“What are you doing?” I call, struggling to keep my voice down. “Get back in the car, idiot!” He’s going to get eaten. All that work to save him back at the garage, wasted. I laugh, then immediately snap my mouth shut, hearing the edge of hysteria.

He doesn’t answer for a moment. Then, slowly, his voice muffled through the window, he says: “I have an idea.”

“Is your idea that you’re about to get us both eaten?”

“Open the fuel door and I’ll tell you,” he says stubbornly. With a muttered curse, I do as he asks.

He pours the gas. He drops the can when he’s done and opens the passenger door, remaining miraculously uneaten, at least for now. I wait for him to get back in but he just leans down to look at me, his eyes bright and gleaming. “My idea is that I know what’s happening.”

“Which is what?” I demand, too loudly, my hands still clamped on the steering wheel.

He waves a hand at the playground and the mile marker and the roadside stand that are somewhere behind us, swallowed by the fog. “I thought about things I might expect to see on the side of a road. Pictured how they might look as I said them. And then they existed. Exactly the way I imagined them.”

I finally catch his meaning. Fear slithers down my spine, and a leaden sort of shock seeps into my veins. My hands fall from the wheel and drop, dead weight, to my lap.

Elliott looks back at me. “It’s not the aliens that are changing this stuff,” he confirms. “It’s us.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I YANK MY SEAT BELT OFF. IT’S TOO CONSTRICTING, cutting off my breathing, but when I thrust myself out of the car I can’t get any more air than before. “How?” I demand. “How is that possible?”

“I have no idea,” Elliott answers, straightening up. He’s animated, excited. He turns and starts toward the woods, leaving the passenger’s side door hanging open, talking over his shoulder as he goes. “But it has to be true. That key on the roof worked because I expected it to work. There were no bodies because that’s the way I remembered the hospital, from when I was there last time. You found a car just like your brother’s—with his tools, his favorite songs—because …”

“Because that’s the only car I know how to hot-wire,” I finish, my lips numb. “Because I was looking specifically for something like it.”

“And earlier, that first road sign, you said you’d thought that, right? That there should be road signs and you didn’t want to miss them?”

“Yeah,” I manage.