mask is on his lap, with a ghostly impression of his face cast in perspiration on the inside. His skin is just flesh now, with no images crawling across it, and scrawled on his palm is an address, written in grease pencil before the dream faded from his memory. 

NO-FOOT looks down at the city from twelve stories up. His hammock hangs from the scaffolding of two ramshackle tenements, his legs dangling over the edge. The cawing of crows grates on his ears as sunlight breaks over a building and cuts across his eyes. This is not the Yoshiza. This is the waking hell of reality and this city is called Senkaku. Somewhere down in that city GRIN’s sleeping body is still trapped in his nightmare. 

As NO-FOOT runs a hand down his face, he looks between his fingers at the stumps below his knees. Two wood and metal prosthetic legs, curled like a fawn’s, are bolted straight to his joints.

They call him NO-FOOT.

Only ghosts remember how Senkaku used to be, how the rings of shantytowns grew around the pit mines and spilled down into the empty terraces when the ore was gone. The first residents learned about the strange acoustics of the pits, and how the rainwater that collected at the bottom turned a beautiful, toxic blue that nourished the tezu flowers. The summer parties in Senkaku had seemed to last forever, with jets of water arcing through the sky from district to district, crisscrossing the mountain with rainbows reflected on the glaciers. I remember the tall white cranes with black wings and red crowns that used to fly over the city. I knew that if I could be anything, I would want to be a crane.

That Senkaku vanished in a hurricane of ash that swept across the continent, filling people’s lungs with burning dust. The Yoshiza is a dream of Senkaku from another time, kept alive in our eternal memories. 

The Senkaku of this age was dug out of the ash and explored like the tomb of a king. New gangs took over the ash-filled districts, but it was the masons and the drug dealers who became the lords of the city. Tower by tower, street by street, the ribs of the city were excavated, repainted and repaired, and its lungs breathed gold, blood, silk, sugar, and drugs again. The parades returned, strange fashions began to blossom, but there are still quarters of the city that are abandoned: ruined parlors and bathhouses half-buried in drifts of dust and crushed timbers, dead towers still standing against the sky. Those houses and streets are the abodes of ghosts, where we sleep like paupers in the land of the living. 

But in the Yoshiza we are the lords of our own court, hunting lovers, weaving intrigue, and waging elegant vendettas against each other. The dreamwrights play for us, and remind us of how it used to be. I watch for the ones with talent, and when they open the windows to their souls in their shows, those windows remain open to me.

Somewhere in Senkaku, GRIN opens his eyes.

Deep inside a twisting metal womb of steel pipes, surrounded by handles, pull-stops, and slides, GRIN lays perfectly still in a cradle of leather, his eyes gazing at the tubes above his head. It is a giant pipe-organ, three stories tall, and he lays deep within it. It is silent where he is, utterly silent and cold. Besides his eyes, he can’t move a muscle.

The calm part of his mind knows what is happening. His mind is awake, his body is still asleep, but his soul is caught somewhere in between. A portion of it is likely still trapped in the nightmare he left behind in the Yoshiza—he can feel the terror in his gut. That means until his soul is freed, he will be trapped in his own flesh until he dies or goes insane. But even worse than knowing that is the silence. With the certainty of a dead man, he knows the blood trickling out of his ears means his screams have left him stone deaf.

Above his head, deep within the maze of pipes, blood begins to silently trickle down to him and drop onto his mask, still strapped to his face. After a while the pipes start to fill with blood and it comes dribbling out of the stops and ventilation holes until he is lying in a slowly rising pool of crimson. His lungs begin to pump faster as the metallic smell sticks in the back of his throat. He recognizes this nightmare: he knows the pool is going to rise up his chest, then his neck, his chin, up under his mask, over his mouth, and finally over his eyes, until he is drowning in his own blood. It doesn’t matter that his mind knows it’s not real—his soul, still torn between awake and asleep, will believe he is drowning. That means death.

