She left the towel hanging over the mirror and returned to the bedroom. At first she thought Connor was asleep already. The lights were off, and he had the covers pulled up to his chest. But when she started to climb into her own bed, he spoke up.

“I won’t be able to fall asleep if you’re just going to be, like, staring at me.”

The sheets were very cold. A radiator was spitting ineffectually in the corner, but the wind still came through underneath the door, and vibrated the windowpanes. “I’m not going to stare at you,” she said. “I’m going to close my eyes.”

“Still.” He was quiet for a minute. Then: “Come here.”

She was sure she’d misheard. “What?”

“You said it would be easier if you had an object. A doorway object. Or if we were touching.” He had rolled over so his back was to her. In the fine line of moonlight coming through a gap in the curtains, his shoulders were just outlined in silver.

“Easier,” she said carefully. She had told him about doorway objects in the car, and how they could substitute for closeness. “But—but I don’t need to.”

“I want you to,” he said, and she felt the impact of the words—I want you to—everywhere, all through her body, as if she were swimming, as if she were absorbing them through her skin. “I’m letting you into my dreams, Dea. It’s weird that you’re halfway across the room. Besides, I’m cold.”

She couldn’t think of any other excuses. She stood up. Her body, dressed in strange clothing, walking through the dark of an unfamiliar room toward a boy’s bed, felt alien. Her heart was opening and closing, opening and closing, like a hand grasping for something just out of reach.

She slipped into bed beside him. She was acutely, painfully, ridiculously aware of his body next to hers, of the rise and fall of his breathing and the smell of his skin. His bare shoulders and chest. The dark shadow of his hair against the white pillow. She was afraid to move or even breathe. She lay on her back, staring at the patterns of moonlight on the ceiling, and the occasional illumination of passing headlights. Their feet were only a few inches apart.

After a minute, he rolled over onto his back too, so their shoulders were touching. She felt his hand skim her thigh and she stopped breathing. A mistake, she was sure.

“Your hair’s soaking,” he said quietly. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m all right.” She wanted to say: she was burning. Her whole body was on fire, was alive at the awareness of Connor so close. She could tell he was looking at her. Part of her wanted to turn her head and another part of her was too afraid. Their lips would be practically touching. What if he wanted to kiss her?

What if he didn’t?

They lay there for a while, breathing hard, fast, as though they were running. She felt like she was drowning in the dark and the quiet, in the anticipation. She wanted to say something. She wanted a shift, a change. She wanted something to happen, just to bleed out the tension in the room.

“Roll over,” Connor said at last. His lips were next to her ear. She could feel the warmth of his breath.

“Which way?”

He put a hand on her waist—solid, gentle—and rolled her over, so that her back was against his chest. She wanted to die. She wanted to be reborn in the space beneath his hand.

Spooning. The expression came to her—she’d heard about spooning, read about it. It was all wrong, she decided, while Connor’s chest swelled against her back with his breathing, and his exhale tickled her neck. Spooning was something hard and metallic. Spooning was organized, like a silverware drawer. This was warm and soft and fluid. This was a cup of milk before bedtime, sunshine pouring like liquid down a wall, soft model clay, imprinted with a finger.

She felt calmer, warmer, happier than she had in weeks. She was drifting, breaking apart on soft, insistent waves of darkness. She fought against the sensation of sleep, tunneling her down into dreamlessness. She needed to focus.

“Connor?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, and she knew he had fallen asleep. It was time.

I’m sorry, she mouthed silently. She closed her eyes. She felt the velvet pressure of Connor’s mind almost immediately, a momentary resistance; then, just as quickly, the resistance yielded. She broke through the surface. It was like throwing a stone into the water and watching a reflected image ripple away.

The blackness dispersed.

She was in.

NINETEEN

It was different, much different, walking Connor’s dream now that she had permission to be there. It was far easier. He seemed almost to be working with her, as if he could sense the direction of her thoughts, her needs and impulses, and was trying to give her as much help as possible. Doors opened at her touch. Glowing exit signs appeared to light the way out of the long white corridor in which she now found herself—a hospital corridor, she thought, except that on both sides of the hall were not rooms but enormous fish tanks, most of them empty. There was no resistance—no overstructure, no maze of concrete rubble to navigate. It was as though he’d been expecting her—which, of course, he had.

“Chicago,” she said out loud, into the empty hallway, even as she began to jog toward the glowing exit sign. Her voice echoed back to her. “Bring me back to Chicago.”

She felt the dream shifting, the way that sand shifted underfoot on a beach. Connor was listening. Connor understood. The moment she burst out of the glass doors she was there, on Connor’s old street.

This time, there was no snow. It was blazingly sunny, and hot. Summertime. In the distance, she heard the faint tinny music of an ice cream truck. A woman was watering flowers on her porch; as Dea watched, they grew enormous, into shading vines that clawed up the front door and started reaching for the windows. Down the street, a nurse was wheeling a girl with a swollen balloon-head on a stretcher. This was dream stuff, mixed-up imagery and time frames, a jumble of past and present.

She started walking, then quickly drew back, sucking in a breath, into the shadow of a nearby alcove.

Connor. She recognized him immediately, though he was much younger—maybe eleven or twelve; a time when, in real life, his mother was already dead. He was still tall, but all elbows and knees and awkward angles, and his hair was longer, nearly hitting his jaw. He was wheeling a bike, walking next to a few kids—friends?—all of them sweating in the heat. He didn’t stop at his house, but instead swung a leg onto his bike and pushed off down the street. As soon as he was gone, his friends evaporated like liquid in the heat.

She cast a quick, instinctive glance up toward Connor’s apartment as she passed and stifled a small cry. In the window, Connor’s mother was standing naked, her waist encircled by the arms of an enormous cockroach. The insect was the size of a man, and Dea felt her whole body go tight with fear and disgust. She looked away quickly and hurried down the street, trying not to think too hard about what it meant.

Her mother was here—somewhere in this world of concrete and heat, of buildings that shifted in the flat light, grew new planes and angles or rubbed away into nothing as Connor’s mind shifted or failed to sustain them. But where? The monsters knew, she was sure of it. They had her imprisoned, or they were tracking her. Dea sensed, intuitively, that it was because of the monsters that her mother had been sucked into this dream-space in the first place. But that was no help. The men with no faces were tracking her, too—that much was obvious. She had to find her mother without being seen, without being sniffed out. That meant disturbing nothing, working quickly, staying concealed.