I ease myself back to my feet. The memory felt so real. The loneliness of it had been crushing. The hopeful boredom, the painful eagerness when he found Earth—

My palm throbs, reminding me of why I’m here, and I shake off the alien feelings. I need to get all the information I can as quickly as possible. “What about the fog and the Beings? Were they … what, your defense mechanism, or something?”

There’s more. Deeper inside this construct, Mirage answers.

I glance toward the closed doors in the hallway behind me and press my lips together. “Of course,” I mutter, and march toward them.

I pass the beat-up old piano, one of the few things Ty refused to pawn off when times got tough. He loved to play. He tried to teach me, but I was worse than hopeless at it, and he eventually gave up on the endeavor. I still loved to listen to him, though. Whenever a storm hit, we’d board up the windows and huddle in the living room, and I’d listen to Ty play the soundtracks to my favorite movies. He was incredible. If he hadn’t loved botany so much, he might’ve studied music.

There are three doors in the hallway. One goes to the bathroom, one to Mom’s room. I open both doors and glance inside—if I just glance, I don’t have to tap—but there’s nothing unusual. The final room is mine and Ty’s.

Drywall stretches down the middle of the room, separating our halves. There’s nothing on my side except my bed, the ancient bookshelf I used as a dresser, and a few band posters. Ty’s side is covered in greenery. Succulents on the windowsill, cacti on the desk. A few different types of violets he’d been experimenting with are shoved against the corner of the far wall.

And something is outside his window.

I tap the frame and edge closer. At first I think the window screen is frozen. It’s just flat gray, with no sound or movement. But as I get closer I spot the subtle swirling.

It’s the fog.

I brace myself, take a deep breath, and brush my fingers across the glass.

I was crashing.

Or pieces of me were, anyway. My elegant oval shape had been shattered by the missiles. When I recovered from the shock, from the awful pain—something I had never experienced before—I quickly used what was left of my nearly ruined power source to suspend the shards of myself in stable orbit. One piece slipped past, though. I calculated the shard’s track. It would crash into an island. An island that was full of sentient life-forms, whom I would be responsible for killing.