There are two kinds of sleep in this world. The kind you wake from — and the kind that decides it’s not finished with you yet. When I fell, I didn’t dream of darkness. I dreamed of London. Not the one on the map, but the one that breathes through fog and cobblestone — a city stitched together from memory and guilt. The lamps burned low, the horses snorted steam, and the air smelled of coal, rain, and consequence. Somewhere, a clock had stopped at 2:17, and nothing in that place ever quite started again. They tell me it was the fentanyl — an overdose of circumstance and bad timing. They tell me LuAnn kept calling my name long after the medics said it was no use. But somewhere in the space between the heartbeat that stopped and the one that restarted, I lived an entire life. A different century. A different case. And through it all, she was there — my partner, my conscience, my compass — the one thing that didn’t change when everything else did. Some call it a hallucination. Some call it the brain’s way of saving itself from the truth. I call it a case I still haven’t quite closed. Because even in dreams, the dead leave clues. And sometimes the detective doesn’t solve the mystery — he just survives it. — Nick Nova