Refraction

by Naomi Hughes

  The smell is too strong. It’s clogging my brain, thicker than the fog, slowing my response times. Someone is shouting at me to get up. Elliott’s fingers dig into my wrist as he hauls me around Ginger’s body. “Move,” he orders. I open my eyes. His voice is cold and steady but the hatred is brighter than ever in his eyes. He’s holding something in his other hand. His gun. He must’ve retrieved it just now. It’s red, sticky with Ginger’s blood.

  I look around wildly. Escape. That’s what I should be focusing on. The fog will start to thin any minute, and when it’s gone, the surviving cops will be able to find us easily. We can’t go out the main entry—that’s where I heard more cops shouting earlier.

  We can go down to the beach. The Being will be gone when the fog dissipates, but it’s probably already killed any cops who were down there, making that our best escape route. Decision made, I start to sprint back toward the edge of the boardwalk.

  Something bites hard into my left wrist, jerking me to a standstill. The handcuff. Elliott has grown roots.

  “What the hell? Come on! They’re going to exile you too!” I shout wildly, pulling at him, but I might as well try to move a brick wall.

  He’s transfixed by something behind me. I spin around. Human-shaped figures—cops—are moving toward us through the gray. There are five, six, a dozen, fanning out across the boardwalk, ducking behind booths, finding cover from us or the Being or both.

  A woman’s voice cuts through the fog, clear and calm. “Put the gun down.”

  As if he’s been nailed with an electric shock, Elliott’s hand opens. Thunk. The gun hits the ground.

  The woman steps out of the fog. Violet-blue eyes, crisp white blouse, blond hair tightly pulled back. It’s frizzed a little from the humidity since I saw her at Sam’s exile.

  Mayor Ackermann.

  She came to personally oversee this operation. She put herself in danger, in the middle of a mirror deal, to make sure I was captured.

  There’s no escape. I’m surrounded.

  My brain won’t stop circling, my thoughts like panicked birds trapped in a too-small cage.

  Then above us, something screeches, grating and inhuman. Everyone dives for cover. Three cops jump to protect the mayor, pushing her behind a T-shirt booth, covering her with their bodies. A winged shadow curves overhead, dives down through the fog. When it comes up again, something writhing and human is in its talons. Gunfire echoes, as if bullets will do any good.

  I’m frozen in place, staring upward, and suddenly realize I should be ducking for cover too. I jerk my gaze to the boardwalk to search for somewhere to hide—and spot Elliott’s dropped gun.

  I glance sideways. Elliott is still next to me but his eyes are on the gradually thinning fog above, tracking the Being and the screaming thing in its talons. His face is lined with horror, his shoulders tense under the weight of his own failure. He’s a shadowseeker, after all—trained to hunt down mirrors and mirror peddlers, to stop these wraiths before they’re born.

  I glance up at the cops, at the mayor. Their gazes are glued on the fog too, searching frantically for the Being. No one is watching me.

  No one sees me pick up the gun.

  The fog vanishes all at once, dissipating like steam. Overhead, the Being shreds itself into shadows that sparkle and fizz and fall, and then it’s gone too. The person in its claws drops, screaming, to the beach far below. All eyes follow the man’s fall—except mine.

  I have maybe five seconds before everyone remembers I’m here. That’s five seconds to figure out what to do with the blood-sticky gun in my hands. I hesitate—and then pivot in toward Elliott, lift the gun, and aim it at him.

  The barrel touches his chest, angled toward his heart. He freezes. He swallows, the muscles in his jaw twitching with the motion. His eyes move away from the twisted body on the beach, but he doesn’t dare turn his head to look at me.

  “You’ve never killed anyone before,” he says softly.

  He’s right. I haven’t. But I’m not a good guy either. I’ve done plenty of stuff I should regret over the last year. And I don’t regret any of it, because it was necessary. Because I will do whatever it takes, no matter how difficult or wrong it is, to get my brother back. Even now, even this.

