Refraction

by Naomi Hughes

I don’t know how far inland we’re going. But sooner or later, they’re going to drop me into the city below and I’ll be alone in a vast sea of fog and Beings. If I want to survive longer than thirty seconds, if I want to have even the slightest chance at finding Ty again, there’s only one option.

  I swallow. I glance at the guard; he’s got his back to us, both hands on his rifle, as he talks to the pilot. He turns around to check on me every few sentences, I guess in case I manage to slip my zip ties and try to hijack the helicopter with my bare hands. Or do something similarly stupid—like team up with the ex-shadowseeker I just attempted to shoot.

  I glance at Elliott. “Ackermann,” I say, barely loud enough to be heard over the noise of the rotors, “listen. We’re going to need to work together.”

  “Shut up,” he says tonelessly, not even looking at me. I practically have to read his lips to decipher the quiet response. The fight that drained out of him earlier is still gone.

  The helicopter shudders, and my stomach twists in a way that tells me we’re descending. Panic slices through my scattered thoughts. I need Elliott. Two people together have a better chance at survival, plus he’ll have training and skills that might actually give us a shot. If he’s already given up before they even dump us down there, though, we’ll be eaten before we have a chance to run.

  I need to find a way to jar him into action. A thought leaps into my mind, something I learned back at the dartboard booth: Anger is better than fear.

  And I know only one way I could make Elliott Ackermann angry.

  “Your brother,” I say.

  He looks up.

  I twist my hands in their binding, try to get some blood flowing to my fingers again in preparation for landing, but I keep my gaze on Elliott. “His name was Braedan, right? He was into astronomy. Stargazing. He kept his telescope after it was added to the Reflectivity Index. That’s why your mom exiled him.” Everyone knows this information. Part of it was public knowledge, part of it was gossip that’s been confirmed by enough sources to be taken as truth.

  “I said shut up,” Elliott says again, but he’s still looking at me, and his response is loud enough to be heard this time.

  I call up the ghost of my own brother—that golden day, the way the memory hurts and the way that hurt feels right. The way he’s filled up every part of my life with his absence. It was painful to hear anyone even mention his name afterward. It still is. I bet it’s the same for Elliott. I bet if nothing else hurts him, if nothing else makes him fight, his brother will.

  “He didn’t keep the telescope,” I say.

  The guard steps back toward us, toting the rifle with one hand, bracing himself against the wall with the other. He flicks a wicked-looking pocketknife out and slices through the rope that connects my zip-tied hands to the loop in the wall.

  My bound arms drop into my lap, dead weight. I dare to look out the window again. In a flash of lightning, I make out a black shape rising toward us. I panic for a moment, remembering the teeth marks on that antenna, but the black shape isn’t a massive Being. It’s the roof of a building. The helicopter is about to drop us off.

  I turn back to Elliott. He’s watching me carefully, but his eyes are still dull, still void of anger.

  I talk fast. I’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they shove us out the door to our deaths. “Your mom confiscated his telescope the day it became illegal. I intercepted it when she put it into storage, and the next week, I sold it back to him at a five-hundred-percent profit. Two days later, she caught him with it. That’s why she exiled him.”

  The guard unlatches the door and hauls it open. I blink and duck my head as rain bullets inside the cabin, which is why I don’t see Elliott coming until he barrels into me, knocking us both out of the helicopter and into the empty air.

  I don’t have time to yell. There’s a blur of gray fog, black sky, silver-blue lightning, and then I crash hard on my back. All the air in my lungs is gone and I can’t inhale. Rain instantly soaks me, slicing cold across my skin. Thunder cracks through the sky. I curl onto my side, trying to inhale. Water sluices into my mouth. I can’t spit it out. I’m suffocating, drowning.

  Another flare of lightning. The helicopter bobbles above us. The guard is half hanging out of the cabin, scrambling to pull himself back in. On the ground a yard or two away from me, Elliott is already rolling to his feet, his back to me. He raises his bound hands high above his head and then brings them down hard across his stomach. The zip tie snaps, falls to the ground.

