And then, Liam bent down and kissed me, and there were no words to describe that.

Clancy’s intrusion came like all the others had before, first with a tingle, then with a roar. I had been so lost in thinking about the dream that I hadn’t even felt him take my hand to start that trial run.

I liked Clancy a lot. More than I ever expected. But he didn’t have a place in this dream. There was nothing there I wanted to share with him.

I clenched his hand back, hard, and threw everything I had into sending my other set of hands out from inside me, like a shove.

His curtain strategy hadn’t worked for me, but this one? Using offense as defense? This one was maybe a little too effective. Even before I opened my eyes, I felt Clancy jerk back, sucking in a hiss of what sounded like pain.

“Oh my God,” I said, when I finally shook the haze from my mind. “I’m so sorry!”

But when Clancy looked up, he was smiling. “Told you,” he said. “Told you that you’d figure it out.”

“Can we do it again?” I asked. “I want to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.”

Clancy rubbed at his forehead. “Can we give it a rest for a little while? I feel like you just tackled my brain.”

But Clancy didn’t get a rest. Almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, we both heard a very different kind of warning. There was a shrill wail from the other side of the room, one I had never heard before, almost like a car alarm. He winced, tucking his head down to escape the noise, even as he jumped up from the bed.

He made his way to his desk, flipping open his laptop lid. His fingers flew as he typed in his password, the blue-white screen of the laptop illuminating his pale face. I came to stand behind him just as he clicked open a new program.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “Clance?”

He didn’t look up. “One of the camp’s perimeter alarms was triggered. Don’t worry—it might be nothing. We’ve had animals step a little too close to the wires before.”

It took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. Four different color videos, one in each corner of the screen; four different viewpoints of the camp boundaries. Clancy leaned forward, bracing his hands on either side of his laptop.

He reached across me to get to the wireless black radio sitting on the other side of his desk. He never once took his eyes off the screen.

“Hayes, do you read me?”

There was a moment of silence before Hayes’s gruff, “Yeah, what’s up?” came crackling through the speaker.

“The southeast perimeter alarm was triggered. I’m watching the feed now, but—” I think what he was going to say was, I don’t see anyone or anything, but his next words had me ducking under his arm to take a look at the screen myself. “Yeah, I see a man and a woman. Both in camo—unfriendlies, by the look of it.”