  About half the cops are running toward the newly dead body, but one of the others glances our way and spots us. She shouts to the others and suddenly half a dozen guns are pointed at me. No one fires yet, though.

  I raise my voice. “I know he’s a shadowseeker,” I call. That’s how Elliott knows I haven’t killed anyone before. Because he’s researched me, read my file, used the information to put together this operation to entrap me. “He’s one of you. Let me go, or I’ll kill him right here in front of you.”

  My voice is shaking. All of me is shaking. I don’t know if I can actually kill a person, but I might have to find out.

  Elliott closes his eyes, opens them again. The hatred is burning, burning. “Don’t,” he says to me quietly, and his voice is still calm and steady, but now there’s a thread of fear beneath it. I can’t afford to hear the emotion, can’t afford to humanize him. He’s my enemy. Just like Ginger.

  Sickness churns in my stomach. I tighten my grip on the gun. “You have to the count of three!” I shout at the cops.

  “No need,” calls a woman’s voice. It slices through the air like a scythe, and the cops who were protecting the mayor from the Being move aside so she can walk toward us. “Go ahead,” she says to me. “Shoot him now.”

  Elliott’s eyes go blank. He doesn’t look at the mayor, instead focusing on a spot over her head. He swallows once, twice. “Mom,” he says at last, and the word is mangled by its own layers, thick with a meaning that it takes me a full five seconds to register.

  I stare at him. I remember the way he wielded his name like a badge earlier, when he was talking to that cop Diaz. I remember how something snagged in my mind at his introduction: Elliott Ackermann. My mind superimposes the image of the mayor over him. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same calm, cold voice—though Elliott’s isn’t calm anymore.

  He has to be bluffing. This is another trick. “You’re lying,” I accuse him. “You can’t be the mayor’s son. The mayor’s son is dead.”

  Everyone knows that. It was the thing that solidified her iron grip on the island in the months following the Fracture. Nothing proves you’re a stone-cold bitch like exiling your own son for possession of reflective material. No one talked about anything else for weeks.

  Elliott keeps his empty gaze on that spot above the mayor’s head. “That was my brother,” he says, and I know that tone. I use that tone. Don’t talk about him like he’s dead, I’d told Elliott earlier, in the same voice he’s using right now.

  My grip on the gun loosens.

  The mayor takes another step toward us. “Elliott just participated in a mirror deal,” she says. Her eyes are on me as she nods at her son. “He was willing to break the law to get the proof necessary to exile you. Apparently he forgot that I put that law—and my zero-tolerance policy for anyone who breaks it—in place for a reason. All these deaths”—she sweeps her hand at Ginger, then toward the bodies I can now see littering the sand below us—”would have been prevented, had he caught you by legal means. But now he’s facing exile the same as you. Go ahead and shoot him now, if you want. It won’t help you at all.”

  She’s got to be faking it. No way would she be okay with me murdering her own son right in front of her, even if he did mess up … but then again, she did exile her other kid. Would this really be that much more of a stretch?

  “You’re bluffing,” I try. “You wouldn’t just let him die.”

  Her gaze tightens. When she speaks, her words spark and crackle with tightly controlled emotion. “I will do whatever it takes to keep this island safe. Including, when necessary, protecting it from my own family.”

  Desperate, I try to figure out my next move. I can’t actually kill Elliott. That would lose me all my le
verage, plus with every second that passes, I get more certain I can’t do it anyway. But I can’t let her know that. I have to call her bluff—because surely, no matter what she says, it has to be a bluff—and let her know I’m serious without actually murdering anyone.

  And suddenly, I know how to do that. I take half a step back, swing the gun down to Elliott’s knee and, before I can think about it, pull the trigger.

  Click. The gun jams. I try again. Nothing.

  Elliott doesn’t flinch, but his hands are clenched and his breath hitches at the sound of the gun trying to fire. He finally turns his head and his gaze meets mine.

  “Arrest them,” Mayor Ackermann calls, and her voice is as empty as his eyes. “They’ll be exiled at midnight.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THEY WALK US TO CITY HALL. IT’S DARK. THE WIND picks up, spraying pebbles and dust across us. I don’t blink, because every time I blink I see Ginger’s face.

