I must have stayed there for a minute, racked by pictures of blood on a cream carpet. This person had been killed with a shotgun. His skull had burst open, spraying brain and shattered bone. My ears rang. When I came to my senses, my body felt uncoordinated. I dragged myself along the ground, blinking away bloody visions. A silver-white burn slashed across my palm. The mark of a poltergeist.

Something shot past my ear. I looked up to see another watchtower, and the guard standing inside it.

Flux dart.

A second dart fired in my direction. I scrambled to my feet, turned east, and ran—but soon enough I came to another watchtower, and another gun had me running south. It was only when I saw the oval that I realized I was being driven back to Warden.

The next dart hit me in the shoulder. The pain was instant and excruciating. I reached up and tore the thing out. Blood flowed from the wound, and a wave of disorienting nausea swept over me. I was fast enough to stop the drug—it took about five seconds to self-inject—but the message was clear: get back on the oval, or get shot. Warden was waiting for me.

“Welcome back.”

I swiped the sweat from my forehead. “So I’m not allowed to run.”

“No. Unless you would like me to present you with a yellow tunic, which we give only to cowards.”

I ran at him, blinded by anger, and drove my shoulder into his abdomen. Given his size, nothing happened. He just took me by the tunic and tossed me away. I landed hard on the same shoulder.

“You cannot fight me with your bare hands.” He prowled the edge of the oval. “Nor can you run from an Emite. You are a dreamwalker, girl. You have the power to live and die as you decree. Lay waste to my dreamscape. Drive me mad!”

A part of me tore away. My spirit flew across the space between us. It slashed through the outer ring of his mind, like a knife through taut silk. I broke through the darkest part of his dreamscape, straining against impossibly powerful barriers, aiming for the distant patch of light that was his sunlit zone, but it wasn’t as easy as it had been on the train. The center of his dreamscape was so far away, and my spirit was already being driven out. Like an elastic band stretched too far, I snapped back into my own mind. The weight of my own spirit knocking me off my feet. My head rapped against the concrete.

The gas lamps swam back into focus. I pushed myself up on my elbows, my temples throbbing. Warden was still standing. I hadn’t brought him to his knees, as I had with Aludra, but I had tampered with his perception. He ran a hand over his face and shook his head.

“Good,” he said. “Very good.”