Dea had sat alone in the very back row of bleachers, cheering for Connor along with everybody else, knowing he wouldn’t see her.

“Do you ever miss swimming?” she’d said to him the next day, at lunch.

He looked up, startled. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “Yeah. I do.” Then he’d reached over impulsively, grabbed her hand, and squeezed, and Gollum smirked in a way that made Dea both embarrassed and deliriously happy.

All of the reasons she had never walked Gollum’s dreams—it was intrusive and weirdly intimate; she didn’t want to do that to a friend; what if she saw something terrible?—she was quickly able to dismiss when it came to Connor. She knew she was invading his privacy, feeding on his innermost thoughts and using them, but no one cared about privacy anymore; everyone knew that. Connor was on Facebook, after all—that was almost just as bad. (Last year, Greg Blume had hacked Coralie Wikinson’s profile and switched her profile picture out to a blurry camera shot of her . . . Dea didn’t even like to think the word. Her mom still called it the “flower pot,” which for years she had heard as “flour pot,” a misunderstanding that had made the act of baking cookies very embarrassing.) And it wasn’t like Dea would use the knowledge against him.

The fifth time she walked, she was back in Chicago.

There was the usual swinging feeling, the sensation of darkness and an imminent fall. But she was through it quickly; navigating the in-between space was getting easier, too. The darkness broke apart and she stepped through it. She was standing among mounds of broken-up cinder blocks and concrete ruins, the remains of the apartment complex that had once been Connor’s mind’s protection from her intrusion. There was a sign staked to a chain-link fence nearby: COMING SOON, WHOLE FOODS. Dea almost laughed. It was a nice touch.

It was snowing again—the same ashy gray snow, accumulating in thick, silent piles, far faster than normal snow. The Christmas lights were still blinking on the awning of the deli across the street. Light overspilling its big window turned the snow a sickly shade of green. She scanned the windows above her, noting the bedroom she’d identified as Connor’s, which was fitted with funny blue curtains patterned with giraffes. She saw a shadow pass the window and wondered if it was Connor or his mom. She imagined the big Christmas tree behind them, covered in tiny glass ornaments, like a coating of frost. She wished, for a moment, she could go upstairs, knock on the door, invite herself in.

But she knew that Connor must never see her in his dream. Miriam had always emphasized that rule especially. Dea wasn’t even sure what would happen if he did. Maybe he’d die from shock or something. Then she’d be stuck here, in his dream, forever. Or maybe she’d die with him.

Instead she crossed the street and repeated her trick with the Christmas lights, tearing them down with one hard yank. Her hands were shaking a little, and her mouth was dry. Funny how even her dream-self got anxious.

She knelt in the snow, enjoying the slice of the cold in and out of her lungs, her breath steaming in the air. She worked quickly, her fingers red, stiff from the cold.

She was nearly done before she realized something was wrong. It shouldn’t be so cold. Connor never filled in the details like that. And it was only getting colder. Now each breath felt like inhaling glass. The snow fell so thickly, she could hardly see. The construction site across the street was almost completely obscured by a thick veil of gray snow, like a vast shadow stretching from the sky to the earth.

The dream shifted almost imperceptibly, like the ground right before an earthquake. But suddenly she was aware of the vast silence of the streets and the darkness of the skies and a waiting quiet, as of an animal holding its breath to avoid attack, and she knew that this wasn’t a dream anymore.

It was a nightmare.

She felt them even before she turned around.

There were two of them coming down the street—men, she thought at first, but as they drew closer, she saw she was wrong. The urge to scream worked its way from her chest to her throat and froze there.

They had no faces. No eyes, no noses, no cheekbones or foreheads: just a swirl of flesh-colored skin, barely patched together, like some horrible painting left to bleed in the rain. But they did have mouths. Dark mouths, gaping open, toothless, like long dark tunnels. They were sucking the air in-out, in-out through their mouths. Tasting it.

Looking for someone.

She felt as if the wires that kept her body and mind connected had been cut. She stumbled toward the door of the deli, slipping in the snow, barely managing to right herself. She threw herself inside—a bell tinkled overhead and she was furious, in that moment, that this, of all details, was intact, the stupid, fucking bell—and slammed the door, wishing it had a lock. The deli was empty, thank God. The cash register was barely sketched in. It kept blinking in and out, like the awning lights, now half-buried in the snow.

The lights. They would see the lights and know she had interfered.

They would find her.

She remembered what her mother had said all those years earlier: she must follow the rules or the monsters would find her.

Dea’s heart was going so fast it was like the rush of water. She thought she might pass out. She didn’t know whether that was possible—to pass out or die in someone else’s dream. Maybe, if her own heart just stopped. She’d have to ask Mom.

Why hadn’t she listened to Mom?

On the street just outside the deli, the men with no faces stopped. Even through the glass, Dea could hear the sucking drag of their breath. In-out. She dropped into a crouch, partially concealed behind a display of Miller Lite. Now she was hot—sweating, nauseous, feeling like she might be sick. Please, she thought. Please. Go away. Keep moving. Please.

She felt as if she’d been crouching there for an infinity. Her thighs were cramping. She wanted out. She wanted to be back in her bed, safe, with the rhythm of her mom’s clocks ticking reassuringly in the darkened hall. In-out. Her chest ached from holding her breath. She was afraid they would hear her, though they had no ears, either—just bits of melted flesh where ears should have been.

Then they were gone. They continued past the deli, and she was so relieved that for a moment she didn’t register that they had gone into Connor’s building—that they must have. She straightened up. Her legs were shaking. Hands, too. The snow outside had turned black; she would have mistaken it for rain, if it hadn’t been falling soundlessly. She could barely make out the silhouette of a blackened church across the street—the construction site was gone.

The dream was changing on her. Her body was tight with terror.

She had to get out before the men—the monsters—came back.

The deli was mostly empty of food. Even as she watched, she saw bits of the room begin to evaporate and blur, as though someone was taking an eraser to them, and she knew Connor’s attention was now fixed elsewhere. Electric fixtures in the ceiling became smudgy coronas of light; cereal boxes vanished off the shelves, dissipating like liquid in the heat; the shelves themselves began to melt. She grabbed a roll of paper towels before it could disappear and shredded open the plastic with her teeth.

She imagined she could still hear the men breathing behind her—in-out—and feel the pressure of hot breath on her neck.

She tore off a square of paper towel, but her hands were shaking too badly and her first bird came out lopsided. It barely lifted off the ground before fluttering shakily directly into the wall and collapsing, inert, only half-changed: a small pale beak and one feather were visible within the folds of paper.