“...But that’s the gist of it.” Josh concluded his recounting of events and was met with confused looks.

It had taken some time to get to that point. Everyone had taken turns in and out of the bathroom, gradually alleviating the stench of sweaty college student from the apartment. And breakfast had been eaten too, though they had moved over to the living room to eat so that they could sit more comfortably while Josh had started recounting events. Josh had taken up residence in an armchair, while Sara and Connor were positioned across the coffee table from him on the couch. They were all on the edges of their seats and leaning over to eat their food over the table though, so it felt like they were all closer together than they actually were.

“They really were as cryptic as they could be…” Connor muttered while he shook his head in confusion. “I mean, some of that made sense. Like the part about being left behind, that’s pretty par for the course of getting a mark. But all that nonsense with the bar code tattoo. What was up with that?”

“You think maybe it’s a different kind of mark?” Sara asked, quietly.

It wasn’t the first time Josh had broached the subject with her, it had been one of his initial questions when he’d shown her his sketch of the alien mark from his dreams. But it hadn’t been as real then. None of it had been. Back then, Josh barely felt like marks were real at all. But now he was engrossed in the mess of marks and alien intelligence and reality beyond his mortal understanding. It hadn’t even been that long either. Josh tried to count back the days to when he had been normal, but it hadn’t been more than two weeks and there were several days of that where he’d been mostly unconscious. But that reminded him.

“I don’t know about the bar code, but I did have another dream about the other mark…” Josh wanted to tell them everything about that too, but it was much more complicated to try and describe.

Mention of the other mark and a dream seemed to get a negative reaction, particularly from Connor. “But I was with you the whole time. Is it getting worse?”

“No, no.” Josh held up his hands to try and correct the direction of the conversation. “It wasn’t a nightmare and the other thing didn’t attack me. I just kept my distance, and it kept its distance. It was like the first dream, but we both sort of decided to let each other know that we were there. I spent most of the dream just looking into the void, really. It was kind of wild. I can’t put it into words, but it felt like I was on a whole other level of understanding.”

“That’s a lot to take in, Josh.” Sara still sounded worried, but it was quickly overcome with a trusting smile that made Josh feel like she was listing. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? The dreams might not be bad right now, but if you’re having them while we’re still around, they might be getting too powerful for you to deal with.”

“I’m not really as worried about it as I was before.” Josh ran his fingers through the hair on the back of his head as he tried to put together the words Gul had used to describe the situation. “If it really is another thing trying to communicate with me, like Gul said, it might be just as terrified of me. But that’s assuming that it can feel fear… It’s actually really hard to think about. But I’m probably just as alien to it as I think it is to me. Whatever it’s doing, it might think is perfectly natural. It could have no idea it’s hurting me like it is. And I think we both kind of recognize that now.”

“You think you’ve actually mad e that clear?” Connor asked. “Because I’d still be really nervous. Just because it could be peaceful and just trying to make contact, doesn’t mean it is.”

Josh nodded in slow agreement. It hadn’t felt like a very deep connection, and Connor was right, it was entirely possible that the creature was incredibly dangerous and malicious. But it hadn’t felt that way exactly during the last dream. “You’re right. I don’t think I ever want to move any further into any sort of communication with it, because it felt really weirdly personal just letting it know I existed. I don’t really even want to do that much again.”

“Just in case it does get worse…” Sara started her question quietly, but then trailed off before she could actually say what she wanted.

“That’s not like you. What were you going to say?” Josh was trying to look into Sara’s eyes, but she was avoiding his gaze.

“It’s just… I know it’s still so soon. But you were pretty gung ho about giving up on going back to a normal life. And it’s been a few days since you decided you were going to try and get deeper information about marks and stuff…” Sara trailed off again, but now Josh knew where she was headed.

“You want to know if I want a mark or not.”

“I do too, but I wasn’t going to ask.” Connor chimed in.

Josh leaned back in the armchair he’d positioned himself in opposite the couch. “Why not? It’s a fair question.”

“It’s personal though, and it’s not like we can pass a mark on to you.”

“Connor, I’ve heard you snore though the night and you’ve met my family. By all accounts, we have a more intimate relationship than anyone else I’ve ever dated.” Josh frowned as he said it. It had been uncomfortable enough when his family had teased him about it, but it made sense in a certain light.

“That’s kind of sad.” Sara said with a slow nod. “Have you never seen your significant other naked, then?”

The question had come out of left field and Josh couldn’t do anything else but stare at her in disbelief.

“Or is that… did you two…?” Sara didn’t actually finish her questions, but she was wagging her eyebrows.

“Nope.” Connor answered calmly and confidently. “It would have given his family too much satisfaction.”

Josh was beat red in the face by that point and no amount of shaking or light slaps to the face were changing that. But at least, after a moment, Josh managed to speak.

“Anyway… I was going to say, yes.”

“Yes, you’ve decided? Or—”

Josh cut Sara off. “Yup.”

“—Oh. And you decided…?”

“I decided that I would like to not be the most helpless person in this apartment.”

“So…?” Connor canted his head to the side, asking a whole new question with even fewer words.

“I think I should move in too… if you guys are okay with that?” Josh hadn’t been very sure about that part, but getting a mark seemed to lend directly to him moving in. “But it had kind of been implied… I know you guys never really asked, and I don’t want to assume anything.”

“Oh, no. Absolutely. If you’re getting a mark, then you have to move in too. It’d just be too weird to have to navigate around Kerry with everything else you’ll have to learn.”

