“Not as much as you.” Maren sprinkled a pinch of cayenne onto a scrap of leather saturated with motor oil. “But I’ve been taking classes since I was little. Tap is my specialty.”

“Tap.” Obscura scoffed and sat down to stretch. “Why even bother?”

Maren shrugged.

“Can you act?” said Obscura. “Or sing?”

“Not really.” Maren dropped the leather strip into the coffee grinder.

“So you have no plans to ever be on Broadway, but you take tap-dancing lessons anyway?” Obscura twisted into a split and lay all the way forward onto her leg.

“It’s fun,” said Maren.

The crunching crackle of the coffee grinder drowned out Obscura’s nasty commentary. Once the ingredients were all the right texture, Maren tipped everything onto the table.

“Is that really all you do?” said Obscura. “Mix nasty things in the coffee grinder and sew them into the little bags?”

“There’s more to it than that,” said Maren, giving a defiant shuffle step under the table. “You have to know the right proportions, the things that will become events in the dream and the things that just create setting or atmosphere. You need dreamsalt, and you need to have dream magic to make the dreamsalt work.”

“But if I took a handful of disgusting things and made you or your grandmother blow on that salt, it’d create some kind of nightmare, would it not?” Obscura stood, eyeing the mostly gruesome ingredients scattered across the table.

Maren didn’t want her to think she was expendable, so she chose her words carefully. “It’d give you a sort-of bad dream, but it’d probably be all jumbled and not have much effect.” She cast a sideways glance at Obscura. “It wouldn’t be real art.”

Obscura leaned her elbows on the table and gave Maren a saccharine smile that turned her stomach. “You could teach me, though.”

And then you’d have no need for me, and I would become disposable, thought Maren. “It takes a long time to learn,” she said. “I’ve been practicing for ages now, and my dreams are still clunky.”

But Obscura had already leapt down into the orchestra pit, where she found a metal folding chair and hefted it onto the stage. “I’ve spent twenty-five years perfecting my ballet technique. Practice doesn’t scare me.”

Maren fought down the panic welling in her chest. She only had to hold out for two days, maybe three. The police knew how to track people using the tiniest of clues. Someone was bound to rescue them; somebody had to have seen them getting off the bus, and maybe Henri was still squawking around outside. And two or three days was nowhere near enough time for Obscura to fully learn how to make dreams. She just had to survive that time and keep Lishta and Amos safe too.

“Okay,” Maren said. “We’ll start simple. Let’s pick through this soil and find all the blackest grains.”