Maren looked at the crumbling old theater and shuddered. A crooked cement roof protruded from the building’s facade, leaving a rectangle of dry pavement in front of the entrance. The board over the center set of doors had been shifted aside, revealing a gap of dark interior, but Maren wasn’t ready to face the inside yet. She grabbed Amos’s arm and dragged him, stumbling and splashing through puddles, under the shelter of the overhanging roof. He sank the ground, mumbling nervously about slugs and dentist drills, which didn’t make sense if he was having the submarine nightmare.

“Let’s get this off so you can lie down.” Maren pulled the strap of Amos’s backpack, then froze in horror. The fabric of the bag was saturated—with water on top, but with an oily black substance on the bottom.

“Oh no, no, no,” whispered Maren. As she eased the bag off Amos’s shoulders, inky droplets fell onto her shoes and ran onto the pavement, where they curled and slithered. The nightmares were dissolving.

She ripped open the backpack, and black liquid gushed out, its oily surface shimmering with flashes of blue and green. The stench was unimaginable: putrid food, roadkill, sewers, and blood. Maren gagged as she plunged her hands into the slippery murk, searching for sachets that hadn’t yet dissolved. Her vision began to swim. She knew she shouldn’t let the nightmares seep into her skin, but she needed them to bargain with Obscura. She needed them.

A hole opened up in the theater’s wall. Stretching wider and wider, it yawned like a mouth. Maren leapt backward, spilling the contents of the backpack onto the pavement. Coils of black slithered out.

“It’s just a dream, just a dream,” she whispered. But she couldn’t tell where the dream ended and reality started. Amos lay fast asleep on the concrete, his legs twitching and his hands swiping at things that weren’t there. Guilt hit Maren like a bag of bricks. She never should have let him come, never should have told him about Obscura. There was no reason to drag him into this, other than her own fear of being alone and the fact that he’d had money for the taxi. Now he lay there suffering, and there was nothing Maren could do.

Something brushed the back of Maren’s neck, and she whirled around. A bus-sized caterpillar crouched on the pavement. Its round black eyes locked on Maren’s, and its mouth opened to reveal jagged teeth the size of her hand.

“You’re not real, you’re not real,” Maren backed slowly away until she hit the theater. She felt so tired; her eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each. Not caring that it wasn’t real, the caterpillar inched toward her, reaching with its long antennae.