GRIN closes his eyes. He knows this organ like his own rib cage; his waking life has been spent playing it, tuning it, repairing it for the Honiza family. He sleeps in it. The organ is real, even if the blood isn’t. GRIN feels a ripple of vibrations go through the pipes. GRIN imagines glistening black snakes sliding down the tubes, attracted by his helplessness. As he glances around the gleaming metal tubes in the dark, watching the flow of blood streaming in, he can feel strange vibrations coming through the pipes, tingling against his skin. He can’t hear it, but he can feel it.

Someone is singing to him.

Overhead, one of the pipes cracks open soundlessly and I unfold myself from the hole like a blooming flower. I envelop him in my wings and fill the chamber in the organ like a tent, then lean down to look into his eyes. I have the ice-blue eyes of a crane and a face that is bone-white. I sing to him, making his body resonate like a bell. My head is cocked, bird-like and curious. I run one fingertip over his mask, as if I’m touching the face of a sculpture. My irises are striated sheets of ice, with sheer, pin-prick pupils in each. He can almost hear the song I’m singing, vibrating in his bones. 

This is a dream, he says, but his mouth doesn’t move. You’re a ghost.

Then I am gone.

Instead, there are bony hands on his mask and clammy fingers slapping his head. A man with sunken raccoon eyes and hollow cheeks, with a shaved head and green eyes, is leaning over him, cramming himself into the cradle of the pipe organ to reach him. His mouth is moving and his metal legs are clanging against the pipes, creating strange vibrations. GRIN looks past him and sees the curling metal prongs below the man’s knees, where his shins should be. The pool of blood has vanished.

The man is mouthing a word, his teeth flashing: GRIN.

GRIN studies the man’s face like a diamond.

NO-FOOT? GRIN asks soundlessly, pushing his mask up onto his forehead. The man nods vigorously, breaking into a smile. He holds up his mask, glimmering faintly in the dark.

GRIN reaches up both his arms and wraps them around NO-FOOT’s shoulders. They’ve been playing and planning together for two years, but always in dreams. He’s never seen NO-FOOT’s face, or met him in the flesh. 

NO-FOOT taps the tops of GRIN’s ears, mouthing Are they okay?

GRIN smiles grimly and shakes his head. No, he mouths.

“Whaa habbened?” GRIN asks. “The shouw.”

NO-FOOT takes a deep breath through his nose. He mouths That ghost tried to…I don’t know.

NO-FOOT shrugs, looks around, and mimes writing something on his palm. Do you have paper?

GRIN’s eyes go wide. 

Paper.

He pushes past NO-FOOT and crawls his way out of the guts of the organ, out into the basement, illuminated with the dying glow of the furnace. He runs over to a stack of blank staff paper scattered across a table and upends his cup of tools to find his stylus, then sets it to paper, desperately scribbling and squinting to make sure he’s writing on the right lines.

There is a song in his head.

Half an hour later, he is still writing.

B, A, D, C sharp, C, C…

C, A, F, F, D, E flat…

The notes are in his mind, as clear as the ringing of individual bells, stretching out to eternity. NO-FOOT is standing by his side, watching. He won’t understand until he sees the whole thing, then he can write the words and make the sensations. This is the song the crane woman had been singing to him.

After another half-hour, he sets down his stylus and calls NO-FOOT over again. He shuffles the papers into order and hands them over. He watches the frown develop on NO-FOOT’s face as he realizes that the composition consists of thousands of notes, meant to be played at 480 beats per minute, with at least eight different individual parts, all meant to be played simultaneously.

NO-FOOT says something to him, still looking at the page. GRIN cups a hand to his ear. NO-FOOT grimaces as he remembers.

Death waltz? NO-FOOT testily writes on a piece of paper.

GRIN smiles. A ‘death waltz’ is a derogatory dreamwright term for a piece that is impossibly complicated, bordering on stupidity. Playing music in dreams means being able to memorize a composition until it is as familiar as breathing. A piece of music that becomes too complicated will come out blurry and dull, like watercolors. But GRIN’s mind is stretching farther than anything he has imagined, and the clarity is astounding. In his head he is already sketching out the way to turn the cacophony into a beautiful whole, a net of overlapping echoes.

