She ignored that—she didn’t have an answer for him, anyway. “She was taken by the monsters,” she said, and there was a small ripple of response from the assembled crowd. Dea wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard a woman say king’s army.

The boy half smiled as if she’d said something amusing. “Which monsters?” he said. “There are many different kinds here. They come in all shapes and sizes.”

“The men with no faces,” Dea said, concealing her fear behind impatience, and ignoring the fact that there might be more monsters, worse ones.

He shook his head, so his hair fell over one eye. “You don’t find them,” he said, still smiling that infuriating smile. “They find you. They’ll keep after you, until you give them what they want. It’s what they’re trained to do.”

He was staring at her so intensely, Dea wanted to look away. But she couldn’t. She still had the sense that she recognized him from somewhere. “What do they want?”

“What do any of us want?” He crossed the distance between them casually, but all of a sudden it was done, closed, and he leaned forward, and she could feel the roughness of his lips bump once against her ear as he whispered: “What belongs to them.”

He pulled away and Dea gasped. His eyes were the deep gold of honeyed candy, and suddenly she knew.

“You,” Dea said. She instinctively reached out, but stopped an inch away from touching him. “I’ve seen you before. In another dream.”

As soon as she said it, though, she realized she’d seen him even more than once. There was a time in Sedona, Arizona, when she was walking the dream of her old bus driver: a freaky dream, which had ended in watching the driver drown a kitten in the kiddie pool. She’d never taken the bus again. The boy, this boy, had been standing just on the other side of a white picket fence.

Then there was a time just a few months ago, when she’d stolen the hair clip from Shawna McGregor and walked a dream of a lame basement party. This boy had been one of the few unfamiliar guests; she remembered that he had almost spotted her. And now he was here, in Connor’s dream.

But it was impossible. People didn’t dream about the same things. Was this boy a walker, too? Were all these people walkers? Were they following Dea?

The boy looked amused—and satisfied, Dea saw, as if he’d been waiting for Dea to figure that out. “I’ve been curious about you,” he admitted.

“You’ve been following me,” Dea said.

“Not exactly,” he said. There was sand between her teeth, sand tangled in the long, sun-streaked strands of the boy’s hair. Too real. “We’re pickers. We make our living from the pits. Whatever we find, whatever we salvage, we sell in the city.”

“What city?” Dea shook her head.

“The king’s city,” he said. Something flickered in the boy’s eyes, an expression gone too soon for Dea to name it. “The only city there is.”

“Can you tell me how to find my mother or not?” Dea said. She was trying not to cry. She’d imagined somehow she would simply feel her mother’s presence. She’d imagined she would take her mother’s hand and draw her out of whatever dark place was holding her.

And then what? They’d walk out of the dream together, triumphant? Dea didn’t even know how her mom had gotten in. Not by walking, certainly. Walking was just like dreaming, in a way—the physical body remained in the real world while the mind traveled. But Miriam had entered the dream world completely.

“You won’t find her unless the king wants you to find her,” he said. “You’ll need to take it up with him.”

Dea was on the verge of tears. She channeled the feeling into anger, forced her rage to take shape. “What are you talking about?” she said. “What king? What is this? Who—who are you?”

He shook his head again. “It’s who you are that matters.”

“Stop speaking in riddles.” She was losing it. She no longer understood the rules; she didn’t understand who these people were, and how Connor’s dream could possibly extend so far in so much detail. “You aren’t real,” she said, although without conviction. “None of this is real.”

“Oh no?” The boy moved barely an inch closer but Dea stopped breathing. She’d never been so close to any boy, except Connor. But standing next to Connor was like huddling under a warm blanket: a fuzzy whole-body feeling that made her feel stupid and happy.

Standing next to this boy, whoever he was, was like putting a hand on an electrified fence: a blast of voltage that left her dizzy and disoriented. Before she could stop him, he reached out and traced his thumb along her lower lip. Her body reacted. She couldn’t help it. His touch made her feel like she was standing beneath a sky full of fireworks. Like she was a firework—all light and explosion. “Are you sure?”

She wrenched away, shaken. No one else had moved. The whole group was as still as a painting, and she knew that no one would help her, either. She turned, blinking away tears, and started back in the direction she’d come.

“Wait.” The boy called her back and she stopped. Maybe he regretted how he’d spoken to her. He came toward her, holding a leather flask. He stopped when they were still separated by several feet, as if he knew he’d crossed a line.

“Water,” he said, extending the flask to her. For just a second, he looked very young. “You might need it.”

Dea nearly didn’t take it. But when he didn’t move, just stood there with one arm out and a penitent expression on his face, she did. She wouldn’t thank him, though.

“You better hurry,” he said. “The winds are changing.” Then he turned abruptly and made his way back down the hill toward the encampment.

Dea set off again, holding the flask by its neck. The boy was right about one thing: the wind had picked up and mostly eradicated her tracks. She started walking, wiping sweat from her eyes, scanning the sky for vultures. She disliked the birds, but they were still birds, and might be useful.

She was suddenly desperate to find a doorway out of the dream, to wake up next to Connor in the small motel room, with its sputtering heat and faint smell of detergent, to return to the real world with its leaky toilets and boring school days and inconveniences and dangers and familiarity.

As the panic built, grew, pushed at her chest, Dea started to run. Sand, sand in every direction. How far was she from the nearest way out? How far had she come? What if Connor had already woken, and the city had fallen and turned to more sand? The idea chilled her, even as she blinked sweat from her eyes, struggling up steep desert peaks, her breath rasping in her chest.

Impossible. This was Connor’s dream. It must be. The alternative was too strange, too frightening: that there were dreams that existed in a kind of permanence. That there were dreams that existed with no one to dream them at all.

And that she, Dea, was in one of them.

Then—a miracle—she crested a hill and saw the dappled shadows of thousands of holes, some of them just opening, some of them disappearing as the sand shifted, moved, like a slowly flowing ocean. Even from a distance she could see her pink sweatshirt, occasionally lifting in the wind, snapping an arm as if to wave at her.

She hurried forward. But as she moved, the sand moved with her, foaming and sliding under her feet, barreling down toward the pits like a wave moving toward shore, so she could barely keep on her feet. A landslide. Dea grabbed hold of her sweatshirt as her legs were whipped out from underneath her. She went sliding over the edge of the pit on a coursing wave of sand, coughing dust from her lungs as her fingers found the cold metal rungs of the ladder. She clung there, feet kicking in open air, as sand continued to drum down on her head and shoulders. Far below her was the distant landscape of Connor’s dream. Chicago had disappeared entirely. She was dangling above a dizzying funhouse landscape, a city made not of buildings but of enormous roller coasters and tents as large as mountains.