The humming is growing louder. It no longer smells of tea, but of ruined engines, of smoke. The sylph looks up from her steaming cup, straight into Tai. I can’t tell if she registers the fear. The danger. “I wanted us all to be safe here,” she whispers. “I wanted us all to be the best we could be.”

“He’s the lumberjack, isn’t he, Mama?” Tai whispers back, reaching for the sylph but never touching her. “You need to help us now.”

But this spirit, this creature, she needs to do nothing. Whatever Tai thinks she is, she’s a figment of the dream of that self.

A metallic bang, and the front door lurches open an inch, and I feel fingers of cold stretching toward us and hear what sounds like the sickening, ripping striking of a match.

The sylph, reaching back toward Tai, shudders—the room goes dark for a moment, all light sucked out with her—and Tai recoils. The stench of an old hearth intensifies, like the mouth of some smoldering beast, opening wide. Tai coughs, and then I feel something sharp pouring into my throat, as thickly felt as a glass of milk with a poison edge.

Smoke.

It’s filling the cabin, fast, and I turn around to see it cascading in through the window I slipped through.

The sylph stands before us, feet bare, more transparent than before. Expressionless, if you don’t count that motherly longing and love she wears like a mask. She flickers out.

“Mama?” Tai shrieks, falling toward the empty space.

The front door shudders open another inch, the little chest jolting toward us, and I feel eyes looking through the gap above it.

Tai faces the front door, shoulders folding in.

“Are we going to die in here?” she asks me.

I take her by the cheeks, sticky-hot with sweat. Alive. “No.”

I rush toward the fireplace and pick up a leftover fire poker. I hand it to Tai and pick up the wrench I’d discarded, turning it in my grip. It’s getting too smoky to bear; each breath is ragged and painful.

“Hide beside the door hinges,” I tell her, “and run out after I hit him.”

She moves, still slack-jawed, fire poker in hand, and when she begins to protest, another blow reaches the door, and the chest flies, bits splintering, into the room. The door swings open on its weakened hinges, and a mountain of a man is there, a heaving shadow even in the dark, storming toward me, the solitary figure visible in the room.

Brando, with three scars drawn across his face.