He pushes more of the pages into NO-FOOT’s hands and points at his open mouth, then traces invisible shapes in the air. 

The words. The visuals.

NO-FOOT leans against the table and picks up a pen. He is holding the first sheet, tapping his finger on the table at half speed. From his lips, GRIN can tell he is singing it under his breath. NO-FOOT begins to draw with his eyes closed, one hand holding the paper in place. GRIN leans closer. This is automatic drawing, art from the subconscious, the same state of mind that dreamers inhabit between waking and dreaming. He had suspected NO-FOOT had synesthesia, but now he is seeing it in action—he is turning the notes into images. 

GRIN watches as the drawings develop from ovals into rough concentric circles, then little details. NO-FOOT’s strokes become eyes, then eyelashes and irises. He keeps humming the song, and starts to draw flashes: half a woman’s face and a silhouette composed of rough lines, more an impression than a drawing. At the edges, her profile dissolves into lighter strokes. Feathers. GRIN’s heart swells as he recognizes the sketches. It’s me. 

His eyes run over the other pages, excited. He gathers them up, ready to start playing the song for himself and hear it echoing in the organ’s huge pipes. Two steps from the table, he stops, his heart sinking and the excitement evaporating from his limbs. He remembers he is deaf.

For the first time, GRIN smells the sweat soaked into his clothes and tastes the stale spit in his mouth. He can’t play the organ anymore. He can’t tune the organ anymore, or repair it. Except for the severance pay from the Honiza family when he was dismissed, he has no money. He’d spent it all on tezuma and old books on obscure music compositions.

He goes back to his table and sets down his pages again. He picks up NO-FOOT’s smooth, conch-like mask from the table, then looks again at the sunken-eyed, wasted man sketching on his table. NO-FOOT is mouthing words, drawing something in the firelight, lost in another world. GRIN walks closer and kneels down so his eyes are level with the surface of the table, looking up at his partner. This was the man who danced on phantom limbs in dreams, but here, in this basement in Senkaku, he is only flesh. 

When NO-FOOT opens his eyes, he looks down at the sketches and screws up his face in disgust.

“Her? She’s the one that ruined the show. Did she put this melody in your head?”

GRIN writes back on a scrap of paper. YES. SHE FREED ME FROM THE DREAM.

NO-FOOT peers down at GRIN’s note and scoffs. “Isn’t that generous of her? She was the one who got you trapped there in the first place.”

GRIN scribbles down something under his first sentence. I THINK SHE WANTS TO HELP.

NO-FOOT shakes his head. “That’s not how her kind operates. There’s always an ulterior motive, some kind of angle they think you’re too dumb to see. I told you when we started working together, no favors, no gifts, no patronage, nothing from ghosts.

NO-FOOT steps away from the table and sneers at the sketches. “Once they have their hooks in you, they’ll drag you into making a deal, and that deal is always going to be the same, just different words: they keep your soul in a cage and make you dance like a monkey until they get bored. Then they trade you to some other ghost or eat you themselves. But it all starts with making you think you’re special. Meanwhile, out in the real world, your body is decaying in a coma house, like all the other idiots who made deals with ghosts. That’s how it works.”

GRIN narrows his eyes and writes down another line. YOU DON’T KNOW FOR SURE.

NO-FOOT scoffs and puts a hand on GRIN’s shoulder. “I do know. Come on. Let’s get your ears checked out.”

Each night, the flesh-and-blood bodies of dreamwrights fill the coma houses in Senkaku like stacks of wood and their sleeping souls find their way to the other Senkaku, the one that exists in dreams. That mirror-city is the Yoshiza, whose streets and buildings match the waking Senkaku only loosely. The Yoshiza is where they make names for themselves.

These days in Senkaku, shrines and cults spring up around celebrities, the poets and the artists, and for a while their autographs are worth more than gold. Invitations from the courts of the drug lords and masons flood in, and money flows as freely as the liquor when they go out.

