THE DARKNESS IS OPPRESSIVE. I SCUFF MY feet to break the quiet as I feel my way down the seventh—or eighth? … It’s easy to lose count in these conditions—flight of stairs. This stairwell is narrow and completely windowless, the air stagnant and tinted with mildew. Better mildew than the metallic smell of fog, though. We’ve gone far enough down that I’ve started to feel relatively safe; if the fog or Beings were going to follow us in here, they would have overtaken us by now.

There’s a scratching noise up ahead. I freeze, until a tiny flame bursts into light a few steps ahead of me. “I have some matches,” Elliott explains. The flickering fire sends shadows chasing each other over his flat expression.

I’m so relieved that my knees are about to buckle—the cops confiscated my penlight, and I thought they would’ve taken all his stuff too—but I scoff. “Of course you do. You’re a regular freaking Boy Scout.”

For a moment I don’t think he’ll answer, but then: “Regular freaking Eagle Scout, actually.”

“Overachiever,” I mutter. Good thing he doesn’t know how to hot-wire a car, or he wouldn’t even need me for that much.

“Underachiever,” Elliott shoots back at me, his tone more cutting now. “What good is a criminal who doesn’t even know how to jimmy a lock?”

I clench my hands. The key, which I didn’t realize I was still clutching, digs into my palm. “What good is a shadowseeker who can’t keep his own brother from getting exiled?” I retort. It’s an unnecessary escalation for a conversation that had almost been borderline civil, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction. If I can distract him, he won’t have any chance at guessing that I never taught myself to pick a lock because I didn’t want to know just how easily a person could get past all my own dead bolts and padlocks and chain slides. Knowing all the exact ways my safe places might be invaded would just add fuel to my mental loop of obsessive fears, and there’s no need to make my OCD combat any harder than it has to be.

Elliott doesn’t take the bait. The match burns out to a watery blue flame and then vanishes. The sharp smell of smoke tickles my nose. The acridness reminds me of the fog, and I hold my breath until it dissipates.

Another match scratches in the dark and a new tiny light flares. Elliott steps onto the next landing with a metallic rattle. “I wasn’t the shadowseeker then,” he says, his tone so even that I can barely detect the anger he’s got under tight control beneath it. I stop on the stairs and narrow my eyes. Did he say the shadowseeker, not a shadowseeker?

Cautiously, I prod him. “What were you, then?”