"Wow. Wow. WOW, I KNOW THIS HOUSE!"

  Maggie stopped in the middle of the street, staring at the two-story colonial. White siding, black shutters, a wraparound porch with a swing that moved slightly in the windless air.

  "You know it," Mark said. Not a question.

  "I drive past this street all the time." She shrugged. "Never knew who lived here."

  Mark didn't respond. He was looking at the house with an expression she couldn't read.

  "Someone's inside," Mark said.

  Maggie looked at him. "How do you know?"

  "I can feel it." He stepped forward, finally. "Someone's dreaming. Having a nightmare, actually. The house is pulling at the edges."

  Now that he'd said it, she could see what he meant. The proportions weren't quite right. The windows seemed slightly too large on one side, the porch a few inches higher than it should be. Small distortions that the eye wanted to correct but couldn't.

  "Should we help?" Maggie asked.

  "You promised you'd leave," Mark said. "If we didn't find anything."

  "We found something."

  "A stranger's nightmare isn't what we came here for."

  "Someone's in trouble. I'll leave after we help them."

  Mark looked at her for a long moment. Then at the house. Then back at her.

  "Fine. Nightmares from regular dreamers are usually manageable. They're not like a stray's manifestations—the dreamer isn't actually here. They're asleep in the real world, projecting through."

  "So we go in, help them, get out?"

  "Something like that. And if things get too dangerous, I can wake them up from inside. Ends the nightmare immediately."

  "That sounds useful."

  "For emergencies. Waking someone mid-nightmare isn't gentle. Better to help them through it if we can."

  Maggie looked at the house again. The distortions were more noticeable now—or maybe she was looking harder. A shutter on the second floor hung at an angle that defied the hinges.

  "Let's do it," she said.

  Mark nodded once, then walked toward the front door. Maggie followed.

  The porch steps creaked under their weight. The swing moved again as they passed, though neither of them touched it. Mark reached for the doorknob, then stopped.

  His hand hovered there for a moment.

  "Mark?"

  "It's nothing." He opened the door.

  The inside was dim. Locke slipped past them, nose low, and disappeared into the shadows ahead.

  Furniture lined the walls—a couch, a TV stand, bookshelves along one side. Normal enough. Except everything was covered in a thin layer of grey, like dust that had settled from the air itself.

  Mark moved through the living room without looking around. Not avoiding, exactly—more like he was deliberately not engaging with what he saw. His attention stayed forward, tracking something invisible.

  Maggie paused by the mantelpiece.

  Photographs lined it in simple frames. All of them showed the same girl—dark hair, maybe five years old. Blowing out birthday candles. Playing in a backyard. Asleep on a couch with a stuffed animal tucked under her arm.

  "The nightmare's upstairs," Mark said from the hallway.

  Maggie turned away from the photos and followed him.

  The stairs bent in the middle—an extra step where there shouldn't have been one, or maybe one fewer. She climbed without looking too closely. At the top, a hallway stretched left and right, doors lining both sides.

  Mark stopped in front of a door at the end. Pink paint, slightly faded. A name plaque that she couldn't read—the letters kept rearranging themselves.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  "Do I need to be?"

  "Probably not. Just stay close."

  Locke pressed against Mark's leg, ears flat.

  Mark opened the door.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  · · ·

  The transition wasn't dramatic.

  One moment they were stepping through a bedroom door; the next they were standing in a shopping mall.

  A massive one. Multi-level, with escalators that ran in directions that didn't correspond to up or down. Storefronts lined every visible surface—clothing stores, toy stores, electronics displays—all of them slightly wrong. A mannequin in one window stood with its arm raised; when Maggie looked back a moment later, the arm was at its side. Signs advertised sales in prices that were just numbers, no currency.

  And people. Everywhere.

  They moved in dense currents, flowing past Maggie and Mark without acknowledging them. Faces that blurred when she tried to focus. Bodies that took up space without quite being solid. The crowd noise was a constant hum, individual words never quite resolving into sentences.

  "Shit," Maggie muttered.

  "Classic anxiety dream," Mark said, scanning the crowd. "Lost in a crowd. Can't find what you're looking for. Everyone else knows where they're going except you."

  "How do we find the dreamer in this?"

  "Carefully." He started walking. "The nightmare will have a center. The dreamer will be near it, trying to get out."

  They pushed through the crowd. The people parted for them—or maybe just flowed around them like water around stones. Every few steps, the layout shifted subtly. A store that had been on the left was now on the right. An escalator that had been going up was now going down.

  "This is a maze," Maggie said.

  "That's the point. The dreamer feels lost, so the space becomes impossible to navigate." Mark turned down a corridor that opened onto a food court that definitely hadn't been there before. "We need to find them before the nightmare escalates."

  "What happens if it escalates?"

  "Depends on the dreamer. Could just wake up. Could get worse before it gets better." He paused, looking up at the ceiling—which was either very high or not there at all. "Could pull us deeper."

  "Great. Love that."

