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  The world wasn’t shaking, at least not here, and the terror that had battered them before had relented. It hadn’t disappeared, not exactly, but it had faded to a manageable amount. Tovah found she could breathe again, and hadn’t realized she’d been unable to, before.

  The cinderblock walls got fuzzy now and again, a sign the boy’s concentration was with other things. Tovah took the chance to try and catch his attention. She moved forward, her arms pulling Spider and Ben with her, though they resisted hard enough to keep her from getting close enough to touch the boy.

  “Hey,” she said gently.

  He lifted his head, took in the sight of their clasped hands. “You want me to stop, I know.”

  “Can you?” Tovah’s voice stayed gentle. “Do you want to?”

  The boy said nothing for what seemed a very long time. In one hand he held the woman-puppet, in the other the beast-doll. He clutched them hard and drew his knees to his chest, burying his face. His thin shoulders heaved.

  “I want my mom and dad.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know!” The boy’s fingers linked around his knees. She could see he’d bitten his nails down so far they had to be sore.

  The walls around them faded entirely, leaving only the cot and the boy with his toys. They were back to black sand and sky. The screams, this time, weren’t so far off. The club Tovah had always been so fond of shaping surged and seethed just beyond the boy’s cot, but instead of writhing in ecstasy the occupants squirmed and wailed in terror.

  Edward stepped from the shadows. The boy looked up, sniffling. He threw a gaze of sheer desperation toward Tovah and lifted his puppets.

  “No!” Tovah’s cry turned his head, stopped him for a moment, but it wasn’t enough.

  The boy lifted his puppets higher, holding them out to either side of his body. “I’m sorry.”

  In the club, the screams got louder.

  Without speaking, without even thinking too much about it, Tovah opened herself to the threads of Spider’s will and Ben’s. The boy pushed. They pushed back.

  It was like trying to shape water, fluid and slippery, without form. The world around them whirled in the way only dreams could, flashing bits and pieces of scenes and sending emotional currents washing over them. Tovah drew strength from her friends and knitted it with her own, sending it out to force away the bad.

  Beside her, Ben groaned. His eyelids fluttered. But Ben was stronger than she was, wasn’t he? She looked at Spider, who stared impassively at the boy. Only the vein ticking in his temple gave away his strain.

  “I…can’t.” Ben’s mutter nudged Tovah’s ear. “This isn’t like making an oasis…”

  “You have to.” Spider’s voice allowed no argument. “It’s coming apart at the seams.”

  He was right. The fabric of the Ephemeros was unraveling around them, and what would that mean? No more dreams? Or something more dramatic?

  “Is it something you want to risk?” Spider snapped, answering the question she hadn’t asked aloud.

  Clutching her friends tight, Tovah used every bit of skill she had. “Remember what you told me, Spider, when I needed to find the way out. Exit light. Do it now. Exit light!”

  The mantra wasn’t working. Beside her, Ben’s hand flared hot and the force of his desire rubbed her like sandpaper. On the other side, Spider’s grim determination tasted like gasoline, burning her tongue.

  “I can’t let you do this, son,” Spider said. “I can’t let you take this place away from me. It’s all I got.”

  Tovah turned her head to look at her friend. “Spider, that’s not true!”

  He didn’t look at her. “It’s all I got, Tovahleh. It’s more real to me than anything else. And I won’t let this kid break it into pieces.”

  The boy cried out, backing up a step and dragging his puppets with him. Spider’s will pulsed and throbbed, pushing outward. A hint of blue sky edged the darkness the boy’s fear had created. It was a start, but not enough.

  Tovah’s stomach lurched. “Listen to me. They’re a part of you. They can only hurt or scare you if you let them, just like any other dream. I’ll teach you how to get out. But you have to trust me.”

  The boy looked at the woman and the beast. The earth shook. The sky opened and lightning flashed inside the rent. “I’m scared! I’m scared to get out.”

  “I know you are.” Strength and compassion filled Tovah’s voice.

  “Leave him alone.” Edward, feet bare and hand reaching, appeared. He stepped toward the boy, who looked up at once.

  “We don’t want to hurt him,” Tovah protested. She looked from Spider to Ben and back again. “Do we?”

  “Tovahleh,” Spider said, “he’s got to be stopped.”

  “You don’t mean to hurt him,” she said, understanding. “You want to kill him.”

  She looked at Ben. “You knew this, too?”

  He had the grace to look guilty. “Spider told me.”

  This was a betrayal worse than any she’d known, and Tovah fought to keep herself from reeling with the shock of it. “You both decided this without asking me? Why wait, then? Why not just do it?”

  “Because we need you, Tovahleh,” Spider said. “We couldn’t do it alone. You’re the only one—”

  She shook her head. She would not listen to this half-assed rationale. “You should have told me. He’s just a kid! Look at him!”

  “It’s a representation, Tovah!” Ben cried. “He’s not a boy any more than Spider is a spider.”

  Tovah did not believe that. She’d seen the truth in the boy’s words, and in the scene he’d dreamed for them. “He’s a boy. And he’s in trouble. Is this why you wanted me to become a guide?”

  Ben’s guilty look gave her an answer, but Tovah fixed her glare on Spider. “Is it, Spider? To do things like this? To decide who gets to play and who doesn’t?”

  Spider’s expression turned grim. “You have a lot of power, Tovahleh. You need to use it for something other than selfishness.”

  A slap would have hurt her less and been more easily forgiven. “Were you just using me?”

  “No, Tovahleh. Never that.”

  Tovah wished she could believe him. She looked at Edward. “I don’t want to hurt him, I swear to you. But you have to trust me.”

  “Tovah, don’t do this,” Ben warned, but she yanked her hand from his anyway. Then from Spider’s.

  The instant she did, the terror and pain their mingled will had held at bay surged forward. It knocked her, clutching her gut and screaming, to her knees. Behind her she heard Ben and Spider doing the same. In the club, the screams rose to an insufferable pitch, and she clapped her hands over her ears.

  And then she got to her feet.

  She faced the boy. “You have to trust me.”

  The boy shook, his face white as bleached sheets, eyes two dark coins. The dream creatures in each of his hands rippled and writhed. Tovah stepped toward him. She began to shape.

  Spider had told her to shape a haven, and that’s what she did. Green grass, a butterfly, the sweetly spanning limbs of a shade tree. She shaped a haven for herself and the boy, in all his forms. Spider had said she could do it, and she did.

  She was sweating by the time it was half-finished, gritting her teeth with effort a moment after that. Never had she needed to work so hard to shape anything, not even in the beginning. For everything she shaped, she had to unshape something else. Even then, when it was done, she stood inside something as fragile as a soap bubble with the world outside pressing against it, trying to make it break.

  The boy looked better, not so pale, and he didn’t shake. The puppets in his hands dangled, ignored for the moment.

  “Where are we?”

  “I made this place for us,” Tovah said. “It’s a safe place. And any time you’re scared, you can come here, okay? You don’t have to…do what you did, before.”

  The boy looked around with wide eyes. “You did this for me? Even tho