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Her friends tried touching the monster, thinking it was a nightmare. The monster immediately pulled them inside the wall. The nightmares were real. Anyone who died in the nightmare was actually dead in real life. When the police and ambulances with people in protective suits came in the morning, they did not know what to put in their reports. A thousand dead in one night. No violence. No cause anyone could name. People had simply stopped breathing in their sleep, from one end of town to the other. Only one person knew the mystery behind this. Her name was Blaire Carver. She had lived through it once before. In her previous life, she had survived eight rounds of the nightmare world. By the end, she knew every rule. She knew which creatures hunted by sound and which by smell. She knew all of this because she had learned it the hard way. One death at a time. She had seen a lot of loved ones die. And then one day, she died herself. And then she woke up at seventeen, standing in a highway restroom, with six minutes before it all started again. This time, she was not going to learn the rules. She already knew them. This time, she was going to use them. When Blaire Carver came out of the washroom she realised her class had come for an outing. She left the school bus behind. She left her class and her teachers too, leaving all forty people waiting at the service area without knowing where she had gone. She walked to a place called Southgate. It was a small town with about five thousand people, located just off the highway. Nobody from her school knew she was going there. Nobody in the real world knew what was about to happen there. But Blaire Carver knew. She had been thinking about this town for years. The rules for the nightmare world were different. When a nightmare descends on a city, everyone inside is pulled into it. Most people have no power in that world. They are just ordinary people trapped in a place filled with creatures that want to kill them. They run. They hide. Sometimes they get lucky. Sometimes they don't. If they survive the night, they wake up with no memory of what happened. The nightmare world locks those memories away in their minds, like a dream that disappears the moment they open their eyes. In Southgate stood a hotel called the Camellia. It was an old building with old furniture. A thin, middle-aged man with red eyes worked at the front desk. He smiled far too much. Along the back wall were large camellia bushes. They were thick, full, and completely out of place for July. Blaire Carver had known about this hotel for years. Not because she had ever visited it. She knew about it because of what she heard afterward. She had listened to survivors who came out of the hotel. During the months she spent in the nightmare world, she had slowly pieced together what had happened on that first night. The hotel owner was what the nightmare world called an aberration. He was not an ordinary creature. He was intelligent. He had a Dream Core. He had his own territory. And he knew how to use both. Blaire Carver checked into the hotel. She took a room, unwrapped her sledgehammer, and sat down on the bed. Then she waited. She thought about the creatures. Inside the nightmare world, the strongest creatures are different. They are intelligent. They have their own territory and their own will. And inside them is something special. It is called a Dream Core. Some creatures have a smaller version called a Dream Crystal. If you kill one of these creatures and take its Dream Core or Dream Crystal, and if you are strong enough to use it, you can become what survivors call a Lucid One. A Lucid One keeps their memories. They keep control of their mind. And, most importantly, they gain real power inside the nightmare world — enough power to fight back. In her previous life, Blaire Carver did not get a Dream Core until the eighth countdown. That meant eight rounds of being thrown into the nightmare with nothing but fear, training, and a stubborn refusal to die. When the nightmare began it hit the town like a switch being flipped. The camellia branches came first. They seemed like the tentacles of a monster. They came through Blaire Carver's window in long whipping lines, three of them at once, moving faster than real plants should move, reaching across the room toward the center — toward her. She picked up her hammer and hit them. Blaire Carver was not as fast as she had been in her last life. This body was of a seventeen year old Blaire Carver and had never been through any of it. But she knew how to move under pressure. Her body remembered things her age should not have let her know. She smashed every branch that came through. Then she got the window shut and broke off what was left inside. And then she heard the ceiling. One drip. Then another. Blood, falling from the light bulb above me, slow and red. Then every wall cracked open, and pale hands came out. Long and thin and white, like they had been pressed flat by something heavy. Dozens of them. They came fast, lunging toward the