by Naomi Hughes
I wait. I give him time to answer. He doesn’t.
I should stop making noise. This place, whatever it is, is where the Beings come from. They probably don’t realize I’m here yet, but if I go around yelling at the top of my lungs they’ll find me soon enough.
But: “Ackermann!” I yell again anyway, something like worry humming just below my breastbone.
A swell of burnt-orange light flicks across the floor a few yards away. It lights up a prone body—someone lying on their back, as still as death. The orange light ripens into a beeswax gold and then shatters outward, a starburst of sparks. It’s enough light for me to make out that the person on the ground is a woman.
I hold stock-still for a long moment as the bright colors fade into blue. Then, cautiously, trying to look in every direction at once in case this is some kind of trap, I approach the body.
Her skin looks gray in the wash of blue light. Her hair is blond and fanned across the floor in mussed waves. Her eyes are closed. She’s silent, unmoving—but I can still remember the way her violet-blue eyes spark when she speaks, and the way her voice crackles like lightning looking for something to burn.
“Wrong Ackermann,” I whisper.
I stare down at the mayor. She shouldn’t be here. She was on Cisco Island—what, yesterday? I watched her turn her back on the helicopter, watched her walk away while her son and I were exiled. So what is she doing here?
Something dark and ugly threads through me. I don’t care what she’s doing here. I should get rid of her. Tie her up, at the very least. She seems to be asleep, her chest rising and falling with shallow, steady breaths, but I’ve been around long enough to know that you don’t underestimate Mayor Ackermann no matter how harmless she looks. I don’t have a rope, though, or anything resembling a weapon.
I close my fists, ready for a fight, and dare to inch closer. I nudge her shoulder with a shoe.
Nothing.
I nudge her a little harder, almost but not quite a kick. My muscles are taut from holding myself in, from tamping down the adrenaline and the urge to hurt the woman who took everything from me—no matter how innocent she looks at the moment.
She doesn’t wake. Doesn’t even stir. I get down on my hands and knees and stick my good hand beneath her nose. She’s breathing, but nonresponsive.
“What the hell?” I say out loud.
Something in my left hand twinges. I’m so distracted by the mystery of the mayor that I don’t register the feeling in time to prepare, and when the wave of agony washes up my arm, I’m caught off-guard.
My whole body jerks. There’s a red-hot poker knifing through my hand, rupturing my veins, shredding my skin. The pain burrows into my arm. Claws its way through my chest. Rummages through my veins and arteries and nerves and organs until it finds the center of me, and then it clamps down and squeezes.
I’m screaming. I’m sure of it. But I can’t hear anything above the pain.
I fold downward. Barely manage to catch myself on the floor. The shirt that’s binding my stung hand is shoved off with the violence of the movement, and the bull’s-eye center of the scorpion sting presses against the cool floor.
Darkness bursts out of my injured hand and spreads across the floor, like I’m bleeding shadows. All the lights, all the colors, ripple out of existence as the wave of black touches them.
The pain dissipates. I gulp down one breath, and then another, shaking. I stare down at the floor—and realize it’s not dark. Not completely. There are tiny speckles of light in it, like someone’s sprinkled fairy dust over obsidian tile.
I squint as I recover from the wave of pain, trying to make out what I’m seeing. This scene, it looks … familiar. And then, slowly, the speckles begin to move. They shift sideways. Something massive slides into view below me. A huge circle pocked with glowing yellow veins.
My breath stutters. No. It’s not a circle. It’s a planet. One with a familiar shape: dark swaths of ocean, green-brown continents stretching wide. Earth. I’m above Earth. That continent right there, that’s Asia. Right next to it is Europe. And that tiny speck of an island clinging to its edge—that’s England. That’s London—and it’s free of fog. There’s no fog anywhere on Earth, as far as I can tell.
I stare at the mayor’s body, which is still lying asleep next to me, and then look into the vast distance beyond her. This floor, it isn’t a floor. It’s a window. It’s translucent glass just like the ceiling. And those glowing yellow veins on Earth below—they’re—
Lights, supplies a small-sounding foreign voice, its grave timbre resonating deep within my mind.
