I looked at my handiwork, liked it, and made a second bridge coming over the wall from the Jersey shore. I solidified the Wall all around, and when I'd done that, turned my attention to the Administration Building itself.

The power was still snarling and arcing, still powerful. I turned it loose again.

I remembered how the building had looked in the other dreams I'd had: a fairyland, a crystalline castle pricking the sky with impossibly high and thin turrets, ramparted and moated, an architectural fantasy born equally of Disney, Bosch, and Escher.

A place where all manner of oddities might walk.

I molded the energy in my mind, shaped it, and placed the image over my drab reality. And, oh yes, added two more things: the Temptation, whole again, and me, shaped as the Outcast.

I shut my eyes. There was a flash that made everyone gasp. The Rox shuddered as it had when the caverns had been formed. When all was still again, my jokers were gasping in amazement. I kept my eyes closed. I didn't have to look. I didn't want to look.

"Bloat?"

That was Kafka's voice, all too real. I shook my head, not wanting to come out of my dream.

"Bloat, please!" he insisted.

I opened my eyes resentfully. Kafka was gaping at me, at the penguin who stood alongside him, at the landscape around us. The penguin chuckled. It sounded remarkably like me.

It was the dream. Or rather, I might never have been dreaming at all. I began to laugh uproariously.

The Wall of stone circled us out in the bay. The faerie bridges arced into the sky. I could see the crystal castle all around me.

Everything was still here. All of it. I'd created this vision of the Rox; I'd made it as surely and deliberately as if I'd shaped it from clay with my own hands.

Except… the Temptation was yet shattered, utterly destroyed. And me-I wasn't the Outcast, but Bloat. But I found that my two failures didn't matter to me, not against the wonder of all the rest.

"Bloat," Kafka whispered, wonderingly. He couldn't keep his gaze still. It went from me to the penguin to the dazzling landscape around us. "Did you-"

"Yes," I told him. "Yes, I did."

I sniggered and guffawed, giddy and faint from the exertion.

"I did," I repeated. "It's mine."

I couldn't stop giggling. This was actually hilarious, you know. All that time I'd spent listening to the thoughts of Blaise and the jumpers and how they liked stomping nat ass and humiliating them, and I never really understood why. I thought they were stupid and juvenile. I didn't think they were right.

But now… now I'd experienced some of their blood-fed emotion too. I'd felt it when I'd let loose the demons; I felt it now, looking at the Rox's new landscape.

Hey, there's a definite kick in knowing you can hit back. That you can hurt them as well as being hurt.

And in the payback department, the nats have handed us jokers a world-class IOU.

"Oh, you're going to hate me, all right," I told the tips of the skyscrapers sticking over my wall like burrs. The power in my head buzzed like a hornet's nest inside me, angry. "Now you're really going to learn to hate me."

And I chuckled again.