“Bea, I need to talk to you,” I whisper.

“No!” she says firmly, shaking her head.

“Bea, this is important.”

“NO!” she says again, her voice ratcheting.

I glance up at the others in the room—our parents. They look confused. Their eyes shift from Bea to me. Seeing them here, like this, after so long, makes my lungs fill up with air. I feel like bursting. Like hurling myself across the room at them, hugging them both. But something tells me to wait. I turn my back on the room and face Bea. I hold her shoulders and spin her towards me. She tries to turn away, but I don’t allow it. “This isn’t them, Bea. This isn’t real.”

“Ana,” she says, squirming. “What do you mean, real?”

She pulls away and I haul her back and turn her face to mine. I can’t even blame her. She’s been trapped here for how long—weeks? Months?

“Look at me, Bea. All this…it’s an illusion. It’s not real. I know it seems beautiful, I mean, of course it does. Your dad. I can’t imagine what it must feel like, seeing him again. And my parents, under one roof. It’s incredible. But it’s not real.”

“And that matters?” she says.

“Yeah. It matters.”

“Why?” she says. “What’s wrong with living here? Can’t you see, Moon? My dad, he’s alive here. He’s alive. And your parents, look at them, they’re together. All that pain. That hurt. It’s gone.”

I grab her at the elbow and yank her arm.

“It’s not real, Bea. These people…they’re not what you think. They may look like them, they may even behave like them, but they are not them. It isn’t real.”

“So what? What do I care what’s real?”

I pull her backward with me through the open doorway, down the passage to the hall. She resists, but I’m stronger.

“I need to show you something,” I say. “Just…trust me, OK?”

“Show me what?” she says, struggling against me.

We get to the front door and I turn awkwardly, still holding her arm, and I fling open the door. We’re hit by bright sunlight. “This,” I say.

As far as the eye can see, in every direction around the house, is a sea of golden wheat. No roads. No houses. No cars. Wheat. That’s all. Like something out of a cereal ad. Blue, cloudless skies and golden wheat, drifting in the breeze. I let Bea go and we stand at the door, staring out at Kronos. I think about the soaring skyscrapers of Lūna and the falling red ash and the devastation of Ares. I think about Gabe, dropping from the sky. Tir and AM-41, a poncho-wearing cyborg. I think about freight surfing and kissing Malik and underwater cities and pyramids in the sky. And Reapers.