I gasp and instinctively rear back. The second my hurt hand loses contact with the floor, it washes back to the colors, and Earth disappears from sight. This time the colors move faster, though, circling and shifting, agitated.
I stare wildly around me, searching for whoever’s spoken, but there’s no one except the mayor. I should probably run at this point, but—that voice. It sounded … young. Its tone called up a memory I’d forgotten long ago: of myself, eight years old, sitting silently in a closet with my knees pulled up to my chin. It had been the first time I’d gotten off the school bus and no one was home waiting for me. Ty was at a game, I knew, but Mom was just … gone. The house felt awful in its silence, profound in its emptiness. And somehow this voice, whatever it is, feels like someone who’s been sitting in the closet for a long, long time.
Slowly, I lower my injured hand back to the floor. That seemed to be what set things off last time. And it does it again—a gray-green light swirls around me before the floor goes back to translucent.
“Hello?” I say quietly.
Hello.
My breath catches at the word. It was in my head, not spoken out loud, but it wasn’t my own thought either. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. What exactly is it I’m talking to?
As if in response, the floor slowly tilts. I go tense by instinct, expecting to slide away, but gravity keeps me right where I am as if we’re not moving at all. The planet below dips to the side. A line of some sort of metallic debris—huge shards of polished silver—comes into view. The nearest pieces are massive, the most distant appearing as tiny flecks that curve around the far side of Earth, catching the light of the hidden sun as they slowly spin in their orbit.
The Shatter Ring. We’re in the Shatter Ring.
Is that what you call it? asks the voice. The words are tinted with curiosity and feel somehow … azure, as if the feeling of curiosity has a color.
I hesitate, still uncertain of who I’m talking to and whether they’re dangerous. This is the place that births Beings, after all, and it creeps me out even more that this—person?—can apparently sense my thoughts. “What do you call it?” I ask cautiously.
The voice is silent for a moment. The floor tilts again until the earth is below us and the Shatter Ring is barely visible off to the sides. Pieces of my body, the voice says at last, somber and small.
I gape. “Who … what are you?”
The voice seems to fumble. I sense it rummaging through itself, searching for the right words. After a moment, a collection of thoughts and pictures and memories pour into my head. Light. Dark. Colors where you don’t expect them. Something shimmering in an empty place. It’s too much. I clutch my head with my right hand. “Stop!” I gasp.
The thoughts and pictures cease at once, like they’ve been snatched back. I’m sorry, says the voice. Contrition shades into my mind, carrot-orange. It flickers across the floor too, radiating outward before it vanishes, and I get the sense of a person trying to rein in their emotions, trying to hold very still so that a spooked animal won’t run away.
Making me the spooked animal. Which means the voice, whose emotions apparently project across the floor, and whose body is somehow also the Shatter Ring, is …
Holy ever-loving shit. I swallow dryly. “You’re an alien. An … alien ship? The alien ship who showed up during the Fracture.”
Yes, says
the voice, a bit sadly. The child in the closet tucks itself a bit farther back.
I hesitate. I recall the images and phrases it tried to show me earlier, when I asked who it was. The colors, the shimmering, the light and the dark. I think it was trying to tell me its name, but it didn’t quite translate. I think of a word that seems to at least mostly match the description it gave of itself—a word I thought of when I first saw the colors on the floor. “Mirage?” I supply tentatively.
Azure curiosity blinks through my mind again, then, slowly, it swells into ripples of cobalt blue. The ship likes that name. Yes. That’s close, it says.
It. That doesn’t feel right. Whatever Mirage is, the ship isn’t an it. “Do you … have a pronoun?” I ask.
Mirage considers the question. I think I like “he,” he says after a moment. Shades of purple swirl around the words. Or—it’s more like the colors are the words, like my mind has somehow learned a new language when I wasn’t looking.
