Maren scooped up a length of satin ribbon and stuck it in her pocket with the bleach cap. Then she and Amos raced through the hallway and down the stairs to the basement, where she locked him back in his cell. Maren blew Lishta’s door a kiss, then dashed into the room where the ominous shovel lay. She climbed the rungs on the wall and hoisted herself up through the hole.

After she had replaced the grate, Maren sat very still until wings fluttered beside her face. She swallowed her revulsion and let the insect crawl along her cheek to her mouth. As its tickly legs pressed at her lips, she caught the moth and crushed it in her hand, cringing at the papery crunch and the squish.

It was time to make her plan a reality.

Twenty-Seven

It was midafternoon, and ever since Obscura had returned and pulled her up through the trapdoor, Maren had been making dream after dream after dream. Apparently the wicked ballerina didn’t require sleep, or even rest. She’d taken Amos out of his cell and put him to work sweeping up trash with his leg chained to a row of seats too far away from Maren for them to communicate. Then she had stretched, rehearsed, and fiddled with the projector for a few hours, changing the cutout puppets and experimenting with different-colored lights for the background.

Finally, she stopped long enough to eat a yogurt and a salad in a plastic takeout container. The enormous striped moth-bee flitted to the handle of her fork.

“Keep working,” she snapped at Maren, who had never felt such deep longing for a bite of raw kale in her life. But Maren had been busy on a little side project, in addition to the nightmares she was making. Unlike the black nightmares, this project came in a pink sachet. She also had a shiny silver safety pin tucked in her pocket.

All afternoon, Maren had been adding ingredients to the pink sachet, a pinch at a time whenever Obscura was too busy to notice. The second hand of a watch, a chip of paint from the piano in the orchestra pit, a scraping from the bleach bottle cap, a thread from Obscura’s pointe shoe ribbons, a rabbit’s toenail, and the legs of the moth that had been unlucky enough to try crawling into Maren’s mouth. And thirty grains of dreamsalt, enough to keep a grown man asleep for two days. There was just one ingredient left to add, whispering dust, but Obscura had tucked the jar inside her duffel bag, which sat at the opposite end of the stage.

Paradiddle paradiddle heel toe heel, went Maren’s feet.

Obscura snapped her empty salad container shut and ambled over to Maren’s table. “Let me see what you’ve made,” she said.