Adrenaline shot through her veins at the sight of the snake. The nagas. Jai. Jai’s empty room. What if that happened to her, too?

Someone was still asleep within the house behind her; Tanvi could just barely sense him dreaming. She pushed her inner radar for the usual details like degree and depth, but she didn’t get more than a weird buzz.

Shrugging off the rising dread, she swallowed a lozenge and slipped inside the house. She was still a dream runner, and Venkat had told her to harvest. She might not have found the girl with the headband, but she could do this.

The family was in various states of preparing for the day: making breakfast, showering, scrolling on their tablets. Since she didn’t have a lot of shadows to hide in, Tanvi made straight for the master bedroom, where a middle-aged man snored on top of the covers, still in his work uniform. Perfect.

She placed her hands above his head.

The man leaned over a railing, his fishing line dangling in the creek below. Cotton-ball clouds rolled through an emphatically cerulean sky, and a wall of fragrant pine trees spread to the horizon. Tanvi hadn’t felt this unstressed in days, and she smiled with the man as a prize trout, as big as a toddler, bit.

He had only begun to reel it in when a voice interrupted.

“Honey? Sorry to bother you, but I can’t find—”

The dream tattered, and Tanvi whirled around to see a woman staring at her. She groped for a dreamstone, coming up with a champagne zircon.

“Who are you?” The woman jabbed her finger at the wisps still billowing through the air. “And what the hell is that?”

Shame and panic clogged Tanvi’s throat as she rushed to guide the loose wisps into the vial. But she’d waited a beat too long, and they dissipated even as she grabbed for them.

The woman elbowed her aside. “Stan?” she cried. “Stan?” She glowered at Tanvi. “What did you do to him?”

The man’s eyes opened. “What’s going on?” he slurred. “Marie?”

Swearing, Tanvi ran for the exit.

The woman’s shouts had been enough to draw her children into the doorway. When Tanvi tried to force herself between them, the boy snagged her arm, and Tanvi had to kick him in the shin before he let go. In the process, she dropped the vial, and the girl snapped it up.

There was no time to fight her for it. The unwanted thing in Tanvi’s chest pounding, she dashed down the stairs and back outside.

Everything was breaking. Everything. Not only had she been seen mid-harvest—by four people—but she’d let the dream get corrupted and even lost a dreamstone.