"No," he says, voice collapsing into childhood. He's afraid to go anywhere else, somewhere he might not know, somewhere he doesn't think of as safe. It's perfectly irrational because no place he can imagine is really safe from this, not even where he went the last time.

(He suspects Benji does not want to visit the Mariana Trench. Anyway, that's not safer, it's just you can't see anything.)

But they can't stay here, not when everything here already has that slightly unnerving quality anything not-quite-real always has. Everything here threatens to fall apart from disbelief, which would open cracks in the nothing-space to the kind of void that drives mortal minds mad. He buries his small face in his arms, already losing his grip on the form of this landscape. Whether they go where Benji has in mind or where his subconscious takes them, the difference is going to be the degree of danger, not whether it's present.

His spirit, even less of a figure here than it is in the material world, is standing next to him, tugging on his sleeve, whispering in his ear, trying to get him to move. This is the first time he's been smaller than she is.