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The pills were taking too long to work. Tovah had, with Martin’s help, turned the reclining bedside chair into a makeshift bed complete with Henry’s extra pillow and blanket. Her legs, the sound one and the residual limb, were propped comfortably. She was warm. The room was dim and quiet. And still, she couldn’t fall asleep.

Martin had pulled over the straight-backed chair from the room’s built-in desk to sit beside her. They didn’t speak, nor did she look at him, but Tovah felt his gaze on her. She heard his breath, slow and steady. She waited for him to touch her, but he didn’t.

The pills he’d given her should’ve started working already, but her mind kept racing. What was happening to Henry as Spider? Had he found Ben? What was going on? What—

“Dr. Goodfellow?”

The voice snapped Tovah’s eyes open, and she looked toward the door. The orderly again. He gave her a curious look, but not a very close one. Martin got up.

“Yes?”

“We could use you out here. We’ve got an admission.”

Martin stood. He straightened the rumpled hem of his shirt, tucking it in. Tovah thought of the first time she’d seen him, so clean and pressed and put together. Now he looked like he’d been rode hard and put away wet, as her grandmother would have said. He left the room without a glance at her.

“Tovahleh.”

She turned. “Henry?”

Henry had vanished from the bed beside her.

The boy understood fear. Everyone had to be afraid, sometimes. Without fear to conquer, how would anyone ever grow? Learn? That’s what his daddy had always said, the times he held the boy’s hand over the flame, not quite close enough to burn.

This was different. This was sheer, constant terror. Unrelenting and without end. There was no conquering it. There was nothing to learn from it. Only relief when it passed, but it wasn’t passing, it was getting stronger and stronger, and he wanted to stop it but didn’t know how.

Edward went to the witchwoman first and grabbed her by the throat. “You should leave him alone,” he told her, squeezing.

The witchwoman’s eyes bulged and her tongue popped out, but she managed voice enough to say, “You know we can’t!”

The dogman had stayed away, circling them and whining, but now it lunged. Not at Edward, not to save the witchwoman, but toward the man in blue pajamas who’d begun creeping toward the weeping boy. The dogman locked its jaws on his calf. Blood flew, and the dogman’s victim screamed and kicked it in the face. The dogman, undeterred, bit again.

“Get away from him, you son-of-a-bitch!” A rock flew from nowhere. It struck the dogman in the head, and the creature clapped its hands to the wound and rolled onto its side with a yelp. “C’mon, Spider. Get up!”

The boy knew this man. Ben. He backed away, hands up, pushing as hard as he could at the world knitting and unknitting all around them.

The man on the ground, the one who’d been a spider, got onto his feet with Ben’s help. “She’s coming, Ben. I saw her at the hospital. She’s on her way.”

Edward lost his grip on the witchwoman’s throat at that, and she took the chance to get away. He ignored her for the moment. “Tovah’s coming?”

Spider-who-was-now-a-man looked at him. “She is.”

“Don’t think she’ll be happy to see you,” said the witchwoman in a strangled voice, and Edward backhanded her to the ground, where she lay and laughed at him.

Edward looked at the boy, who’d huddled into himself. “She’s coming to hurt him, too?”

The boy looked up at that. Terror and despair rolled off him in faintly visible waves, making him sick to his stomach.

Ben seemed to be struggling a bit, too. His face had gone white, and he spat to the side as if he wanted to clear his mouth of the taste of something foul. “He’s hurting a lot of people!”

The boy sobbed, trying to tell them it wasn’t his fault. It was the witchwoman’s fault, and the dogman’s. They made him do it. But even as he couldn’t force the blame, he knew it wasn’t true. He knew it was him and had been him, all along.

“He doesn’t mean to!” Edward stepped in front of the boy.

The one they called Spider put his hands out, placating, and took a step toward the boy. “Mean to or not, he’s doing it. And he has to stop. You can help us.”

“Don’t let them hurt me, too!” The boy grabbed tight to Edward’s shins and buried his face against them. “You promised!”

Edward put his hand on the boy’s hair tenderly. “I did. Do what you want to the other two, but leave the boy alone.”

“Don’t you get it?” Ben looked around at the witchwoman and the dogman, both pacing while the world shuddered around them. “You can’t take them and leave him alone. They’re all part of each other!”

