“This radio tower,” I say. “Ty promised the two of us would climb it together when he got back from his year of studying abroad.”

Elliott waits.

After a second, I sigh. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I just … I needed you to believe me. I needed you to think you had to help me wake everyone up. That it was Mirage forcing us to do it. That maybe there might be a chance Braedan was still alive, that you could see him the next time you woke up in the real world. I knew from how strongly I felt about finding Ty that it would work—that you would help me, if it was for Braedan’s sake.”

“I would have helped you anyway,” Elliott says, “if you had just asked.”

“I had to make sure.” But that’s not quite right. “I was afraid,” I confess instead. “I thought there was a chance you might be like me after all. That you’d abandon me, if it came down to it.”

“You think you’d abandon me, if our positions had been reversed?”

“In a heartbeat.”

He breathes an almost-laugh. “Bastard,” he says, more lightly than I deserve. Probably because it doesn’t really matter anymore for either of us.

“Hero,” I reply, striving for the same tone.

“That’s not even an insult.”

“Shows what you know.”

We fall silent. I’m not sure if it’s because it hurts him too much to talk or because there’s nothing else to say. My injured hand is starting to sting again, the sign of an oncoming wave of pain. I wish Mirage would finish crashing before it hits. I’d rather die quick and brilliant than slow and painful.

“I’m guessing you’ve already tried to conjure up a mirror to get back out?” I ask after a moment.

“First thing,” he confirms. “Didn’t work—no Beings, no exit. Probably because your construct doesn’t have the same rules as the shared dream. And also maybe because I’ve lost too much blood to wake up by now anyway.” Before I can respond to that, he rolls his head to the side to look at me. “There’s one thing I haven’t been able to figure out. You claimed earlier that your sting went away in the real world—that that’s what you were getting out of waking everyone up. But we both know that isn’t true. So what were you trying to get out of it?”

I lift my injured hand. The skin is gray and corpselike all the way up to my shoulder now, and the black veins are spreading across my collarbone and chest. They’re crawling across my skin so fast that I can almost see their growth in real time. “He was going to heal me,” I say, and then pause.