36 HOURS UNTIL EXTRACTION 

We hobbled to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up. The driver raised an eyebrow when I shouldered Alison onto the bus. I paid our fare and we hurried to the back. Groaning, Alison slumped in the plastic seat near the window, and I eased myself down next to her, pain searing my nerves like a blowtorch. The bus was empty, so the concerned driver kept eyeing us in the rearview mirror.

"Something happen to you kids?" he asked.

Alison cradled her ribs with one arm and sat up. "No."

"Do you need to go to the police or the hospital?"

"No, we'll be fine," she said, ire bubbling up in her voice like groundwater.

"Alison," I whispered, "they almost killed us. We need to go to the cops."

"I don't want to, J!"

I didn't push it. Luckily, Alison's nosy grandma was already asleep when we crept into her house. I shouldered her all the way up to her room. She collapsed onto her bed. I went into her bathroom and rolled some tissue around my hand, then I sat on the bed next to her, dabbing blood off my nose.

I looked down at the wad of bloody tissue in my hand. "I need to get home."

She grabbed my arm. "Stay." Limping back into her bathroom, I flipped on the light and gave myself a scan in the mirror. My hair was matted with blood, my lips swollen. The pain in my head was already dying down, though. Maybe it was that extra vitamin C Alison had been telling me to take every morning. I turned on the faucet, splashed my face, then pressed a towel to my skin, hoping to wipe off the dried blood, but the coarse cotton stung. Leaving the bathroom, I texted my dad, told him I was staying over at Ali's, and slumped into bed next to her.

•

I found myself in a darkened hallway in my school. Time moved like molasses, and I heard something ticking. Swaying from side to side, I waded forward and spotted a black cat sitting atop a locker. It hopped down, scratched itself with a hind leg, and sauntered away. Following the cat, I slogged through the syrupy air. It turned its head and looked at me with shining yellow eyes, then behind me, I heard a slimy noise, like churning clay. Spinning around, I saw shadowy pools forming on lockers, floors, ceilings. Black tentacles sprang from the inky blots and reached for whatever they could snatch. Abyssal pools opened up everywhere, closer and closer to me. I ran, but I couldn't escape the shadowy masses. They swallowed everything around me, and when fear conquered my senses, the dark wriggling masses caught my legs, yanked me to the ground and dragged me—my nails scraping across the floor—into the darkness.

•

Alison's phone vibrated on the nightstand next to me. I looked at the time: six o'clock in the morning. She hadn't even stirred. Not feeling like walking into school looking all beat up, I fell back asleep. A few hours later, I woke up alone. Standing up, I noticed my body wasn't sore anymore. Weird. I walked into the bathroom and studied my face in the mirror. Most of my injuries were gone, except for the cut on my lower lip. How was that even possible? Had I imagined all those bruises and cuts last night?

I headed downstairs and found Alison in the basement, kneeling on the dusty cement, drawing a weird-looking circle on the floor with red chalk. She still had some bruises, but overall, her injuries looked much better today too. Weird.

"Where is everyone?" I asked. "Mom's been in bed all day, and my grandma's probably at the grocery store."

"What're you going to say when they see you all beat-up?"

"I'll say you knocked over the shelf with all the paint cans onto me because you've always been secretly jealous of me."

"Seriously, Ali?"

"J, could we not talk about this?"

"I'm sorry. About not coming quicker when . . . they were beating us up."

"I'm not some delicate flower, Johnny." I put my hands on my hips and examined the diagram she was drawing. "What's this thing?"

"I'm copying out a picture from this," Alison said, pointing at a thin book on the floor next to her.

I studied the featureless vellum cover, the parchment pages covered in scribbly handwriting, and imagined some guy in a tri-corn hat and frock slashing through pages with his quill in an ink- splattering frenzy.

"Look at the dog-eared page," she said. On the page, the words weaver and cintamani next to a complex diagram leaped out at me. Smirking, I asked Alison, "What's a cinta . . . cintamini?"

"Cintamani. It's an ancient jewel that grants wishes."

"Seriously?"

"Yes, seriously," she said, sitting back on her heels.

I flipped the book around and scanned the back. "Where'd you even find this thing? Candle Creations?"

"So, this is totally weird: I go out to get some Tylenol, and on my way back from the store, I see this pale lady standing in the middle of road on North Oketo Avenue. Morticia vibes. Anyway, so she motions for me to come over, and I'm like, 'Whoa, creepy, no way,' but I walk up to her anyway, because, you know, what the hell. When I get close, I notice she has—no joke—cat's eyes. Freaking cat's eyes."

"Cat's eyes?"

"Like, big yellow cat's eyes, with slits for pupils."

"Shut up."

"I'm not kidding! When I'm close enough she says, 'This world is full of monsters constantly rewriting the rules for the rest of us. Why don't you rewrite the rules for a change?' And then she hands me that book and tells me I'll find what I've been looking for inside. I take it from her and start looking at it, and when I look up again, the lady's gone. Like she just disappeared."

I shook my head. "Ali."

"I'm not messing around, J! I have the book, don't I?"

