CHAPTER TWENTY

WHEN I WAKE UP, THE WORLD IS MADE OF STARS. They roll out, horizon to horizon, shining gently like there’s never been such a thing as a storm. I want to fall into them forever.

“They’re still wrong,” says a voice to my right.

I turn. It’s Elliott. He’s sitting next to me, knees drawn up to his chest, head tipped back against an iron bar. I follow the line of metal upward; about twenty feet above his head, it arrows inward and meets with other bars to support a big, blinking red light above us. It looks faintly familiar but I can’t quite identify why. My thought processes are slow and muddy, and my head aches as if someone’s taken a hammer to it.

I look down. We’re sitting on a metal platform. I lean out to look over its edge—we’re suspended above a pine forest.

Radio tower. The term for this structure finally comes to me, along with an image: a day of sunshine and honey, “Stand by Me” in the background, my brother’s sideways smile. The radio tower we drove past. The promise to climb it when Ty returned.

Another image: the same tower viewed from above, the top of it scarred and twisted, snapped off like a toothpick.

I squint, trying to make my fuzzy brain work right. They’re still wrong, Elliott said a second ago, when I was looking at the stars. “We’re still … in the dream?” I finally manage, wondering why the radio tower is suddenly intact again, whether Elliott has fixed it with his thoughts for some reason. Although I guess I should be wondering how we got from the island—we were on the island, weren’t we?—back to here in the first place.

Elliott’s gaze stays on the sky. “Not exactly.”

“I was falling,” I remember.

The faintest trace of a humorless smile crosses Elliott’s face. “Me too.”

I stand up. I grab on to the iron bar and lean out, scanning the forest below us. There’s no fog anywhere. This isn’t right. I remember falling from the Being, I remember the rainbow sheen in the water. I should be either dead or on Mirage now. Not here. How could I have gotten here?

Unless … I fell unconscious right before I hit the mirror-exit. Which has to mean that instead of waking up—because the damage that knocked out my dream self would also have happened to my real body on Mirage—I was inserted safely right back into the shared dream. Except this can’t be the shared dream, because there’s no fog and no hurricane.

Not exactly, Elliott said a second ago.

“Where are we?” I demand, staring down at him.