The wind, the lightning, the black sky, the sand, the far-off screams…

Everything stopped.

The moment Tovah saw the empty bed, she got to her feet. No hesitation. Utter faith that when she stood she’d be standing on two sound feet…and she was. The room looked the same as it had when she was awake, minus the presence of Henry in the bed. She looked hard for something different. A door, maybe, or a wall made thin. Everything looked the same.

“Henry? Ben?” She paused, listening. “Spider?”

Nothing but the sound of the radiator hissing air, and the faint, far-off murmur of voices from down the hall. Tovah looked harder. There had to be an exit from this room. She sent the tendrils of her will seeking Ben and Spider. She closed her eyes.

At once, terror sheared her as though she’d run her hand over the edge of a razor. She gasped, her eyes flying open, her hands clutching the sudden sharp pain in her guts. Her legs went weak and she kept herself from falling only by stepping forward.

She shaped, instantly, on instinct. Not a meadow this time, or green grass, but the full length of her left leg. Solid and strong. It wanted to go away, she felt that, felt the tug and pull and tear of someone else’s will trying to break her down. Push her back. Make her afraid.

She was afraid, but she would not allow that fear to take away her wholeness. Not now. Not ever again.

Edward had not been what she needed, in the end, but he’d taught her something vital. She had climbed the mountain and found something that would last. Her sense of strength and self. Nothing and nobody would take that from her again, no matter how strongly they shaped.

She cried out for Spider and for Ben again, but they did not appear. It took every effort she had to keep herself steady, but she managed. Shape a haven, Spider had told her, and though she didn’t think she could without Ben and Spider there to help her, she managed.

The Ephemeros’s usual shifting gray mist had become a void.

With nothing solid beneath her upon which to stand, Tovah should have fallen. With no sky or earth to orient her, she ought to have been lost. But instead, she shaped a haven, something small, a bubble of protection.

Screams echoed in the darkness, and Tovah caught flash after flash of different wills in search of guides. Someone ran from a monster while another huddled on the tracks of an oncoming train. Sleepers faced guns and fire, heights. The world dreamed, held tight in the fist of an unseen dictator who allowed only fear to reign.

She couldn’t worry about others, now.

Tovah shaped a meadow. Green grass. A stream, for Ben, who liked the sound of running water. A rock for Spider to sit on. Butterflies, here and there, because she liked them. Each effort left her breathless, as though she was running a race.

She didn’t have time to waste. Martin would be back in a few minutes. They wouldn’t let her sleep in Henry’s room forever. Though the pills Martin had given her would keep her under more easily than if she’d fallen asleep on her own, they could and would still wake her.

The meadow, half-formed, shuddered and quaked. In the distance, she saw the mountains. That’s where they’d be. All of them.

“You can fly, you know.”

Tovah looked to her left. Justin Ross, dressed in the gray jumpsuit uniform of his character from
Runner,
pointed to the distance. He nodded, solemn, as if he was imparting great knowledge.

“Can I?” She knew she could, but wondered why he was there. She didn’t have time to guide him, and looked for the army of dildo-waving fangirls. Tovah looked at the mountains. She bounced lightly on the balls of her feet. “I could run there, too.”

“Flying’s faster.” Ross shrugged and finally, really looked at her. “Hey. It’s you. I wanted to thank you.”

She paused, eager to be on her way but too used to the way the Ephemeros worked to discount the possibility he might have something important to say. “For what?”

“Saving me that day.”

“You saved me, too.”

Ross gave her smile-porn. “Yeah. I wish I could do it again.”

The offer was surprising and sweet, but Tovah shook her head. “Not this time, Justin. Listen…you might want to wake up now.”

Ross’s smile spread like honey on a biscuit, and Tovah had no difficulty imagining him wooing the ladies. “I’m on a plane from L.A. to Vancouver. I took a dose of Dramamine. I don’t think I
can
wake up.”

Tovah looked around for other sleepers, but her shaping had kept her far from them as it always did unless she was trying for contact with others. She moved to Justin Ross, who was taller than she’d expected. Kelly claimed he was over six feet, and he was definitely representing as such. She had to tilt her head to look up at him.

