I’ve had the dream dozens of times. I’m walking through an utterly empty city. The buildings are designed in the architectural styles of a hundred different periods, somehow unified into resonatingly, eerily perfect whole. The landscaping is perfect, but without the touches a mortal gardener would add. The wall around the city is a hundred miles high. I scale the wall. I look down to a featureless desert, and up to the cracked sky.

Then I wake up.

I had a fairly ordinary life until I came home from work last week to find my mother, who I buried in 1989, sitting on my couch with a soda and an air of apprehension. She didn’t look any different than I remembered, down to the faint spray of freckles across her perfect cheekbones.

“Hello, Petra,” she said. “I think it’s time you knew.”

I’d had a bad feeling all day, but I was prepared to blame it on my feckless tomcat or the weather. I should have known better.