But towering over all the petty stars are the dreamwrights. MIRROR-HEART. THIEF. BLACK. Their fans paint the sides of buildings with their names in the middle of the night, writing love notes in twenty-foot-tall letters. Their fans carve their names onto tables, wooden joists, scaffolding, tattoo them across their skin, weave them into robes and scrawl them onto the margins of menus in tea houses. The popularity of dreamwrights is measured by the ubiquity of their name. But for every one that makes a name, a hundred wither away, and no one remembers them.

For the living, the bridge between Senkaku and the Yoshiza is the blood of the tezu flower, distilled, purified, and dripped onto the tongue. This drug, tezuma, is the gateway to lucid dreaming, and it was the users of tezuma who found the path to the Yoshiza. Rumors spread about the dream-city, where doors led into nightmares and ghosts held snaking parades across a city that never slept. Soon coma houses were built and people who had no use for waking life could spend the days and nights stuffed onto a shelf, traveling the Yoshiza. 

But the Yoshiza is our place, a place for ghosts. I remember the first dreamwrights, the ones who played simple songs and struggled to paint anything beyond a memory. We laughed at them and tricked them into taking off their masks so we could steal their faces and possess their waking bodies. Still, they came to us, asking for inspiration and patronage. Sleepwalking and insomnia haunted the ones who stayed too long. Phantom limbs pain crippled the ones who broke bones in the Yoshiza, and wasting hunger starved out the ones who tried to eat the chocolate or drink the alcohol in the shops. But in time, they began to eschew the waking world, deride the flesh—they wanted to live here, with us, for as long as their bodies could withstand it.

Senkaku’s first celebrity was COKOLO, its favored son, poet and dreamwright. After four years of living on the line between waking and dreaming, drowning in tezuma and liquor and an endless stream of fans, he leapt off a building in Senkaku and burst his head open like a watermelon. The spot where his head hit the street is now a stone pillar of roses, his favorite flower, and the pillar is covered with the kisses of his worshippers.

A cold, wet afternoon in the circular streets of Senkaku, where rain runs off rooftops and soaks into people’s skin. Through the mist and the scent of petrichor, NO-FOOT and GRIN stumble down the street, their clothes soaked in stale sweat. They are huddled under one umbrella, NO-FOOT holding onto GRIN to keep his metal prong-legs from slipping on the wet paving stones. Their eyes are hidden behind dark glasses to keep the daylight from disturbing their migraines, and their mouths and noses are covered by black rags. Every now and then they lift the bottom of the rags and spit out the blood pooling in their mouths. Behind their lips, their teeth are black and their gums are bleeding, the fruits of tezuma addiction. GRIN’s eighty-two silver pieces of severance pay jangle in his pocket, and the two of them pray not to get robbed. They make their way down a long, narrow street that slopes down into the Kaozaru, Senkaku’s flesh district.

Three years earlier, NO-FOOT had been dragged down this same street by two fellow narcomancers after he’d broken both his legs leaping buildings in the Yoshiza. They’d pulled him to the door of Joru the surgeon and shouted that he couldn’t walk anymore. NO-FOOT had just laid there, screaming from the pain of thousands of needles undulating across his skin. Underneath his flesh, his legs were perfectly intact, but he could still feel the phantom fractures. By the end of the night, he was carrying the bloody stumps of his feet in a burlap bag and trying to stumble home alone on curling metal legs. Psychosomatic, Joru called it. Phantom limb pain. That night, he dreamed he could walk, but his feet were gone.

Now he is going back to Joru to see if he has a trick to replace GRIN’s eardrums, and if eighty-two pieces will be enough to pay for it. There is the hope that GRIN’s deafness is only physical, that he had ruptured his eardrums by screaming in his sleep. That could be fixed. But if it is psychosomatic, GRIN would be whole only in his dreams. NO-FOOT’s right prong slides across a cobblestone, and he braces himself against GRIN. He spits on his own knee in frustration.

