She knew that what she was doing was wrong. She was taking a huge chance. Never be seen. That was the most important rule of dream-walking. But it was as if the dream was a heartbeat, pulsing through her, drawing her forward. She moved quickly down the hall, deeper into the house, deeper into the dream.

The next door led to a bathroom. That left one closed door, and one final bedroom. Connor’s mom’s room. Where his baby brother had slept. Where the murders had happened. She placed a hand on the doorknob, then hesitated. Maybe it was better not to know. What if she entered and saw Connor’s mom’s face already splattered across the pillow, his poor baby brother lying in a pool of blood?

What if she entered and saw Connor, standing over his brother’s crib with a gun?

What if he had lied after all?

She dismissed that thought quickly. She didn’t—she wouldn’t—believe it. And still the dream seemed to draw her forward and deeper, as if she were a ship riding a strong current. She eased open the door, cold with terror.

Then she was inside the room and the fear was gone, making her feel loose and shaky. Connor’s mom was sleeping on her back, lips partly open, snoring quietly. Connor’s brother was curled like a small fern in a patch of moonlight in a crib near the foot of the bed. They hadn’t died, not tonight, not in this dream. She knew it didn’t change anything in real life, but it seemed like a miracle: in some place, in some version of reality, imagined or wished, they were alive.

She should go. She knew she should go—slip out of the dream, unobserved, no harm done. But she was moved by the sudden impulse to know what Connor’s mom looked like, whether Connor and his mom shared the same chin, whether he was written, somehow, in her face. She inched forward, toward the bed.

Connor’s mom’s chest swelled and fell under the sheets. Her dark hair was scattered across the pillow. She was smiling very slightly in her sleep—a dream within a dream.

“What the hell?”

Dea spun around. Connor was standing in the doorway, rigid, staring—seventeen-year-old Connor, his normal self, not the six-year-old he had been when his mom had died. This was dream-logic, the push-pull between reality and projection, memory and wish.

She felt a wild seesaw of panic.

Never be seen.

“What—what are you doing here?” He took a step forward. His mom stirred.

“It’s a dream,” she whispered. You must never, ever be seen. This was wrong, all wrong. She felt the dream stretching, bending around her, as if it might come down.

“No.” Connor came closer. But she found no comfort in his presence. His eyes were hard, horrified. “You’re here.” He grabbed her arms, gripping her so tightly it hurt. “Why are you here?”

“Let me go.” she said. Connor’s mother moaned. His brother still slept quietly in his crib, his face obscured by a long stripe of shadow. Then Dea realized it wasn’t shadow. It was blood—blood seeping from his head, pouring onto the ground, sliding across the room toward them like inky dark fingers. Connor’s mom was bleeding, too. Her eyes were open and she was staring sightlessly at the ceiling, moaning over and over. Her head was split in two.

Dea was suddenly so terrified, she wanted to cry. “Please let me go.”

“You shouldn’t have come here, Dea.” Connor sounded regretful. His face was changing, too—melting, almost, his features distorted like candle wax by heat. “Now they know where to find you.”

Dea froze. “Who?” she whispered, even though she knew—she sensed it in the air, in the frigid room, in the blood pooling around her shoes.

Connor’s eyes had turned black. He opened his mouth, but instead of answering, his mouth expanded, yawning open like a tunnel, and the rest of his face simply blew apart. Dea stumbled backward. He was no longer Connor but one of those things—faceless, deformed, his breathing wet and ragged.

“We’ve been looking for you,” the thing said, and its voice was like the howl of wind through a canyon.

Then everything exploded. The room, the walls, the floor—there was a tremendous blast and Dea was falling, screaming, as the building around her turned to black dust and then evaporated. The nightmare was eating everything, turning it to rot. The monsters had consumed Connor. They would consume her, too.

She hit the snow hard and slipped. She rolled back onto her feet and began to run, crying, ignoring the pain in her ankle and wrist where she had fallen on them wrong. The snow was so heavy it was hard to move, but she plunged recklessly forward, not daring to look back. The thing was right behind her. She could hear it panting, and feel the wet blast of its death-sweet breath on her neck.

Around her, the dream was coming down. Whole buildings collapsed in an instant, thundering to the street. Scaffolding crashed through windshields; metal ricocheted into storefront windows and the air vibrated with the sound of wailing alarms.

Connor was trying to wake up.

She needed to find a way out.

The thing was closer now. She felt its long, wet fingers graze her back, like the touch of someone’s tongue, and she screamed. A string of stoplights came down—crash, crash, crash—sparking in the snow. She dodged a fallen streetlamp, her heart screaming in her throat, her legs burning, tears freezing on her cheeks.

From somewhere far away she thought she heard her mom calling her name. Mommy, she wanted to scream. Help me. But she couldn’t scream at all. She could hardly breathe. Her lungs felt like they’d been flattened, and she could barely draw in enough air to keep running.

An exit. She needed an exit. But every doorway crumbled before she could reach it. The whole city was turning into cascades of dust and dark sand. She had no time to make a harbinger. She veered toward the sidewalk, and toward a small dark archway between buildings that looked as if it might be a way out. But she tripped on the curb, half-concealed by the snow, and went skidding, facedown, on the icy sidewalk. She tasted blood in her mouth. Already the archway was crumbling, bricks thudding to the ground, as if the whole street were being rocked by a massive earthquake.

Then the thing had its hand around her ankle. She lashed out and landed a kick in its chest. It stumbled backward and she pushed herself back to her feet. When she risked a glance behind her, she saw the thing was no longer alone. There was a second one now, with a face like a hole and long, black fingers; it had materialized out of nowhere.

Help me, help me, help me, she screamed silently. The air was thick with dust and plaster and her ears were ringing. The city was being torn apart: it screamed like a living thing; it groaned and cried out.

She turned the corner and found herself in a narrow street flanked by warehouses and blocked, at one end, by a massive pile of rubble. A dead end. She turned around to backtrack, but the monsters burst around the corner. The buildings on either side of her began to shiver and shake.

Even though the men had no faces, Dea could tell they were smiling.

She swiveled around again, desperate, her breath slicing through her chest. Her mom’s voice was still singing in her head. And then, just as the buildings around her started to crumble, tumbling soft piles of old brick and sheetrock into the street, sending plumes of snow shooting back toward the sky, as the men reached out their liquid fingers to her and unhinged their jaws, roaring, as if to swallow her whole—as she felt their wet breath on her throat and neck, their eager, tasting tongues, black as rot—a narrow opening was revealed, just for a second, as one of the warehouses shifted on its foundation. She threw herself sideways toward the thin slice of darkness, and heard a scream as if the whole world was tearing.