Take The Flyer by M. K. Dreysen

Moishe gets lost. And by gets lost, I mean the child really gets lost. Can't find his way back from a strange building lost. Friends and family don't let him drive lost.

The kid's got no sense of direction. At all. Only, in one rare instance, as it turns out, there are places only Moishe can find.

Oh. And creatures. But be patient. We'll get to them. Or perhaps they'll come for us...

This week's free story, dear reader, is called Take The Flyer.

Take The Flyer by M. K. Dreysen

Moishe passed the flyer half a dozen times before he pulled it off the bulletin board.

The one outside the department's office. Someone had tucked the flyer in next to the "Roommate Wanted". The flyer read, "You really can make money from your dorm room, honest!"

"Must be a psych department study," Gracie said when Moishe showed her the paper. "You ready to be a guinea pig, Moishe?"

Moishe recalled his bank account. And the start of semester's bookstore panic, wondering if he'd bounced another check. "Wanna earn fifty bucks the easy way?" he replied.

"The hard way," Gracie corrected.

"What?"

"The joke's 'Wanna earn fifty bucks the...'." Gracie stopped as Moishe's cluelessness spread across his face. "Oh, look never mind that. You'll be number ten for a nine person study, you know that, right?"

Right, Moishe told himself. "Which is why I pulled the flyer off the board, Gracie."

"At least you admit it."

"I'm headed over there right after lab. I'll put it back on the board if they're still looking for people, promise."

Gracie rolled her eyes. "Let's just get to the fumes and the goo."

Six hours later and Moishe's memory of the flyer had vanished under the monotony of organic chemistry. He stumbled up the stairs and out into something that he did recall. Vaguely: clean air. As much as there could be downwind of the fume hood exhaust. At least he could see through the clear fall evening. Once he remembered to take his goggles off and put his glasses back on.

"Ahem," Gracie said. "Moishe..."

"What?"

"The flyer? The one you're relieving our fellow chemists of the burden of reading? And, just possibly, benefiting from?"

Moishe's hand slapped at the back pocket of his jeans. Where all receipts and notes went to die. Or to be lost irretrievably the next time he sat for a lecture.

Six hours standing in front of a distillation column that refused his entreaties had saved the flyer from disappearance to the lecture hall floor. "Guess I'll head over and see what they have to say. Huh."

"What?"

"Office CB-009, where's that?"

"No clue. The psych building's prefix is Y, are you sure?" Gracie reached for the flyer.

Moishe let her have it; better than arguing with her. And, maybe he had read it wrong. Too many hours behind goggles and his eyes still weren't ready to cooperate.

"Huh," Gracie muttered.

Moishe pushed his glasses up on his forehead, then his cell phone close enough to his nose so that he could read the campus map. "Told you. It's not the psych department. It's somewhere in the biology building." He thought. The map's key had been built to the same standard as the university's semester class schedule notation.

"Biology's prefix is BI," Gracie pointed out. Almost, Moishe thought, a little indignantly.

Then again, she was carrying that Bio minor. Three semesters in, Moishe figured he knew Gracie well enough to assign a little meaning to her reaction. Moishe was a little lost lamb, his paths limited to the library, the dorms, chemistry, physics, math. No more history and English, philosophy, AP tests and their freshman year had taken care of that end of things.

Gracie, on the other hand, piloted a more general course. To bizarre, far-off lands such as biology and psychology. Moishe had come to suspect that, chem major aside, Gracie harbored the dream of medical school.

Either way, Moishe knew, because she'd told him so, that Gracie believed Moishe couldn't be trusted on his own when it came to exploring new things and strange places. "I should go with you," she said. "Make sure you find it."

"Gracie," Moishe began.

Her phone buzzed. "Shit, hang on," Gracie told him. "Yeah?"

She walked far enough away so Moishe could pretend he didn't hear Gracie's conversation with her roommate. Moishe hid his relief, he hoped, when Gracie hung up. "I guess you're on your own for this one," she said.

It being Gracie's turn to stop at the campus pizza parlor and bring a large cheese and mushroom back to her dorm.

"Raid night?" Moishe asked. Gracie's roommate, a political science major named Tarisse, allowed herself a handful of study breaks every week. With pre-determined start and end times. And invite lists.