The Kaozaru is marked by blood-red gates with a weathered portrait of a vivisected man spread across its open doors, drawn in faded gold. NO-FOOT squints at the people passing by, carrying tubs of pig blood and piles of white linen, trying to find someone to ask for directions. A pair of leper girls walk up to them, but NO-FOOT waves them off and pulls GRIN away from the debtor cages, which hold the wretches who have defaulted on their loans and now have to repay them by becoming vessels for growing new kidneys, new stomachs, or new eyes. A man in a cage is screaming at GRIN from behind the bars, but GRIN’s gaze is fixed on a crane perched on the branch of a stunted tree growing over a wall. From the crane’s ice-blue eyes, I look back at him—GRIN has a narrow, pale face, a curly red beard and ginger hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Together, NO-FOOT and GRIN pick their way down worn stone stairways, going deeper into the district where the black market surgeons operate. NO-FOOT stops a messenger-woman and asks her where Juro’s shop is. Meanwhile, GRIN wanders over to a puddle and glances down at the ripples spreading across its surface. I look back at him from the water, but his gaze is pulled away by a hand on his shoulder.

“He’s this way,” NO-FOOT mutters to GRIN.

When NO-FOOT leads them back out of the Kaozaru three hours later, they’re soaked to the bone and reeking of rotting meat. GRIN’s deafness is not physical, and Juro had congratulated him via sign language that he would never hear anything in the waking world again. He had still taken most of their money for the examination.

NO-FOOT takes GRIN to a soup shop outside the Kaozaru, but they are immediately pushed back out into the rain by the owners due to their smell and the blood on their sandals. NO-FOOT spits on the shutters of their windows and walks away, holding GRIN’s shoulder for support. They wander around in the rain for a while under their umbrella, heading into the upper districts. Between them they have twenty silver pieces, enough for two nights in a bad inn for both of them if they eat once a day. 

They steal new robes from a clothesline left out in the rain and take turns dressing while the other holds the umbrella. Shivering, they make their way to a tea shop in the Izo district, slipping in the front door and sitting by the stove for a while to dry their robes. 

One of the servers comes over to them. 

“You have to order something if you come in,” she says quietly but firmly. 

NO-FOOT knows what she is really saying: You look like vagrants.

They get up and walk to a table. The server is a young woman with black hair pulled back in a bun and a red birthmark on her throat. She pulls out chairs for them at a corner table and clears away the old cups. NO-FOOT orders ginger tea, and GRIN wites “GREEN TEA” on a scrap paper and hands it to her. She takes it from him warily and looks at both of them. Her eyes glance down at NO-FOOT’s metal prong-legs.

“Phantom limbs,” she says faintly. Her tone tells NO-FOOT that she’s heard about them, but never seen them. He takes off his black glasses and looks her in the eyes.

“Do I need legs to be in here?” he asks bluntly.

“No,” she mumbles. “Call me if you need anything. I’m Mono.” She walks toward the kitchen.

NO-FOOT lets his head hang; he’s exhausted. GRIN taps him on the shoulder and pointS out the window, where a crane is perched on the sill.

“It just wants out of the rain,” NO-FOOT mutters.

I tap on the glass with my beak.

GRIN tries to write something on the piece of wet, crumpled paper from his pocket, but it tears under his stylus so he walks over to the next table over, where three girls are folding paper. After some awkward gesturing, they give him a piece. He comes back to the table and writes on it, spinning it around to face NO-FOOT when he’s done. 

I THINK SHE WANTS TO HELP US

“Ignore her. It’s part of her game. She’ll keep tempting us until she gets bored.”

WHAT IF YOU’RE WRONG?

“Listen to me, listen,” NO-FOOT says, whispering. “Yoshiza ghosts are all the same. I’ve been living here all my life, and not one has done anything out of the goodness of their hearts. To them, we’re novelties—we’re exciting for a while, and then they toss us aside. They take everything from you and leave you with nothing once they’re done. ”

GRIN scribbles on the paper. SAME DEAL IN SENKAKU.

NO-FOOT chuckles bitterly and shakes his head. He takes out a knife and begins carving something into the table. GRIN folds his piece of paper in half, then unfolds it and folds it again from the opposite side.

