Now.

The pain in my shoulders where Thane stabbed me is nothing compared to the way my heart seizes at the memory of Poppa’s death.

I push Thane’s lifeless body on the floor. He had a knife. Where is it?

There!

Just a few feet from me. I grab for it, but someone kicks it out of my reach.

“No, no, no!” I howl. Disappointment crashes into me hard. I try following the blade as it slides across the floor, but someone stomps down on my leg, then grabs a handful of hair.

I meet Lennon’s icelike eyes. My right hand is free to defend, and I send my sharp nails down her face. Her skin comes loose under my nails, and she screams, casting me aside.

“Bitch!”

Influence continues to invade my body, like thick oil, coating and suffocating all the parts of me that like the light.

“Your soul is mine!” Lennon hisses, reaching for me again. I grab her arms and pull hard. She tumbles over me and onto the ground. The impact jars her hold, and then I’m free. I stumble to my feet. My mind still feels split in two, and I understand that as much as I need to be free of Lennon, I also need to be free of Influence. I call the thread forth, just as shadowlike creatures circle me like sharks smelling blood. When they rise to the surface, it’s as thick, tar-like glue. I’m lodged in a puddle of darkling quicksand. I stumble, and my hands are consumed, quashing the thread.

I scream, trying to free myself, when I hear Lennon laugh. She bends so that her eyes are even with mine. “This is for your own good. Once Influence takes hold, you won’t feel so desperate to die. You’ll be used to this feeling of hopelessness and easier to control. Just like Thane.”

At the mention of Thane, I recall the marks on his wrists. Times when he’d cut himself, probably as a result of Influence taking hold.

Suddenly, it feels like someone’s cracking my head open, and I have this renewed determination to win, to defeat Lennon and Influence. I know how Influence corrupts. Grief might be all-consuming, but there are pockets of light, memories that bring a flood of feeling—sadness, yes, but also happiness and love and warmth. Sensations that make the darkness a little more worth it. All I have to do is knock some holes into his darkness.

And so I think about all the nights spent with Poppa on the old quilt Grandma Poppy made, watching the stars. He would spread it out, his crepe-paper hands decorated with brown spots and raised veins.

“Gotta bring Poppy,” he says and winks. “Help me set up the telescope.”

A chasm forms between my mind and Influence. Tendrils of its being reach out, stroking, testing my resolve.