Of course. Dea had broken the rules. She’d started interfering, making herself visible, making herself obvious. The monsters in Connor’s dream had seen her. And so her father had used them to track her. She was gripped with a fury that felt like cold—a blizzard of anger, freezing her insides.

“You sent the men after me,” she said. Her voice, too, cracked as if it were frozen. “You pulled them from Connor’s dream.”

She expected him to get defensive—angry, even. Instead, he just looked amused. “I don’t know Connor,” he said. “I recruit all my soldiers from the pits. The pits, as you know, aren’t permanent. Dreams collapse. The monsters collapse with them. They have to be reborn, and redreamed, every time.” He shrugged. “I can give them new life. Real life. A kind of permanence and power.” Then his expression darkened. “They were under strict instructions not to harm you. To take you, yes. But not to harm you. Just as the soldiers who came for your mother were under instructions to deliver her safely.”

Dea’s stomach turned when she thought about the mirrors, and the exploded shards of glass carpeting her room. Her old room. She wasn’t crazy: monsters really had come through the glass.

He shook his head. “But I don’t always find my soldiers easy to control,” he said. “So I decided on a . . . different tactic.”

Aeri. Jesus. Dea felt like such an idiot. It was like some bad TV plot—all it took was a cute boy with dark hair, and she went trotting like a dog after him. The icy rage inside of her cracked all at once and became a flow, a river. She was lost in it.

The room was too big, too cold, all hard surfaces. Those swooping dark creatures in the sky cast shadows across the marble floor; the tile mosaic, Dea saw, was very slowly moving, shifting orientations and designs while she watched. It was dizzying. But turning toward the windows, looking down from this vast height to the tiny dark blots of tens of thousands of people, was just as bad.

She waited to speak until she was sure her voice would be steady.

“I don’t understand this place,” she said. “How did it get here? How did any of it get here?”

When he spoke, the king’s voice was soft. Gentle, even. “Some people say the world was made from the dream of the first god,” he said. He smiled and waved a hand as if to say, But we know better. “The pickers like to take credit, of course. They say they brought a grain of sand out of one of the pits, and it became the desert, and from the desert grew the great city.” He shrugged. “The truth is, no one knows. Do you know where your world comes from? Can you be sure it isn’t somebody’s dream?”

Dea didn’t answer that. “What do you want from me?” she said.

He stared at her as if he hadn’t understood. “Dea,” he said, drawing her name out. “This is your home. This is where you belong.”

“Wrong.” Dea shook her head.

“I’m right.” He sighed, and moved past her to the vaulted windows that extended, floor to ceiling, over the city. “Your mother took you, Dea. She stole you from me when you were just a baby. Did she ever tell you that? Did she tell you how she brought you into the other world?”

Dea said nothing. Of course her mom hadn’t told her; she had, Dea realized now, never told her the truth about anything. Dea was on the verge of tears but refused to cry here, in front of this man who was supposed to be her father.

The king turned back to her. And Dea found herself looking for a resemblance, for any feature or habit or twitch she’d inherited from him. But she saw nothing—nothing but a tired man with an army of monsters. “There’s a war coming,” he said quietly. “I can’t say what the outcome will be. I want you here, by my side. I want to know my daughter.”

“And what if I say no?” Dea lifted her chin and did her best to appear unafraid. “What if I don’t want to stay?”

Her father shook his head. “Despite what you may think, I’m not a monster.”

“No,” she cut in quickly. “You just use monsters to do your dirty work.”

His smile tightened. “I’m the king, Dea. Kings need armies.”

“Are you going to throw me in prison if I refuse to play along?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, in an exasperated tone. For a moment Dea’s chest ached as she realized she was fighting with her dad, like any normal girl. But one look at the mosaic tiles, crawling over one another like square beetles, reminded her how far from normal she was. “I’m not going to keep you here against your will. If you don’t want to come home, that’s up to you.”

“What’s the catch?” Dea said, watching him closely.

“Honestly”—he threw his hands up—“there’s no catch. Stay in that world, if you want—where everything is dull and everyone grows old and dies at the same rate. A world where you’ll grow, where you’ll get sick. Or come home, to this world, where you belong, where you’re the daughter of a king. I’ll let you choose.”

Dea thought of Connor’s face, and the sputtering of a motel room heater, and the way his body felt lying next to her in bed. The world she knew, the world that was everything she understood.

A world where she would be homeless, without family, pursued by the police.

Still, she knew she wouldn’t—she couldn’t—stay here.

“So that’s it?” she said. “I can go now, and those—those monsters won’t come after me again?”

He smiled again—sadly, this time. “Those monsters,” he said, “will stay in your friend Connor’s nightmares. And in his memories, of course.”

Dea looked at her father one last time. She tried to memorize the lines of his face, the fine bits of stubble shadowing his jaw and neck, the low-drawn look of his eyebrows. Father. But the word had no meaning. No matter what he said, she didn’t belong here.

“I want to talk to my mother,” she said.

Something flashed in his eyes—anger or grief, Dea couldn’t tell. “Your mother stays here, Dea,” he said warningly. “That’s part of the bargain. If you go, I’ll make sure you never see her again. I can keep you out, you know. Of the city. Even of the pits.”

Dea felt as if a fist had plunged inside her chest and ripped away her insides: hollowed out, breathless. Of course. She’d known there would be a catch.

“I want to see her,” she repeated.

“Be my guest.” Dea’s father turned around, gesturing to a plain wooden door almost directly behind the dais and the throne. “You’ll find her in the tower. And Dea.” He called her back when she’d already started for the door. “I’m not a monster, but I’m not a saint, either. Patience isn’t one of my virtues. You have twenty-four hours to decide.”

TWENTY-SIX

Beyond the wooden door was a small, bright room, airy and pretty—maybe some kind of study or sitting room; there were walls full of books, graceful columns that extended up to the painted ceiling, and gilded chairs arranged around an unlit fireplace. Through a skylight she could make out the tower, which must have been almost directly above her.

She heard footsteps approach and, fearing more of her father’s monsters, crossed quickly to a painted door across the room, reaching for the elaborate gold handle. As soon as she touched it, it started to move. It began to melt, to change, to slither; it was soon a metal snake, weaving its way up her arm, coiling itself around her shoulder, its belly hard and cold as steel. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She was being careless, forgetting that this was still a world built out of dreams—that things were fluid and likely to change.

“Through the door and to the left,” the snake hissed. “Straight to the top of the tower.” Then it slithered back down her arm, curled up, and became a door handle again.

This time, the door opened easily at her touch.