When the tea came, it burns their tongues and hurts their gums. They get up and leave without paying and head back out into the rain. As he closes the door behind them, NO-FOOT sees the server, Mono, running her hand over the new names carved into the table. Her head jerks up as she realizes there is no money, and she catches a glimpse of them before the door closes. NO-FOOT holds up his rain-soaked palm in farewell.

When sunset comes, NO-FOOT and GRIN are sitting together on the edge of the reservoir lake that sits at the bottom of the Izo district, their feet hanging low enough to almost touch the water. The rain dots the surface of the lake with a million expanding circles, distorting their reflections and the lanterns of the shops. It is still bitterly cold, but GRIN doesn’t want to head to the inn yet. NO-FOOT looks blankly at the water. He’s still hungry, his wet clothes are stuck to his skin, and his head feels like a hot, broken kettle leaking water through the cracks. Tears begin to well up in the corners of his eyes.

“God, I hate all this,” he mumbles.

No matter how he adds it up, it comes out to nothing. He had maybe two or three years left before the real world eats him alive. Between alcohol, tezuma, and muscle atrophy, both his body and GRIN’s are already husks. One night his organs will give out, or he’ll suffocate face down in a coma house. He remembers the first morning after going to Juro’s, waking up and realizing that this was real, that he was a cripple forever. NO-FOOT glances over at GRIN. He is folding something new, but figuring it out as he goes along, folding and unfolding the paper. His lips are pursed, whistling faint notes. NO-FOOT knows he won’t survive three months in Senkaku without money, not as a deaf man—from actors to cooks, everyone else in Senkaku went into debt to enhance their bodies with decorations and augmentations, so anyone who remained a cripple was assumed be too hopelessly destitute or feckless to be worth saving. GRIN would be dead soon, and no one would remember him at all.

When NO-FOOT had gazed into my soul, he had tasted the terror of dying—the leeching away of senses, the splintering of memory, and the silent emptiness so vast that no sound could make a ripple in it. Now, looking at the rain-soaked buildings of Senkaku, he could see it everywhere.

Out on the horizon, the sunlight is dying. Time is already marching on. It makes him want to scream the way GRIN had, during that last terrible show. 

Instead, NO-FOOT stares at the ripples in the water. There has to be a way out of all this, a door that leads out of the world, not just a reprieve from it, he thinks. A way to wake up from our lives. 

He blinks and stares again. One by one, the ripples are disappearing, but the rain is still tapping on his shoulders. There is a ringing in his ears, like a finger on the rim of a wine glass, and then something passes over their heads. He sees GRIN’s head jerk up, and there is a childlike eagerness on his ginger-bearded face. NO-FOOT follows his gaze.

Across the reservoir, a white and black crane is walking toward them on long, thin legs, growing taller as it comes, changing its shape until it is a woman with long dark hair and a robe made of feathers, holding a lacquered blue umbrella on her shoulder. GRIN rises slowly, smoothing out his wet robes. With a rain-soaked palm, he stands at the edge of the reservoir and offers her what he has been folding: a paper crane.

“For you,” he says with a fumbling tongue.

NO-FOOT watches as I step forward, my translucent feet flashing out from beneath my robes, making single ripples on the water. I wear a blindfold with patterns of orchids, keeping the rays of the sun from touching my eyes. Slowly, I uncurl my delicate fingers and close them lightly around the paper crane. I smile, my little ivory teeth shining. My blind gaze rises to look at them and my lips move, but only echoes come out.

I mouth the words Can you forgive me?

NO-FOOT rests his forehead on his dripping palm. He drags his hand across his clammy skin and sighs.

“I know what you’re going to offer us,” NO-FOOT mutters. “New cages. A new owner.”

I slowly shake my head. No cages. No masters.

NO-FOOT furrows his brows. “Then what do you want?”

I look up at the terraced streets rising above my head. I remember how it used to be. The city, the people, the music. You are making this city into something new. I want to see what comes next.

