Sickness churns in my stomach. I tighten my grip on the gun. “You have to the count of three!” I shout at the cops.

“No need,” calls a woman’s voice. It slices through the air like a scythe, and the cops who were protecting the mayor from the Being move aside so she can walk toward us. “Go ahead,” she says to me. “Shoot him now.”

Elliott’s eyes go blank. He doesn’t look at the mayor, instead focusing on a spot over her head. He swallows once, twice. “Mom,” he says at last, and the word is mangled by its own layers, thick with a meaning that it takes me a full five seconds to register.

I stare at him. I remember the way he wielded his name like a badge earlier, when he was talking to that cop Diaz. I remember how something snagged in my mind at his introduction: Elliott Ackermann. My mind superimposes the image of the mayor over him. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same calm, cold voice—though Elliott’s isn’t calm anymore.

He has to be bluffing. This is another trick. “You’re lying,” I accuse him. “You can’t be the mayor’s son. The mayor’s son is dead.”

Everyone knows that. It was the thing that solidified her iron grip on the island in the months following the Fracture. Nothing proves you’re a stone-cold bitch like exiling your own son for possession of reflective material. No one talked about anything else for weeks.

Elliott keeps his empty gaze on that spot above the mayor’s head. “That was my brother,” he says, and I know that tone. I use that tone. Don’t talk about him like he’s dead, I’d told Elliott earlier, in the same voice he’s using right now.

My grip on the gun loosens.

The mayor takes another step toward us. “Elliott just participated in a mirror deal,” she says. Her eyes are on me as she nods at her son. “He was willing to break the law to get the proof necessary to exile you. Apparently he forgot that I put that law—and my zero-tolerance policy for anyone who breaks it—in place for a reason. All these deaths”—she sweeps her hand at Ginger, then toward the bodies I can now see littering the sand below us—”would have been prevented, had he caught you by legal means. But now he’s facing exile the same as you. Go ahead and shoot him now, if you want. It won’t help you at all.”

She’s got to be faking it. No way would she be okay with me murdering her own son right in front of her, even if he did mess up … but then again, she did exile her other kid. Would this really be that much more of a stretch?

“You’re bluffing,” I try. “You wouldn’t just let him die.”