I sweep my light in a circle. It reflects back, a thousand iterations of me hovering above the monstrous dark. “This forest, these mirrors—you said something like this wasn’t possible. That we weren’t supposed to be able to do anything big or unreasonable. But my thoughts made this happen anyway.”

Elliott’s brow crinkles. “Are you—do you mean, you think we could … conjure up a plane after all, or something?”

There’s a faint stirring of hope in his voice. I squash it. “No. I’m saying, even if we could conjure up a plane, it wouldn’t matter. Because there is nowhere to go. There’s no safe haven here, because we changed the forest, and there’s no safe haven on Cisco Island, because someone changed the stars.”

Elliott swallows. I see the fire start to catch in him too, but in his panic he tries to smother it. He shakes his head. “No. That can’t be what happened. Thoughts can’t change things on the island, there’s no fog there, it’s safe—”

“It’s not the fog that’s doing this. What happened to the stars means that things can be changed on the island. Which means things can be changed anywhere. Which means everything, everything, around us could be imaginary. These woods. The road we were traveling. The hospital—you might’ve just remembered the whole building into existence, the same way you did the prepper hideout. If the stars are wrong, the whole world could be wrong.” I laugh again. The beam from my flashlight jerks wildly with the motion of it. “Nothing is real. Nowhere is safe.”

Elliott lifts his light. At the edge of its yellow circle, a charcoal scorpion crawls out of the forest. Elliott takes a step backwards.

I do too, involuntarily, even though I already know there’ll be no escape this time. Maybe we could get away from the scorpions. We definitely won’t get away from the vast shadow stirring in the mirrors around us, though.

My left hand throbs, and beneath the skin, a cold ache gathers strength. I watch the scorpion Being skitter closer, watch the terror on Elliott’s face, and my wild humor drops away. “Even them,” I realize slowly.

I sweep the flashlight outward. It pans over the dozens, hundreds, of tiny Beings surging through the fog toward us. Elliott, who is scared of almost nothing, is terrified of scorpions—and then a legion of them crawl out of his brother’s glasses. And the foxlike Being from the garage … I’m creeped out by foxes. It’s too much to be a coincidence.

I said a second ago that everything could be imaginary. If the hospital and the Camaro were our memories and the road signs were our expectations, then … “The Beings are our fears,” I say aloud.