Immediately wary at the eagerness in Mirage’s tone, I lean back. “Show me what?”

What happened last year. The fog, the mirrors. Why you’re here. Everything.

I curl the fingers of my left hand, prepared to lift it from the floor. This is nuts. Just because Mirage sounds young and harmless doesn’t mean he is. This could be a trick, a trap. Maybe he’s going to send me back to the Beings. He’s apparently the one who made them in the first place, after all.

But then I look through my black-streaked fingers, at the planet below. At London. At the lights that wreathe it, beautiful and impossible.

Shadows in my veins. Lights on Earth. It’s a choice and not a choice at all.

Because I don’t want to die. Of course I don’t. But most of all, I don’t want it to be the darkness that kills me. I’ve been terrified of it for a year and now it’s inside me, corroding me, one wave of pain at a time. I don’t want to watch it consume me. I don’t want to belong to it. I don’t want any part of it to own any part of me.

If I let Mirage show me what’s happening, maybe I can find a way to help him. A way to get him the energy he needs to heal my wound.

Maybe I can find a way to escape the shadows inside me.

“Okay,” I say. “Show me everything.”

Gently, Mirage reaches into my mind—and then pulls me into his.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I’M IN THE DARK. THIS TIME, THERE ARE NO STARS.

I raise my hands and try to feel around me. Nothing. I spin—and hit a solid surface. Something digs into my arm. I know instantly it’s a doorknob, because I’d know the shape of a doorknob even in my dreams.

I run my hand down the surface in front of me—a door, paint flaking off from it under my fingers—and put my hand on the knob. It feels oddly familiar. A round, cool sphere, except for a small imperfection under my index finger: a tiny scratch etched into the metal, sharp enough to cut skin along its edges. The front door back at my old house, the house Ty and I left last year when he took me to Cisco Island, it had a scratch just like this.

I hesitate, staring into the darkness all around. “Mirage,” I whisper at last, because this expanse of emptiness seems at once too small and too large for anything other than a whisper. “Where exactly am I?”

Your body is exactly where it was a moment ago, he answers.

“So I am in your mind.”

Not quite. I am building a—mental construct for your consciousness to move through.