center of the room — lunging toward me. Blaire Carver rolled off the bed. She hit the floor moving. She smashed hands until they stopped coming from one wall. Then she moved to the next wall. She was not trying to win yet — she was buying time, finding the rhythm, learning this version of the fight. Down the hall, a girl was screaming. One of Blaire Carver's classmates — Eleanor Wallace, who had ended up in the same hotel on the same class trip. She was in a different room, fighting off flower branches with a hardcover textbook, hitting them like she was trying to shove a door shut. In another room, two more girls — Mia and Rose — were pinned in a bathroom. A pale hand had grabbed one of them through the floor drain and was pulling her down. The other one was trying to stab the hand with a broken toothbrush. Forty people in that hotel. Most of them had no idea what was happening. Most of them had no weapons and no knowledge and nowhere to run. She fought her way out of her room and went for the back garden. The hotel owner — the aberration — had his heart buried in the dirt at the center of his garden. That was where the power was. That was where the Dream Core was. Blaire Carver dug it out with her bare hands. It was black and covered in thorns and it beat hard against Blaire Carver's palm, trying to drive the thorns into her skin. The last camellia branches still attached to it whipped at my arms. Blaire Carver bled. She tightened her grip. She looked the heart in the eye. Behave, she said. Or I crush it. The branches went still. Eleanor Wallace was watching from a window above. So were Mia and Rose and the teacher. All of them pressed against the glass, staring at the seventeen-year-old girl in the garden holding the owner's still-beating heart in her bare hand. The hotel owner came through the wall then. He had been there all along, watching. He had not expected to be cornered like this. He had not expected a guest who knew what his heart was. He dropped his human shape. What came through the wall was enormous. Bones stacked like a centipede, dozens of pale hands extending from every joint. He filled the space between the hotel and the garden wall and came at Blaire Carver from every direction at once. The hands grabbed her. They wrapped her in a cage of bone and locked her in. From the windows above, Eleanor Wallace started screaming. She threw her textbook at the hands. The teacher grabbed a chair. Mia grabbed a broken piece of furniture. They all started hitting, throwing, doing whatever they could from three floors up. None of them could get to Blaire Carver. None of them knew what they were doing. But they did not stop. Inside the cage of bones, Blaire Carver was already finding the center. She found the Dream Core. She took it. The aberration collapsed. Blaire Carver heaved a sigh of relief. Night one. Done. She said to herself. A detective named Skye Donovan arrived from Blackwood the next morning. He was the criminal police captain — serious, careful, the kind of man who noticed things that other people looked past. He had been stuck on the highway when the countdown appeared, so he was the closest senior officer when the calls started coming in. He walked into The Camellia Inn and found forty students sitting in two rooms in the far corner. All of them pale and quiet. Wearing masks. Eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Skye Donovan scanned the room and his gaze stopped on Blaire Carver. She was sitting apart from the others. Perfectly still. Watching the room. He went to ask her questions. She gave him almost nothing — polite, calm, technically honest. She was in her room. She did not know what happened. She had been there all night. He walked away from that conversation with one thought: that girl knows something. He was right. And he would not stop thinking about it. The government quarantined them for eight days. They needed information. They took statements, ran medical tests, confiscated weapons. At the security checkpoint, a man in his forties was screaming at the guards who had taken his kitchen knife. He was holding on to it like it was the only thing keeping him alive. To everyone around him, he looked like he had lost his mind. He was shouting things that did not make sense — words that came out slurred and wrong, like someone trying to speak a language they had only learned the night before. Blaire Carver understood every word. He was a Lucid One. He had gotten a Dream Crystal in the nightmare. He was conscious, awake inside the horror that most people experienced as a sealed-off dream they would never remember. And his knife was his medium — the weapon that let him access his power in the real world. Without a medium, a Lucid One's nightmare abilities cannot reach the waking world. The knife was not a knife to him. It was the bridge. This was why Blaire Carver had chosen a metal sledgehammer. You cannot take a sledgehammer through a security check in one piece. But you can take it apart. Each individual piece of hardware — the head, the handle, the assembly fittings — passed as legal