“Tabitha!” She grabbed hold of Tabitha’s black dress and tugged. “Be careful!”

  Tabitha yelped, arms pinwheeling at her side. She toppled backward, straight onto Molly. The two landed on the ground in a heap of limbs and fabric, black and pink and white hair and shining eyes.

  There was a twisting tussle as they untangled themselves. I started down the steps to join them.

  Molly gasped, “What were you doing?” with accusation in her voice.

  Tabitha stared at her, and then stared at me. There was a flash of something in her gaze; was that fear? It looked like it.

  Was… Was she afraid of me?

  Then Tabitha looked away. “Nothing. I was trying to see how far down it went.”

  Molly didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t push. She just patted at the sides of Tabitha’s shoulders. “That’s dangerous, Tabitha. You could slip and get really hurt.”

  “I was being careful.” Tabitha stood up and used one hand to smooth out her skirt. Her motions seemed more fluid and human than they normally did. Her hair was just as perfect, though, and her eyes were just as painted dark.

  Molly’s mouth tugged into a thin line.

  “Did you find out?” I asked.

  Tabitha shook her head.

  “Give me your shoe,” I told her, stepping over to the railing.

  “Here,” said Molly. “Use this instead.”

  She pulled a small golden pocket watch out of seemingly thin air and gave it to me. I could have sworn that I had seen the pocket watch before, but wasn’t sure where. Maybe nowhere, or in a movie, or…who knew?

  What I did know was that it was perfect for my height test.

  I leaned forward, extending my arm over the edge of the railing. I held the pocket watch by the chain, letting it dangle for a moment. Then I dropped it. Molly and Tabitha moved to join me, one girl on either side. We watched, captivated, as the watch plummeted down the shaft.

  It managed to avoid hitting all of the crooked, jagged stairs and shot straight through the center of them. It was small enough that it got hard to see pretty fast. Then I couldn’t see it at all.

  There was a small, barely audible tnk when it finally hit the ground.

  “That’s a lot of stairs.” Something scratched at the back of my mind. What would happen if Tabitha fell from here? If she jumped?

  ...If she was pushed?

  A shiver ran down my spine. The curiosity was strong—enough that I could taste it. There was salt and copper on the back of my tongue.

  As though Tabitha could sense that I was thinking something not super friendly about her, she turned, pulled away from the railing, and started down the stairs without a word. She went fast, taking off at a sprint. Her long, pale hair was flowing behind her.

  It was like someone had turned the predator drive on in my brain. The moment that Tabitha ran, I went after her.

  I had no idea why. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I caught her. But she moved, and I chased.

  “Quinn,” shouted Molly. For the first time, I wasn’t the one trying to keep up with Molly. Instead, Molly was trying to keep up with me.

  Down we went, all three of us. The stairs were groaning as though they could barely handle our weight. When we all took a turn one after the other, it felt like the stairs moved with us.

  Tabitha looked over her shoulders. She really was afraid of me. Guilt should have risen up. Instead, there was a surge of excitement. This was better than Dream Hero, who had just stood there. This was… Well, I didn’t know what this was.

  Exciting.

  Exhilarating.

  Motion.

  Tabitha ran.

  I chased.

  Molly followed.

  The bottom of the stairs suddenly dropped off into a stretch of hallway. Tabitha hit the ground and then simply vanished from sight. I came to such a sudden stop that I slid a few feet, arms waving as I tried to catch my balance.

  Molly slammed into my back. She grabbed me by the shoulders, fingers curling into my shirt, as though worried that I was going to take off running again.

  Yeah, not going to happen. For one, I was suddenly aware of the fact I was breathing so hard—my sides were heaving and my throat felt wounded and raw. I was dizzy, sweat drenching my clothes and the back of my neck. An errant pink curl clung to my star-covered cheek.

  I leaned backward against Molly. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t tell if she was lying. “What were you doing?”

  “...I don’t know,” I admitted to her.

  “You don’t?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t, really. It just… It felt like I was supposed to follow her.”

  “You were chasing her,” Molly accused. “Not following her. And that meant I had to chase you!”

  “You kept up alright,” I said, my gaze still stuck on the hallway before me. It looked like any other stretch of this weird dream building. I couldn’t figure out how Tabitha had managed to disappear.

  Slowly, once I had caught my breath, I stepped over to where Tabitha had vanished. I stretched my hand out. The very tips of my fingers shimmered and then vanished. It was like they had just been cut off at the knuckle. “Whoa.”

  “This must be a divide.” Molly moved to join me.

  I pulled my hand back. “Is it dangerous?”

  My fingers returned to sight. They wiggled just fine when I tried to move them.

  Molly shook her head. “It just means that, well, you know that sometimes the building moves? This is just a divide. The building hasn’t finished moving or maybe it leads somewhere far away.”

  “Why haven’t we come across it before?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just like that sometimes.”

  “We should go through it.”

  “The stairs are gone,” Molly pointed out. She was right. They were. It was just an empty room behind us now. “We don’t have much of a choice. We should try to find the mother. You don’t have much time left.”

