I don’t wait for him to come at me again. I throw myself at him before he can move, blinded by the urgency of shutting him up, of stopping him before he can say any more awful things. He’s ready for me, of course. He ducks sideways, snakes one arm under mine, yanks me around and punches me hard in the side of the head.

My skull rings. I stagger sideways, trip over something soft, hit the ground. When my vision clears, I’m on the asphalt staring into Braedan’s empty eye sockets. His glasses are still hanging over what’s left of his nose. One lens is intact, the other shattered. Lightning flashes again. The fog catches its light, and the intact lens glimmers with its reflection.

I freeze. Its reflection.

I sold Braedan these glasses. His own glasses, which had been confiscated, because they’d been added to the Reflectivity Index.

The lightning’s blue hue has faded from the fog around me. But it hasn’t faded from the glasses. There, the reflection is swirling, intensifying, thickening. A rainbow sheen washes over the mirror—and then a black mass begins to coalesce behind it.

Something twinges inside my abdomen. The feeling intensifies and spreads until it feels like a rope wrapped around my waist, tugging me forward. An invisible electric field buzzes over my skin.

I put my hands on the ground. I push myself backwards until I hit the dead tree. “Ackermann,” I croak.

A shadow crawls out of the lens. It’s a few inches long, a thing with gleaming pincers, too many eyes, too many legs. A fat stinger curls above its back and darkness drips from its tip like acid. Its features are distinct, impossibly vivid, each of its tiny scales rendered in hues of charcoal and ebony. The monster looks like a twisted version of the scorpion I brushed off my shoe earlier, but this one is far from harmless—and it’s not alone. In the lens behind it, the onyx shadows are still writhing. Another scorpion Being crawls out. Then another, and another. A dozen. Two dozen.

I scramble sideways. I trip over Braedan’s leg, kick hard to propel myself across the concrete. The scorpions scuttle after me. Where their stingers drip on Braedan’s body, his flesh sizzles and turns black. One of the Beings reaches my shoe. I shake my foot violently, but the creature’s pincers clamp tight on my shoelaces and now two more are skittering toward me, the clatter of their claws against the asphalt audible even over the rain. I remember hearing about the spiderlike Beings that came out of a mirror back on the island, remember the way their victim—a girl my age—had screamed when they’d bitten her. The way she’d writhed and wailed for hours after being “rescued,” her arm slowly turning black and falling off before she finally died.