At least we have provisions now, though. I reach the shelves and tear open a box. It’s prepackaged freeze-dried meals. I make a face; at least back on the island, we had fresh-caught fish included in our rations. I pull another box over to check it and then stop. If I think hard enough about a steaming plate of lasagna, will it appear in here?

Unease mingles with my anxiety. The mixture slowly eats through my veins, like rust through an old fence. I shake my head. “You know what I hate most about all this?”

Elliott’s on the other side of the shelf. He glances at me from between the boxes. “Besides the evil monsters made of darkness that want to devour us?”

I ignore him. “I hate not knowing what’s real. If I eat this food, will it actually nourish me? And the bodies, back at the hospital—if they were only missing because you remembered the hospital without them, then where did the actual bodies go? Were they there the whole time and we just couldn’t see them? Did they stop existing? Can you do that?” It’s terrifying, to think my mind, or anyone’s, might have that much power.

I look back down at the box between my hands. Here’s one way I could find out just how powerful my thoughts are. Biting back my trepidation, I concentrate on Mom’s lasagna, the kind she used to make after she’d left us alone all night to go clubbing or had to work a double shift at one of her jobs. Guilt lasagna, my brother and I called it. It was my favorite meal because the only time I ever felt like we were a real family was when we were all sitting together eating it.

When the image is so strong in my mind that I can almost smell the meat sauce, I open the box. It’s full of freeze-dried peaches. I push it to Elliott, trying to hide my relief. “You need to imagine us some better food, because apparently I’m no good at it.”

“Sorry, you’re up a creek. Both literally and metaphorically,” he adds, wading through the now shin-high water to grab two flashlights and a handful of batteries from the next shelf over. “I did some experimenting while you were asleep. I figured instead of driving to the airport, why not try to just conjure up a plane right here? But it didn’t work. Apparently we can only change things—and only relatively small things, as far as I can tell—when our subconscious can reasonably expect those things to appear in that particular way. So I can find a prepper hideout across from a gas station just the way it was during my Scouting trip in this area, but I can’t summon a three-layer cake from thin air or, unfortunately, imagine up a cellar door that doesn’t leak.”