  Elliott turns. He scans the roof, spots me. In three steps he’s standing over me, then he bends down, grabs a fistful of my shirt, and drags me toward …

  Toward the edge of the roof.

  I finally manage to suck in a breath, spit out the rain, try to choke my way through a garbled sentence that even I can barely hear over the storm. My brain spins its wheels. Elliott is one of the good guys. He wouldn’t even defend himself against the cops earlier, for God’s sake. Surely he won’t kill me in cold blood.

  I twist, grabbing at him, but my hands are still bound. We reach the edge of the roof. He thrusts me out until I’m tipped over the edge, way overbalanced. If he lets go of my shirt I’m a dead man.

  I turn my head. The fog is a quilt below us, pocked and marbled by the storm, so thick it looks impenetrable. The ground is hundreds of feet down. The fog is much closer. I remember the flying Being, the one that killed Ginger. How many more like it are just a few yards beneath me?

  I hold very still.

  So does Elliott.

  I’ve got my hands clamped over his. I can feel the ridges of his knuckles, the tendons taut in his wrist. I’m holding on tight, trying to keep him from opening his hand, but he and I both know that effort is about as useful as trying to hold a grenade together.

  Above us, the helicopter starts to lift. The guard has managed to pull himself back in. The sound of the rotors fades, overtaken by distance and thunder.

  And then we’re alone on the mainland.

  Wind screams across the roof. We’re both soaked. It’s too dark to see Elliott’s face, too dark to guess his expression. I don’t need to, though. I’m the one who told him what I did to his brother. I know exactly what his expression is.

  Finally, he speaks. “I wish I were like you. You would have let go already.” Something ugly twists, fleeting, beneath the surface of the words.

  I lick my lips. I raise my voice to be heard over the storm. “That’s not true,” I say, even though I’m not sure if it is or not.

  “You pointed a gun at me, Callahan. And you pulled the trigger.”

  Wind buffets me. “I wouldn’t have killed you, though. I swear.”

  His hand tightens, twisting my shirt a little more. “But you did kill my brother.”

  “I sold him a telescope.” I also sold him back his own glasses, though I’m not about to tell Elliott that. “Your mom is the one who killed him.”

  He’s silent. Wind whistles across us, pushing me sideways. I squeeze my eyes shut. A curse, shakier than I would like, slips out before I can stop it.

  But apparently the sign of vulnerability sways Elliott. He takes a half step back, just enough for my shoes to get a tiny bit of purchase on the concrete ledge but not enough to take me completely out of harm’s way.

  “She had to do it,” Elliott says, his voice flat. The words are rote, practiced. He’s said this a lot. Probably to himself.

  Sensing weakness, I push harder. “After what she did to him—to both of you—you’re still going to defend her? She didn’t know the gun would jam, man. She told me to shoot you, let me actually shoot you, and she didn’t know the gun would jam.”

  “Neither did you,” he snarls.

  Lightning shatters the sky, illuminating us for a moment. Below, the fog has swirled into new patterns. Fear thickens my throat.

  I look back to Elliott. “We can work together,” I repeat. “We have to, if we want to survive. We need each other.”

 
He barks a short, scoffing laugh. “Why would I need you?”

  I grimace. My plan to jar him into action worked—a little too well—but now I’ve got to follow through, convince him I can contribute to his survival. I talk faster. “I know how to hot-wire a car. We could get to street level, find something that’s still got some fuel—”

  “And drive through the fog, constantly on the lookout for Beings, to try to get where? There’s nothing left. Better to just die quickly.”

  I clamp my hands a little tighter over his wrist. “No, not better, that is not better. There is something left. There’s London, there’s Singapore. Maybe there are other places too, cities we just haven’t been able to get a signal from yet.”

  Another surge of lightning splits the clouds. I turn my head to check the fog below again. It may be a trick of the shadows, but for a moment it looks like the fog is moving, shifting.

  Or something in it is.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, unable to keep my breathing even any longer. I’m gasping, hyperventilating. “Please. Ackermann, please,” I beg, not even hating myself for it. If it’s groveling he wants, I’ll give him as much as it takes to save my skin.

