Atticus' appearance seems as natural as any other dream logic. That's not what makes Vandelin bat an eye. He gazes out over the carnage with sick, sinking deja vu. He's never been here before, not specifically here, with its frost-rimed trees and broken barricades of ice, but the rest of it is so nauseatingly familiar that he may as well have.

"They don't want us dead," he says, rounding sharply on Atticus with an argument he's made so often and so desperately that doing it in his literal sleep is second-nature. The 'us,' too, is reflexive, because it was always an 'us' until it wasn't. "What are we even fighting for, if there's never going to be anyone we can trust? You want to stay out here robbing farmers and sleeping in the dirt until they finally put us down? That's what we left the Circle for?"