I spin in a slow circle. My light catches on everything and reflects back at me. This is not small. Not reasonable.

Above the din of the storm, a tinkling clatter reaches me: tiny claws on glass. Elliott and I look at each other. The scorpions are still coming for us. And I’ve got a twisted ankle, and a poisoned hand, and we’re surrounded, surrounded, by mirrors.

Something moves in the mirrored tree trunk next to me. A rainbow oil-slick ripple. Then comes the shadow, swallowing up the beam from my flashlight. It flickers, swells across the ground, the grass. It flares and stretches like some great dragon unfurling its wings.

An invisible rope twists around my ribs. It tugs me out toward the tree. Reels me down toward the grass. I’m a fly caught in a spiderweb; there’s nowhere to go.

But insistent as the tugging is, it also feels oddly gentle. And with another wave of agony building up in my hand, a tide of scorpions at my back, and a forest of mirrors all around, some fatalistic part of me almost wants to obey the tugging. To walk toward the mirrors—toward my fears. To fall into my own reflection. To face the coming Beings in whatever twisted alien world they come from, rather than ending my life hunted and tortured here on what’s left of the mainland, drowned in fog, without even a last glimpse of the stars.

The stars. “The stars!” I say out loud. And then I laugh and laugh. The sound reminds me of when I was clawing at the tree’s bark earlier, the ragged scrabbling of it, the way splinters burrowed beneath my fingernails.

Elliott looks at me. His face is pale but set; he’s done running. Which is good, because there’s nowhere left to run. Nowhere we can get away from ourselves. “What exactly is so funny?” he says sharply.

I turn around, point through the darkness toward the road we’ve just left, toward the body of Elliott’s brother. “The stars. You said there was something wrong with the stars. That’s why Braedan wanted the telescope. The stars, the constellations, they kept disappearing and moving in ways the laws of physics shouldn’t have allowed. Well, I don’t think the laws of physics did allow it. I think the stars themselves are still out there, completely normal. It’s just our view of them that’s changed.”

The skittering of claws on glass intensifies. Tiny mirrored pebbles vibrate on the ground in resonance.

“Does that really matter right now?” Elliott says, and in his voice I hear the same fatalism that singed me a moment ago. No brother, no plane, no escape. No point. But a new realization has caught fire in my mind, and it’s burning through everything.