by Naomi Hughes
“Get down here,” Elliott shouts. His voice comes from below me, on the ground.
I sit on the trunk and let myself slide blindly downward. I land wrong and something in my ankle twists too hard in the wrong direction. I yelp and hiss through my teeth, but force myself up and hobble off the road and into the grass. The storm lessens a touch, the forest blunting some of its force.
A light flicks on—one of the flashlights Elliott put in his pockets earlier. He tosses me another and I catch it with my right hand because my left is tingling and cold, like it’s still clutching the ghost of the writhing Being. I don’t want to think about the eerie sensation. I flick on my light. It casts a dim yellow glow around me, enough to let us flee at a slow jog without running face-first into a tree. I hold an arm up to shield my eyes from the driving rain.
“Don’t think about anything dangerous,” Elliott shouts from ahead.
“What?” I pant. I can hardly put any weight on my ankle, but I’m hobbling after him as fast as I can manage.
“I can’t focus on keeping us safe right now. Don’t think about anything.”
Ice slicks through my veins. “What? You know that doesn’t work! I can’t—I keep thinking about—” More Beings. Faster ones. More mirrors, everywhere.
A crackling noise ripples out through the forest around us. It could be the wind but it might be something worse. I speed up, grab Elliott’s shoulder, shove him around. “You have to FOCUS,” I yell in his face.
“I can’t, okay?” he shouts back. His hair is plastered to his forehead and he shoves it off like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Those scorpions—I can’t—” He shakes his head and his voice drops. “It’s like someone reached into my head and pulled out all my fears and let them loose in the world.”
I laugh, a little wildly, because I know just what he means. But our fears are exactly the problem. If we can’t pull it together—if he can’t pull it together—we’re dead.
My hands are still on his shoulders. I shake him. His gaze drops, and he looks at my left hand like he has no idea how it got there. “You’ve got to try—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“Marty,” he says. The word sounds strange, like a foreign language, like it means more than itself. I realize it’s the first time he’s called me anything other than Callahan.
He’s still looking at my hand. I follow his gaze.
On the back of my left hand—the hand I used to wrench the scorpion off him—my knuckles are crisscrossed with jagged black streaks like veins of lightning. Slowly, I take my hand off his shoulder. I turn it over. In the middle of my palm is a perfect, dime-sized circle of dead white flesh. Angry red skin encircles it, making an ugly bull’s-eye, and black veins creep from its edge toward my wrist and fingers and over the back of my hand.
The strange coldness, the eerie feeling of something still writhing in my palm. It wasn’t a memory.
It was venom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I RAISE MY EYES AND STARE AT ELLIOTT. THE YELLOW glow of the flashlight turns his face to a skull, all sharp shadows. “Marty,” he says again, and then the pain hits me.
It’s an inferno. The whole world is a burning building and I’m trapped inside. The agony intensifies, going from an unbearable burning to an ice-cold acid. My body bows in on itself and I drop to my knees. The flashlight clatters to the ground. I curl around my injured hand, my breathing jagged like I’m going to scream.
I do.
Elliott is on his knees in front of me. He grabs me by my good arm. He shakes me, and the scream cuts off, but the silence is almost as bad. The night seems to twist around me.
He searches his pockets frantically, pulls everything out. Aspirin, bandages, gauze. None of which will help a Being sting. He searches through my pockets next. There’s nothing except my key and that stupid stuffed fox, which only reminds me of that first Being back in the garage, the one with the foxlike muzzle. The one that felt like my fears brought to life.
Elliott looks down at me. He knows what neither of us are saying: that I’m as dead as the spider-bit girl, whether I die right here or hours from now.
The pain ebbs, retreating until it’s a throbbing coldness in my left hand. It’ll be hours, then. There’s a part of me that wants it over now, but my well-honed survival instinct rears up and overshadows it. It pulls me, staggering, to my feet. It orders me to move. Move. Don’t think about what other fears could come true. Don’t think about—
That crackling noise from a moment ago ripples out around us again, loud even in the storm. The sound reminds me of a chandelier: a thousand pieces of glass clinking against each other.