cargo. She had packed them in her suitcase as her father's belongings. She told the inspector her father had owned a hardware shop. That he was gone now, and she carried these with her everywhere because it was all she had left of him. The inspector let her through. From the Dream Core she had taken in the hotel garden, two things happened. First, she discovered her healing ability from her previous life was still with her — reduced, but real. She could stop a wound from bleeding. She could take pain away. It had no offensive power. But in the nightmare world, the ability to not die from your injuries when everything is trying to kill you is worth more than most people understand. Second, she discovered something new. Something she had not had before. The Bone Whip. It lived in her spine. That is the only way to describe it. A presence, a hunger, something coiled inside her back that was patient when fed and impossible to ignore when it was not. It wanted nightmare creatures. Their flesh, their energy, the corrupted power inside them. When she fed it, it grew stronger. When she did not, it made her back itch so badly she could not concentrate on anything else. She learned to feed it. She got very efficient at it. And there was a third ability. The Mask. She did not fully understand it yet. But she would. The camp held several hundred people from Southgate and the surrounding highway. Most were in shock. Talking too much or not at all. Trying to make normal sense of something that had no normal explanation. But scattered through the common areas were others. You could spot them if you knew how to look. They sat too still, or tracked the room the way you track a place you are not certain is safe yet. Some of them had had their weapons confiscated and were falling apart quietly. Some were already finding each other — pairs and small groups, voices low, working things out. These were the newly conscious. People who had gotten Dream Crystals and come out the other side with their memories and no framework for what that meant. Blaire Carver watched all of them. She said nothing to any of them. She was not ready to build alliances yet. The right people would find her. The wrong ones always came first and you had to know how to turn them away without making enemies of them. On the sixth day, a woman in her thirties sat down near Blaire Carver in the food line. She looked at Blaire Carver the way Blaire Carver looked at everyone else. You got something at the hotel, the woman said. Quiet. Certain. Blaire Carver said she did not know what the woman meant. The woman held her gaze for a moment. Then she nodded, stood up, and walked away. Someone to watch. Someone who might matter. Blaire Carver filed her away and kept eating. She also thought, during those eight days, about what she was becoming. In her previous life, she had spent years in the nightmare world until she was nearly impossible to kill. She had also spent years becoming someone who did not sleep without checking all the exits first, who did not eat without scanning the room, who had stopped knowing how to sit in a place without tracking every person in it. She had not noticed it happening. That was the thing about the nightmare — it did not change you all at once. It changed you one small choice at a time, and by the time you noticed, you had already become someone else entirely. She was in a seventeen-year-old body now. None of that had happened to her yet. She made a decision, there in the quarantine camp, sitting on a cot with her hammer parts laid out under her pillow. She was going to be careful. Not just about the nightmare world. About what fighting it did to the person doing the fighting. She had paid that price once. She was not going to let it take her again the same way. After eight days, the quarantine ended. Blaire Carver went home. She was an orphan. Her birth parents were gone. Her adoptive parents had died in a car accident when she was fifteen. She had a small apartment, a little money, no relatives who would notice if she was absent. The hallway outside her door had been covered in pig's blood while she was gone. Someone had poured it there and left a hand-painted sign calling her a killer. The message was from Troy Sutton's father — Troy Sutton was a classmate who had died in the nightmare at the hotel that first night. His father was a wealthy businessman who blamed Blaire Carver for everything. Blaire Carver cleaned up every drop of the blood. She took her time. Did a thorough job. Then she went inside, checked the apartment, found a bag in the refrigerator with two steamed buns left behind by a former tenant — buns that, she quickly realized, carried a strong nightmare-world aura, which told her someone in her building had already been touched by the corruption — and ate them. The Bone Whip settled down. It had needed that. Then she started thinking about the woman upstairs. Diana Poe ran a breakfast stall a few minutes from the building. Soup dumplings, steamed buns, savory egg soup. She was in her mid-twenties. She wore long sleeves all summer. She spoke