Moishe had yet to make the cut. Not that he cared, really. Especially not after Gracie had pointed out Tarisse's very studied curation of her social set, and the obvious, once someone else clued him in, "Network Building" behind it.

"Just... Moishe. Don't get lost on your way home again, ok?"

"Jeez, Gracie, that was last year! I take one wrong turn, am I gonna hear about it until graduation?"

Moishe turned to go.

"Ah, Moishe?"

"What?"

"Biology building's that way," Gracie pointed out.

"Ah? Shit." Moishe turned himself around, north instead of south, and grumbled his way over to the biology building's basement. The one he had never known existed.

His phone buzzed just as he reached the biology building. "Text me when you get back home."

Moishe tucked the phone, and Gracie's message, back into his pocket. The map said this was the building, and that the office should be somewhere downstairs. But he'd fallen for that before. Spring semester, Moishe had taken a music class, history or appreciation he forgot which. The map had told him to go to the fifth floor of the music building.

Only, the music building Moishe went into only had three floors. The map did admit the companion building, across the plaza, existed. It just insisted that building was where the art department lived, not the music department.

This time, the map did believe that the biology building contained a basement. A tiny one, the map showed maybe half a dozen cubbyholes. And a stairway. Which should be behind the door Moishe stood in front of.

Moishe paused, caught between the feeling that he was about to get run over by someone on their way to evening lecture, and the belief that he probably should just give this up and go read a book instead.

People streamed in and out of the main doors. But the little door to the basement stairs, and Moishe and his indecision, lay tucked to the side, and below, the concrete porch of the main doors. Moishe had plenty of time and space to argue with himself.

And then go looking for room CB-008.

****

"It's some kind of animal study," Moishe texted Gracie later that night.

"Did you get lost?" she responded. "And what kind of animal study?!?! You're allergic to cats!"

"And dogs and everything else. And no, I didn't get lost."

Not really. The chemistry building was right there across the way; once he'd finished the interview, sure, he'd had to take a few minutes, under street lamps because he'd been with the lady taking the study applications longer than he thought.

Moishe wondered at that. Labs ended at six, he'd only been down there with Miss, or was it Professor? Miss Martinez? Ok, Doctor Martinez at least. Anyway, he'd only been down there long enough to fill out the little card she'd given him, dorm room address, name, major, phone number and email. Answer her questions, yes he did have a computer. No, he didn't have a social media account.

"That's the one," Doctor Martinez had said. "We have to turn down anyone who does."

"What do you have to do?" Gracie asked.

"Just watch video and post pictures," Moishe answered. "Twice a week for six weeks, six hundred bucks."

"Sweet gig, any room for me????"

"Nope." By the standards of their peers, Gracie's social media feed might as well have been as non-existent as Moishe's. But she did have one.

"Too bad. Ok, gotta run, Tari's calling us back from snack break. See ya! tomorrow!"

Moishe fell asleep while reminding himself to put the flyer back on the chemistry department bulletin board.

****

Doctor Martinez wasn't a professor. "Not yet, anyway. I'm a research assistant. With a little luck, this project will be the one that gets me a tenure-track job."

Moishe nodded. "Ok. So what exactly am I supposed to do?"

Martinez had phoned Moishe two days after the interview. About the time he'd started telling himself that nothing would come of it, and he'd better start applying to Whataburger. "Can you take a walk around campus with me?" she'd asked.

She wanted to show him the cameras at the heart of the study. "We've got disk space enough for seventy-two hours of video. So you'll be able to go home for the weekend, if you want."

Once Martinez pointed them out, Moishe learned to spot the cameras. Tucked into oak trees and the lights illuminating the campus flower beds. On the sills of strategically chosen windows. "On the roof, too," Martinez said. "Pigeons, mostly, but we get a few falcons as well. Especially on the taller buildings."

"Do I need to do anything with the cameras?" he asked. "Because I'm not sure I could find any of these again, without you here to help."

Martinez shook her head. "Nope. That's my job, and Rickie Walker's. She's one of Professor Litsmoth's graduate students, you'll meet her. Your job's to watch the video and sort the interesting bits."

Rickie gave him more of the explanation when she gave Moishe his login information. "You're our control."

"Against?"

"AI. Mona built a system to catalog animal behavior automatically. But she has to calibrate it."