Gingerly, slow with the echoes of pain, I pick up my flashlight and hold it out. I turn in a circle. I take a step—and yank my foot back with a hiss. Something sharp is sticking up from the ground. I aim the flashlight downward. The fog is thicker than ever, and I have to bend low to make out what’s stabbed me.
I blink. It’s a blade of wire grass. This plant isn’t too tall, maybe three inches, but each thin blade that arcs up and out from it looks as hard and sharp as a knife. And it’s difficult to tell through the fog and the night, but the grass is a strange color—a sort of yellow-white, and almost metallic. I reach out to touch it with a fingertip. Something like static electricity crackles off it, buzzing beneath my skin, and I pull my hand back before touching it.
Lightning flashes. The fog catches its light more brightly than ever, sparkling like blue magic, and the blades of grass sparkle blue too. Almost like they’re …
Reflective.
My inhale freezes somewhere in my throat. Veins of frost reach into my lungs, wrap in icy bands around my chest. This time it’s not an effect of the venom. It’s terror.
The grass isn’t grass. It’s mirrors. Every blade, every tuft, is an impossibly detailed silvered-glass sculpture. Numbly, I lift the flashlight. More grass. More bladed mirrors. A nearby pine tree: every knobby flake of bark reflects the flashlight’s yellow-white beam back at me. I point my light at the ground. I take a step. My foot skids on the flat, glassy dirt. It’s slippery with the rain that now beads on its surface, streaming across it in rivulets.
Mirrors everywhere, I thought a moment ago. And now my fears have come to life.
But something flickers behind my breastbone—a protest, a thought, a single ragged heartbeat. We aren’t supposed to be able to change anything big. Elliott said it himself. Only small things, he claimed. Only reasonable things.
I spin in a slow circle. My light catches on everything and reflects back at me. This is not small. Not reasonable.
Above the din of the storm, a tinkling clatter reaches me: tiny claws on glass. Elliott and I look at each other. The scorpions are still coming for us. And I’ve got a twisted ankle, and a poisoned hand, and we’re surrounded, surrounded, by mirrors.
Something moves in the mirrored tree trunk next to me. A rainbow oil-slick ripple. Then comes the shadow, swallowing up the beam from my flashlight. It flickers, swells across the ground, the grass. It flares and stretches like some great dragon unfurling its wings.
An invisible rope twists around my ribs. It tugs me out toward the tree. Reels me down toward the grass. I’m a fly caught in a spiderweb; there’s nowhere to go.
But insistent as the tugging is, it also feels oddly gentle. And with another wave of agony building up in my hand, a tide of scorpions at my back, and a forest of mirrors all around, some fatalistic part of me almost wants to obey the tugging. To walk toward the mirrors—toward my fears. To fall into my own reflection. To face the coming Beings in whatever twisted alien world they come from, rather than ending my life hunted and tortured here on what’s left of the mainland, drowned in fog, without even a last glimpse of the stars.
The stars. “The stars!” I say out loud. And then I laugh and laugh. The sound reminds me of when I was clawing at the tree’s bark earlier, the ragged scrabbling of it, the way splinters burrowed beneath my fingernails.
Elliott looks at me. His face is pale but set; he’s done running. Which is good, because there’s nowhere left to run. Nowhere we can get away from ourselves. “What exactly is so funny?” he says sharply.
I turn around, point through the darkness toward the road we’ve just left, toward the body of Elliott’s brother. “The stars. You said there was something wrong with the stars. That’s why Braedan wanted the telescope. The stars, the constellations, they kept disappearing and moving in ways the laws of physics shouldn’t have allowed. Well, I don’t think the laws of physics did allow it. I think the stars themselves are still out there, completely normal. It’s just our view of them that’s changed.”
The skittering of claws on glass intensifies. Tiny mirrored pebbles vibrate on the ground in resonance.
“Does that really matter right now?” Elliott says, and in his voice I hear the same fatalism that singed me a moment ago. No brother, no plane, no escape. No point. But a new realization has caught fire in my mind, and it’s burning through everything.
