I hear him breathing, the inhale and exhale of lungs contracting. Breath in his lungs—the breath of a boy who sounds alive. But what do I know of dead boys’ lungs? What do I know of any of it? His skin smells of pine and fern—the scent of someone who is more wilderness than boy.

He nods. “Yes.”

My eyes want to well up with tears, but the air is too dry and it saps the moisture from my skin. “I don’t understand,” I say. Any of it. All of it.

“Neither do I.” He shifts slightly, every motion like the battering of wings—an inch too far away, an inch too close. Never close enough. “After you found me in the woods,” he says quietly, as if it were a confession, “you told me that I shouldn’t have survived that long—two whole weeks in the forest. You were right.”

Because he was already dead.

I don’t know if I want to touch him or scream. Pound my fists against his chest and claw at his skin until he bleeds—I’ll make him real. I’m make him bleed and feel pain and then he’ll be a real boy again. The anger is a jagged lump in my throat.

A knife in my back.

His gaze slides to mine, heavy lidded and familiar while the world burns around us. Fire and heat and lies. “I didn’t know,” he tells me, like it’s something he needs to say. To get off his chest. “Not at first. But no one could see me, like I wasn’t even there. Except you.”

Flames devour whole trees on the farthest shore, licking up into the sky, and there is a fire inside my gut, burning me alive. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me?” he asks. “Do you believe me now?”

“No.” How can I believe you.

His gaze lowers and his mouth dips open, his throat fighting against the words. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”

The roar from the fire behind us fills my ears, a beast coming for us—a creature set loose from the woods. It ignites the summer home where Max had been hiding, the trees around it already glowing red-hot as flames chew them apart. Max might still be inside. Or maybe he fled in time. But I don’t care either way. Or maybe I want him to burn—for what he did. He is the killer, not Oliver.

“I’m not afraid,” I say, I admit, even though I know I should be. Of what you are. Of what you aren’t: alive.