"Which is where I come in."

And hour after hour of students passing by cameras. "During daylight hours, the cameras roll full time," Rickie told him. "After sundown, they're activated by motion sensors."

Moishe ran the videos as fast as he dared. "You'll get faster as you learn," Martinez said. And he did that, too. Twice regular speed the first few days, then up to four times by the end of the week.

The squirrels dominated the action during the day. Every camera with an angle picked up the little thieves and their antics. And the students that fed them both.

"Thing is," Rickie said. "The squirrels get the most attention."

Moishe's hour of video review each day went like this. Fast forward until squirrel, flag the timestamp, then fast-forward again until the next bit. Add a few notes, like "Students feeding squirrels at the fountain" to each timestamp in the list. Then, when he reached the end of the day's backlog, email his list to Rickie.

But that wasn't the end of it. Moishe's final job each day was to go back to one or two of his timestamps, cut out a minute or two of the action, then post the video clips to the study's Twitter account.

"Publicity," Martinez told Moishe when he asked. "For the university and the study."

And thus, Moishe realized, eventually, why Martinez and Walker wanted someone without a social media presence.

Moishe's first few squirrel videos, because Rickie was right as rain, squirrels dominated the action for both the cameras and the Twitter feed, Moishe obsessively read all the comments.

That stopped when he counted the number of shitheads trolling the feed. "You block those, right?"

Rickie nodded. "Yep, the never ending battle. Just post the videos you like, I'll take care of the assholes."

So Moishe focused on the job that Martinez was actually paying him for. Spotting what animals got up to amongst the noise of forty thousand students and faculty roaming campus.

The pigeons showed, of course. Sparrows and finches, too; Moishe didn't know enough about the little birds to really distinguish their proper names. A kestrel and her mate roamed the place. She posted herself most often on the psych department's back door porch. Away from the foot traffic, Moishe figured, and in hunting view of one of the last patches of open grass still remaining to the campus.

At night, though, the owls dominated Moishe's attention. They came late, after the night classes released and only the die-hards remained. That's when the silent killers moved in. Barn owls mostly. Moishe looked those up once he'd caught the little assassins ghosting the cameras lining the walk to the music building.

He remembered that shady walk from his music class. Well, he believed it was the same walk. It turned out the architecture building shared a similar green alley, laid out with street lamps and live oaks.

Moishe did find a way to distinguish between the two. After midnight, a single owl haunted the architecture walk. No barn owl, when Moishe spotted her he went straight to the internet. She, it seemed, was a barred owl. The stripes decorating her eyes gave her away. She liked to take her mice and the occasional squirrel into a live oak, usually around two in the morning.

Her favorite perch for the evening repast sat just in front of one of Martinez's cameras.

The barn owls happily displayed their hunting prowess. Half a dozen of the smaller species roamed the music department's walk; at least once a night Moishe found one of them posing, wings up, crouched, waiting for the right moment to pounce.

The barred owl gave him no such view. Only the site of her gulping her way through dinner. Moishe posted the barn owls on their hunts, but left their larger cousin's views for himself and the study. Hoping that eventually she'd grace the cameras with something more.

The squirrels took all the online attention through the first half of Moishe's six weeks. A possum mother and her brood clinging to her back waddled their way into second place. The kestrel danced through the morning thermals and into third place.

Moishe's owls, his favorites, came dead last. "I don't get it."

"No worries," Rickie answered. "They're golden for the study itself. And the squirrels bring in the traffic regardless. So it's a win-win, Moishe. Really, just post them and get on with your life."

Moishe tried his best to do that. But little things, like the fact that the campus stray dog population outranked his owls, and the cats wandering the place seriously looked like they were ready to climb all the way up and challenge the squirrels...

"Moishe, when does your study end?" Gracie asked him one day at lunch.

"Um." He looked at his calendar. "Three more weeks." Had it really been only three weeks? Moishe felt like he'd lost a month somewhere. "Why?"

"Ever listen to your grandmother go on about her soaps?"

Moishe blushed, then dropped his end of the conversation.

****

Moishe's biology knowledge didn't extend much farther than NOVA and Nature and his sophomore year in high school. Three weeks into the study, though, he'd built himself a little citadel of new information.

