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.

Then a rectangle opened in the wall of the world, and light spilled in. Real light, not bright, but vital and alive. Mandy hoisted me a little higher, and we walked together into the moon-washed strip of pasture outside the concealed back entrance to the facility where I’d been held. I blinked repeatedly, trying to get my eyes to adjust.

Gradually, a landscape appeared. We were standing in a divot carved out of a larger hillside, ringed on all sides by dense trees. The ground was covered in patchy grass, the sort of thing you’d see after a bunch of cows had been through. I spotted the first cow patty a moment later.

“Private grazing land,” said Lucas, confirming my suspicions. “There’s not a lot of it out here, but there are farmers almost anywhere you go. No good mining rights, so they sublet a large percentage of their underground to the government.”