in short sentences and did not make eye contact unless she had to. Blaire Carver sat down and ordered fifty soup dumplings. Diana Poe watched her without blinking. Blaire Carver asked if she could come by for meals sometimes. She would pay. She was not a good cook. My husband doesn't like strangers. Blaire Carver nodded and said nothing else. But she kept coming back to the stall. Because the Bone Whip reacted to Diana Poe. Every time Blaire Carver was near her, something in her spine started pulling. The same pull she got from nightmare creatures. The same hunger. Feed. Get closer. Feed. But Blaire Carver did not attack Diana Poe. She watched her instead. There were two possibilities. Diana Poe had survived the first nightmare and, without realizing it, had gotten a Dream Crystal and developed a power. That would make her a Lucid One — a potential ally. Or the nightmare-world corruption had started growing inside her, slowly converting her from the inside out into something that looked human but was not. That would make her a threat that needed handling. Blaire Carver sat with the uncertainty and watched. She watched Diana Poe flinch at sounds. Watched her wear long sleeves to hide bruises that appeared and disappeared. Watched her husband Vince Porter come home from work looking for something to be angry about and find it easily. Watched Diana Poe make herself very small in those moments, the way someone does when they have had a lot of practice. Blaire Carver did not intervene. Not yet. She had a rule about that sort of thing — about choosing her battles, about not spending herself on situations that would resolve themselves one way or another. But she kept watching. A man arrived at Blaire Carver's door one night. He had been sent by Troy Sutton's father to frighten her. But the nightmare had already been working on him — he was at the tipping point, most of the way converted, barely holding a human shape. The Bone Whip handled him. What was left, Blaire Carver put in a storage box. Then she carried the box upstairs and knocked on Diana Poe's door. Diana Poe answered. She looked at the box. Then she looked at Blaire Carver. Blaire Carver said she needed help with trash. Diana Poe was quiet for a long moment. Then she went and got her trash can. It was an ordinary metal trash can. The kind you find in any home. But when Diana Poe turned it upside down over the storage box, it did something no ordinary trash can does — it opened and it consumed. Completely. No trace, no residue, no evidence. Diana Poe's power was that she could eat the nightmare world. Whatever the corruption produced — creatures, residue, the physical remains of things that should not exist — it went into her trash can and it was gone. They sat across from each other after that, and Blaire Carver explained the basics. The countdowns. The nightmare world. The difference between ordinary people and Lucid Ones. The weapons and the powers and why the dead keep looking for the living. Diana Poe listened without interrupting. When Blaire Carver finished, Diana Poe asked one question: what about her husband. Blaire Carver looked at her steadily. That's up to you. Diana Poe nodded once. And after that, she started cooking Blaire Carver dinner. Diana Poe was a good cook. Better than Blaire Carver expected. Not fancy food — she made simple things, the kind you make when you know how to feed people without making a production of it. The first night she made plain rice with a fried egg and pickled vegetables, and Blaire Carver ate three bowls and did not say anything for a long time. After dinner, Diana Poe told Blaire Carver what had happened to her in the nightmare on that first night. She had been in a relative's house on the far side of town when the countdown hit zero. She had woken up in the nightmare version of the kitchen, standing in the middle of the floor, the room all wrong around her. Her relative was still in bed, still asleep, still breathing. Not waking up. Not conscious. Something had come out of the wall. Long and pale and reaching. And Diana Poe had grabbed the trash can from under the sink. She did not know why she had grabbed it. It was just there and she had grabbed it. And when she put it in the path of the thing coming out of the wall, it had opened up and the thing had gone inside and been gone. She had spent the rest of that night walking through the nightmare version of town with a metal trash can under her arm, putting it in front of everything that came at her. She did not have a word for what she was doing. She did not understand what the trash can was or what she had become. She just kept moving. Blaire Carver listened to all of it. When Diana Poe finished, Blaire Carver said: the whole night, alone, no training, no information, no one nearby. There wasn't another option, Diana Poe said. No, Blaire Carver said. There wasn't. She meant it as a compliment. Diana Poe seemed to understand it as one. After that, the pattern settled into place. Diana Poe cooked. The trash can worked. The Bone Whip stayed fed. And the neighborhood started to