  “Right.” Tabitha wasn’t who I needed to look for. It was Mrs. Harringbone I needed to locate. Or the dream version of her, at least.

  I took a deep breath. Then I stepped down the hallways…and vanished from where I stood.

  Water into Wine

  Now I was in suddenly the kitchen. It was strange, though. This wasn’t the kitchen I normally saw, not in the real world or in the dream house. Had I drawn this place? I wasn’t sure. It felt familiar, but only in a distant kind of way.

  I had drawn a kitchen in one of my pictures and I was wracking my brain to try and figure out what it might have looked like. It wasn’t this kitchen…I didn’t think. The walls were covered in lemon wallpaper, and there was a weird chandelier made of empty glass soda bottles and cat-eye marbles hanging from the center of the ceiling.

  That was totally not the kind of thing I would have ever drawn.

  “I don’t see anyone in here,” I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Where are the other people?”

  The kitchen didn’t answer me, though the marbles were definitely looking at me. It kind of felt like the bear-shaped cookie jar was looking at me, too. It was sitting on the back of the counter, just to the left of the sink. The bear was made out of glass and the ceramic was painted bright blue. It held a bowl at the front that was meant to be used as a key holder, though it was piled up with strange-looking buttons.

  I stepped over to it, catching hold of one of the buttons and pulling. It stretched out and out, into a great big long necklace. The buttons were held together with pretty yellow thread. I looped it around my neck, fingers running over them so that they clacked together. They were a variety of rainbow colors, though there was an extra big purple button at the center of the necklace.

  Then I reached over and I pulled the head off of the cookie jar, peeking inside.

  Nothing.

  “What a disappointment.”

  “I told you,” said Molly. “You don’t actually need to eat. That’s why you haven’t felt hungry at all since you got here.”

  The marbles watched, too, rolling around in their holder, as Molly stepped into the room behind me, too, their eyes rolling and trailing after her as she moved to join me at the counter.

  “I know I don’t need to eat, but I still wanted something. Don’t you ever get cravings?” I asked. “I mean, that whole run down the stairs—whew!”

  Molly frowned at the mention of our pursuit of Tabitha.

  I ignored the look that she gave me and continued, “Something really yummy now would be great. My dad—he used to always tell me that the best thing to do after a run would be to eat something crisp and refreshing.”

  “And cookies are crisp and refreshing?” Molly asked, sounding like she was trying very, very hard to be amused.

  “They are in—” I cut myself off before I could say in a dream. Quickly, I rerouted the sentence, hoping that she didn’t catch my little fumble. “When you’re me!”

  Molly didn’t look amused. “You know, I wasn’t allowed to have cookies very often.”

  “When?”

  Molly didn’t answer. She blinked at me with those bright eyes of hers and then turned away. “Quinn, about what happened on the stairs…”

  “I didn’t know that stairs could go on for that long,” I told her, knowing full well that she meant the part where I chased Tabitha.

  Molly wanted to ask me why I had done that, which I understood, but the problem was—I didn’t have an answer for her. I had been thinking about the people back in the real world, and how when I finally woke up from the dream, they were going to be fine. Nothing would have changed with them—nothing at all.

  And I was going to be pushed right back into that role of having to deal with it, having to let it happen. Not being able to tell them off, and being forced to listen to the teachers. And it had made me so angry, that the fury needed a way to come out.

  Then I looked at Tabitha, looked at her there on the edge of the railings—wondered what would happen to her, as a doll that had come to life, if she hit the ground… And I just couldn’t control myself.

  “You know,” I carried on, not giving Molly time to try and ask any other questions. Either they wouldn’t have any answers or she just wouldn’t like the answers that I had to give her. “The other thing that I love more than anything after a lot of work is a cold glass of soda.”

  I walked over to the sink. Molly was right I didn’t need to eat or drink in this world—dream logic for the win!—but after such a long run… I didn’t know.

  A glass of soda sounded good. And since there wasn’t going to be any soda sitting around in this world, I would settle for water.

  My dad really did always say that you should have something to eat after a run, but he was always talking about a few slices of apple or some cucumber strips. Something that would refresh you and get your body in top shape.

  The soda was a treat.

  Water would have to do, in place of any of that.

  I flipped on the faucet so that it could get cold. The pipes groaned and gurgled, and then they spat out a strange-looking liquid. It was the purplish-red wine that my grandparents had been drinking! The smell was so powerful it was almost nauseating.

  It didn’t smell like wine at all. It smelled like the strong perfume Grandma always wore; a mixture of flowers and strawberries that just somehow managed to clash in all of the worst ways. And it was strong, too. My Grandma always wore too much of it, but this was an extreme even compared to that!

  Yelping, I jerked backward. The wine splattered against the copper basin of the sink and splashed up onto the edge of the counter around it. The little red droplets almost looked like blood being misted over the edge of the marble surface.

  Molly asked, “What’s wrong? Did you see the mother?”

  I shook my head. “Where’s the water?” I gestured at the sink. “Look at that, Molly! Why is it spitting out wine like that?” And then, even more nervous, “That is wine, right?”

