Prologue

The heat was the thing that finally convinced me I wasn't dreaming.

Dreams didn't usually come with sunburn.

I'd been walking for what felt like hours, though I'd stopped trusting my sense of time somewhere around the second time I fell down. The desert stretched out flat and empty in every direction, all scrub brush and cracked dirt and a sky so big it made me feel like a speck of dust somebody had forgotten to sweep up. My throat felt like sandpaper. My side throbbed with every step, a deep, insistent ache that meant something back there had torn or cracked or both.

I didn't remember exactly how I'd gotten hurt. I remembered running. I remembered a fence, and pain, and the sound of my own breathing loud in my ears. After that things got blurry, like someone had taken an eraser to the edges of my memory and rubbed too hard.

Which, honestly, wasn't exactly new for me. I just couldn't remember why that felt true.

I stopped walking and pressed a hand to my side. My fingers came away dark, though in the fading light I couldn't tell if it was blood or just dirt anymore. Both, probably. I'd stopped being picky about my injuries somewhere around sundown. Or maybe that had been hours ago. I'd lost track.

A shape moved at the edge of my vision, and I froze.

It was just a jackrabbit. It bolted off through the brush, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding, then almost laughed at myself. Almost. Laughing took more energy than I had left.

I kept walking because stopping felt more dangerous than moving, even though I had no idea anymore what direction I was moving in. There had been a road at some point. I was almost sure of that.

That was when the woman appeared.

She was standing maybe thirty feet away, near a cluster of dead-looking mesquite trees that definitely hadn't been there a second ago. Blonde hair, longer than mine, caught the last of the light. I couldn't make out her face. I never could. But something in my chest pulled toward her anyway, sharp and immediate, like my body remembered something my mind had lost.

"Hey," I said, my voice cracking on the single syllable. "Hey, wait—"

She didn't wait. She never did. She just watched me, still and quiet, the way she always did in the dreams, if these even counted as dreams. I wasn't sure anymore. I wasn't sure of a lot of things, actually, now that I was trying to line them up.

I took a step toward her and my knee buckled, and by the time I caught myself against a boulder and looked back up, she was gone. Just brush and dirt and the desert, like she'd never been there at all.

"Great," I muttered. "Awesome. Love this for me."

I kept moving. What else was there to do.

The gray-haired man showed up sometime after that, though I couldn't have said how much later, or whether he came before the woman and I was just remembering it wrong. He was older, maybe sixty, with a kind of stillness to him that felt less like calm and more like control. He didn't speak either. None of them ever spoke. He just stood there at the edge of my sight, watching me the way you'd watch something you were disappointed in, and something about that look made my stomach twist with a feeling I couldn't name. Not quite fear. Not quite guilt. Something tangled up between the two.

"I don't know who you are," I said out loud, mostly because the sound of my own voice was better than the silence. "I don't know either of you. So maybe stop showing up like I'm supposed to."

He didn't stop showing up. He just faded, the way the woman had, dissolving into heat shimmer and dust until I couldn't tell if he'd ever been solid at all.

I wondered what Grandma would say if she could see me now.

Probably something about how this was exactly what happened when I didn't listen to her. I could practically hear her saying it, too, which should have annoyed me.

Instead it made my chest hurt, and I wasn't entirely sure why, and then I lost the thought completely and had to stand there a second trying to find it again.

Grandma drove me crazy. She was bossy, overprotective, and still seemed to think I needed permission to cross the street by myself. I'd spent so long wishing she'd just once treat me like an adult.

Right now, I would've given just about anything to hear her tell me what to do.

The sun dropped low enough that the sky went orange, then purple, then that deep bruised blue that comes right before full dark, and the temperature started falling fast enough that I could feel it in my teeth. I found a low outcropping of rock and sat with my back against it, less because I'd decided to rest and more because my legs had decided for me.

For a second, when I closed my eyes, I thought he was sitting right there next to me.

Dark hair. Green eyes, the kind you noticed even in bad light. I could hear his voice, low and even, saying something I couldn't quite catch, and I felt my hand move like it was reaching for his before I caught myself and realized there was nothing there but rock and empty air.

Whoever he was.

Something in me went warm and safe just thinking about him, like being near him meant nothing bad could happen. And right behind that, before I could figure out why, came the anger, hot and sudden and strong enough that my eyes stung. I pressed the heels of my hands against them.

He'd done something. I knew that much, the way you know you're angry at someone in a dream without remembering the argument. Something that hurt. I chased after what it was and it slipped away from me every time, like trying to hold onto water.

"Don't," I said to no one, or maybe to him. "Don't you dare."

I didn't know what I meant by that either. I just knew that some stubborn, wounded part of me still wanted him there beside me on this rock in the middle of nowhere, and I hated that almost as much as I hated him right now. Almost.

I didn't know how long I sat there before I heard the sound.

It was a low, wet groan, carried on the wind from somewhere off to my left, and every hair on my arms stood straight up. I knew that sound. Everybody knew that sound.

I got to my feet fast enough that my vision went white at the edges, one hand braced against the rock, the other pressed to the wound in my side like that would somehow hold me together. The shape came shuffling out of the dark maybe twenty yards off — stiff-limbed, wrong in the way its head hung, wrong in the way it moved. A zombie, out here in the middle of nowhere. Because apparently my night wasn't bad enough already.

I should have run. I knew I should have run. But I was so tired, and so empty, that for one long second I just stood there and watched it come, almost too exhausted to care anymore.

It got close enough that I could hear its breath rattling, wet and awful. Close enough to see, in what little moonlight there was, the ruined gray of its skin.

And then it stopped.

Not slowed down. Stopped. Ten feet away, its head tilted at an angle that made my skin crawl, like it was listening to something, or smelling something, or trying to work out some kind of math it didn't have the brain left to solve. It stood there in the dark, swaying slightly, and it didn't come any closer.

I didn't move either. I didn't breathe. I just watched it stand there, confused and hesitating for reasons I didn't understand and didn't have the strength to think about, until finally it turned, shuffling off into the dark the way it had come, groaning low and dissatisfied, like it had lost interest in something it couldn't explain.

I stood there shaking for a long time after it was gone.

I pressed my hand harder against my side and kept my eyes on the dark where it had disappeared, waiting to see if it would come back.

It didn't.

I sank back down against the rock, my legs finally giving out completely, and closed my eyes. The blonde woman. The gray-haired man. Green eyes and a voice I couldn't hold onto and a feeling of safety with an ache running right underneath it, like the two things had gotten tangled up somewhere and I couldn't pull them apart anymore.

I didn't know who I could trust anymore.

I didn't know who I used to be.

But somebody did.

And if I made it out of this desert alive, I was going to find out.