get a little quieter, one problem at a time. The problem with Troy Sutton's father and the smear campaign got worse. A classmate named Griffin Porter had posted a video online. He wore a cartoon face filter and said Blaire Carver had beaten Troy Sutton on the school bus without provocation, that she was responsible for the route change that brought the class to Southgate, and that the deaths that followed were connected to her. None of it was accurate. All of it was designed to be believed. Eleanor Wallace called and said Griffin Porter had asked her to meet him at a coffee shop. To talk. To sort things out. Blaire Carver went along. She sat down across from Griffin Porter and did not look at his face. She looked at the air around him. The leeches were everywhere. Small, transparent, the shape of thumbnails. They covered every surface he had touched. They were crawling into the drinks of the people sitting near him — people who had nothing to do with any of this, who would wake up tomorrow feeling slightly wrong and not know why. Griffin Porter was heavily corrupted. Almost fully converted. The nightmare was almost done with him. Eleanor Wallace was arguing with him about the video. Griffin Porter was being calm and slippery and completely unbothered. Blaire Carver reached under the table. She brought the handle of her hammer up against his knee with enough force to fracture it. She did it without changing her expression. She did not look at him while she did it. Griffin Porter could not run after that. And that night, when the nightmare hunger in him got strong enough that what was left of the real Griffin Porter lost control of the body, he came to Blaire Carver's apartment. He crept through the garden in the dark, drawn by the smell of a conscious person, barely able to think of anything except the need to feed. Blaire Carver and Diana Poe were sitting in the garden, waiting. The Bone Whip fed. The trash can ate. By morning, Griffin Porter was entirely gone. Blaire Carver stood in her garden after, in the dark, listening to the neighborhood. Cicadas. A dog barking two streets away. Someone's television still on at this hour. The Bone Whip had gone quiet. Full and settled, the way it only got after a real feed. Her back felt loose, almost warm. She rolled her shoulders and looked at the spot in the garden where Griffin Porter had been. No trace. Diana Poe's trash can was thorough. There were things that Blaire Carver had not told Diana Poe or Eleanor Wallace yet. Things she had not told anyone. How many people she had watched die in her previous life. How many she had not been able to save even when she had tried. The specific way the nightmare world had of making you feel responsible for everything, as if you personally had failed every person who did not make it out. She had believed that for years. That it was her fault. That a better, faster, smarter version of herself would have saved them. She no longer believed it. The nightmare was not personal. It did not target anyone for a reason. It was just hungry, and everything living was food, and you either got strong enough to matter or you did not. But understanding that had taken years and she had not fully understood it until she died. She went back inside. She had things to do in the morning. The neighborhood was becoming something she could work with. Not safe — nowhere was safe anymore, not really — but manageable. The corruption moved through communities the way water moves through soil, following the lowest path, collecting in the places where people were already struggling. Vince Porter upstairs had been heading toward conversion for weeks. The neighborhood gossip who had watched Diana Poe with mean eyes had started smelling wrong too. There were others. Blaire Carver kept track of all of them. She was patient. She did not rush toward anything she did not have to rush toward. The right time was the right time. Eleanor Wallace had seen enough by then. She had watched Griffin Porter go from a classmate to a smear campaign to something that should not have existed, and she had seen what Blaire Carver and Diana Poe had done about it. She sat at the table and looked at the small crystal Blaire Carver was holding out to her. What does it do? Eleanor Wallace asked. It opens the door, Blaire Carver said. Everything that happened at the hotel that night — you'll remember it. All of it. And after that, the nightmare world won't be invisible to you anymore. Eleanor Wallace asked what would happen if she did not eat it. Blaire Carver looked at the spot on the garden floor where Griffin Porter's remains had been. Eventually you end up like him. Everyone who went through that first night without getting conscious has a clock running on them. You just don't know it. Eleanor Wallace stared at the crystal for a long time. Then she picked it up and swallowed it whole. What happened next looked like a seizure from the outside. Eleanor Wallace's whole body went rigid, her eyes went wide, and then all at once every memory she had been carrying without knowing it — the flowers, the hands