  Elliott pauses. Then, a sharp inhale. He’s spotted the shapes in the fog too. He yanks me back onto the roof and releases me. “Go,” he orders coldly.

  I open my eyes, wobbling as I regain my balance. “Together or we’re dead,” I maintain, though everything in me is shouting to run and not look back.

  He sets his jaw and then nods curtly.

  Below us, something scrapes. It sounds like claws against glass.

  I back quickly away from the edge. We have to get somewhere inside, as far from the fog as possible. Lightning flashes again. In the burst of light, I scan the roof and spot a door at the same moment Elliott does. I get there first, grab the doorknob. The metal is rain-slick and my hand slips off. I try again and realize it’s locked.

  “Move,” Elliott says tersely. I get out of the way and he kicks the door hard. Once, twice. It rattles but doesn’t give. He turns to me. “Can you pick the lock?”

  I’ve got my back to him now, staring into the rain, waiting for a monster made of shadows to claw its way over the ledge. My heartbeat is a thrum in my ears. “No.”

  He curses. “Look for a key, then!”

  I tear my attention away from the rooftop, drop to my knees and search the ground blindly. The concrete is smooth, the bricks to either side of the door featureless. No key. Desperate, I stretch my still-bound hands out farther, and something falls out of my pocket and clinks metallically to the ground. It’s my key, the one that opens the padlock in my loft.

  “There!” Elliott shouts, and snatches it up.

  “No, that’s just to my—” I start, but he’s already turning it in the latch.

  Snick. The door unlocks and swings open. I stare dumbly at it for a long moment. That shouldn’t have worked. This key is to my loft, not to this random door on the roof of a building I’ve never seen before.

  Then lightning flashes again, and I glance over my shoulder and spot fog spilling across the roof toward us out of the corner of my eye. I stop caring how the key worked. I yank it out of the lock, step through, and slam the door behind me. I slide my hands upward. There: a dead bolt. I flick it shut. Then I turn and hurry after Elliott into the inky stairwell.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DARKNESS IS OPPRESSIVE. I SCUFF MY feet to break the quiet as I feel my way down the seventh—or eighth? … It’s easy to lose count in these conditions—flight of stairs. This stairwell is narrow and completely windowless, the air stagnant and tinted with mildew. Better mildew than the metallic smell of fog, though. We’ve gone far enough down that I’ve started to feel relatively safe; if the fog or Beings were going to follow us in here, they would have overtaken us by now.

  There’s a scratching noise up ahead. I freeze, until a tiny flame bursts into light a few steps ahead of me. “I have some matches,” Elliott explains. The flickering fire sends shadows chasing each other over his flat expression.

  I’m so relieved that my knees are about to buckle—the cops confiscated my penlight, and I thought they would’ve taken all his stuff too—but I scoff. “Of course you do. You’re a regular freaking Boy Scout.”

  For a moment I don’t think he’ll answer, but then: “Regular freaking Eagle Scout, actually.”

  “Overachiever,” I mutter. Good thing he doesn’t know how to hot-wire a car, or he wouldn’t even need me for that much.

  “Underachiever,” Elliott shoots back at me, his tone more cutting now. “What good is a criminal who doesn’t even know how to jimmy a lock?”

  I clench my hands. The key, which I didn’t realize I was still clutching, digs into my palm. “What good is a shadowseeker who can’t keep his own brother from getting exiled?” I retort. It’s an unnecessary escalation for a conversation that had almost been borderline civil, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction. If I can distract him, he won’t have any chance at guessing that I never taught myself to pick a lock because I didn’t want to know just how easily a person could get past all my own dead bolts and padlocks and chain slides. Knowing all the exact ways my safe places might be invaded would just add fuel to my mental loop of obsessive fears, and there’s no need to make my OCD combat any harder than it has to be.

  Elliott doesn’t take the bait. The match burns out to a watery blue flame and then vanishes. The sharp smell of smoke tickles my nose. The acridness reminds me of the fog, and I hold my breath until it dissipates.

