“Did you have any trouble?” she asked. She was dying to sit up, to stretch out her legs, but she didn’t want to move, not until they’d packed miles between the car and the station.

Connor didn’t answer. She thought he must not have heard.

“Connor?” she prompted.

He sighed. When he spoke, he suddenly sounded much, much older.

“It’s your turn to talk,” he said.

EIGHTEEN

Connor picked a direction and started driving. When Dea judged it was safe, she wiggled out of her hiding space, her legs dull and heavy, feeling a little bit like something jostled out of a drain. She was glad, in a way, that Connor didn’t stop so she could take shotgun. It was easier to talk from the backseat, easier when she didn’t have to look at him and wonder what he was thinking.

She told him everything: how she had learned to walk dreams, how her mother had taught her, how she got sick when she didn’t walk for a while. She told him some of the basic rules, how birds were harbingers and dreamers unconsciously responded to intruders and worlds fell apart when the dream was ending. How if you weren’t careful, you might become trapped.

She told him she believed that’s what had happened to her mom: she had become trapped, somehow, in one of Connor’s nightmares.

It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense. Dea’s mom was with Connor’s monsters. That meant she’d found a way into his dreams.

But Dea wasn’t ready to tell Connor about the monsters. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to tell him that her mother had warned her away from mirrors and water and that she suspected, now, that those substances served as doorways between the two worlds. That because Dea had allowed Connor’s monsters to spot her, they had followed her, pursued her to a country road in the real world.

After she ran out of story, he was quiet for a bit. The only sound was the gentle shush of the highway under the tires. It was completely dark—she couldn’t tell where the road ended and the fields began, and didn’t even know where they were headed—except for intermittent and unexpected bursts of civilization, a sudden cluster of lights off in the distance, or a billboard rearing out of the dark, featuring some plastic-looking girl with fat lips and fake boobs perching on six-inch heels, or an advertisement for a family-planning clinic. It wasn’t until she saw a sign for PRIVATE EYES: OHIO’S PRETTIEST GIRLS that she even realized they’d headed east and had made it across the border. They passed a billboard, stripped bare, on which someone had graffitied: Jesus Saves. The words flared briefly in Connor’s headlights, as if they were burning. Dea felt a squeeze of sadness. She wished it were true. She wished it were as simple as that.

“I knew it,” he said at last. “You were there. I knew I wasn’t just dreaming you. It felt different. . . .” He went silent again. Dea didn’t want to say anything. She was so relieved that he didn’t sound angry—or worse, disgusted—she was afraid to ruin it by making a sound. “And you’ve always . . . been this way? You’ve always walked?”

She nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “Yeah.”

“So what changed? Why did everything go to shit all of a sudden?”

You, she almost said. As soon as she thought it, she knew it was true. Things had gone to hell because when she met Connor, her whole world had lit up, and she wanted to be close to him, to know his secrets, to know every dark, twisty corner of his mind.

Because she was in love with him. She knew that was true, too—all at once, with total clarity. She was in love with him because of the almost-dimple in his chin and the way he could make everyone, even strangers, laugh; she loved him because of how soft his T-shirts were and the fact that he pronounced her name as if it were a lyric in a song he knew by heart. Because he was loyal and funny and smart and had gone through hell and hadn’t been broken, hadn’t turned hateful and mean.

And now she was going to have to ask him to go through hell again, and he would have every right to hate her.

She said, “I broke the rules.”

They were coming up on a town—Wapachee Falls, according to the sign. Dea had never heard of it, but she’d never heard of any of the towns they’d passed so far. From the highway, Dea could make out a blur of gas stations and motels, a sudden blaze of neon signage against the night.

She was surprised when Connor turned the car off the road.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m tired,” he said. “Hungry, too.”

She looked at the dashboard clock and realized they’d been driving for almost three hours. It was after eleven. She was exhausted, and weak, and hungry. But she was worried about stopping.

“Do you think it’s safe?” she said.

“There must be five hundred motels between here and Fielding,” he said. “It’s safe. At least for tonight.”

“For tonight?” Dea repeated. “Don’t you have to go home?”

“God, Dea.” Connor sounded tired, but not angry. There was even a hint of a smile in his voice. “You really are an idiot sometimes, do you know that?”

But he didn’t say it meanly, and she let it drop. She was just glad she didn’t have to say good-bye yet.

Wapachee Falls was even smaller than downtown Fielding, but it consisted entirely of chains: McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell. Motel 6, Holiday Inn, Quality Inn, Super 8. BP and Texaco. There wasn’t a single business that catered to locals: just places where nameless strangers could pass out, pass the time, pass through. It was perfect.

At the Burger King drive-through she moved into the front seat. Connor ordered them double of everything, and Dea paid with a twenty she found rubber-banded at the back of the envelope, behind the fifties. For a minute they could have been anyone, going anywhere, two kids with the munchies and a craving for fries.

They ate in the parking lot, the bags pooling with grease resting on their thighs. Dea was so hungry, she barely tasted the food, burning her fingers and tongue. She’d been on hospital food for more than a week. She licked the salt and grease off her fingers and swallowed her burger in three bites. By the time she stopped eating, her stomach was cramping and she was nauseous. But it was better than being hungry. She had money. She was with Connor. Best of all: she’d told the truth, and he was still talking to her.

They scouted the motels next, looking for the darkest, dingiest, and least likely-looking place. They settled on a no-name motel on the very end of the commercial strip, painted a bleak shade of gray that looked more suited to an internment camp. Half the letters on the neon sign were burnt out, so it read simply: VAC CY.

“This looks like a place where people go to die,” Dea said.

Connor angled the car into a parking space as far from the street as possible, where it would be roughly concealed behind an industrial-size Dumpster. “This looks like a place where people leave you alone,” he said. He jerked his chin toward one of the few illuminated windows.

Through a narrow gap in the curtains, Dea caught a quick glimpse of naked skin—a man and woman together. She looked quickly away, her face burning. It hadn’t fully occurred to Dea until she and Connor were walking together, through the slicing air, that she would be sharing a room with Connor. Maybe even a bed. Even though this was by necessity and not by choice, she was both excited and terrified. She thought of the moment on the Ferris wheel and wondered whether he might try to kiss her again.

But no. Their relationship had changed. She’d ruined everything. He hadn’t looked at her that way again—it had probably been temporary insanity.

For the briefest second, she thought of the vision she’d seen in the gap between the curtains and wondered what it would be like. With Connor.