Even Minhyun’s patience had a limit.

After all this time in Nuest much had changed. For example, he had fallen in love. But there had been one – and only one - reason for him to join. And that reason still stood. Sujin.

Junior had promised to use the resources of his organization to aid the search. Minhyun needed to know what had happened to her. Most of all he needed to know if she was alive. His sister had been his everything.

Of course it was perfectly understandable that Nuest had other priorities. Minhyun didn’t need to write a list to see that the crazy stuff that had happened greatly outweighed the search for a single person who had gone missing years ago.

But the total lack of results was too much to accept quietly. He knew that the organization had followed all his leads. Every piece of knowledge he had extracted from dreams all across Korea had been investigated. Junior had told him about each one. Kidnapper rings, child slavers, organ thieves. Everything was a dead end, even if the crimes were real. There was no trace of Sujin.

So he began to dreamwalk anew. He hadn’t really done it in a while – not since the disaster at the Japanese base. And of course there wasn’t anything relevant to find here in China. Maybe Minhyun would ask Junior to send him back to Korea for a while, just so he could find new leads. Someone had to know something. But until then, this was practice. He couldn’t allow himself to get rusty.

***

The first dream he found was naturally Aron’s who slept right next to him in the physical world. Minhyun never invaded Aron’s dreams without explicit prior consent these days. Dating a mind reader who could delve through your subconscious every night was surely a bit unnerving. Though the boys trusted each other fully, Minhyun wasn’t going to invade a place as private as the mind unless Aron let him.

He had insisted on that rule, not Aron.

A part of him wondered if their relationship progressed too fast because they could share their minds every now and then. Was that a sustainable development? They rarely talked about anything, simply mended their psyches together at night. They never really communicated, only saw and sensed and felt. That was going to lead to problems, surely. But what problems?

Flying through the dreamscape was helping Minhyun to clear his head. It was a leisurely stroll through fantastical palaces, apartments and forests. Drifting aimlessly from dream to dream, he paid no attention to their contents or the people who were having them. The void connecting the scape was his path and his destination.

The boy was alone with his thoughts.

Until he wasn’t.

Never had he met anyone outside a dream, so this came as a shock at first. He was the only one who could access the white, diffuse area between set pieces and he was the only one who could bring people there – hell, if Junior was right, he was the one creating the scape.

And yet, there was a silhouette. Out in the nebulous area between dreams. Far away, almost at the very edge of what Minhyun could still perceive before the void’s foggy nature obscured it. A tiny, humanoid figure, flying perpendicular to him, moving away steadily. There was no frame of reverence for distance but the boy’s avatar still had to physically – or rather metaphysically – cross the scape.

He had all the power of a lucid dreamer at his disposal. The other dream-walker might not have seen him, might even want to avoid him, but he had to find out more.

Minhyun summoned binoculars from nothing. They were perfectly steady and focused on the vanishing silhouette. It wasn’t enough to resolve the image, so the binoculars became a telescope. The magnification was arbitrarily strong.

Now he could see, in detail, with whom he was sharing the land between minds.

His heart jumped. Even though he could only see her profile and even though it had been years, he recognized her, down to the pony tail. Indubitably. Even the cozy clothes of subdued color were exactly her style.

Sujin was a dream-walker like him. And she was close by in physical reality.

Already, her avatar was drifting off. Minhyun summoned a fancy jet pack he had recently seen in the dream of a science fiction author and flew after her, propelled by flame.

It wasn’t enough. Somehow she must have figured out how to fly faster than at a jogging pace without props. Minhyun had always assumed this limitation to be inherent in the scape’s mechanics and felt anger at himself for never testing this hypothesis.

The next few seconds were spent trying to link with her, but couldn’t find a mind to reach for.

He summoned a helicopter, the fastest thing he had been in recently. Of course he had no idea how to fly it but he just had to imagine it already flying and the lucid powers did the rest. It still wasn’t enough. Sujin was slipping into the fog.

Minhyun set off a nuclear explosion.

The detonation kicked a few dozen people out of the scape, causing them to awaken abruptly wherever they slept. But the sound didn’t carry inside the void and he wasn’t even sure if he could reach her at all.

Precious seconds remained and then she was gone. But he wouldn’t give in to sorrow. Not while there were options.

***

“Aron. Aron!”

“Hmpfgl-“

“Aron, wake up!”

“Wha-?”

 “Get up you lazy bastard. In which room is Junior staying?”

“Huh?”

“Ugh. You’re useless.”

Minhyun shoved his feet into fuzzy slippers and rushed out of the room in his underwear. But not without turning on the light, causing his boyfriend to groan in pain.

He did some estimations as he walked along the corridor in search for the stair case’s light switch. There was no way Sujin was on the new head quarter’s grounds. And those had been built in the middle of nowhere. She was likely in one of the surrounding settlements, but that could include a radius of an entire province. If she had learned to fly that fast and kept moving in a straight path she could cross vast distances. And that was assuming she had gone to sleep at the beginning of night time and wasn’t flying through the scape since earlier in the day. But how likely was it that she kept moving straight ahead with no diversion? What would be the point of that?

Flicking on the corridor’s light switch, he saw no reason to wait for the neon tubes to catch on and just made his way up the metal stairs. His mind was still reeling from the realization.

His sister had the same powers he had. Was that likely? There was no data since nobody else had ever mentioned siblings. Had Junior ever claimed that he knew them to be the only ones for sure? Minhyun didn’t recall.

Nuest’s leader wasn’t in his bed. Or even his room. It looked practically uninhabited.

He should have really tried to get to know the base instead of doing the do with Aron every free second of the day. With no clue where the other’s rooms were located he did the next logical thing.

It was rude and reserved for emergencies but he couldn’t exactly ask for permission when they were still asleep.

Minhyun forced four minds into a link with his.

“Wake uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!”

Once he felt the boys violently slammed into the waking state, he sent “Everybody. Conference room. Now.”

***

One in the morning. Harsh lights reflecting off a polished table into the faces of tired boys.

“I found my sister.”

Baekho froze mid-yawn. Ren was taken aback. Junior, in particular, was extra shocked, his eyes looking like they were about to pop out of his head.

The boys in pajamas and various stages of undress – Aron had brought Minhuyn’s shirt with him, mindfully – sat around the oval desk in a lavishly furnished, modern glass cube of a conference room, surrounded by nightly abandoned office space.

“You… entered her dream, I’m guessing?” Ren spoke up.

“No, she has my power, too. She’s a dream-walker. And a better one than I am for that matter. She moved faster than I thought was possible. I couldn’t reach her in time.”

By now Junior seemed to wear a permanent look of despair and confusion. What was his problem? Did he not like it when he wasn’t the one supplying unknowable information?

“I estimate,” Minhyun continued, “that she’s not too far from here. We have to look at the cities in the area. The whole province at worst. Surveillance footage, traffic cameras, asking people in the streets. Make it happen, Junior. But for the moment I’d like- Junior, are you even listening?”

The leader had been staring blankly at the table. Apparently the boy was useless without a cup of coffee. Well, they probably all were. Minhyun did his best to slow down his breathing. They had time. She was around here. They would find her. He had to believe it.