The dust settles. Elliott and I are trapped between the two downed trees, which shelter the spot where we’re standing so the wind isn’t quite so strong. The totaled car forms the third leg of the triangle. I stare at the freshly felled pine, its branches on one end and upended roots on the other disappearing into the fog.

My first two fears came true. Lightning. Debris.

The third fear was a mirror.

I squeeze my eyes shut and clamp my hands over my head. My breathing is loud, uneven. Elliott’s safety measures aren’t working anymore. My thoughts are acting on the world, unfettered. I can’t look at anything. If I don’t look at anything, I won’t see the mirror, I won’t bring a Being. The only way I can stay safe is to keep my eyes closed.

I laugh out loud. It sounds more like a rattling gasp. The familiarity of this response—huddling into myself, trying desperately to stay safe, not daring to look up for fear of what I might see—is achingly familiar. This is how I used to deal with my OCD. Keep your head down, try not to think about what terrifies you. Try not to think about how the fear that it might come true is worse than actually having a Being right here in front of me. Because if I were facing a monster, I could run, I could hide.

But I can never get away from myself.

“Ackermann!” I shout over the wind and rain. “You’ve got to focus!” You’ve got to help me, I want to say, but I bite down hard on the words and they stay thrashing and unspoken in the back of my throat.

There’s no answer. I stumble forward blindly. Fingers clamp around my arm. I go still. The hand is warm, but the grip is painfully tight.

It could be Elliott. Or it could be something else.

I keep my eyes shut. “Help me,” I say finally, the words trembling on the air, twisting like a fish caught on a line.

The storm howls. The wind savages my poncho, the rain pelts my face.

“He wasn’t a mainlander,” Elliott says at last, in a voice I can barely hear above the storm.

The relief that it is Elliott who has ahold of me is so staggeringly great that it takes me a moment to register his tone. It’s flat and cold, and it makes me remember his expression when his mother exiled him: empty eyes, a face carved from steel and bone.

I shake off the image, my eyes still squeezed tightly shut. “What are you talking about? I don’t—it doesn’t matter! You have to focus on—”

“Open your eyes,” he says, still in that dead tone.

I breathe. The air shudders into my lungs, flees back out. “I can’t.”