I can barely see. Ash falls like thick, choking rain, clinging to my hair, my clothes, my skin. The air burns. Smoke curls into my lungs before I even open my mouth, thick and bitter. I stumble over cracked stone and splintered wood, my hands scraping against ash that’s hot enough to sting.

Voices swirl around me—snickering, taunting, pleading, screaming—but I can’t tell where anyone is. I can’t make out what they are saying. Does someone need help? Shadows twist and stretch, reaching, shifting. A pit of bodies crawls over each other, crushed and broken, faces twisted in agony. I fall into them. Their weight presses me down. Fingers claw at my arms, at my legs, at my hair. I can’t move.

A hand—hot, burning—presses to my shoulder. Searing me. Branding me. Pain rips through me in jagged flashes. I scream, but the chorus of terror drowns me, each voice overlapping, taunting, whispering my name. Who’s there? Where? Every time I reach, faces flicker and vanish, slipping through my fingers like ash.

The ground cracks beneath me. Lightning slices the sky over the ruins of houses I thought I knew. I struggle, kicking, biting, gasping, but the bodies, the smoke, the pain—it will not let me go. The voices swirl tighter, closer, laughing now, mocking every flail of my arms.

Then—snap.

I wake, heart hammering, sheets tangled around me, the stench of ash clinging to my hair. Dawn light filters through the window, soft and nonthreatening, but my pulse is wild. I swallow, tasting iron, hands trembling. Wrists and ankles heavy from the mysterious chains placed on me.

Somewhere outside, the Borough stirs, murmuring, unaware. And I know—it was only a nightmare. But tomorrow… tomorrow, the danger waiting out there won’t vanish so easily.