[ She's not sure that any of them have stopped having the nightmares; she sure hasn't. It's just that now, she doesn't feel them chasing her into the waking world, marking her, following her. The only option they have is to shove it down and keep carrying on.

Julie thinks about this for a moment, what he saw, then her face breaks into a wide smile. She remembers pictures and videos online. Another thing she would never get the chance to see in real life, not that it was really a goal of hers. It still would have meant something to her. ]

Polar lights. We had 'em too. People would spend their whole lives savin' money for a trip to see 'em. The best places to watch were isolated and far from where most folks actually lived. [ There's so little that their worlds share, it feels nice to have something. ] In my world, there's so much manmade light that most people can't see many stars. But where I'm from, we were so far from the cities that we could just go out in the fields or on the prairie to see the Milky Way. Like lookin' into space itself.