This was the end. Tanvi knew it.

Her harvest last night in Belfast had been excellent, rewarding her with top-tier dreams. She’d focused fully on each one, conducting the wisps of the vision into the dreamstone she’d selected for it and patiently waiting out the effects of the residue before moving on to the next. In a handful of hours, she’d been a grandparent racing their team of flying pigs in the Indianapolis 500, a comic-book alien from the rings of Saturn, a werebook switching genres from romance to thriller to cozy mystery, and a kid winning an international burping championship with an all-time record of ten minutes.

The bracelet was hers.

Daybreak had found Tanvi snug in her bed and her dream-filled vials safely stored in the cabinet, ready for her appointment with Venkat in the morning. She’d pictured how her bracelet’s delicate charms would swing on her wrist. Settling into her pillow, she’d closed her eyes and given herself up to the void.

Everything had been the way it should be.

Until she dreamed.

This time, she was five, and she stood in line at a museum with a woman and a man in their thirties, their skin glowing brown under the pink lights. Off to the side, a girl Tanvi’s height peeked out from behind a shiny purple-and-green book sculpture so big that only the tops of her striped butterfly-frame sunglasses showed. Tanvi couldn’t tell what the book cover said, and she didn’t care. They were finally going to see the exhibit on virtual reality from other dimensions! She’d been waiting months for this.

The woman bought their tickets, along with a steaming pretzel as tall as a giraffe and flecked with salt crystals that were actual cut crystals. It smelled so good and yeasty that Tanvi wanted to devour the entire thing. She tried to break off a foot, but the woman laughed. “You can’t eat a friend,” she said. “Now give him your ticket.”

A ghost-white teen boy with a shaggy mess of sandy hair and an employee uniform had appeared before them, his hand out. The woman offered him her tickets—one for herself and one for the pretzel—and the boy waved her through, along with the man and the other girl, who’d hopped back in line when Tanvi wasn’t looking.

So excited she could burst, Tanvi bounced toward him with her ticket. The boy tore it in half. “Sorry, not valid.”

Tanvi stomped her foot. “This is so unfair. We just bought it!”

The boy only shrugged. “You’re not allowed.”

She watched helplessly as the other four vanished down the color-changing hall. “Wait!” she called after them. “I’m coming!”

If they heard, they didn’t stop.

“Please,” she begged the boy. “There has to be some mistake. You let them go. You have to let me go, too!”