Refraction Read online

  The body. We’re kneeling in front of the body. Elliott wants me to open my eyes and look at—

  What I’ve done.

  And suddenly, I know whose body is beneath my hand. I don’t want to look at it, but I can’t keep my eyes closed now either, so I open them and look at Elliott instead.

  He’s crying. No. That’s not the right word. No word is quite right, not for this.

  Except maybe broken. Maybe anguish. Maybe hate.

  I tear my gaze from his. But I still can’t look at the body, so I look at the massive tree behind it. This one was felled a long time ago: bare limbs, a few clumps of shriveled brown leaves, twisted roots that have long since been washed clean. Its trunk is scored with gouges. I don’t want to think about what put them there, what felled this tree, what killed the person lying in front of me.

  I can’t delay any longer. I lower my eyes to the body.

  Rotted skin, white bone. It’s gouged too. If the storm wasn’t so violent, if the air wasn’t filled with wind and rain and ozone, the smell would be terrible.

  I raise my eyes a little higher. The single remaining headlight casts sharp shadows over the body, but I can still make out clumps of hair on the corpse’s scalp. He was a blond. Just like Elliott. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt, the same one he was wearing when he walked across Valkyrie Bridge last autumn. His glasses—the glasses I sold him—are crooked, and one lens is broken.

  Braedan Ackermann. The first son the mayor exiled.

  “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to move,” I say, but I don’t stand up. I can’t look away from the body.

  He was my enemy, I tell myself. Just like Ginger. Just like Elliott. It doesn’t matter that his body is in front of me now—I’ve known for a long time that he was dead and that it was because of the things I’d sold him, and I didn’t care.

  But I do now. Because he wasn’t ever actually my enemy, was he? He wasn’t the shadowseeker, wasn’t even some random cop. He was just a guy. The same age as my own brother. The brother that I want back so badly, the brother I’ve been determined to do anything to find.

  And now the cost of my determination is rotting beneath my hands.

  I jolt to my feet, take a step back. Distance myself.

  I still need to find Ty. I’m still willing to do whatever I need to do, for his sake. This doesn’t change anything.

  “You’ve got to focus on keeping us safe,” I say to Elliott. I make my voice strong, clear, certain. The opposite of how I feel. “A mirror is going to appear somewhere, so you have to counter my—”

  “The stars were wrong,” Elliott says in that awful, empty voice, looking at his brother instead of me.

  I stare at him. Thunder booms, shredding the air between us. “What?” I dare to say when it stops.

  “That’s why he needed the telescope. He noticed it a week after the Fracture. Stars disappearing, whole constellations moving independently through the sky. No one else noticed. No one else ever looked up. But he did.”

  I lift my hand. It hovers in the air. I’m not sure what to do with it … put it on his shoulder? Shake him out of his trance?

  “He made it so far,” Elliott says. His voice doesn’t sound empty anymore. Now it sounds like it’s being wrenched out of him by some external force. “He must have walked for days. How many Beings did he have to face before one killed him? How much did he suffer, how many nightmares did he live through while I was safe on the island?” His hands twist into fists in the fabric of his brother’s shirt. “While you were safe on the island.”

  I drop my hand. I say nothing.

  Elliott bows his head. I can’t make out his expression, but once again, I don’t need to. “You’re not even going to admit this is your fault,” he says. It’s not a question.

  I take another step back. My defenses snap into place. “I didn’t do this to him! Your mother—”

  Elliott comes to his feet, his words a roar. “—did what she had to do!”

  My own hands curl into fists. This is ludicrous, arguing about someone who’s been dead for months when the fog is roiling all around us, when a horde of Beings could be waiting on the other side of a mirror that’ll appear at any moment—but my mind is bubbling with panic and horror and something like guilt that I refuse to feel, and lashing out at Elliott gives all that energy a focus.

  “That’s just what you want to believe!” I shout back.

  His eyes are alight, and the hatred from earlier has overtaken the anguish and brokenness. All his energy has found a focus too. “What?” he demands, his voice a low warning.

  I ignore it. “You’re so blindly loyal to your mother, so desperate to think she’s somehow a good person, that you’ve managed to excuse her exiling your own brother. Exiling you, even! And do you know why you’re so desperate to believe she’s good?”

  “Enlighten me,” he bites out, daring me to answer.

  I never turn down a dare. “Because if she’s a good person,” I say, “then she might actually love you back.”