Raccoons and possums. Stray dogs and cats. Birds aplenty; squirrels that turned bread, french fries, and potato chips into protein for much of the rest of the population.

"A couple hundred acres of trees and grass in the middle of a city," Moishe told himself. The green spaces built the common threads between his video companions.

The deer startled him when they made their appearance. A buck, showing off his fall semester head gear, and two, sometimes three does that he accompanied. The does wandered into frame just an hour before dawn on the third weekend of Moishe's study participation. The one right after Gracie had reminded Moishe that he'd become a little obsessive.

"Do I get some kind of grade?" Moishe had asked Doctor Martinez.

"No. Hell, Moishe, I won't even know which of you and your compatriots picked out which videos. They're anonymized so we don't accidentally bias our results."

The little herd startled Moishe so much that he didn't note their first appearance on camera. He didn't try yet to figure out which camera they'd shown up on. He just watched, breathless and waiting for something he didn't understand, as the does made their way across the camera's frame.

For the study, that weekend's haul turned out to be a confrontation between a momma cat and a squirrel who'd eaten so many student handouts Rickie had nicknamed him Andre the Giant; the possum gang, now so large their mother refused them rides, parsing the leavings after a raccoon raided the library's trash cans; and two male barn owls tussling in view of a female.

Moishe, on the other hand, remembered only the deer. He told himself, that week, while he waited every night for another sighting, that he'd got caught up because of boredom. The deer stood out because they were something different. Moishe pulled a satellite image of the campus, then traced his finger across the bayou drifting along just a couple blocks south.

The weekday traffic seemed too much for the deer herd to brave; the next weekend, though, and sure enough, Sunday morning in the wee hours, when Moishe pulled the camera feeds live to his dorm room, he found the buck looking straight into the camera.

The buck shook his head, pawed at the ground. The cameras didn't have microphones; still, Moishe could hear the buck snorting at him. "Do you know I'm here?" he asked the animal.

In response, the buck flared his nostrils, reared up, and charged, just a step or two toward the camera. Behind him, the does startled, ears up and tails waving. The buck false-charged again, ducking his head and his weapons to Moishe.

And then the deer bounded away. Their tails waved at him as they disappeared into the brush.

"Woa." Moishe backed away from his monitor; he wanted to jump up and pace. He remembered the roommate agreement before he could get too far with that. So he picked up his laptop and a jacket and made his way out of the room before he accidentally woke Chris.

Gracie was out, and for a similar reason to Moishe's roommate. The Honors College had hosted one of their occasional parties the night before. Midterms fell on them all next week; Professor Staul liked the timing. Chris had gone, and so had Gracie.

Moishe had stayed in his room. Even with only a couple hours' nap, the deer keyed him up too much to go back to sleep. So Moishe found his way to the edge of the kestrel's hunting territory, set himself down with his laptop, and went looking for the camera that had captured the deer herd's passage.

Which turned out to be a lot harder to do than Moishe expected. "Shit," he muttered to himself, once he realized what was going on.

Rickie had anonymized the camera feeds. Each night, Moishe received the links to the feeds; strings of random letters and numbers. Moishe went back and read through all of his emails. But there were no correlations. The same camera that captured the barred owl most nights came to him with labels like "A8tOOl" one night, and "trO9311z" the next.

"She just doesn't want the internet figuring out the camera sequence," he told himself. And stumbling around looking for Andre the Giant or his friends and neighbors.

Of course, the majority of students and faculty could figure out which cameras overlooked particular pieces of property. Even Moishe had managed that much.

The deer, though, had found a camera he couldn't track down. Certainly not from his own poor brain's images; even Google's streetview and satellite imagery didn't help. In Moishe's memory, the deer stood in front of trees and brush, in an open stretch of grass that looked like it hadn't been touched with a mower since summer break.

With no buildings in the background, no street signs, nothing that Moishe might have used to route around the way his mind refused to hold location clues.

Frustrated, Moishe tried to replay the video, but he couldn't find it. "Where's the link?" he asked the computer. He went back to last weekend's email, hunting for the first video, but no dice. "Oh, come on," he yelled at the laptop, before slamming the lid shut.

The buck snorted in his mind, sound fury and a wave of tines and threat.

"Oh fuck off," Moishe whispered.

****

Moishe realized something, once he'd spent the week trying to find the deer camera again. He discovered just how much time he'd been spending on the study.