  I can still smell him. Blood and dryer sheets. It’s crusted to my clothes, filling my mind.

  The older cop, Ginger’s partner, is at City Hall. He’s the one who pats me down when they separate me from Elliott and process me. He doesn’t call my name like we’re friends this time. He doesn’t even look at me.

  I’m escorted to my ten-minute “trial.” No one but the judge and a sleep-rumpled lawyer bothers to attend. I don’t have any family to protest my exile. My aunt died last August, my parents bailed long before that, and Ty is further out of reach than ever.

  No one protests Elliott’s exile either, apparently. His trial takes almost exactly as long as mine. And then it’s midnight, and they’re shoving us back outside.

  The helicopter is in the parking lot. Its blades are whirring, waiting. I stare at it until I figure out why we’re being pushed toward it and then I laugh and laugh until I can barely breathe. I’ll be on the chopper tonight after all—not as a stowaway hijacker, but as a prisoner on his way to an inescapable exile. There’ll be no walk across Valkyrie Bridge for me. No chance to jump into the ocean and try to swim back, no chance to take a run at my escort and get shot rather than face the Beings. It’s a suitably horrifying end for the island’s last mirror dealer and a warning to any who might think of following in my footsteps.

  Or maybe the mayor just doesn’t want to hear her son screaming as he’s torn apart, and that’s why she’s putting us on the chopper instead of the bridge.

  Someone shoves me. I stop laughing. I’m jostled sideways, pulled to a stop, sandwiched between four officers. So many. I’d be honored if I wasn’t too terrified to even think straight.

  The red blink of the radio transmitter. The impossibly bright blur of the helicopter’s lights. The mayor’s face is all cold, hard angles: a woman carved from steel and bone.

  She faces the gathering crowd. She praises the bravery of those who have volunteered for tonight’s mission. She speaks of her faith that the crew will find food and fresh water to resupply the island before the looming storm season. Then, as if it’s an afterthought, she passes sentence on the mirror dealer who will be dropped off on the mainland on the way.

  The crowd cheers at the news of my capture. The mayor quiets them. I plaster a smirk on my face and try to act like I’m not ready to throw myself at her feet and beg for mercy at the first sign she has a soul.

  She keeps talking. The words dip in and out of my consciousness. Shadowseeker. Zero tolerance. Tragedy, she says, with no emotion at all in her voice.

  The crowd shifts. Something about their quietness snags my attention, and I struggle back to myself for long enough to squint at them. The mayor has just announced Elliott as the second of tonight’s exiles—and, if I heard right, outed him as a shadowseeker—but they’re not cheering for his capture the way they did for mine. Instead, they mutter and frown, an uneasy energy snaking through them as they glance between the mayor and her son.

  I twist to look to the side. Elliott’s got his head bowed, and that pretty-boy blond hair covers most of his expression, but not enough. He’s carved from steel and bone too.

  The muttering in the crowd gets louder. Their restlessness grows. I realize, with a distant sort of surprise, that they’re upset. All of them. They don’t want Elliott exiled. If he’s a shadowseeker, then he’s a hero—one of the special-ops legends they’ve all admired for months.

  Something like hope stirs painfully in my gut. I will Elliott to resist. To yell, to stir them up, to start a riot. Anything.

  Elliott finally registers the shift in the crowd’s energy. He looks up, scans them. Then he glances at the guard next to him. There’s only one. It would be so easy for him to fight back. To at least try to escape his fate. And maybe I could escape too, in the commotion.

  But Elliott just bows his head again and does nothing.

  A sour taste floods my mouth. I realize now why he only has one guard: because they already knew he wouldn’t fight. They knew it the second he dropped the gun because his mom told him to.

  My handcuffs are replaced with zip ties. I’m shoved toward the helicopter. There’s a brief argument about who’s going to pilot, punctuated by nervous glances at me and Elliott. I try to bolt, but one of the guards kicks my legs out from under me and hauls me on board. I get in a good shot with an elbow, break his nose. After that they tie my hands to one of the loops that hang down from the helicopter’s ceiling just inside the door. I can sit, barely, but my arms are numb and bloodless in minutes.