I shake my head. The sensation of someone else talking in my mind, of colors bleeding from an alien ship to me, it’s impossibly weird. I want to pull my wounded hand back—the only time he seems able to communicate with me is when my injury is touching him—but I want answers, and Mirage is the only one who might actually be able to give them to me.
I am sorry about your injury, Mirage says softly. There’s a vast ocean of grief resonating behind the words, a heavy, dark veil of slate gray. I remember what he said before: that the Shatter Ring was pieces of his body. He’s injured too, then. Maybe even dying.
Like me.
I look down at my hand. The crooked black veins have reached across my knuckles now, and have also spread a few inches past my wrist and up my forearm. The pain has receded to a throbbing ache, but I know another wave of agony will come soon. I wonder how long it will take those veins to reach my heart. My brain.
“Do you know if—my injury, maybe it’s not so—?” I can’t manage more than that.
I’m sorry, Mirage says again, confirming my fears.
I bow my head. I don’t want to think about my impending death, so I ask another question. “Is it what’s allowing me to talk to you?”
Your injury is part of the reason I’m able to reach you, yes. The thing that stung you, it was … Again that sense of Mirage rummaging through himself, trying to find the right words. Made by me.
I freeze. My muscles go taut. “What?” I say, confusion and anger burgeoning. I’d just begun to believe Mirage might not be my enemy.
Mirage fumbles again. I didn’t want it to harm you. I would heal the wound now, if I had enough energy.
Hope surges through me, erasing the anger with startling alacrity. “Why don’t you have enough energy?” Maybe I can help him. Maybe he can fix me. Maybe I can live. And if I’m going to survive, then I could think about those yellow veins on Earth below—and maybe I could dare to ask Mirage whether they’re true. Whether Earth’s power might really have been restored somehow, whether the fog is truly gone. Whether anyone managed to survive down there until now.
Whether Ty managed to survive.
The hope strengthens. But I learned a long time ago that hope is much more dangerous than any Being, that it can freeze like water over the cracks in your life and burst them open and leave you with even less than you had before.
Mirage is an alien. I have no idea what he wants. And, more important, the Being that stung me somehow came from here. I rein in the hope, seal it back underground, caulk carefully over the cracks.
Because I’m keeping them alive, Mirage tells me. A burst of muted green whirls at my side, around the mayor’s body.
“Them? You mean Mayor Ackermann and—what, more people?” I lift my head, scan my surroundings. Field of stars above, Earth below, the Shatter Ring stretching out to either side—it’s incredibly disorienting, and the darkness makes it impossible to see if there are any other bodies nearby. Who is Mirage keeping alive? And why does he need to keep them alive?
“There was a guy I came here with,” I tell Mirage. “Elliott Ackermann. Where is he? Is he okay?”
I’m not sure, Mirage says. I will begin a search for him, but it may take some time.
I bite back the urge to curse at the ship. So Elliott could be just fine, wandering around somewhere in this vast darkness without the ability to communicate with Mirage—since he didn’t get stung by the scorpion Being, thanks to my idiotic heroism, which I still can’t quite wrap my head around—or he could be dead. Or stuck back in that clearing.
No, Mirage says, sensing my thoughts again. He is not on Earth. He is somewhere inside me.
I blow out a breath in relief. “So he did get through the mirror?”
I don’t know.
I narrow my eyes. “You just said he’s somewhere here.”
Yes.
Something must be getting lost in translation. I try a different tack. “How did the mayor get here? This … woman,” I finally say, though it’s definitely not the first word that comes to mind, “in front of me. I saw her yesterday at the island. How did she escape? Why won’t she wake up?”
I—she’s not … Burnt-umber frustration undulates over the floor, then flashes suddenly to gold. I could show you, I think. May I show you?
Immediately wary at the eagerness in Mirage’s tone, I lean back. “Show me what?”
What happened last year. The fog, the mirrors. Why you’re here. Everything.
