He holds me at arm’s length. His eyes are still shining as he scans my face, like he’s looking for proof I’m really me. He believes, and doesn’t believe, and he’s scared of both options.

“I kept thinking if I came back, if I stayed, you’d come back too,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper. “That maybe one day I would walk out of my room and you’d be here. It doesn’t make any sense, you’re dead, but—” He stops, swallows. “Marty. Tell me you’re really here.”

My brain is fumbling, darting from one detail to the next. I can’t take it in. I can’t wrap my mind around my brother, whole and alive and standing in front of me. I have to say something. I don’t know what to say. I open my mouth anyway. “Why are you wearing a climbing harness?” is what comes out.

He looks down at himself like he’s forgotten what he looks like. The coil of rope is still splayed across the floor at his feet. “I—I climb that damn radio tower every month,” he says. “For you. To … find you. To remember you.”

My brain still isn’t working. I’m overwhelmed. Joy courses through my veins, brilliant and liquid like sunlight, like a jar of upended honey, like “Stand by Me” on the radio and an old Camaro humming beneath me. I can hardly speak through it. “Isn’t that illegal?” I manage.

He laughs, his voice breaking. “I’ve been arrested three times. Someone had to fill your troublemaking quota,” he says, and then he crushes me in a hug.

He smells like the woods. Like earth and grass. Like something green that wraps itself around your life, and grows through the cracks, and binds you back together.

The shard—the only remaining piece of Mirage—is still in my hand. When I lift my arms to hug my brother back I think I spot a flicker of color. Just for a second, no more than a blink. No more than a ghost.

Cobalt. Happiness.

I close my eyes and let it in.

EPILOGUE

I WAIT FOR ELLIOTT NEXT TO VALKYRIE BRIDGE.

It’s a ruin. The road is charred, torn apart. The statues are pulverized. The palm trees are gone. There’s nothing left of the bridge itself beyond twisted chunks of metal that stab up through the waves offshore, barely visible in the dim starlight. Other things are different too.

There’s no fog. The northeastern horizon no longer pulls at me.