I squint into the fog ahead. There should be road signs around here at some point, and I don’t want to miss them. I’m pretty sure we’re going the right way—the regional airport I remember is near a town called Pidgeton, I think—but it would be nice to know exactly how far we are from it. Plus, we still need to find gas somewhere. The fuel gauge is hovering on E now.

At my reaction, Elliott relaxes a bit. “My mother didn’t see it that way. ‘Woman sics violent son on opposition’ was the headline of every newspaper, talk show, and political blog in a hundred-mile radius afterward. That asshole blamed her for my ‘attack’ and ended up winning their race anyway.” His words are easy, but his tone is hard, brittle. “Mom was furious; she blamed me. She said if I’d left things alone she could’ve at least gotten some sympathy votes, but after what I did everyone hated her. When we picked up and moved to Cisco Island to start fresh, she made sure no one would use me against her again. She kept me home, had me study to get my GED instead of putting me in another school. She asked me to ‘stay out of the public eye.’”

“So you did,” I say, mentally slotting in another piece of the puzzle that is Elliott. Not only did he take the blame for what had happened, he tried to make up for it by letting his own mother pretend he didn’t exist.

“So I did,” he agrees, one corner of his mouth tilted up in a humorless smile. “While she thrust Braedan into the spotlight, I stayed home, stayed anonymous, and tried my best to make her proud of me again.”

“Flying lessons,” I realize. “Eagle Scout.”

“Yeah.”

“Did it work?”

“She exiled me. What do you think?”

The air between us thickens. I ignore the warning in it. “I think you should’ve guessed she’d exile you,” I tell him frankly. “Did you really think she’d make an exception, after you broke the law, after what she did to Braedan when he broke the law?”

Up ahead, a shape rises out of the fog. I tense until I register that it’s a green road sign—not a Being—but it recedes into the fog behind us before I get the chance to read it.

Elliott’s lips turn up in an expression that’s too sharp to be called a smile. “I was willing to take that risk if it meant ridding the island of every last mirror dealer. That’s why I became the shadowseeker, after all.”

Ah, here we are again, at this conversation. “The shadowseeker?” Another sign flashes past, but I don’t even look at it, too focused on the topic at hand now.