“I’ll…I’ll need to make the nightmares myself,” said Maren. “It’ll take a couple of days.” Her dreams wouldn’t be as scary as Lishta’s or Hallie’s, but that wasn’t a bad thing. That should be the goal, in fact. Something like the pyramid-teddy-bear dream, but less obvious. Less silly. “And I still probably can’t get the whispering dust.”

Obscura shook her head. “You have one day. I don’t care what you need to do, but you’d better figure it out.”

Maren hated her disdainful tone, like she was used to ordering people around and had never been questioned or challenged in her life. Maren wasn’t anybody’s servant. She took a couple of steps toward the front of the hospital, then stopped.

“Are you still afraid of snakes?” she said.

Obscura’s eyes bulged. She stuck her hands behind her back, but before she did, Maren saw they were clenched into white-knuckled fists, and she knew she’d found something. A tiny hole in a stocking that might turn into a giant, ripping run if she pulled on it. She just wasn’t sure how yet.

“You have one day,” growled Obscura.

“I’ll do my best,” said Maren, and she ran to the front doors and let them swallow her up into the hospital.

* * *

Hallie lay slightly crooked in her bed. Maren wished it were because she’d moved, but the nurses had probably reconnected her tubes or given her a sponge bath. Hallie would die of humiliation if she knew people were giving her sponge baths. She didn’t look humiliated, though. She looked asleep and a little deflated, like always. Maren shut the door tight, checked the room and all the flower arrangements for hidden cameras, and pulled the chair up close to Hallie’s bed.

“A world-famous ballerina is blackmailing me,” she whispered. “Isn’t that ridiculous? But it isn’t actually funny. She saw me giving you dreams, and now she’s forcing me to make nightmares for her. I can’t tell anybody, because if I do, Gran-Gran’s shop will have to close and she might get arrested and I won’t be allowed to visit you anymore.”

Maren imagined her words slipping down her sister’s ear canal, reaching her brain and penetrating through the coma fog. She was torn between hoping Hallie could hear her and hoping she couldn’t, because it was all so sad and unfair and Hallie had enough problems as it was.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “I know what I should do, but I don’t think I can. I just wanted to fix everything so you wouldn’t have to go to that long-term facility, but I’m making it all worse.”