  I don’t see the punch coming. Elliott is too fast, lashing out with that brutal left hook of his. It sends me staggering sideways, agony shooting through my cheekbone.

  “You really think you have any right to lecture me about family?” he seethes, not even shaking out his hand. “Your business gets people killed. Do you seriously think your brother would’ve been okay with that?”

  Something warm and wet mingles with the rain that trickles down my face. I swipe a hand across it; it comes back watery red. “Shut the hell up,” I order, my voice groggy with the pain and shock. I should’ve known he’d lash out. I would’ve been prepared for it yesterday. But tonight, after the way he talked me down in the hideout, after he protected me from a Being while I hot-wired the car—it put me off my guard. It let me forget that neither of us can change what we are.

  But Elliott isn’t done. He’s shaking, glowering at me, his brother’s body shadowed at his feet. He wants to hurt me the way I’ve hurt him. “Do you seriously think Ty would still love you after what you’ve done?” he demands. “That he’d even want you back, if he was still alive?”

  Anger flickers in my veins, sparks through a live wire. I straighten up. “Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.”

  Something in Elliott’s expression shifts subtly, hardens, goes cold. “He is dead,” he says.

  I don’t move. Lightning cracks again nearby, flashing the world a brilliant white, making the fog gleam and shimmer.

  “What?” I say at last.

  “He is dead,” Elliott repeats. His words are a scalpel’s cut: measured, cleanly vicious. “There is no London. No Singapore. They’re a lie, a way for my mom to keep everyone calm and hopeful and under control. There’ve never been any ham radio signals. No signals of any kind. The whole world is dead; Cisco Island is the only thing left.”

  The smell of ozone is almost gone now. Traces of it linger in the air like ghosts. After a moment, even they are driven away by the wind.

  I swallow. I’m shaking now too. “You’re lying.”

  “No.”

  “You’re LYING!” The scream is swallowed by the rain, by the dead trees, by the body at Elliott’s feet.

  Elliott shakes his head. His expression is wild, fierce with anger and hatred and vindication. “Your brother,” he says savagely, “is as dead as mine.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHITE NOISE DROWNS OUT ALL MY THOUGHTS. Adrenaline takes over.

  I scoop up a piece of broken brake light from the ground and pitch it at Elliott. He throws his arm up to shield his eyes, and before he can lower it, I’m on him. I bring my foot down hard on the side of his knee. He curses and staggers sideways, grabs ahold of my arm and wrenches it up behind my back. It hurts like hell, but I follow the momentum, twist around, throw my free elbow at his face. The blow lands on his cheekbone, the same spot where he punched me. He flinches but the pressure on my arm intensifies. He’s going to break it unless I stop him. I’ve got ple
nty of dirty street fighting tricks but he’s all battering-ram power, sharply focused violence, crisp punches that’ll break bone if I let him get ahold of me.

  I go limp. He shoves me forward, up against the huge trunk of the long-dead tree, to avoid being dragged to the ground by my weight. With my free hand I snap off a dead branch next to my face. I stab it blindly backwards. Elliott yells and releases me, dodging. I whirl, shove him hard. I’ve caught him off-balance, and he reels backwards, stumbling into the car. I dart toward him to press my advantage.

  There is no London. The words loop in my head, warping, scattering apart and gluing themselves back together as I try to force them to make sense. Your brother is as dead as mine. There is no London.

  It can’t be true. It can’t. My brain throws information at me, a shield of evidence against Elliott’s words: He was so eager to get to the airport. He drove through a hurricane to try to reach the planes. Why would he do that if he truly believed there was nowhere to go?

  I stop in my advance toward Elliott as a sick realization washes over me. “You were going to take us back to the island. Back to your mother.”

  He pushes himself off the car and wipes blood from the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t say anything but only watches me warily, that wildness still bright in his eyes, waiting for his chance to rush me again.

  I remember more. “That shit about asking for asylum.” My muscles are so tight they ache with the pressure of holding me in, holding out the awfulness of what Elliott’s said and done. “You meant asylum there. You were going to just hand her the information about the fog and hope she’d spare your life in return. You always meant to go back!”

  “It’s the only place we can go!” he shouts.

  I don’t wait for him to come at me again. I throw myself at him before he can move, blinded by the urgency of shutting him up, of stopping him before he can say any more awful things. He’s ready for me, of course. He ducks sideways, snakes one arm under mine, yanks me around and punches me hard in the side of the head.

