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this, and thinking it so clearly, it seemed somehow less like a dream than anything she had ever known. It felt, in fact, less like a dream than the motel bathtub that she presumed she was still sleeping in. And the more she thought of it, the more a hotel or a truck or a governor or someone named Brad seemed impossibly unlikely. The purple hill she was on—that was real. The feel of soft moss beneath her, the warmth of the sunless turquoise sky on her face. How could anything else have ever existed beyond this place at this moment?
    She rose to her feet with hardly any effort, as if she were made of some lighter material—and even this, after she was standing and had taken several steps, seemed to be the way she had always moved, always walked, always felt.
    A soft breeze scented by some sweet, flowering spice she could not name blew gently against her skin as she moved down the hill toward the still black sea. And as she moved, she grew lighter and lighter, until she was barely touching the soft, mossy ground beneath her. She hovered just above it, feeling its tickle against her heels as she moved faster and faster toward the dark shore.
    It was like flying, but a flying that did not quite leave the earth—or, rather, did not leave the surface of whatever planet this was. As she moved closer to the black ocean, it seemed less still than before, with ebony waves crashing against gray sands in explosions of ivory foam. It was not long before she was at the edge of this sea, standing on a shore where the purple moss had given way to the fine gray sand.
    The black waves that crashed here were less black than they had appeared from a distance. Not a solid color but a shimmering, oily hue made of a myriad of tiny living organisms, writhing in a liquid that could barely contain them. Some of the creatures were no larger than a speck of dust, others the size of sea urchins, and still others seemed to stretch out with barely visible tentacles just touching the wet sand or stretching out in the other direction to a point far out to sea.
    The living waves reached her feet, overlapped them, climbing lightly up her calves before being pulled back by whatever tidal forces ruled these alien waters.
    Beth looked out across the now-roiling black sea—stirred it seemed by her presence more than by any other force—and she wondered if she was still Beth at all. She did not feel that she was.
    She raised a hand in front of her and was not surprised to find that it was not a hand at all, but the gentle, tapering tip of something more mobile and delicate. Nearly translucent, it pulsed with a liquid that was more shadow than blood. She looked down at the rest of her new body—her graceful curves and multitudinous limbs. She floated above the sand without indent, leaving it to drift out across the living waters, until the shore was a distant thing behind her.
    In her center, suspended within her ethereal self, was a black spherical object, wavering like a stone beneath swift currents. She knew it now as her heart, her soul, her mind, and a part of her dimly still remembered a similar object in a warehouse an infinite distance and time away.
    From the sea beneath her emerged something long and lithe. A pulsing and undulating thing that she recognized first by its want. It entwined itself into her appendages—circling, weaving, confusing itself among her parts. It felt warm, but not in any way in which she had ever experienced warmth before. It was a heat of thought as much as sensation. It was a heat of intention.
    It continued insistently, its tip, like a glowing ember now, searching its way through the forest maze of her limbs, finding, at last, some opening to her that she had not known about until it was breached.
    The thing was inside her now and the feeling of it was like an impossible sweetness exploding inside her brain. But not that either. It was like every orgasm she had ever had folding in on itself to become a white hot point of