"So what exactly are you looking for?"

"Revenge."

"Revenge?"

"Yeah. Did I stutter?"

"Hey, calm down. I'm on your side, remember?"

"This is exactly what I wanted, J. I begged for it all night, and then, boom, here it is. We can get revenge on Todd and Spencer and the others. You can help me perform the ritual."

"Ritual?"

"To conjure the cintamani."

"Ali, this sounds so dumb. Okay, you ran into some random crazy woman with special-effects contacts who gave you a book— but magic? Real magic?"

"We made that paper float, didn't we?"

"That was just a weird draft or something."

"If you don't believe it'll work, then why not just help me?" I kept giving her a funny look, so she rolled her eyes, stood up, snatched the book from me, and continued drawing the diagram.

"Fine," I said. "I'll help you cast the stupid spell. What do I have to do?"

She snatched a knife off the floor, grabbed my wrist, and nicked my palm with the tip of the knife. I gasped and jerked my hand away. "Alison! What the fu—"

"We need blood to perform the ritual," she said, dripping my blood off the knife and into the circle. Alison knelt again. "Come on, put your hands around the ring." I glared at her, wiped my palm off on my shirt, and knelt across from her. "There's actually an incantation for this spell," Alison said.

"Agnew lee Trev, eonism et hum. Bron mein tug egret thines whi, cintamani. Eggo fifo hum troths, bili sumps tier, beech hes I tee. Mat tenere to: cintamani. Cintamani, cintamani, cintamani."

"I can't say any of that."

"Fine. We'll practice it a few times." We practiced the incantation until I could almost repeat it. Then we chanted the whole long-winded verse three times with our hands on the floor around the circle.

Though I didn't expect it, I waited for something to happen. Outside, a bird, probably a nightingale, chirped. Alison's white cat, Chairman Meow, scuttled downstairs, rubbed himself against a wooden beam, yawned, and started to clean himself. Her grand- mother's footsteps echoed over us. Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp.

"Did it work?" I asked.

"Shh! Concentrate on the spell." I was about to close my eyes again when black tentacles sprang forth from the circle and whipped around in the air. They whirled faster and faster, spinning into a gloomy tornado, a funnel of darkness that groaned and climbed higher and higher until it exploded into a million shadowy wisps flying in all directions. They swirled over us, then plunged into the ground. Then, everything started shaking . . . a great, horrible shaking, like the earth was yawning open. A roar echoed through the room as the circle glowed crimson. We shot to our feet.

"What the—"

"Hold on to something!" Alison said as dust from the rafters trickled down on top of us. Bracing ourselves against the walls, we glued our eyes to the ceiling, wondering if the main floor would cave in on us. The circle's red light filled the room, and the strange characters Alison had drawn on it danced like strips of paper in the wind, floating above the circle, whisking through the air, then slamming back down, burrowing deep into the earth, disappearing. My blood seeped into the earth, too, the last thing to vanish along with the circle.

The tremor stopped. Silence. Then car alarms. Above us, we heard Alison's grandma issue a great, "Oh my goodness!" so we dashed upstairs to investigate.

Emerging from the basement, we found her grandma braced under the archway leading into the kitchen. "Alison?" she said, turning toward us. She was probably wondering why we weren't at school.

Alison's mom, Cecilia, was hurrying downstairs in her bathrobe and the headwrap she wore to hide the baldness caused by chemotherapy. She looked over the banister at us. "Was that an earth- quake?" she asked over the blaring car alarms.

"Sure was," Alison said, bolting out the front door. I followed close behind, finally catching up to her on the sidewalk in front of her house. Panting, I grabbed my knees and leaned over.

Alison's nosy neighbor on her right, Mr. Feffer, was wearing knee socks and short shorts, his belly paunch sticking out like a boil as he ambled about on his phone, eyes fixed toward downtown. He'd parked his push mower in the middle of his lawn and was standing by the white picket fence between Alison's yard and his. To the left of Alison's house, Mrs. Traynor was walking up her driveway to the curb, her son half a pace behind her, still holding a brown paper bag filled with groceries. They, too, were looking in the same direction as Mr. Feffer, their faces pinched and confused. The wail of distant sirens joined the ruckus of car alarms.

Nothing looked damaged. Alison's street had always been pocked from disrepair; there was no sign the earthquake had disturbed it any further.

"Does this mean the spell worked?" Alison said. I took in a deep breath. "There's no way we—" 

Before I could finish, she rushed back inside, and I trailed after her, catching up just as she turned on the living room TV. Her mom and grandma inched up behind her. Cecilia wrapped her fingers around Alison's shoulders as they stared at television.

"A state of emergency has been declared for the city of Chicago. All public transit lines are suspended until further notice," the news anchor said. "Chicago hasn't experienced any seismic activity since February 10, 2010, when a quake of magnitude 4.3 rattled northern Illinois." There was no mention of anything strange about the earthquake. A geologist came on and said the earthquake had been of low magnitude and that the epicenter was downtown.

Alison pointed at the screen. "That's where the spell went off, J! Downtown! We've got to go!"