I curl the fingers of my left hand, prepared to lift it from the floor. This is nuts. Just because Mirage sounds young and harmless doesn’t mean he is. This could be a trick, a trap. Maybe he’s going to send me back to the Beings. He’s apparently the one who made them in the first place, after all.
But then I look through my black-streaked fingers, at the planet below. At London. At the lights that wreathe it, beautiful and impossible.
Shadows in my veins. Lights on Earth. It’s a choice and not a choice at all.
Because I don’t want to die. Of course I don’t. But most of all, I don’t want it to be the darkness that kills me. I’ve been terrified of it for a year and now it’s inside me, corroding me, one wave of pain at a time. I don’t want to watch it consume me. I don’t want to belong to it. I don’t want any part of it to own any part of me.
If I let Mirage show me what’s happening, maybe I can find a way to help him. A way to get him the energy he needs to heal my wound.
Maybe I can find a way to escape the shadows inside me.
“Okay,” I say. “Show me everything.”
Gently, Mirage reaches into my mind—and then pulls me into his.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’M IN THE DARK. THIS TIME, THERE ARE NO STARS.
I raise my hands and try to feel around me. Nothing. I spin—and hit a solid surface. Something digs into my arm. I know instantly it’s a doorknob, because I’d know the shape of a doorknob even in my dreams.
I run my hand down the surface in front of me—a door, paint flaking off from it under my fingers—and put my hand on the knob. It feels oddly familiar. A round, cool sphere, except for a small imperfection under my index finger: a tiny scratch etched into the metal, sharp enough to cut skin along its edges. The front door back at my old house, the house Ty and I left last year when he took me to Cisco Island, it had a scratch just like this.
I hesitate, staring into the darkness all around. “Mirage,” I whisper at last, because this expanse of emptiness seems at once too small and too large for anything other than a whisper. “Where exactly am I?”
Your body is exactly where it was a moment ago, he answers.
“So I am in your mind.”
Not quite. I am building a—mental construct for your consciousness to move through.
My fingers tighten on the doorknob. The resulting numbness in my fingers is a too-familiar ache. The scratch on the knob slices shallowly into my finger. “And what sort of mental construct did you build?”
I do not know. I have no control o
ver the form it takes. I supplied the memories I want you to see, and your mind has built a home for them.
I want to laugh, but I can’t quite manage it. My mind has built a home for the memories of an alien ship that creates monsters but is somehow also both lonely and vulnerable. Where else would my brain put someone like that, except here?
I start to twist the doorknob. A compulsion twists at me and I try to shake it off. This is a mental construct, a dream, a hallucination. Whatever the room beyond is, it isn’t real. The door frame isn’t real. I don’t have to tap it.
Except I do. I close my eyes and lean my head against the frame with a quiet thunk. Why do I have to be like this? I’m already dying. Is whatever’s beyond this door really more dangerous than what’s already happened to me?
It doesn’t matter. I still have to tap it. So I do: three times on the left, five on the right, at shoulder height, giving up everything I spent grueling months of therapy working for. Giving up a little more ground, receding a little further into my fears. Just like the coward I used to be. The coward I still am.
I twist the doorknob.
It’s locked.
I frown, then sigh. With my left hand, I dip into my pants pocket and a cool sliver of metal falls against my injured palm. My clothing may be somehow different, but my key is exactly where I left it. It feels strange—the teeth aren’t quite right, this isn’t the key to my loft—but it slides into the door without a hitch.
I turn the key. Click: the lock disengages. I pull the key out, hold it gingerly so it doesn’t touch my wounded palm, and nudge the door.
It opens with a creak. Yellow light spills out, carving a bright rectangle through the shadows that stretch out behind me.
A pile of dirty plates spread out across the Formica counter. Four mismatched chairs are pulled up to the table. The centerpiece is a potted fern. Ugly gray and pink floral curtains hang limply over the window that overlooks the front yard. I hate those curtains. I hate this window. This is where I always stood when I waited for Mom to come home, my little nose pressed against the glass as I scanned the darkness for someone who often didn’t show until long after Ty had pried me off and sent me, protesting, to bed.