Every night, around eight, after he'd disposed of the necessary homework, he queued up his four video feeds. Even with all of them running at eight times standard and simultaneous, midnight usually found him just finishing up. "No wonder they only want me to do six weeks of this," he told himself.

He hadn't lost track of homework. Yet. But here he was, adding time each night to hunt down a camera that suddenly didn't exist. Moishe searched all the emails for the fifth link. The one that would show him the field and brush and the deer herd.

He went through the week this way, until Saturday night's email came in, auto-generated by one of Rickie's systems. Accompanied once again by Chris's snores, Moishe stifled a yell when he found a fifth camera link. "Finally," he whispered.

He opened the other four, minimized the windows, then opened the precious fifth camera feed. "Now I've got you."

The hours slipped by; the character of the light changed. Then Moishe remembered how the links and the camera had disappeared from his inbox. He fumbled around, trying to remember, and then search for, the key sequence that would capture the screen image.

Then the doe stepped out into the camera's frame.

All ideas of capturing the screen's image drifted away. Moishe clicked the window to fill his monitor; the doe stared back at him, then, like the buck had, she seemed to respond. To know, somehow, that Moishe watched her. She stomped, one quick beat, and raised her tail.

"No," Moishe whispered. "Don't..."

But she did. She crouched, lifted the white tail that gave her species its name to its fullest, and bounded out of view. Behind her, Moishe caught the briefest of glimpses of the others; he couldn't distinguish doe or buck, only a pair of brown-gray figures disappearing into the last of the night.

"Son of a bitch," Moishe muttered.

His hands wanted him to close it all down again. They almost ached, almost reached for the mouse without Moishe's instigation. But Moishe caught himself, hung on, grabbed the mouse and opened the email again.

Four links. But the window he cared about was still there, off to the side. The camera still showed him a view, a place somewhere close that held a bit of nature that wasn't an accident. Moishe could almost smell the grass; he fought the sneeze that his body begged for in response.

"Ok, right." His hands trembled. Some part of him fought, still, to close this up and go on to other things. He'd been up all night, after all. Just close it up, get some sleep, get through one more week and back to class and labs with a little money in the account. "It's just biology stuff anyway," Moishe whispered.

Instead of letting his hands continue that way, Moishe pulled the laptop from its docking station. Flipped the lid open, so it wouldn't accidentally go into sleep mode, or worse. Reboot and close the window forever.

His only connection now to whatever place it was still showing on the laptop's monitor. Moishe fumbled his way into shoes and jacket, pausing only to gently brush a fingertip across the trackpad. Fighting each time to keep that finger from going on to close the open window.

Moishe bounced off the tiled walls. He punched three different floor buttons on the elevator before he got the lobby. He tripped on every step from the dorm lobby down to the outside world.

Every bump on the way, and his hand drifted to the trackpad of its own accord. Moishe bit back curses and stumbled out into the green space at the back side of the dorms.

"No cameras in the dorm areas," Martinez had told him. Four eras of dorm construction. The towers Moishe roomed in, the older three story rambling stone quad where the athletes and most of the other Honors College kids stayed; the newer buildings like apartment complexes just a couple blocks off campus. Each with some bit of green park space, tree and grass boundaries that should have been perfect for Martinez' study. "I figured it's better safe than sorry. Privacy laws."

Moishe stood in the park space behind the towers, the park holding just enough open grass for the frisbee and soccer devotees to descend upon in a few hours. He stared at the screen, turning around, laptop over his arms so his hand wouldn't catch the mouse pad on its own.

He tried to orient himself like he would have to a compass. This made sense, somehow, here where lack of sleep and confusion and the darkness of night slowly disappearing for another day held Moishe close. Moishe had never successfully used a real compass in his life. Even with the GPS on his phone, he just listened to it and turned left, or right, where it told him to.

The few times anyone let him drive, anyway.

In the here and the now, Moishe pointed the laptop and stumbled somewhere. Not into the heart of campus, though; when he crossed the street to the neighborhood bordering campus, he didn't know he was walking through what would have been traffic in more regular hours. Moishe tripped over the curb going and coming.

Somehow holding onto the laptop. And somehow not closing the window on the field.

