I ignore it. “You’re so blindly loyal to your mother, so desperate to think she’s somehow a good person, that you’ve managed to excuse her exiling your own brother. Exiling you, even! And do you know why you’re so desperate to believe she’s good?”

“Enlighten me,” he bites out, daring me to answer.

I never turn down a dare. “Because if she’s a good person,” I say, “then she might actually love you back.”

I don’t see the punch coming. Elliott is too fast, lashing out with that brutal left hook of his. It sends me staggering sideways, agony shooting through my cheekbone.

“You really think you have any right to lecture me about family?” he seethes, not even shaking out his hand. “Your business gets people killed. Do you seriously think your brother would’ve been okay with that?”

Something warm and wet mingles with the rain that trickles down my face. I swipe a hand across it; it comes back watery red. “Shut the hell up,” I order, my voice groggy with the pain and shock. I should’ve known he’d lash out. I would’ve been prepared for it yesterday. But tonight, after the way he talked me down in the hideout, after he protected me from a Being while I hot-wired the car—it put me off my guard. It let me forget that neither of us can change what we are.

But Elliott isn’t done. He’s shaking, glowering at me, his brother’s body shadowed at his feet. He wants to hurt me the way I’ve hurt him. “Do you seriously think Ty would still love you after what you’ve done?” he demands. “That he’d even want you back, if he was still alive?”

Anger flickers in my veins, sparks through a live wire. I straighten up. “Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.”

Something in Elliott’s expression shifts subtly, hardens, goes cold. “He is dead,” he says.

I don’t move. Lightning cracks again nearby, flashing the world a brilliant white, making the fog gleam and shimmer.

“What?” I say at last.

“He is dead,” Elliott repeats. His words are a scalpel’s cut: measured, cleanly vicious. “There is no London. No Singapore. They’re a lie, a way for my mom to keep everyone calm and hopeful and under control. There’ve never been any ham radio signals. No signals of any kind. The whole world is dead; Cisco Island is the only thing left.”

The smell of ozone is almost gone now. Traces of it linger in the air like ghosts. After a moment, even they are driven away by the wind.

I swallow. I’m shaking now too. “You’re lying.”

“No.”

“You’re LYING!” The scream is swallowed by the rain, by the dead trees, by the body at Elliott’s feet.