"What on earth are you talking about?" Cecilia said. "Why aren't you two at school?"

"I'm going home, Ali," I said. "J, if we conjured that cintamani thing, then it's clearly downtown somewhere."

"We didn't conjure anything. It was just a coincidence. I'm going to check on my dad."

Cecilia raised her voice. "Alison! What are you doing at home? And how did you get all those bruises?"

Alison got hung up lying about the night before, so I slipped out before she could badger me any further. The buses weren't running, so I had to leg it a few blocks home. Winded from the walk, I found Dad on his phone, pacing in the living room.

"Oh my god, Juanito!" he said, throwing his arms around my neck. He pulled away and put his big hands on my shoulders. His face tightened when he saw my scrapes from the fight with Todd and his goons. "What happened to your face?"

Good thing it didn't look nearly as bad as it had the night before. "I don't feel like talking about it right now, Dad."

"Who did this?" 

"Dad." 

He hesitated. "You were over at Alison's? Did you skip school today?" 

When I didn't say anything back, he changed the subject. "How's Cecilia? Is everyone okay over there?"

"Yeah, Dad. Everyone's fine." He paused and stared at me a minute, then slipped his hands off my shoulders. "I'm glad you're safe."

"Same."

•

That night after I'd gone to sleep, a shiver tiptoed up my back and woke me up. I sat up in bed and searched my room. No one there. After sliding my feet onto the cold floor, I made my way over to the light switch and flipped it. Nothing happened. I flipped it a few more times. Click. Click. It wouldn't turn on. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I walked out into the hallway and puffed out a cloud of vapor. I hugged myself to stave off the bizarre chill and called for my dad, but when my voice just bounced off the walls and died in the darkness, I headed out to look for him. I peeked inside his bedroom. His patchwork eiderdown was still folded at the foot of the bed. He hadn't slept in his room in months. He was probably downstairs in the recliner, as usual.

As I headed downstairs, dread haunted my every step. Sweat rolled down the back of my neck, followed by a symphony of pinpricks stabbing me all over. Something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it, but things were off. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I looked through the arch into the living room. There, bathed in the pale moonlight shining in through the bay window, a figure in holey jeans and a hoodie loomed over my dad's recliner. "Dad?"

Enveloped in a black halo that flickered like beating moth's wings, the stranger turned, his shoulders quivering, slouching his entire body toward me. A hiss like shifting sand sliced through the air. My feet were glued to the floor, my eyes fixed on the shape's hypnotic movements like a rat caught in a king cobra's trance.

When the figure turned around enough that I could finally make out his face, a gasp slipped from my lips.

Inside the hood, where a person's face should've been, poured a cascade of hissing sand. No eyes. No mouth. Nothing but a falling sheet of dust. At the figure's sides, sandy stumps vaguely shaped like hands seeped into a swirling cloud around its feet. It raised a disintegrating digit at me, then took a shambling step forward. Then another. And another.

"Dad?" I squeaked. "Dad?" I groped around on the wall behind me until I snagged my finger across the light switch and flipped it on, but the shower of light didn't change anything. The monster was still there, and its twitching, shuddering body was heading right for me. This had to be a dream.

Stumbling back, I hurried to the front door, grabbed the handle, and turned it—locked. The Sandman staggered toward me. I spun the locks, turned the knob again—still, nothing. Fussing with the door was pointless. Turning to flee, I bumped the entryway table and knocked off the planter. It tumbled through the syrupy air and shattered on the floor as I bolted up the stairs, around the banister at the top, and rushed into my room, slamming the door behind me. Every muscle in my body tensed, I eased away and watched the frame. This had to be a dream. I clenched my eyes shut, shook my head, fought to wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up. I cracked open an eye. No change. This wasn't a dream.

Hoping for a way out, I ran over to the window, unlatched it, tried pulling it up. Stuck. It never got stuck. What the hell was going on? I jerked it upward a few more times, but it wouldn't move.

Sand blew into my room through the crack under the door. It flowed and flowed and formed into a satiny pillar that shapeshifted into the Sandman. Then the creature reached out its hands and staggered toward me.

Clawing through the muddy air, I sank to my knees on the bed, and as the world around me rocked like an unsteady boat, I waded into the corner between my bed and the two walls, pressing my back against it and shrinking. Hands raised in front of my face, through my trembling fingers, I watched the monster crawl onto the bed, its sandy limbs casting crooked shadows over me. It stretched out its gritty hands, reaching for me. I pushed back deeper into the corner, clenching my teeth. Please, please, please, this is a nightmare, let me wake up please, please, please. The monster broke past my hands and clutched my neck, so I dug my fingers into its wrists and reeled back, pushing away and kicking up the bedsheets with my feet. Then it drove its sandy thumbs into my larynx, bearing down until I couldn't breathe. But the monster wasn't done pressing. It pushed down even harder. Breaking skin. Trying to rip off my head. I wheezed and kicked, the covers bunched in my hands. My skin turned purple and blood trickled under the monster's fingers. I was going to die.