Time and space spun; part of his mind, the one that wanted nothing more than to get back into bed and forget about this nonsense, knew full well they'd all be lost somewhere and have to send an email to Gracie to come get them... should have meant something. Didn't. Moishe knew only the field, the grass smell, and that his hands wanted to betray him.

The wetness, his shoes damp with dew and grass seeds rubbing at his skin, broke through Moishe's brain fog. Little by little, he acknowledged the world waking around him. The sun poked one, then two beams over the horizon, true light coming. A bird, one of the tiny singers Moishe still wasn't sure of, fidgeted and bitched at him from somewhere over to his left.

Grass seeds irritated his ankles while late season pollen twitched his sinuses. He'd suffer for both, Moishe knew, old enemies of skin and runny noses because hay fever was a bitch and psoriasis rode pillion.

Moishe raised his eyes from the screen.

He stood in the middle of the field. Yards away, trees marched left to right, brush tangling their bases. Moishe turned his head, slowly, to there: where the does had disappeared. Right there. And to the right, there, that's where she'd come into view just an... hour ago?

Moishe didn't want to rewind the video; his hand warned him that it, and the rest of Moishe, the real part of Moishe that didn't go running off after figments of imagination, the rational, mature Moishe would close this motherfucker down and start typing a "Rescue Me" message to Gracie just as soon as he had the good damned sense to put this shit aside and come back to the fucking world. Please.

So Moishe didn't know from time. Here was only the daylight threatening, the morning breeze responding, over an empty field. Had it been an hour? Had it been an instant? He couldn't answer that.

But he could see the view on the screen, and the one he stood in the front of. Moishe turned now, all the way around. Get the whole of it, he told himself. Where are we?

And. More importantly. Where's the camera? The one his laptop insisted should be right over his shoulder.

Moishe stood in the middle of the field. Just like he'd seen, just a little pasture, maybe two acres. Knee high grass fading after the first real cold front of the fall.

Behind him, Moishe saw only the parking lot for the quad dorms. The only possible place to put a camera would have been the street light, red security call box its most prominent feature. Moishe walked over there, just in case.

But no. No little gray and brown camouflaged plastic box. Nothing. And when Moishe turned back to the field, the view from the laptop showed him this couldn't be it. All the long hours watching the video feeds for the study and Moishe knew better.

He walked back into the field, letting that feeling back, the one that he'd only just realized that everyone else had in their head.

That he knew exactly where he was. And that this field, the one he stood in the middle of, wet feet and all, calling the dawn to life, this spot was one that Moishe had come to apurpose. He could find this place again.

Moishe shut the laptop. The rational voice quieted, and the urge to close the camera feed went with it. Moishe turned one more time to place himself and the view in his head. Then he turned around and crossed the street to the quad dorms.

He didn't notice the stray cat crouched on the dorm room steps. Nor the barred owl spiraling just over the field.

****

The field lingered all that week. The last week of Moishe's participation in the study. Friday was the official last day; Moishe got the email from Rickie early that morning.

"Thank you for everything. I'll close out your logins this afternoon. You should get your last check next week."

And just like that... only.

The space in his head still filled Moishe's mind. Monday night, he dreamt of walking it. Outside, of both his mind and the dorm room window, the moon waxed toward full. The place rotated around him; the deer came earlier, each night.

"The moon, not the dawn," Moishe whispered to himself Thursday morning around three. The idea woke him; he told the message to the ceiling. But neither the ceiling nor his half-asleep self understood the message.

The deer appeared in Moishe's dreams Tuesday night.

Wednesday, they dominated the dream. Thursday and Friday...

Blood dripped down his legs, it had to be blood because pain shot from the joints. Pain, something grabbed him. Moishe looked down. Talons, claws, gripped his hips, the nails tore his skin. He jerked; other claws gripped his shoulders. Something rode him.

"Your moment comes," it whispered into his ear.

Moishe drifted between terror and pain until the almost-full moon set and Saturday's dawn took over. He finally slumbered. And woke after lunch.

"Do I need to ask about new friends?" Gracie asked via text. "You never sleep late."

Something his parents had complained about since Moishe was old enough to get his own cereal and turn on his own cartoons. Something in his head refused to just stay in bed when the sun rose. "No 'friends'," Moishe answered. "Just the end of the study. Finally catching up on my sleep."