  A chill ran down my spine. It had to be wine. The only other alternative was blood, and that… That just felt wrong.

  “You ask a lot of funny questions.” Molly stepped past me and shut the sink off. “Think about where you are, Quinn. Why are you still surprised by these things?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, with a shaky exhale. “I guess it’s just that the moment I think I’ve got it figured out, something else happens and then I’m all thrown for a loop again.”

  Over and over and over again, like this world delighted in surprising and confusing me the same way that the real world delighted in hurting my feelings and making me struggle.

  “Maybe you should stop trying to figure it out. It doesn’t really matter, after all. You’ve almost finished the story! Then you can go home!” Molly smiled at me. There was that cold light in her eyes again. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  I wondered if she wished she could go home, too. Then I wondered what her home might have been.

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” I told her, unable to make myself sound excited about the prospect.

  “You guess?” Molly tilted her head to the side, brows lifting slightly as though she was surprised by my answer.

  “I just… I don’t have any friends like you back home,” I admitted. “Remember what I was saying, about the strangers?”

  Molly smiled for real that time. “I know what you mean. Good friends are hard to find. People come and they go and they come and they go and—” She laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. “You’ve been a good friend, Quinn.”

  “Even though my story is about killing people?” I hedged.

  Molly nodded. “You didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t pick it on purpose. My project at school—it was about villains. I had to make a story like this.”

  “You didn’t know about us,” said Molly, more persistently. “So it doesn’t matter.”

  The door creaked open. Dream Mrs. Harringbone stepped into the room. She was staring down at a piece of paper, which she held like it was a phone. She tapped her fingers against the paper like she was making a text, and tutted and hemmed and hawed as she walked over to the counter by the fridge.

  She muttered but the sounds weren’t words. It was like animal speech, or something from a video game; sounds that blended together and formed nonsensical strings of consonants. She pulled open the doors of the copper fridge and looked inside.

  I could see that one of the shelves held a bowl of some sort of green pudding. At first, I thought that it was pistachio with marshmallows in it, but then the little white globs started to wiggle and move, and I gagged.

  Dream Mrs. Harringbone heard the sound. She jumped, throwing her arms up in the air, and spun around to look at me. Even more gibberish fell from her lips as she pointed a finger at me accusingly. I could feel the shift of my clothing as the dress came back into being.

  This time, I didn’t need Molly to help me figure out how to kill her. I was smart enough to do it on my own.

  “Plug the sink,” I shouted.

  Molly was quick to listen. She slammed the plug into the sink and flipped on both faucets, while I lunged at Dream Mrs. Harringbone. I grabbed her by the front of her shirt; I was impossibly strong. She was bigger than me, and older, and she should have been stronger too.

  But it was like picking up a toy. A doll. I grabbed her and slammed her against the edge of the counter, belly first. Then I tangled my fingers in her hair and I shoved her face into the basin of the sink. Wine spilled over her hair. She thrashed, but I was too powerful.

  Molly grabbed onto one of Dream Mrs. Harringbone’s wrists, holding it down against the counter. The ballerina had to use both hands and all of her weight to keep it still. But I just had to push down slightly.

  The sink filled at a super-fast rate. The wine covered up her face; great big bubbles formed in the purple-red liquid. It splashed up around the curves of her cheeks, and stained her hair. She bucked backward, but I just leaned against her even more forcefully.

  The bubbles got bigger and more frantic, like a hot tub running. And then they started to get less active, and the thrashing got weaker. Wine splashed up around the edge of the tub, and it spilled onto the front of my dress. The woman suddenly stopped moving.

  Neither Molly nor I were willing to let go of her. We held her under until the bubbles stopped, and the moving stopped, and I was totally, fully, and completely certain that she was dead.

  Then I let her go. Molly let go, too. The hand slid off of the counter and then the rest of Dream Mrs. Harringbone crumpled to the ground too, looking a lot like wet tissue paper. There was no blood this time around but the wine had stained the skin of her face. It looked like somebody had covered her with red grape peels. Even the whites of her eyes were stained with it.

  Her mouth was open, tongue sticking out. Her teeth were wine-stained, too. Molly commented, “That’s kind of gross.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, reaching out with one foot and nudging her in the side. “But it worked, right? I didn’t think about the mess. Is the wine going to vanish, like the blood does?”

  “I’ve never spilled wine before,” admitted Molly. “I don’t know. The rules change sometimes, anyway. What would happen—in your book?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess whatever happens here, I’ll draw later.” I picked at the front of my tattered dress. The wine was staining the fabric. “This is pretty gross too.”

  Molly turned off the faucet and pulled the plug. The wine did not stain her hands. It didn’t even cling to the tips of her fingers in pretty maroon droplets. “She’s gone.”

  “Oh! She is!” I let go of my dress and bent forward to inspect the doll. It was made from porcelain, with the same clothing that she always wore to school, and a smile carved onto her face. The paleness of her skin was stained with wine, but her clothing was clean and so was her hair and the floor around her.

  I picked her up. Her eyelids slid shut when I tilted her one way, and then opened up when I tilted her the other way. Her lashes were thick and soft looking.