The girl was human. She was like me.

Fletcher dragged her from the water and tossed her onto the sand like a hunting trophy. The girl gave a little groan and curled up into a ball. There was blood smeared beneath her hair and crusted on her elbows, and a sort of mottled bruising all along one leg. “Oh, you’re a rare one,” Fletcher sneered, brushing dust from her shoulders with a hint of disdain. “Trying to hide? Trying to run? But where were you thinking to go? All that ocean would do is weigh your little wings down, and all you’d earn for it is a nasty end.”

No answer. The girl was visibly shivering, and not just from the cold of the water. She was terrified. She was facing down a nightmare which to her was suddenly a lot more real than it had any right to be. Fletcher clocked it too, and her sharp-edged smile nearly glowed. “Are you scared of me? At least there’s sense in that.” Her voice dropped an octave. “Get up.”

It would be a miracle if the girl could move at all, I knew. I’d been worse off when I first arrived in the Outscape. She tried anyway, but it seemed like her injured leg wouldn’t take her weight, and Fletcher didn’t feel like waiting for her. She grabbed her by the collar of her dirty red T-shirt and hauled her over to the nearest streetlamp, just a dozen feet away from where I stood hidden. Fletcher pushed her up against the metal, nudging her face first one way and then the other. “Now where did you come from?” she muttered. “And what is there to do with you?”

The girl’s eyes were wide and bloodshot, searching frantically for some relief from Fletcher. She was waiting to wake up, to gasp and sit bolt upright from this nightmare, to run to the comforting arms of her parents—and she never would.

I knew the story. I knew what she couldn’t tell Fletcher, because it’d happened to me, too. The girl had been having a bad dream, one that should have been like any other, a dream that should have run its course and which she would have forgotten within minutes of waking. But then it didn’t end. There’d been a shock, a jolt, a sudden onrush of darkness like the world was closing in around her—and she’d ended up here.

It was death that brought us—the death of a sleeping nightmare. Mine had been that of Basil Grier, a man with greasy slick hair who embodied a fear of needles. Like every nightmare, he’d carved a path through the barrier separating the Outscape from the waking world, he’d invaded my dreams, made me writhe with the sensation of metal points slipped beneath my skin. And then someone had slit his throat, and as the nightmare fell apart it had swallowed me whole and dragged me here and dumped me in a bloody bedroom that reeked of bad moonshine.

It shouldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen, most of the time. We were one in a thousand, cases of rotten bad luck, conflations of unlikely factors. Children were most susceptible, they said, because nightmares were strongest to children. Drugs like Luna or Dragon that strengthened a nightmare could also strengthen that chance, made it hungrier and more vicious.

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I didn’t know who’d been killed to bring her here. But I suspected.

She’d been hiding along the shore where Chesnes was killed, covered in enough grime that she could have been there for a day at least. And from what I’d found in Chesnes’ basement, I knew he’d been taking something while he slept. Something to make him feel powerful, something that would have ensnared the girl when he died. And if it had been Chesnes, that made her important. That made her valuable. That made her a witness.

Nobody could prove it except the girl herself and what she said. But there was an edge to Fletcher’s movements and words that suggested she was following the same thought processes as I was, and she didn’t like it. She shook her head. Her left hand disappeared into her pocket and emerged with a Liston surgical knife. Light from the gas flame above glittered and danced along its edge. “Look away,” she whispered, leaning in close to the girl. “This will be ugly. Look away and you’ll never ever have to know it.”

Fletcher’s aura was making my hand shake, but I began to draw Bella. I’d been that girl, once—I couldn’t let her die.

But before I could finish drawing the hammer back, Fletcher stopped. She let her hand drop, slipping the knife back where it’d come from. “No,” she said. “No, not here. Already there are murmurings, already the Delta is not where eyes fall. More blood in the water here will not draw the right kind of attention.”

Despite the silky sinister warnings, the girl’s eyes had been fixated on the blade. She swallowed as it went away, and found somewhere a reedy thin voice, high and fast with fear. “W-what?” she managed. “Who—who are-?”

“No sounds.” Fletcher pressed her hand over her mouth. “Just nighttime quiet. Nod.”

She nodded.

“Good. You understand. Now follow.” Half-dragging the girl, half allowing her to stumble along behind her, Fletcher walked away.

I shook my head to clear the last remnants of her nightmare. A doctor’s office, clean and bright to hide its bloody character underneath, sweetly nice so long as you did precisely what they asked, filled with all manner of implements for carefully eviscerating you. Then I stepped out into the street and started to trail her, keeping my eyes trained on that scarlet patch on her sleeve.

Fletcher made a meandering path towards the dark silhouette of deserted warehouses. She was cautious, checking for tails and doubling back on herself—but the girl’s uncertain footsteps concealed the sound of my own, and there was no shortage of outcropping walls behind which to hide. She halted abruptly near the rust-ridden door of the nearest building, unlocking it with a ring of keys. The girl tried to dig in her heels at the sight of the utter darkness within, but Fletcher dragged her over the threshold with a snarl of disgust.

I caught the door just before it latched. I wouldn’t have much time. Fletcher was smart enough not to associate one murder scene with another, but she meant to kill the girl, dispose of the only evidence there might yet be of Chesnes’ death. She’d die still hoping to wake up, still waiting for the nightmare to end—unless I could save her.