Which was true enough. "Meet you for Chinese?"

"Of course." Saturday afternoon's ritual, they'd started the long weekend before their freshmen year started.

Gracie filled most of the conversation; neither of them noticed the transition. Moishe usually chattered just as much or more than Gracie did. The field and the full moon just starting to rise as they walked back to the dorm rooms ran as constant undercurrent to Moishe's friendship talk.

"You'll have to get another job," Gracie pointed out as Moishe made ready to climb the stairs to the tower's lobby.

He shrugged. The scholarship covered most of his tuition, loans did for that and the dorm room and food. He'd known the books and sundries had to come from somewhere; the guy in the administration building who'd put the financial aid package together had pointed the way to work study right from the beginning. Moishe didn't say anything, he just turned to go.

Then stopped, one hand on the stair rail. "Hey, Grace?"

"Yeah?"

The field flashed into his mind. And the pain the nightmare had inflicted. "Ah, nothing, just a brain fart. See you Monday."

****

Moishe went through his Saturday night the way he always did. Homework, a run down to the cafeteria for some ice cream before they closed up. A couple hours of reading with some random movie streaming on his laptop for noise. Then a shower and bed.

Where he stared at the ceiling instead of drifting off. Moishe wanted to chalk that up to having slept all morning. "See what happens? You'll be skipping class next and sleeping all day." Like some of the other kids did, showing up for finals for a class where the lady teaching hadn't seen you since the first day of the semester, going "Who the hell are you?"

Then Moishe registered the full moon lighting up the room. And his mind forced the dream phrase from his lips. "The moon not the dawn."

Chris had found a friend; Moishe didn't know anything more, two years roommates and he couldn't quite find the courage to ask Chris any details. He just knew that his roommate had started coming home early mornings instead of late nights.

And that he could get out of bed and make ready with the lights on and no concern for the noise.

Moishe didn't bring the laptop, or anything else except his jacket. And socks. He remembered the socks this time.

He walked through the midnight of campus like he knew where he was going. A strange feeling. The moon's full illumination and the power of his mind holding on to the world around him well enough for Moishe to believe he was going someplace, and could get there without trouble, intoxicated him.

Moishe felt like he floated to the center of the field.

Every step of the way, shadows the size of small animals flickered in his wake. And followed him.

When he stepped into the middle of the field, the moon lit the space. And lunar midnight rose to greet him.

Moishe held his breath. Across the field, three figures stepped from the trees.

Then rose to stand upright. Between the scant tree shadows and the full view of the open grass, the buck stood and became a human figure.

Almost. The figure loomed tall, and from his forehead grew now a pair of blackberry vines, they twisted higher from the forest king's forehead than Moishe stood above the ground.

In front of the king figure, the does walked now as queens of the night.

With talons glowing from their fingers and toes. Moishe's shoulders and hips screamed a brief flash of pain echo to the figures standing in front of him. "The sacrifice appears..."

"As we have called..." "And now he is ours..."

"As is necessary," the thorn-headed figure in the back concluded.

Moishe had assigned king and queen, female and male, because that's what his mind threw out as a reference. The closer he looked, the more his mind now ran screaming from answers. These... people... were too alien. Too far away from human to know anything.

Other than the claws that reached to take him. Moishe tried to scream. Only nothing came of it. His mouth refused to open. His legs should have shivered, should have turned to run because he begged them to. But none of these things happened.

Instead, his legs told him of something else. Of a cat's tail, and its owner, weaving its way between his legs.

Others, then. The thorn-crowned head filled Moishe vision, but now behind that figure a dog appeared, head low, crouched over its paws and tail stretched straight out behind. Shadows too, small and dark they slid across the three faces.

The barred owl settled on Moishe's shoulder. Gently, though the prick of her talons echoed the nightmare pain and the silvered claws of the three. The owl clicked her beak, speaking in a language just as alien to Moishe as the nightmare fey bearing down on him.

The pair in front stopped their advance on Moishe. But they didn't let their hands, claws, rest, either, Moishe recognized. "This is ours fairly taken..." "Little birds can join him..."

"Or fly away safe," their third concluded.

The owl clicked her beak again. From his ankles, Moishe felt the cat's answering purr-growl; the dog said nothing, only bared his teeth in a grin. Moishe knew this one; the street mutt fought casually, and often.

