CHAPTER 23
The marimba alarm on her iPhone woke Sakiko from a dream. She’d been walking through a town that was unfamiliar in the details but utterly ordinary—she remembered remarking to strangers just how ordinary the place was—but right after she exchanged a few words with each stranger, she’d get a creeping sensation at the back of her neck, turn, and find that the man or woman had been transformed into an alien creature. Some of them were dolphin-like, others more like squid, and they’d become more bizarre and more frightening as the dream progressed. She would run away from them, turn a street corner, calm down, only to begin the cycle all over again. When the alarm went off, she’d just noticed a group of five strangers walking toward her, looking more menacing than the others.
Than