The mention of his roommate caught Josh off guard. He had almost totally forgotten about him. It started a sort of downward spiral of worries in Josh’s mind as he realized that there would be additional steps in actually moving residences. He would have to pack all of his things and move them out, change his address with the dorm administrator and the school administrator; and Kerry would probably be there for all of it. And, frankly, this whole ordeal was almost his fault. If Josh had never relented and started the astronomy course with Kerry, he never would have met Sara and none of what had transpired since would have happened. Josh would have still been perfectly normal and probably bound for a life of relative success. There would have been no dealing with assassins and alien entities and other realities. There would have been several more semesters of college courses and mundane assignments.

“Actually… Maybe… could we move my things over here sooner rather than later?”

“It’s”—Connor leaned to check the digital clock on the oven in the kitchen—”almost ten already. Classes are probably getting into full swing. We could probably get in and out in one or two trips while Kerry’s in classes.”

“Yeah, you don’t have that much stuff in your room…” Sara muttered.

The comment caught Connor off guard and he turned to look at his best friend with confusion and shock. “Sara Wilder, have you been in a college boy’s room alone with said boy? In direct violation of your mothers rules?”

“It was one time after Josh had that first nightmare, and he was way too afraid to actually do anything. C’mon, Connor, you know I’m not about to sleep around campus.”

“I’m not the one that went boy crazy in high school.” Connor held his hands up in defense.

“I thought Margot was going to ship me off to some private college in Europe after high school to keep me safe, I didn’t think I was going to get another shot at a normal relationship after graduating.”

“Can we get back to the problem of me…” Josh tried to interject, but he was too quiet and the two of them were getting into a heated—albeit pseudo-serious—debate.

“We both know that you developed the tee shirt test after several months of practice, Sara.”

“And you helped!”

Josh buried his face in his hands. He had expected the day to go very differently than it was already. He had already missed one class and he didn’t think he’d make the next. He was avoiding Kerry entirely, and now Sara and Connor were slowly devolving into an argument that was becoming less of a back and forth banter and more of a genuine bickering.

“Whatever.” Sara grumbled, loud enough that it snapped Josh back to reality. “We can talk about that later, we still need to figure out how we’re going to move Josh on such short notice.”

There was a quiet minute of contemplation as all three pondered the best course of action. It was more than two blocks from the dorms to the Benedictine and that was moving through campus, which Josh wanted to avoid. They didn’t have a car at their disposal, and relying on public transport was either too pricey if they used a cab or too unreliable if they tried to wait for a bus. And it would probably end up being more than one trip, so walking meant it could take over an hour. And Kerry could stop back by the apartment between any of the blocks of classes; in fact he often did, since the dorms were so close to several of his classes it was convenient leave books and other things there to trade out between classes.

“What if we do it slowly?” Connor offered. He was the first to speak up and he had an odd mischievous confidence in his voice that told Josh he definitely had more of a plan than either he or Sara did.

“Explain.” Sara hummed. She couldn’t tell where he was going with his idea, but she was willing to entertain any strategy at that moment.

“The campus post office is right across the street from the dorms, right? What if we just box everything up that we can’t fit in one suitcase or backpack and mail it here? We still have boxes left over from when we moved our crap here, and shipping labels too. It would be less than a five minute walk from the room to the post office, and we could do the whole thing in under a half hour.”

“That’s… kind of brilliant, actually.” Josh wasn’t prepared for the idea at all, but it definitely sounded doable. The only issue was—”But I can’t really afford that. They charge shipping costs based on weight, not distance.”

“Bleh, not an issue. If you’re getting a mark and you’re moving in, you get a share of the savings.” Sara shrugged the issue off as casually as one might dismiss a fear of the ocean while stranded in the desert. “And before you say that you can’t accept that, you need to get it in your head that it really doesn’t matter. Money is fake and as soon as our marks get activated it’s all gone anyway.”

“Wait, what?” Josh was lost. Money as a fake thing kind of made sense, but the money going away didn’t click.

“When our marks get activated, we have to get out of town on a dime and book it to the nearest entrance to the other reality, to the abstract world. When that happens, all bets are off and there’s virtually no way we’ll be able to come back here and resume life as normal.”

“But… Margot lived here for—she had you…”

“Margot came back here after she’d been activated, joined the military, and started her life from scratch so that she could help other marked people navigate this world.” Sara shot back. “I was barely a factor to consider when that all happened. And I know that’s a lot to take in too, but you should really be prepared to let things go when the time is right. All of this is nice, but it’s extremely temporary.”

“O—okay.”Josh tried to nod and accept it. It was difficult, and it didn’t fully make sense, but he didn’t question it. “Right. Okay, you guys can help pay for it the shipping.”

The issue of shipping Josh’s things hardly seemed like the issue at hand anymore. Sara had just dropped a bombshell on his expectations of what life would be like if he got a mark. And deep down he had already suspected as much, but that wasn’t something he had fully accepted as part of his future yet. There were a lot of things that Josh was avoiding thinking about in conjunction with receiving a mark. And he wasn’t about to let those things cloud his judgement. Survival needed to come first, keeping the people around him safe would come second, and the other factors of his life could trail behind that.

“So, we’re all going to be skipping classes today, I guess…”

“Oh, absolutely.” Connor announced with a nod.

“It’s for a good cause.” Sara shook her head in agreement with him.

“Let’s get going then.” Josh said with a deep sigh. “Next period starts at eleven thirty. We need to get some eyes on Kerry before that.”