"To protect..." "One must usually bring forces..."

"And such few you have."

Click, purr. And now, from behind a growl.

And the first reaction beyond words. The crowned third shifted its weight, turned to the dog; the dog skipped back from that gaze.

But he didn't run, he remained, Moishe told himself. He stayed.

The entire tableau remained, held their places. Moishe didn't come to this place having ever considered the smell of violence coming.

Then... in the middle of campus, the administration building, and a fountain in front of it, framed the center of the place. The administration building had been put together when floods weren't a grandparent's stories.

A great stone stair rose from the fountain's level in two tiers to the building's entrance. In the middle of the relief between runs sat a bronze statue of the campus mascot.

Here, now. The bronze figure stretched from her crouch of ages. Twitched her tail and sniffed the wind. Purred. Growled.

Flattened her ears against her skull and screamed her nightmare's answer to the full moon and the sky above.

The scream reverberated across the field, and between the combatants. Moishe felt it, the ancient call so often compared to a woman's cry of terror. Moishe felt torn between the three fey and the animals who'd come to his aid. He quailed from the forces that scream called forth...

And then he remembered the cougar's favorite prey. Moishe grinned, then.

And the nightmare fey stumbled back, away from the sound and what she threatened them with. The dog sidled around them, even the old scarred warrior giving them the chance to run away. And so they did.

Silver under the moonlight, taller than thunderheads, yet by the time the tree shadows claimed these nightmares they had shrunk once again to two and one glimpses of fur and white tail flags waving their fright.

Moishe shuddered, head to toe, and fell to his knees. By the time he could bring himself to look, his only companion in the empty field was that he'd started with: the full moon and the stars beyond. Moishe shook himself free and stumbled away for home.

****

Weeks later, Moishe and Gracie took their lunch to the administration building's porch. One of Gracie's favorite people-watching spots. With finals coming on, and one of those fall days where the cold front has just cleared the air and the sun and frost have battled their way to a draw, Gracie wanted as much time in the sun as she could get before they disappeared back into study mode.

Moishe settled himself at the bronze cougar's base. The idea in his head, that he finally could trust his instincts and be able to walk around campus without getting lost, had disappeared.

The moonlit field and what had happened there faded too. But only, so far, to the same level as a well-loved story. Moishe leaned against the cat's paw.

"Which one are you going to take?" Gracie asked.

Moishe had gone looking for more work study programs. This far through the semester, he'd mostly found "Check back at the start of the spring term" as the default answer. Still, he'd finally picked up a lead on a couple of jobs with that magic combination of money in the budget and too few hands to use it.

The first one came from the engineering department. Gracie had had to walk Moishe over there each time he'd gone to talk to the professor. That section of campus was, for some reason, even more of a nightmare for Moishe than the business building they had to traverse to get to their Saturday dinner.

"If you take the chemical engineering job I'll brain you," Gracie said. "I am not spending three nights a week shepherding you across campus."

Moishe shifted against the cat's leg.

Gracie noticed his discomfort. "I keep telling you, it's more comfortable down here." The statue stood on a granite base; Gracie preferred the ground level with her back against the granite and her butt on her backpack.

"It's not that," Moishe began, but then stopped. Explaining what he'd felt wouldn't get him anywhere. "No, Gracie, I'm not taking the chemical engineering job."

Not that Professor Denov really wanted him. "A pure chemist's not all that useful to me, kid. But we do need someone who knows their way around a lab. So the job's yours if you want it. I guess." Moishe didn't really mind taking the second option.

Herding data for Professor Feliciano in the psych department. He'd be able to watch the kestrel every day; Moishe figured she had her eyes on the ancient live-oak trees fencing the psych departments little green border as a spring nesting site. "I'm going to work for Professor Feliciano. I emailed her this morning."

"Way cool. Which means you're buying me dinner on work nights." The quad, where Gracie's dorm took up space, sat just across the green space from the psych department.

And Moishe had to walk through the quad, anyway. That's how he'd trained himself to find his way back to his own dorm room.

Moishe laughed. "Deal," he said, and then the friend picked up their trash and headed back to the finals grind.

Moishe rubbing his shoulder absentmindedly the whole time.

The one the bronze cougar had purred against when Moishe announced his choice of work study.