I step out of the reservoir and walk up the street, floating six inches above the paving stones, then hold out my hands. 

Will you come with me?

The sun has set and the streets have faded into shadow. Above the heads of NO-FOOT and GRIN, orange street lamps silently burst into life one after another. The rain is coming down hard, running in streams down NO-FOOT’s face, getting in his eyes. It turns the lights into brilliant constellations, blurring everything but my shape in front of him.

He watches GRIN reach out and take my right hand. 

Finally, NO-FOOT takes my left.

Together we rise to the top of one of a tenement, drifting up through the rain, our legs trailing below us like jellyfish. I bring them to the roof, set them down on one of the tiled slopes, then touch down next to them. I turn in a slow circle, tapping points in the air with my fingertips, and one by one, the lights of Senkaku go out around us, until we are standing in an ocean of darkness. Then I raise my arms, as if I’m calling up an orchestra. A glow begins to gather in the city, and from the darkness rises the green-tinted landscape of the Yoshiza, in all its splendor. I took one, two, three steps off the building into the night air, turn to them, and hold out my hands once again.

In a flash, GRIN has put on his mask and is stepping off the roof. He sets one foot in the air, then another, until he is standing next to me. I smile delightedly and clap my hands. My blindfolded gaze turns to NO-FOOT, and GRIN spreads his arms wide, as if to say easy!

NO-FOOT steps up onto the ledge and closes his eyes. There is still rain running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. He can smell the city, even if he couldn’t see it: frying oil, wet lumber, and smoke. There is nothing here for him. 

He slips his mask on and steps off the roof.

Mono looks up at the hundreds of paper kites floating above the Yoshiza, their golden fabric emblazoned with the names THIEF and BLACK. The streets are packed tonight, and the cedar-walled hotels and smoke-filled bars are overflowing with people. She tears her eyes away from the face of the seven-foot-tall ghost gliding by her side and turns herself sideways to squeeze between two people who, like idiots, have stopped in the middle of the street. 

It is only her third time crossing over to the Yoshiza and the tezuma has already given her a headache. It blurs her vision and pulses hard behind her eyes, but whenever she lifts her hands to her head, she realizes that the pain isn’t in her skull, but floating somewhere above her body. On top of that, her old, chipped fish mask doesn’t hide the birthmark on her neck. But she is here, and the giddiness in her limbs is slowly rising the deeper she goes. 

After seeing the two dreamwrights in the tea shop today, she had to come. The smell is what she loves the most. Besides the scent of chocolate and liquor, there is a simmering heat to the Yoshiza that glazes everyone’s skin in sweat, and she loves the heavy fragrance of it drifting through the clean, cool night air. It makes her think of slick bodies sliding by one another like salamanders. She wants to dance. 

Threading her way down to the lower streets, following the strings of the kites, she finally comes to the circular reservoir lake at the bottom of the district. Its surface is crowded with floating paper lanterns, drifting in glowing shoals that illuminate the plaza with faint light. The edges of the pool are piled with mounds of robes, as if hundreds of people have suddenly vanished, leaving their clothes behind. Mono shrugs off her own robes, glancing around in case anyone is looking at her. Above her head, the crowds of the Yoshiza move amid a panoply of tiny silver bells, bobbing lanterns, shrieks, and laughter, flowing through the streets like salmon moving forever upstream. 

Mono sits down and dips her foot into the water slowly, then pushes aside the shoals of floating lanterns and slides in. With these reservoir shows, she heard you have to be careful when getting in, or else you may break the surface tension of the water.

As soon as her head is under, she feels herself dropping down through a hole in the world. The dreamscape is a dark, vertical shaft, reaching down for miles, its walls painted with flickering faces and the music throbbing like the chambers of a heart. Swirling clouds of colors burn in the water like highways, and everywhere people are cartwheeling and spinning in time with the beat. She descends down the center of the shaft, towards the two tiny figures that lay at the bottom. There is one lying on their back, looking up at the surface, their voice booming. The other is moving in their own dance, a silhouette of light controlling the shadows and colors like a puppet. 

