It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d started our descent. I swallowed, and said, “You don’t sound like you approve.”

“It’s bad design,” he said. “Never construct a prison you can’t actually use for its intended purpose.”

“Lucas—” I reached for his arm.

“No.” He shrugged off my hand, turning his face away so that I couldn’t see his expression. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to do this right now.”

“I’ve got you,” said Mandy, sliding her arm around my back, so that her hand was in my right armpit and my left arm was slung around her shoulders. It was the sort of hold that people use for someone with a sprained ankle, and it provided a surprising amount of support. I leaned in to her gratefully, trying not to dwell on Lucas’s reaction.

It wasn’t working. He wasn’t looking at me. He’d been willing to come here, to help break me out—that meant he couldn’t hate me for telling him the truth, right? We’d known each other for years. We were friends. And I had never lied to him, not once.

But maybe that didn’t matter. Graham’s family hadn’t sought out his company in years. They still believed he was lying, that one day he was going to wake up and announce he was tired of pretending to be something he wasn’t and go back to being their good little girl. He had never lied to them about anything that mattered. Maybe he’d lied about who ate the last cookie when he was a kid or why he’d been twenty minutes late for curfew, but those weren’t real. They mattered in the moment, not in the grand sweep of a lifetime. Those weren’t lies that got held against him.

The truth, though … the truth was something they couldn’t seem to forgive. Maybe Lucas was going to be the same way with my truth. It had been fine as long as he’d been able to pretend it wasn’t real, that I was lying for my own amusement, and now that it was real …

I tightened my grip on Mandy’s shoulder, letting her pull me down the long, dark tunnel toward freedom, and tried to think about a future where I wasn’t this dizzy, where my friends didn’t need me to be a liar if they were going to love me.

I don’t know how long we walked. I think I passed out at one point, still walking but no longer aware. The air rang with the distant sound of rattling petals, a sound that faded into footsteps on concrete and then back out again. The smell of alien greenery washed over me, only to be replaced by wet stone and Mandy’s shampoo. It was like moving through a nightmare, unwaking, unable to free myself.