“So she does remember.” Obscura flexed and pointed her foot as she leaned over it. “Did she tell you how she refused to help me?”

Maren picked up the tweezers and pretended to sort through the grains of cemetery dirt, keeping one eye on the duffel bag. “She told me she wouldn’t give you a nightmare for revenge. She wanted to help you in a different way.”

Obscura scoffed. “That wasn’t helping. That was letting my brother get away with everything. He thought it was funny! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be terrified to go to sleep every single night? To have those images loop endlessly through your mind all day?”

“I do, actually,” said Maren.

Obscura’s thin arm curved over her head as she leaned into a deep backbend. “Your grandmother thought she could patch me up with some minty relaxation dreams, but they wouldn’t even scratch the surface.”

Maren reached all the way across the table for the pile of crow feathers, which she didn’t need, just to see if Obscura would notice.

“With a single dream, my brother took control of my brain,” continued Obscura, oblivious. “One tiny, vile nightmare that crawled into my brain and hid there permanently. Every night, it ssslithered back out.”

She lifted her leg off the barre, swung it all the way around at ear height, and snapped it down into a neat fifth position. Then she left the barre and strode backstage. Maren slowly eased around the side of the table and slid into Obscura’s chair.

A rusty creaking sound came from the darkness and the ballerina emerged, pushing an antique movie projector on a cart. Levers and wheels and rods stuck out at all angles from the machinery. She wheeled the projector to the front of the stage and angled it at a blank screen that hung across the backdrop.

“I’m going to renovate this place and reopen it,” said Obscura. “But it won’t be called the Starlight anymore. It will be the Shadow Theater, and I will be the star.”

Twenty-Three

The projector’s light clicked on; it began to tick and whirl, throwing a tangle of shadows onto the white screen. Obscura lifted to the tips of her toes and floated toward the screen. On the cart, two mechanized arms moved black cutouts in front of the projected light. The jumble of shadows on the screen shifted in and out of focus, then became clear: a puppet boy and a row of crooked buildings with a pier at the end.

“The performances will be like nothing anyone has ever seen,” said Obscura. “A dark blending of shadows and dance, puppets and live performers, beauty and terror.”

She flitted into the light and her shadow joined the others. It warped and stretched, bending disturbingly in places that real bodies didn’t bend.