in the walls, the screaming, Blaire Carver moving through all of it like she had done it a hundred times — came back at once, clear as daylight. Eleanor Wallace sat on the floor and breathed for a while. Nobody rushed her. When she looked up, her expression had changed. Not fear exactly. Something more focused than fear. She said: okay. What do we do. Her power turned out to be knowledge. Her hardcover textbook — the same one she had been hitting things with in the hotel — was her medium. When she used it consciously in the nightmare world, it became a weapon that could stun nightmare creatures with something close to a mental shockwave. The force of concentrated learning, delivered like a blow. It was unusual. It was strong. And Eleanor Wallace took to it faster than almost anyone Blaire Carver had seen acquire a power. Three women now. No authority. No institution. No one giving them orders or watching their backs or writing their names in any official record. Just three people who knew what was real, living in the same city, handling what needed handling. After the Bone Whip had eaten enough corrupted things, it produced something. It happened the way a seed works — slowly, and then all at once. The Bone Whip had been taking in nightmare energy for weeks. Absorbing, processing, building something from it. And one day Blaire Carver woke up and went outside and found a shrub in her garden that had not been there before, with two flowers the deep red color of dried blood, about the size of a closed fist each. She touched one and it came off the stem immediately. Like it had been waiting. She stood there in the garden for a moment, the flower in her palm, the morning sun already strong. The camellia was warm. Not from sunlight. From the inside. It had the same temperature as human skin. Blaire Carver had seen a lot of things in the nightmare world. She had held hearts and dream cores and nightmare residue. She was not easily unsettled by strange objects. But the warmth of that flower in her hand made her stop in a way she had not stopped in a long time. The Bone Whip had made this. From nightmare energy, from the corrupted creatures she had fed it, from weeks of work she had not been able to see. It had produced something beautiful. That felt like information worth having. She called Eleanor Wallace and Diana Poe outside. They stood in the garden and looked at the small shrub with its two impossible flowers. Eleanor Wallace took a step back when she felt how warm the flower was. Diana Poe held hers without flinching. Blaire Carver explained the properties. The twelve-hour concealment. The limitation — attack once and the protection was gone until it recharged. The way the tree worked, the way feeding the Bone Whip sustained it, what would happen if the tree was ever cut down. Eleanor Wallace asked when it would grow more. When the Bone Whip produces another seed, Blaire Carver said. She did not know how long that would take. Eleanor Wallace looked at the two flowers in their hands and then at Blaire Carver, who had given both away without keeping one for herself. She started to protest. Blaire Carver stopped her. Blaire Carver did not need one, she said. She wanted to be found. She held it in her palm and felt what it was. The flower had a name. Nightmare-Feed Tea. It could be worn on clothing — pinned, tucked, tied to a strap. And if you wore it into the nightmare world, it would hide your aura completely for twelve hours. No nightmare creature would be able to sense you. You could walk through a room full of them and they would look right past you. There was a catch. The moment you attacked — the moment you swung a weapon or fought back or used your power against anything — the flower went dormant. Twelve hours to recharge before it worked again. So you had to choose: stay hidden, or start fighting. Not both. Blaire Carver gave both flowers to Diana Poe and Eleanor Wallace. What about yours? Eleanor Wallace asked. Blaire Carver planted the tree, she said. It recognized her. She did not need to wear one. That was true. It was also true that she did not want to be hidden. In the nightmare world, she wanted the monsters to know exactly where she was. She wanted them to come to her. It was faster that way. A classmate named Megan Miller hired Blaire Carver to sleep over. Megan Miller was from a wealthy family. She had survived the first nightmare at the hotel and woken up with no memory of it, like most people. But she could not sleep after. Every time she closed her eyes, something pulled at her. Something restless. She saw doctors. She tried medication. Nothing worked. What she could not explain was that whenever she thought about calling someone for help, the name she kept landing on was Blaire Carver. A classmate she barely knew. Someone whose reputation was currently being shredded online. And yet she kept hearing a voice in the back of her head — go find Blaire Carver. She offered Blaire Carver Three,Zero dollars. Blaire Carver accepted. She brought Diana Poe and Eleanor Wallace. Megan Miller opened the door and looked at