  By the time we take off, rain has cracked the clouds open.

  We cross the sound. We’re over the mainland in minutes. We keep going. Lightning flashes, illuminating the side of our guard’s glaring, still-bloody face, casting millisecond-long shadows across the cabin.

  Wind batters the helicopter. Rain lashes angrily across the windows. We dip and weave through the onset of what’s probably a hurricane—a weak one, but still no joke to fly through. Our guard gets up and walks to the front to talk to the pilot. They debate whether they should dump us and turn back, search for supplies another day when there’s no storm.

  The helicopter’s noise is deafening. I wish it were louder. Maybe then it would fill up my brain, dissolve the memories, drown out the fear of what’s next. Maybe it could make me forget that it was my mirror the cops looked into beneath the boardwalk, my ambition that ended with the blood that’s still on my clothes.

  I know the mirrors I’ve sold have gotten people killed before. But I’ve never been a part of it—not like tonight. I didn’t think it would matter. I don’t want it to matter.

  Anything for Ty. I meant it. I still do. I have to, or it’ll have all been for nothing.

  I glance at the window. We’re below the storm, but above the fog that blankets the city. Here and there, the top of a building pokes up beneath us, glittering a cold, wet blue in the flashes of lightning. Directly below is a radio antenna scored and dented with enormous teeth marks. The thick metal poles are frayed and jagged, snapped off at the top like matchsticks.

  I close my eyes. A memory from last year seeps in.

  Ty’s sideways smile. My arm hanging out the window of his ancient Camaro. Sunlight pouring over the day like a jar of upended honey, “Stand by Me” coming from the stereo.

  We pass a radio antenna. I point at it. “We should totally climb that.” The urge tingles in my bones: to push myself, to conquer something just because I know I shouldn’t. To accept the universe’s dare.

  Ty raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  I shrug. “Gotta fulfill my daily troublemaking quota somehow.”

  He snorts, then shakes his head. “Sorry, your quota will have to go unfulfilled today. I told Aunt Irene we’d be there by five.”

  I turn my head, pretending to watch out the window as we pass the antenna, but actually working hard to hide the unease that’s slithering through my stomach. Neither of us has met Aunt Irene in person yet, but she could be the coolest pseudo-guardian in the world, and I would still hate leaving my old home
behind to move to some speck of an island surrounded by strangers.

  But I could find a way to be okay with it if Ty were coming too.

  He glances over, sees my expression. His smile fades and his brow goes all crinkled, the way it always does when he worries. “Look,” he says softly. “Let’s just try this, okay? I’ll stay with you a few weeks to get you settled in, and if you haven’t adjusted by then, I’ll call it off.”

  And he would. He’d turn down his scholarship to study abroad, turn down a free year of living in London, to make sure I was all right. Ty is always making sacrifices for me that way. Like when he took a second side job delivering takeout so I could afford to see Dr. Washburne, my therapist, every week. If my OCD hadn’t improved enough for me to move to occasional phone check-ins instead of regular office visits, Ty wouldn’t even be considering this move. And even now, after his scholarship has been accepted and all the arrangements have been made, he would still stay behind if I asked him to.

  Because that’s what Ty does. He tears himself into pieces and then gives them up, one by one, for me. He’s been doing it since even before Mom ran out on us, and he’s not about to stop.

  Not unless I make him.

  I formulate the words he needs to hear and then force them out. If I do a good enough job I can even convince myself they’re true. “Nah, I’ll be fine,” I say lightly. “Just do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “When you come back from your precious fancy-ass London next year,” I say, pointing out the window at the antenna in the rearview mirror, “we climb that. Together.”

  He laughs. “Deal.”

  One month later, the day after Ty leaves for London, the Fracture happens.

  I open my eyes. The helicopter banks violently, pushing me against the window. The antenna fades into the distance.