Familiar, aching darkness. The smoke jolted my consciousness awake. “Daniel.” I recognized his voice before I saw him. He shook me just as much as his whisper shook. “Daniel, wake up. We have to get Luke—” He didn’t give me time to process what was happening. He dragged me out of the bed and yanked me toward the hallway. I stumbled after him, watching dust collect on his brown hair instead of what was around us. I didn’t look away, not even when we got to the stairs. The lamp gave the dream away. Even though Robert was eight and I was six and this was supposed to be the Western Flock ambush—and we were supposed to be running for the basement where Luke was, where all the sick kids slept—we stopped running at the top of the stairs, and Robert stared at the snowflake lamp. We weren’t in the Western Flock’s house at all. “In here,” I said, moving toward my room—the other room, the one in the Northern Flock’s house, the house we were in. The ambushes were blending together, but there was one essential difference in this dream I had figured out.
