The sand was coming so fast now it had obliterated all the light above her.

The pit was collapsing.

Connor was waking up.

She lost her grip on the ladder and fell, or slid, or was pushed—she didn’t know. There was sand in her mouth, her eyes, her ears. She clawed for open air and came up blinking, coughing, struggling to stand. But before she could get to her feet, a roller coaster fell in slow motion, a giant iron skeleton coming apart. Its collapse sent out a booming echo so loud it knocked her off balance. Now the sky was breaking apart in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle being disassembled: sand poured through the cracks, a steady downpour of it.

She got to her feet but made it only a few staggering steps before another structure fell, before the ground trembled and bucked and sent her to her knees. Up again. A surge came toward her—a shimmering high wall of white sand—and before she could move or turn or cover her face, she was trapped. There was sand in her shirt, in her nose, sand choking her. She fought blindly against the sucking weight of thousands and thousands of tons of sand—sand shaved over centuries from dream-mountains. Then she was spit out, tossed into the fine brightness of the air. She rolled onto her back, hacking, as the sand continued to bury the dream.

Most of the dream was gone—rubbed away, leaving only a faint smear where the colored funhouse tents had been, an aureole of dust and destruction. She would never make it. Still, she took a step forward, and then another: moving mechanically, instinctively, without hope.

It hurt to breathe. She had never been so thirsty. She uncapped the water that the boy had given her, but before she could drink, the ground shifted again. She stumbled, landing on her hands and knees. The water seeped into the ground, a dark line of it, like a snake being sucked underground. She grabbed for it, trying to palm some of the wet sand into her mouth, desperate for even a drop, a taste, of water.

Instead, the sand gripped her fingers, ate at her wrists and arms, sucked her downward. She let out a short cry and then was jerked to the ground, face pressed to the hot sand, as a whirling, unseen pressure continued working at her, spiraling her downward, as if an invisible monster were sucking her slowly through a straw.

Then she realized: a door. The water had made a door.

But it was unlike any door she had ever used. She was being pulled headfirst into the ground. She shut her eyes and held her breath. She was kicking at the air, and then her legs were pulled under, too. She was caught, trapped, buried in the sand, and for a second she believed the boy had tricked her, and she would die.

Boom. Even through the muffling sand, she heard the last of Connor’s dream-city falling. Boom.

Just when she knew she couldn’t hold her breath any longer—just when she was ready to give up, and float away—there was a small, subtle shift in the pressure around her. She gasped and tasted air. She kicked out and felt the tangle of blankets around her ankles.

She sat up, stifling a cry, as Connor came awake beside her.

TWENTY

Boom.

For a second, still disoriented and terrified, she thought the echoes had followed her into real life. Then she realized that someone was knocking on the door. Her eyes went to the clock on the bedside table: 7:35 a.m.

“Connor?” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar. His stepmom? But Connor looked confused, too. “Dea?”

Connor eased out of bed, gesturing for Dea to stay put when she moved to follow him. At the window, he parted the cheap curtains with a finger and peered outside. Then he reared back quickly, as if something had bitten his nose, just as the woman started knocking again.

“I just want to talk to you. Five minutes. Ten, tops.” Even through the door, Dea thought she heard a sigh. “Listen, you’re not going to get rid of me, okay? I’ll wait around all day. So you might as well let me in.”

“Damn it,” Connor muttered. His hair was sticking straight up, and sometime in the middle of the night, he’d lost a sock between the sheets. Now one of his feet was bare. Dea wanted to go to him and give him a hug. But she stayed where she was, still half-dizzy from walking.

“Who is it?” she whispered. Her throat was raw, as if she’d really inhaled sand.

But he just shook his head and moved to open the door, even as the knocking started up again. They’d locked the door twice and put the chain up the night before, and it took Connor a minute to work the door open. When he did, Dea was momentarily dazzled by a vision of pale blue sky and wintry sun. A beautiful Thanksgiving.

“Christ.” The woman who stepped into the room was weirdly familiar, although Dea was sure they’d never met. She was balancing a cardboard tray of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee—four cups, Dea noticed—in one hand. With the other, she unwound an enormous scarf from around her neck, carefully disentangling the fabric from a pair of dangly earrings. “You’re a hard person to get ahold of, you know that?”

And then Dea knew her. She recognized the voice. Kate Patinsky, who was writing a book, who’d been trying to talk to Connor for days, who’d tried to visit Dea in the hospital. Kate was younger than Dea had expected. She’d been imagining a woman in her forties or fifties, with the long snout of a bloodhound and the kind of mean, calculating expression that Morgan Devoe and Hailey Madison had perfected long ago. But Kate looked only a few years older than Dea. She was wearing fingerless gloves and several layers: a T-shirt, an army jacket, an ivory wool peacoat sporting several coffee stains.

“Do you ever give up?” Connor hadn’t moved from the door—maybe he was hoping Kate would take the hint and leave again.

“No,” she said, finally unraveling the scarf and tossing it onto the foot of the unused bed. “I brought coffee,” she said. The tray she put on top of the TV. She reached into her enormous purse and extracted a crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag. “And bagels. Mind if I sit?”

“Yes,” Connor said.

Kate ignored that. She took two of the coffees for herself, leaving the other two in the tray. When she caught Dea staring, she winked. “Only fair,” she said. “I’ve been up all night.”

“Why are you here?” Connor asked bluntly.

Kate sighed. “Look. I know you think I’m out for blood.”

“Aren’t you?” Connor asked, crossing his arms.

Kate looked up at him. Her eyes were big and warm and brown, like a cow’s. “I’m out for the truth,” she said. “This case has been my life. It made a huge impact on me. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to study criminology in the first place. The way they treated you . . .” She broke off, shaking her head. After another moment of hesitating, Connor crossed the room and snatched up the coffees—still glaring at Kate, as if he wanted her to know that he resented her just the same. Connor passed Dea one of the coffees and the bag of bagels. The bagels were warm on her lap and the coffee was amazing: delicately flavored, swimming with cream. She almost—almost—couldn’t hate Kate Patinsky anymore.

“How did you find us?” Connor asked.

Kate had settled on the unused bed and produced about seven packets of sugar from the pocket of her peacoat. She emptied them, one after the other, into her coffee. “Wasn’t hard,” she said. “This one”—she jerked her chin toward Dea—“makes a break for it and at the same time, you disappear. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you’d be together. And I figured you wouldn’t drive more than three, four hours without stopping.” She popped the lid back on the coffee and took a long, gratified slurp. “I called fifty-six motels before I found someone who said he’d seen you.”