all three of them. She had said one person. You're getting three, Blaire Carver said, and walked in. What Blaire Carver knew, and Megan Miller did not, was that Megan Miller had been noticed. Two classmates — Leo Wallace and Yara Adler — had died at the hotel on that first night. And in the nightmare world, instead of becoming simple creatures or fading into nothing the way the dead usually did, they had been converted. Shaped. Directed. Someone had taken them and pointed them at a target. The target was Blaire Carver. And Megan Miller was the thread that led to Blaire Carver. When the nightmare descended that night, Leo Wallace and Yara Adler found their way into it. Yara Adler came apart fast — the trash can handled her. Leo Wallace lasted longer. He had lost most of his body but his head was still active, still talking, still saying Blaire Carver's name in a flat voice that was nothing like the classmate she remembered. Blaire Carver held his head and asked him questions while she worked. Who else is looking for me? Julian Fisher, the head said. Find Blaire Carver. Eat her. Not hungry anymore. Julian Fisher. Another classmate who had died at the hotel. Another dead person being pointed at her like a weapon. Blaire Carver put the head down and used the hammer. Then Megan Miller, who had been watching the entire nightmare with no power and no protection, lunged at Blaire Carver and started screaming at her. Saying it was Blaire Carver's fault. That she had brought this on all of them. Eleanor Wallace got between them. Diana Poe held the trash can. Blaire Carver looked at Megan Miller for a moment and then made a quiet decision. In the nightmare world, the part of the brain that connects to consciousness, to power, to becoming a Lucid One — it has a location. And it can be disabled. Blaire Carver used the Bone Whip. One precise strike. Megan Miller felt nothing. In the morning, Megan Miller would wake up with no memory of the nightmare. She would never become a Lucid One. She would block both Blaire Carver and Eleanor Wallace on every messaging app she had — Blaire Carver checked and found Megan Miller had already done it before she could. She was not a threat anymore. She was also not an asset. She was simply gone from the board. Blaire Carver did not feel anything complicated about it. That night, after they had left Megan Miller's villa and were walking back through the city, Eleanor Wallace was quiet for a long time. Then she said: 'I used to think she was kind of brave. Back at the hotel, the first night, she stayed with Mia the whole time. Didn't leave her.' 'People are different things at different times,' Diana Poe said. She was carrying the trash can by its new strap, walking a half step ahead. Eleanor Wallace thought about that for a while. Then she said: 'Do you ever wonder how many people are going through the same thing as us right now? In other cities? Other countries? Who got conscious in the first countdown and are just trying to figure out the rules alone?' Blaire Carver had wondered about that since her very first life. The answer was: a lot. Not all of them figured it out in time. Most of them did not last past the third or fourth countdown. The ones who survived long enough to get strong were rare, and most of them eventually made choices that turned them into something more dangerous than the things they were fighting. She did not say any of that. Some of them, Blaire Carver said. The ones who live long enough to matter will find each other eventually. Or they will not. Eleanor Wallace seemed unsatisfied with that answer. Diana Poe just nodded. They walked the rest of the way home in silence. Blaire Carver checked her bank balance on her phone. She had enough for about three more weeks at her current rate. The Bone Whip's appetite had not gotten cheaper. She made a mental note to look for paid work of a kind that did not require explaining what she could do. She had not expected Megan Miller to solve that problem the very next morning. After they left Megan Miller's villa, Eleanor Wallace said: Leo Wallace mentioned Julian Fisher. Should we look for him? Blaire Carver had been thinking about this since the moment she heard the name. Julian Fisher had died at the hotel on the first night. His parents had identified the body. There had been a memorial at school. But Leo Wallace had said Julian Fisher's name the way you say the name of someone who is still moving around. Still making plans. Still looking for things. Give me your phone, Blaire Carver said to Eleanor Wallace. She found Julian Fisher's number in Eleanor Wallace's contact list. She dialed it. It rang three times. Then someone picked up. A male voice. Slow. Flat. Careful. Hello. Blaire Carver kept her voice completely steady. This is Blaire Carver. Where are you? A pause. Long enough that she could hear ambient sound in the background — wind, distant voices, what might have been waves. Port Crest. Another pause. Then: Are you coming to find me? Eleanor Wallace's face across the table had gone white. Diana Poe had put her fork down and was very