Dea pressed her palms flat against her thighs, as if she could press the feeling of guilt out through them. “For the truth,” she said. “For you.”

TWENTY-NINE

“I won’t do it.” Connor backed up, as if afraid Dea might physically leap into his mind. “I won’t let you do it.”

“Connor,” Dea took a step toward him.

“I said no, okay?” He looked as if he were about to be sick. He repeated, a little quieter, “I said no.”

For a minute they stood there, staring at each other.

“Okay,” Dea said finally. She held up both hands. “Okay.”

Connor visibly relaxed. He turned partly away from her. He was so beautiful in the winter light. He looked almost insubstantial, like something she had imagined.

“I’m scared,” he said, in a raw voice.

She came close to him. Her heart was fluttering like wings. She put a hand on his arm, reassured by the feel of him. “I’m scared, too.”

He turned to face her. In that second there was nothing but him: his eyes and lips and the small scar on his chin, like a tiny moon. They were suspended together in space, in a bright white room that spoke of newness, and Dea allowed herself to believe—just for a moment—that they could stay like this forever and be happy. She put her hands on his chest and felt his heartbeat, a skimming rhythm under her fingers. Blood and bone, valves and shutters—all so easily broken, damaged, dissolved.

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him.

I love you, she thought.

And: I’m sorry.

For a half second, he didn’t respond. She closed her eyes and thought her way toward the soft darkness of his mind but instead felt a barrier, a rapid confusion of images that rose up like a wall. Then he let go, relaxing against her, breathing deep into her, exploring her mouth with his tongue. And she felt an inner relaxation, too—so faint, so quick, it was barely perceptible. There was a split-second gap, a fraction of a fraction of a second when the curtain parted and she felt a pull, strong as a current, toward the other side.

She pushed. Or she let go of her body and leapt. Distantly, she heard Connor cry out.

Already the curtain was closing, and for a moment she was in smothering darkness, floundering without a body, without any boundaries. She felt a sudden blast of cold wind; she fought toward the image of a winter skyline, a city blanketed in snow. With no hands, no fists or fingers, she reached out.

The darkness released her. The pressure on her chest released. Her breath was sharp and painful in her throat. The sky above her was a strange, bruised purple in the twilight, slashed like a wound above the buildings.

Across a street piled with old snow and trash, Christmas lights were blinking in the window of the deli.

She’d done it.

She was walking Connor’s memory.

She didn’t have much time.

Connor wanted her out. That much was clear. The air felt thick, almost syrupy, despite the cold—it was as if she were moving against a tremendous pressure, fighting just to be there. Even her body was responding slowly, as if she were a puzzle that needed to be reassembled after every step. She crossed the street with difficulty, her breath rasping in her throat. She was an infection; the memory was attacking her on all sides, exhausting her, rendering her weak.

She went, half limping, down the street. Connor’s memory was significantly different from his dream. It was much darker; the snow had obviously fallen several days earlier, and was streaked yellow and gray. But the picture was badly melded, confused—in places the snow was piled high, in places it simply vanished. It was a city wrapped in the thick haze of a child’s sleep, its details sketched in only afterward, in retrospect, a composite image of previous nights and other snows. Dea guessed it was well after midnight: all the apartments were dark.

She stopped to catch her breath, ducking into a darkened doorway. She didn’t want to think about how she would find the strength to fight the monsters when they came—when they finally showed themselves as men. She was being gripped by an invisible hand, squeezed on all sides; she felt that at any second she might be expelled into reality, simply popped back into the real world like a cork out of a bottle. But she wouldn’t leave.

Not until she knew for sure.

Not until she gave them faces.

She would have to pick whether to watch the alley that ran along the back of Connor’s apartment building or whether she should stay here, and keep her eye on the front entrance. The police believed the killers had come through the back window; they had certainly left that way. But if Dea was right, if her instincts were right, the killers had come through the front door and only made it look like a break-in later.

She stayed where she was, dragging breaths in and out, fighting to stay awake, to stay in. There was one way in which the memory and the dream were identical: she had no sense of time. It seemed to her both that she stood there for an eternity—feeling her lungs flutter against the pressure in her chest, wondering whether she had made the wrong choice and should circle around to the alley, whether she was wrong in general—and also that only a minute passed before there was a shift. The memory contracted like a heart. Everything went still, even stiller than it had been before. Dea spotted a light coming on quickly in an upstairs window; just as quickly, it was extinguished.

But it was enough. The truth hit her quickly, all at once.

The killer was already inside.

When Connor dreamed, he imagined the men approaching, sliding through the hallways, seeping up the stairs.

But in his memory, they had simply appeared. Connor was sleeping; when he woke, there they were.

She ran. Her progress was painfully slow. She had to fight for each step, each breath. She could hear her breath rasping in her ears, sharp and foreign, and every footstep sent a shudder through the sidewalk, as though the whole memory trembled at her intrusion. She was winded even before she reached the alley. She forced herself to go on, through air that felt like oil, and darkness that felt like weight.

She counted apartment buildings as she ran past them, looking for the wooden stairs stitched up the back of Connor’s building. It was still quiet. There were no screams yet, but she wasn’t sure there would be. Connor had never said that his mother had screamed—only that she had talked, and then begged.

More proof. She would have screamed, first and immediately. Unless . . .

Unless she knew them.

Up the stairs, her breath ragged in her throat, the wood giving way like mud, sucking her shoes down before spitting them out.

Then she was on the landing. Window closed, door locked, a trash bag heaped next to a shovel in the remains of an old snow.

She drew an elbow back and jabbed it once, hard, against the window. She heard a sound like a gunshot—or maybe it was a gunshot?—and the world blinked. Then she was thrown backward, as if by a giant hand.

For a second, everything was darkness and she felt herself being pushed out, felt the heavy lines of her real body and heard Connor shouting at her to stop, stop.

For one long moment, she was split. She was Dea, lying on her back on a porch in the snow. She was Dea, gasping for breath in Connor’s arms, her body stone-heavy, useless and abandoned.

She was neither and she was both.

Wood. Snow. Cold. She reached out, she pulled, she hauled herself back into his memory, leaving her body behind.

She stood up, shaken, steadying herself on the porch railing. A web of cracks extended across the windowpane where she had struck it, but the glass was still intact. She was changing things, screwing up the memory; and the memory was fighting back. Connor was fighting back.