  They kept moving. The mall seemed to go on forever—corridors branching into corridors, levels stacking on top of levels that shouldn't have fit in any physical space. Maggie found herself checking over her shoulder, though she wasn't sure what she expected to see.

  "Question," she said, after they'd passed what might have been the same pretzel stand for the third time.

  "Yeah?"

  "When you found me—in my nightmare, the first time—how did you do it?" She stepped around a group of not-quite-people clustered near a fountain. "Because this seems impossible."

  Mark didn't answer immediately. They climbed an escalator that deposited them on a floor identical to the one they'd left.

  "You were outside," he said finally. "On a street. Open space. I sent the eagle in first—from above, it's easy to spot someone." He glanced at her. "Especially someone running through an empty street screaming profanities at the top of her lungs."

  "I wasn't screaming that loud."

  "You were screaming pretty loud."

  "And here?"

  "The eagle's not useful in a space like this. Too enclosed. No sky to fly in." He gestured at the endless corridors around them. "In an open nightmare, I can get a bird's-eye view, find the center. In here, it's all internal. We're stuck navigating like everyone else."

  Maggie thought about that. About her own nightmare—the endless street, the faceless figures chasing her. She'd felt trapped, yes, but the space had been open. Room to run, even if running hadn't helped.

  This was different. This was a trap built from the inside out.

  "So how do we—"

  She stopped.

  A sound. Faint, almost swallowed by the ambient hum of the crowd, but distinct. A voice. High-pitched. Young.

  "Mama?"

  Mark's head turned.

  "Papa? PAPA!"

  The voice came from somewhere ahead—or maybe to the left. Hard to tell. The acoustics of the mall bent the sound the same way the corridors bent space.

  "There," Mark said, and started moving faster.

  They pushed through the crowd, following the voice. It came in bursts—sometimes closer, sometimes further, always the same desperate pattern.

  "Mama! Where are you?"

  They rounded a corner. Nothing. Just another corridor, another row of stores, another stream of faceless shoppers moving with purpose they didn't have.

  "PAPA!"

  Closer now. Maggie broke into a jog, weaving between bodies that didn't quite feel solid. Mark kept pace beside her, Locke at his heels.

  They passed a fountain. A jewelry store. A place selling phones that displayed nothing on their screens.

  "Mama?"

  The voice came from the right. They turned.

  Another corridor. Empty except for the crowd.

  "This doesn't make sense," Maggie said. "We should be getting closer."

  "The nightmare's fighting us." Mark scanned the storefronts. "It doesn't want her found. That's the whole point."

  "PAPA!"

  Left this time. They turned again, pushed through a set of doors that led to a department store that stretched in directions department stores shouldn't stretch. Racks of clothes formed walls. Mirrors reflected things that weren't there.

  "Mama! MAMA!"

  The voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. Maggie felt the frustration building in her chest—the same frustration the dreamer must be feeling, multiplied, feeding back into the space around them.

  "We're going in circles," she said.

  "We're going where it wants us to go." Mark stopped walking. Closed his eyes. "Give me a second."

  Maggie waited. The crowd flowed around them like they were rocks in a river. Somewhere in the distance, the voice called out again—smaller now, tired.

  "Papa?"

  Mark opened his eyes. "This way."

  He didn't follow the corridors this time. He walked straight through a store, past the registers, through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY that led to a service hallway that shouldn't have connected to anything but did. Maggie followed without asking.

  The hallway bent. Twisted. Opened onto a food court that was somehow above them and below them at the same time.

  "Mama? Papa?"

  Closer. Much closer.

  "There," Maggie said, pointing.

  They rounded a corner and found her.

  A girl. Small—maybe five years old. Standing near a carousel that turned without music, clutching a stuffed animal to her chest. She wasn't moving with the crowd. She was turning in slow circles, calling out to faces that wouldn't look back.

  "Mama? Papa?"

  The girl had dark hair. A pink dress. Eyes that were the only clear thing in the entire nightmare—brown, wide, terrified.

  Maggie took a step toward her.

  The girl turned again, scanning the crowd. Her gaze swept past Maggie—then snapped back. Past her. To Mark.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the girl's face changed. The fear didn't disappear—it transformed into relief, bright and sudden.

  She dropped the stuffed animal.

  She ran toward them.

  And she screamed one word, loud enough to cut through the noise of the crowd, loud enough to make the nightmare itself seem to flinch:

  "PAPA!"

  She ran past Maggie without a glance and collided with Mark's legs, arms wrapping around them, face pressed against his coat. Her small body shook with sobs that came from somewhere deeper than a five-year-old should be able to reach.

  Mark stood frozen.

  Maggie stared at him.

  The girl looked up at Mark with those clear, terrified, relieved eyes.

  "I was so scared," she whispered. "I couldn't find you anywhere."

  Mark didn't move. Didn't speak. His face had gone completely blank—the kind of blank that came from having too many things to feel and no space to feel them in.

  Maggie waited for him to say something.

  He didn't.