still. Blaire Carver ended the call. She looked at the phone for a moment. She looked at the window. Julian Fisher was dead. He had been cremated. There was a grave marker with his name on it in a cemetery. And he had just answered his phone from a beach city four hundred kilometers away. What is he? Eleanor Wallace asked. Blaire Carver said she did not know. That was completely honest. In her previous life, she had never seen anything like this. The dead stayed dead. They became fuel for the nightmare or they became nothing. Julian Fisher was something she had not prepared for. The Port Crest was the city where the second major countdown was going to hit — she had always known this. A concert arena near the water. Fifty thousand people at a music festival. In her previous life, none of them had made it out. The whole city had fallen into the nightmare at once and the things that were waiting there had been far more powerful than anything she had faced at the hotel. She had already been planning to go. Every countdown was a chance to get stronger — more Dream Cores, more power, more of the advantage she needed for what was coming later. Now she had another reason to go. We're going to Port Crest, she said. No question. No vote. She put her phone in her pocket and started mentally packing. Diana Poe and Eleanor Wallace exchanged a look. Then Diana Poe got up and went to get her travel bag. Some things you do not need to discuss. But Blaire Carver stayed at the table for a moment after the others left to pack. Julian Fisher's voice had been completely flat on the phone. No fear, no urgency, no emotion she could identify. He had answered in one word — Port Crest — and then asked a question with the tone of someone who already knew the answer. Are you coming to find me? Not a threat. Not a warning. Just a question. Like he was marking a box on a checklist. In her previous life, Blaire Carver had met a lot of people who had lived through the nightmare world long enough to change. She had changed herself, in ways she was still unpacking. But she had never heard anyone sound the way Julian Fisher sounded on that call. Not afraid. Not angry. Not excited. Just — patient. Like someone waiting for something that was already in motion. They took the first available flight. On the plane, two rows behind business class, Blaire Carver registered a smell she recognized. She did not turn around. She tracked it with her peripheral vision, watching the reflections in the window. Two elderly passengers — a man and a woman, both around seventy. The man walked bent nearly double, like he was carrying something on his back that nobody else could see. The woman had a stomach that swelled under her loose clothing in a way that was not natural for her build. She kept her arm across it. Both of them smelled like the early stages of nightmare corruption. Not converted. Not creatures yet. But the process had started. A few rows forward, a young couple argued about a child who would not stop crying. The husband criticized his wife. The wife pointed blame at the elderly couple in the back — her in-laws, apparently — for forgetting to pack the child's toys. It was an ordinary scene. An ordinary bad family flight. Diana Poe leaned over quietly. If they change on the plane— They won't, Blaire Carver said. Not yet. They're early stage. The corruption takes weeks to get there. She paused. But hold the trash can on your lap anyway. The flight was two hours. The child screamed for most of it. The family argued about luggage at the baggage claim when they landed. Nobody on that plane knew what was waiting for them in Port Crest. Nobody knew that somewhere in that city, in a beach-view stadium built for concerts and sports events, fifty thousand people were watching a performer on a stage while a nightmare clock counted down in the sky above them. Nobody knew. Except Blaire Carver. And Blaire Carver, for once, did not know enough. She had been in this city before, in her previous life. She knew what the Port Crest looked like from the nightmare world — the water had gone red, the beach had turned to something that looked like bone, the buildings near the waterfront had folded and warped in ways that made the streets impossible to navigate if you did not already know the city's layout. She knew all of that. She had spent months after the Port Crest countdown studying the reports, talking to survivors who had made it through, mapping what she could. But that had been in a different timeline. A timeline where the concert happened four weeks later. A timeline where the entity under the stage had had four more weeks to prepare, four more weeks to build whatever it was building, four more weeks of people walking in and out of that arena with no idea what was sleeping in the concrete beneath the stage. Did that make it weaker? Or stronger? She did not know. For the first time in this second life, Blaire Carver was walking into something she could not predict. And Blaire Carver, for once, did not know enough. What would Blaire Carver do now? How will she tackle the new countdown?