I stare down into the curling flames. My guitar teacher is building a fire to burn my own severed finger. It’s so unbelievable, so sick and ridiculous, I almost let out a laugh. But the force heaving up inside my chest might just as easily be puke.

This can’t be real.

But it’s real.

“We’ll give it a couple of minutes.” Flynn adds a snapped pine branch to the flames. “Make sure it’s nice and hot.”

I squint upward. Light and smoke from the fire rises up into the canopy, touching the hanging bodies. The bodies of everyone I love. I can see the color of Jezz’s Converse shoes, the glint of the beads on Mom’s necklace. The firelight makes all of them look more detailed. Warmer. More alive.

It feeds my hope. It makes me desperate.

Flynn has found a small, flat rock. He balances the pocketknife on it. Its blade reaches into the flames.

“There,” he says. “We’ll make sure it’s clean.” He gives a casual wave of his missing-fingered hand. “The blade’s pretty small, but you have to show that you mean it. You’ve got to open yourself up. Give them a way in. So no half-assed little nicks, got it?”

“Flynn.” I swallow. He’s been here, where I am. I wonder who he was back then. If he was another small-town, metalhead teenager, too floored by the gifts all around to see past them, into the dark. “Afterward—will I be myself anymore?”

He looks at me, hard. “Who do you think you are?” he asks. “You’re the kid who writes the songs. You’re the guitarist. That’s what you are. You’ll be those things again.”

His answer falls through me like rocks falling through water.

That’s not what I am. Not all I am.

That’s not me, deep down, at the very core.

Flynn puts a hand on my shoulder. A second later he pushes me down. I’m so wobbly, I don’t even resist. I drop onto my knees next to Yvonne’s case. Firelight turns the surface to a sheet of liquid gold.

Heat from the fire washes over my face. My head swims.

Flynn adds another snapped branch to the flames. In the distance, somewhere behind his back, I think I spot a patch of light glowing between the trees. But I might just be wishing.

Flynn crouches there, watching the leaping flames for a while. Then he takes the knife by the handle and lifts it up. I can see the blade glowing, red-orange color fading away as it leaves the fire for the cold night air.

Flynn touches its edge with one calloused fingertip. “Should be sterile,” he says. “Seems pretty sharp, too.”

He hands me the knife. So casual. He might as well be passing me a guitar pick.

The instant I have it in my hand, the darkness around us shifts.

The creatures are coming back. They’re drawn in. I see their long fingers wrapping around nearby trunks, their milky eyes staring.