“Okay, then,” she told him. “Just remember—”

But before she could give him advice, she lost hold of the haven she’d shaped. Blackness swallowed him, then her. She swam against it, kicking and finding nothing to push against.

No. No. No. She would not let this happen.

She was in the car, the seat belt locked tight against her chest and the reek of smoke forcing her to bark with coughs.

No.

She was in the hospital, watching wide awake as the surgeons cut off her leg. The pain was immense.

No.

She was a child, hiding beneath the bed as something crept from the closet on taloned feet…

No!

And then she had a handful of agony, climbing the mountain of razors and glass.

They were all the same. All of them. The boy, the witchwoman and the dogman. The boy let out a low, strangled groan, hands clutching and clenching, and dropped to his knees.

He could feel them inside. They would never go away. Never, never, never. They would never go away…because they were all part of him. He could feel it. He knew it was true. But they didn’t, not the witchwoman or the dogman.

Everything had stopped. If there was screaming, the witchwoman could no longer hear it. She touched a trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth and wiped it without care on her jeans. The dogman paced, hunger in its belly like fire.

“Come here, little Spider,” the witchwoman said. “Let’s dance again.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Edward stepped forward, yanking his leg free of the boy’s grip. “You’re a liar!”

Ben moved forward, too. “It’s true.”

“Who told you that?” The man advanced again, ignoring the boy’s sobs. He grabbed Ben by the front of his shirt and shook him. “Did she? That lying bitch?”

“Careful,” the witchwoman said, easing her way toward the boy. “You might make me cry.”

“You’re a guide,” Ben told Edward. He wasn’t struggling to get away. “Aren’t you? Can’t you feel it? That boy needs guidance, right? Can’t you tell—”

“Shut up!” The man shook Ben harder and raised one fist to punch him in the face.

The witchwoman took advantage of his distraction to grab the boy. She cradled him close, crooning words of love and intimidation. The boy lay lax in her embrace, the dogman panting at his feet.

“Don’t you listen to them, sweetheart,” she whispered, pushing his hair from his forehead. “They all want to hurt you, but you’re not for them, are you?”

The boy looked up at her with wide blue eyes shining with tears that no longer slid down his pale cheeks. Bruises colored the flesh beneath his eyes, and his mouth looked puffy and sore, the lips cracked and hinting at blood. He cradled that damned red-and-white ball in his hands.

“Where did that piece of shit come from?” The witchwoman recoiled at the sight of the toy.

The boy reached to grab her, holding her close with torn fingertips. Blood dotted her shirt, and sudden disgust rolled over her. The boy’s grip was like iron. She had thought she was trapping him.

She’d been wrong.

Tovah shaped the pain away. Barely. She could concentrate on getting up this damned mountain to her friends, or she could shape herself without pain, but doing both was like breathing water. The effort choked and threatened to drown her.

She got to the top, though, fast, and heaved herself over the edge without even resting. She got to her feet. Blood streamed from a dozen wounds, but she didn’t bother shaping it away.

“Spider!”

He was there, and Ben too, and Tovah ran to them with wings on her heels. She was in Ben’s embrace without quite knowing how she got there, just that when his arms went around her she stopped feeling afraid. The world around them rocked and reeled, but she was safe.

It only lasted a moment.

“Tovah?” Edward had yet another new face, dark eyes and pale hair, but at least he had one.

Tovah faced him. “Edward.”

He moved toward her, one hand outstretched, but he stopped before touching her. His gaze took in Ben’s arms around her. Shadows swam in his eyes.

Once he’d promised to give her everything she needed. Tovah hoped he still would.

“We’re glad you came,” Spider said as calmly as if she’d just shown up at the annual Fourth of July picnic.

Spider took Tovah’s hand. The three of them faced Edward. Behind him, Tovah saw the boy with the red-and-white ball sitting on the black sand. The woman crouched beside him, one wrist caught in the boy’s hand. The dog-headed man had dropped onto all hands and knees behind them, its whine reaching Tovah’s ears like the sound of a dentist’s drill.

The boy stood without letting go of the ball in his right hand, nor the woman held tight with his left. She hung in his grip like a toddler-dragged doll. The boy let his right hand tilt. The ball dropped and rolled away. The dog-headed man fit itself beneath his right hand at once, the boy’s fingers sinking into the coarse fur and grabbing tight.