  Another match scratches in the dark and a new tiny light flares. Elliott steps onto the next landing with a metallic rattle. “I wasn’t the shadowseeker then,” he says, his tone so even that I can barely detect the anger he’s got under tight control beneath it. I stop on the stairs and narrow my eyes. Did he say the shadowseeker, not a shadowseeker?

  Cautiously, I prod him. “What were you, then?”

  “A kid.” He pauses. “A failure,” he corrects.

  He’s already a full landing ahead of me, too distant to light my steps. I jar myself into motion and follow him. The key is still in my hand. I unthinkingly put it in my left pocket—left, for locked doors—and then pause, recognizing the compulsion.

  I clench my jaw. I want to laugh, and I want to hit something. I’m on the Being-haunted mainland with no allies except a guy who’d be just as happy to see me dead, and all I can think about now is this damned key and how badly I want to keep it in the correct pocket so I’ll be sure to remember that my loft is definitely locked. As if that matters. As if that’s the most urgent thing I could possibly be facing right now.

  I pull my empty hand out of my pocket and do my best to shove the thoughts out of my head. I’ve got to focus. Got to remember that I’m stronger than my OCD. I can’t afford any distractions pulling my focus away from survival.

  Ahead of me, Elliott pauses. He lifts the match toward the door next to him. FLOOR 2, it says. We both peer over the railing; the next flight of stairs is the last one.

  Elliott speaks first. “We should find somewhere to wait until morning. The storm might wane by then, and we’ll be able to spot any Beings better in the daylight. In the meantime, maybe you can work on picking locks. Or on learning how not to be an asshole. Your choice.”

  “Did you just make a joke?” I ask, astonished.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Learning how to pick locks it is, then.”

  It takes a little work with my still-bound hands, but I manage to salute him, lone middle finger touched to my eyebrow. He catches the gesture and gives me a look.

  “What, isn’t that the Scout salute?” I say innocently.

  He drops the now-dying match to the concrete floor, then plants his hands on the railing and vaults down to the ground without answering. I don’t feel the need for theatrics so I take the normal route down the stairs.

  The match above flicks out, and Elliott lights another. We walk to the first-floor door. Neither of us moves
to open it.

  “So, I don’t suppose you have some kind of Swiss Army knife that includes, like, a machine gun or a blowtorch or something, do you?” I ask at last. My words are flippant but the terror from earlier is still humming just beneath my collarbone, ready to burst back to life. This is the ground level. Beneath the fog. There could be a Being behind this door, but there’s no way to know for sure until we open it.

  Elliott reaches into his pockets with his free hand and holds out everything he comes up with. “I’ve got five more matches, a ration coupon, and a mint. You?”

  I don’t bother to check. I know what I’ve got—one key, plus one completely useless stuffed fox that’s somehow managed to stay in place since the boardwalk.

  I reach out and grab the mint from his hand, popping it into my mouth. “I’ve got a mint,” I say, and then I push through the door before my courage fails me entirely.

  The first floor is as dark as the stairwell, but it’s a different sort of dark—one that drips over everything and leaves behind a film, so that whatever it touches becomes a part of it. I can almost feel it sliding over my skin, can almost taste it: thick and sticky, like blood.

  I glance back at Elliott. The match is burning out, and the door is swinging slowly shut, but he’s standing still, staring down at the ration coupon in his hand. CISCO ISLAND is emblazoned in bold letters across its front, with the city’s official seal stamped over it.

  Carefully, he folds it and tucks it back into his pocket. Then he lights another match and steps out next to me. We both stand very still, the flickering flame barely illuminating the tiles beneath our feet.

  Elliott takes a breath. “You owe me a dollar for that mint, jackass,” he says, and finally dares to lift the match so we can see where we’ve landed and if any Beings are waiting to devour us.

  He turns in a circle. The light highlights tiny bits of our surroundings, puzzle pieces that we have to put together one at a time. A pillow. A white blanket, tightly tucked in over a thin mattress. The flame glints off dull metal crisscrossing beneath the bed, and then, at the bottom, wheels.