THIEF and BLACK, she thinks.

She feels her mind slide into the music. Soon she is looking at her masked face through the eyes of hundreds of other people at once, cycling between their heads like a merry-go-round, with her dancing body at the center. She is losing herself in the pounding rhythms and the taste of sweat on her tongue. For a split-second, she sees a pair of ice-blue eyes looking back at her.

Back at the surface of the reservoir, two girls are excitedly stripping off their robes, helping one another undo their sashes and adjusting their masks. They kick off their sandals and sit on the edge of the water, holding hands. One of them glances around nervously and freezes. Standing next to them, silent and still as statues, are two figures wrapped in black robes trimmed with gold. One of them wears a red porcelain mask, grinning like a monster, and the other has a blank, expressionless one that reflects the light of the lanterns in iridescent ripples. There are no feet in his sandals.

The girls watch the pair back up a few steps, away from the lake, shrugging their shoulders in circles and bouncing in their sandals like boxers. The one without feet catches their gaze and motions to cover their ears. The girls eyes widen. Then, bowing their heads down, the pair sprint forward. The girls watch in terror as they dive into the pool head-first. There is a split-second of wire-thin silence, and then the ripples left in their wake rebound and collide, exploding like fault lines. One hundred feet of rolling, thunderous laughter erupt from the water and echo across the Yoshiza.

The world around Mono ends in thunder. Roiling waves of noise destroy the euphoria coursing through her body, and she feels gravity jerk her skeleton up through endless successions of freezing and burning, then slam it against the sky and force it through the cracks in the earth until she is alone and naked on an endless plane of black, humming noise. Her lungs reinflate and her esophagus opens, and in spite of herself, she lets out an incredulous laugh. Goosebumps are stiffening on her arms, and she can feel every muscle in her body humming like violin strings. The humming begins to rise, and she bites her lip and closes her eyes. 

This is something new. 

The music kicks in, and someone starts singing. It is a different voice from before. Someone, another pair of dreamwrights, have hijacked THIEF and BLACK’s show. She can hear the words echoing around her.

Close your eyes and die, come and say goodnight

Our blood will stain the moon, and you’ll remember tonight

Towering walls of sound crush her bones like a grape between two giant hands. Her mind is struck free, and in an instant she is in the sky above the Yoshiza, looking down at the lights and crowds. She is falling toward the streets, dancing as if she is already dead. She breaks through the paving stones like water, gasping for air, laughing like a kid again. All around her, dozens of melodies and harmonies are unfolding and crisscrossing like the threads of a loom, tessellating and interlocking. She opens her eyes and finds herself face to face with a mask the color of a conch shell, reflecting her own face in its rainbows. It is singing to her.

Show me the night, and how to fly

If everyone has to die, I’d rather do it in the sky

She is staring into a pair of jittering green eyes, and she remembers the names carved into her table at the tea house.

Her eyes open again.

She awakes standing knee-deep in the reservoir of the Izo District. The sky is alight with stars and the plaza is silent around her. Her wet nightgown is stuck to her legs and water is working its way up the fabric. She takes off her mask and wretches from the sheer cold soaking into her skin. It smells like it has just rained.

Around her, almost a hundred others stand soaked and confused around the reservoir, looking up at unfamiliar buildings. More fill the stairs leading down to the plaza surrounding the reservoir, and Mono realizes that they have been sleepwalking.

Shakily, she climbs out of the reservoir. She has never sleepwalked beyond her own bedroom before. She points herself in the direction of home and clenches her eyes shut. Her lungs are working hard and her body feels tight, as if she is still freefalling from an endless height. She starts to walk.

After a few steps, her feet brush against something soft, and she opens her eyes again. She is standing in front of an old, dilapidated wooden building, twelve stories high, and her toes are tangled in a wet robe stained with blood. Scattered around her are porcelain shards— bright red or the colors of the rainbow. 

Two bodies are lying on the paving stones, crumpled from the impact.

Want to learn more about the world of OROBORO? Go here.

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Those who explore hidden paths are rewarded.