I sweep my light in a circle. It reflects back, a thousand iterations of me hovering above the monstrous dark. “This forest, these mirrors—you said something like this wasn’t possible. That we weren’t supposed to be able to do anything big or unreasonable. But my thoughts made this happen anyway.”
Elliott’s brow crinkles. “Are you—do you mean, you think we could … conjure up a plane after all, or something?”
There’s a faint stirring of hope in his voice. I squash it. “No. I’m saying, even if we could conjure up a plane, it wouldn’t matter. Because there is nowhere to go. There’s no safe haven here, because we changed the forest, and there’s no safe haven on Cisco Island, because someone changed the stars.”
Elliott swallows. I see the fire start to catch in him too, but in his panic he tries to smother it. He shakes his head. “No. That can’t be what happened. Thoughts can’t change things on the island, there’s no fog there, it’s safe—”
“It’s not the fog that’s doing this. What happened to the stars means that things can be changed on the island. Which means things can be changed anywhere. Which means everything, everything, around us could be imaginary. These woods. The road we were traveling. The hospital—you might’ve just remembered the whole building into existence, the same way you did the prepper hideout. If the stars are wrong, the whole world could be wrong.” I laugh again. The beam from my flashlight jerks wildly with the motion of it. “Nothing is real. Nowhere is safe.”
Elliott lifts his light. At the edge of its yellow circle, a charcoal scorpion crawls out of the forest. Elliott takes a step backwards.
I do too, involuntarily, even though I already know there’ll be no escape this time. Maybe we could get away from the scorpions. We definitely won’t get away from the vast shadow stirring in the mirrors around us, though.
My left hand throbs, and beneath the skin, a cold ache gathers strength. I watch the scorpion Being skitter closer, watch the terror on Elliott’s face, and my wild humor drops away. “Even them,” I realize slowly.
I sweep the flashlight outward. It pans over the dozens, hundreds, of tiny Beings surging through the fog toward us. Elliott, who is scared of almost nothing, is terrified of scorpions—and then a legion of them crawl out of his brother’s glasses. And the foxlike Being from the garage … I’m creeped out by foxes. It’s too much to be a coincidence.
I said a second ago that everything could be imaginary. If the hospital and the Camaro were our memories and the road signs were our expectations, then … “The Beings are our fears,” I say aloud.
I bring the beam of light up. It arcs over the monsters that are even now coalescing behind our reflections. What will be in the mirrors all around us? What else am I scared of?
So much. Everything.
Elliott doesn’t ask what I mean. He looks at me, and I can see in the set of his jaw, in his squared shoulders, that he understands. Ever practical, he asks, “Then how do we fight them?”
And that’s when it hits me.
If I’ve learned one thing from my OCD, it’s that you can’t run from your fears. And the more you do to stop them, the more powerful they become. We’re surrounded by fears made literal, Beings made of darkness that could tear us limb from limb, and I finally know exactly how to fight them.
I look back at Elliott. “We don’t.”
He looks at me like I’ve suggested lying down and letting the Beings eat us, which must be what it seems like from his perspective. He doesn’t have the experience with fear that I do; he doesn’t understand. He shakes his head. “Do what you want,” he says, and hefts his flashlight like a weapon. “I’m going down fighting.”
The scorpions flood around us, cut off our escape. They make a circle. It starts to close.
My hand starts to tingle, another wave of agony rising. The darkness in the mirrors starts to solidify: a slitted golden eye the size of my torso. A vast wing covered in delicate feathers. Scales. Claws. Teeth.
The tugging in my ribs gently reels me in. It’s a question. A dare. And I never turn down a dare.
I grit my teeth. I look around. There’s a tree next to Elliott, a big pine-turned-mirror, that’s just barely inside our quickly narrowing scorpion-free circle.
“How much do you trust me?” I ask him.
He gives a ragged smile, eyes on the Beings. “Not at all.”
“That’s what I thought.” Only one thing for it, then.
I take a deep breath. I launch myself at him. And I push us both toward the mirror.
My shove catches Elliott off guard. He only has enough time to turn his head, to grab my arm, to widen his eyes, and then we’re falling toward the silvered pine. I hit its cold, glassy surface first. There’s a buzz like static electricity on my skin. It folds over me. The mirror—liquefies. It’s mercury, ice, a silvery sort of coldness that drags me in and swallows me up. The forest is gone. The Beings are gone. The mirror has pulled us through.
The world breaks down into a kaleidoscope of sensations.
A chemical smell. Something acrid. Something burnt.
A rainbow sheen that flickers through the mercurial ice around us. It’s trying to tell me something. I can almost understand it, as if the colors are words with half their letters scrambled. If I could just decode them—if I could just put them in the right order …
Elliott’s grip on my arm tightens. It vanishes.
And then I wake up on a cold, hard floor—alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I INHALE.
My ribs creak with the motion, like I haven’t breathed deeply in eons. The world is dark. My thoughts are fuzzy and gray around the edges, like the fog has crept into my brain, too. I can still smell it: metallic, faintly burnt. But the world isn’t made of ice anymore, and the dizzying kaleidoscope of sensations is gone—and so is the noise of the storm. There’s no howling wind, no booms of thunder. The silence is vast around me.
My brain sends an order to my fingers. Move. But nothing twitches.
I exhale.
Some of the fog clears from my brain. I realize that the reason the world is dark is because my eyes are closed. My brain sends another order. This time, it’s obeyed. My eyes open.
I’m staring at a field of stars.
I squint. My eyes feel rusted shut, like I haven’t opened them in eons either. I try to move my fingers again, and this time, my right hand obeys. I rub my eyes. Open them again. The stars are above me, impossibly clear and bright, the arm of the Milky Way spangled with purples and blues overhead. A phrase snags in my mind: The stars are wrong. I don’t have any idea which stars I’m looking at or whether the constellations above me are correct, but somehow these stars look clearer, brighter, and sharper and more painfully real than anything I’ve seen in a long time.
I sit up. The floor beneath me feels like glass but is opaque, and a gentle shimmer of rainbow light flows across it like a mirage. Chartreuse, sapphire, candy-apple red.
It’s hypnotizing and distracts me for a long moment—until I realize I’m wearing shoes.
I frown. Some more of the fog in my brain clears. I wasn’t wearing shoes before. Was I? No. I’d kicked one off to get rid of a scorpion, and threw the other at … someone, I think. But now I’m somehow wearing them again, and they look nearly brand-new, the way they used to look last year when I first bought them. And—I’m wearing a different shirt, too, a nice button-down with a crisp white undershirt. None of my clothes have been white, not for months, not with the electricity on the island so carefully guarded that hardly anyone can afford to use a real washer and dryer.
I smooth down my pants—they’re different too, nice khaki cargo pants instead of beat-up jeans—and freeze when I spot the jagged black veins creeping across the back of my left hand.
The scorpion. The shadows. The pain.
I clutch my hand. I tear off my button-down and wrap it around the wound, like that’ll help. At least this way I won’t have to see it. I won’t have to remember that I have a Being’s venom crawling slowly up my arm, that my veins are full of shadows now as well as blood.
I stand up. I stagger at first—I feel somehow lighter than normal and off-balance. But after a moment I stabilize. Warily, I scan my surroundings. The field of stars above, the soft rainbow-lit floor below, in all directions, for as far as I can see.
No Beings. But also … no Elliott.
Elliott. That’s who I threw my shoe at. I took him with me through the mirror, I know I did. But I remember his grip vanishing—maybe a Being overtook him, or maybe he didn’t make it through.
I can’t see very well in these conditions. The floor’s wavering light is dim and dizzying, rippling out into infinity, and the only other lighting is the gleam of stars filtering down from above. Maybe Elliott is nearby and I just can’t make him out.
I cup my hands to my mouth. “Ackermann!” I shout. My voice echoes off the rainbow floor, off what I can only assume is the translucent glass ceiling. There’s no reply except my own voice fading into nothingness.