  My skull rings. I stagger sideways, trip over something soft, hit the ground. When my vision clears, I’m on the asphalt staring into Braedan’s empty eye sockets. His glasses are still hanging over what’s left of his nose. One lens is intact, the other shattered. Lightning flashes again. The fog catches its light, and the intact lens glimmers with its reflection.

  I freeze. Its reflection.

  I sold Braedan these glasses. His own glasses, which had been confiscated, because they’d been added to the Reflectivity Index.

  The lightning’s blue hue has faded from the fog around me. But it hasn’t faded from the glasses. There, the reflection is swirling, intensifying, thickening. A rainbow sheen washes over the mirror—and then a black mass begins to coalesce behind it.

  Something twinges inside my abdomen. The feeling intensifies and spreads until it feels like a rope wrapped around my waist, tugging me forward. An invisible electric field buzzes over my skin.

  I put my hands on the ground. I push myself backwards until I hit the dead tree. “Ackermann,” I croak.

  A shadow crawls out of the lens. It’s a few inches long, a thing with gleaming pincers, too many eyes, too many legs. A fat stinger curls above its back and darkness drips from its tip like acid. Its features are distinct, impossibly vivid, each of its tiny scales rendered in hues of charcoal and ebony. The monster looks like a twisted version of the scorpion I brushed off my shoe earlier, but this one is far from harmless—and it’s not alone. In the lens behind it, the onyx shadows are still writhing. Another scorpion Being crawls out. Then another, and another. A dozen. Two dozen.

  I scramble sideways. I trip over Braedan’s leg, kick hard to propel myself across the concrete. The scorpions scuttle after me. Where their stingers drip on Braedan’s body, his flesh sizzles and turns black. One of the Beings reaches my shoe. I shake my foot violently, but the creature’s pincers clamp tight on my shoelaces and now two more are skittering toward me, the clatter of their claws against the asphalt audible even over the rain. I remember hearing about the spiderlike Beings that came out of a mirror back on the island, remember the way their victim—a girl my age—had screamed when they’d bitten her. The way she’d writhed and wailed for hours after being “rescued,” her arm slowly turning black and falling off before she finally died.

  Frantic, I shove my shoe off with my free foot, leaving the scorpion on my shoelaces behind. I scramble up. The scorpions are a tide now, a crawling mass, a flood. I turn to run from it—but they’re spreading out in every direction, and I’m trapped between the dead trees.

  The car. Its hood is crumpled against the massive, long-dead tree, its trunk crushed by the recently felled one. If I can get on top of it, I can run along the bigger trunk and get to the woods, get away.

  I reach the car, plant my hands on the hood, vault up. The windshield cracks further under my weight. I clamber to the roof.

  It’s only then I think to look for Elliott.

  He hasn’t moved from where he was a moment ago: hands fisted, standing a few feet away from Braedan’s body, a deep purple-red bruise already spreading over his cheekbone like an inkblot. The rest of his face is as gray as the fog that surrounds us. He’s staring at the Beings. I remember his reaction to the normal scorpion earlier. If he was that terrified of a regular, harmless one, these must look like death itself.

  I consider leaving him. After all, this is his fault. If he had kept concentrating on our safety, or if he hadn’t lied to me, I might never have seen the glasses and we wouldn’t be getting attacked now. And after what he’s said, what he’s done … I want to see him hurting. I wouldn’t care if he died. But I still need him in order to survive out here, so I take off my remaining shoe and throw it at him.

  It hits him square in the side of the neck. His head snaps around, his gaze finding me, his eyes going from frozen back to furious. “Get up here if you want to live, douchebag!” I yell, and he finally jolts into motion just a few inches ahead of the scorpions.

  The flood of Beings turns, spreads out across our slice of the road. They swarm the car. Elliott springs onto the hood and then follows me onto the roof. He pushes past—none too gently—and leaps onto the massive tree.

  I eye the distance. The top of the trunk is several feet higher than the roof of the car, and I need to jump from this height to have any chance at sticking the landing, but the distance looks just a little farther than I’m comfortable with. Elliott is much more athletic than me—to no one’s surprise—and he’s hauled himself onto the top of the trunk already. He runs the length of the tree, disappearing into the soupy fog.

  Something explodes with a bang beneath me. A tire. The car jolts, and I nearly lose my footing. Two more tires follow in quick succession, falling victim to the scorpions’ acid. I glance down; the first few scorpions are crawling up onto the hood now.

  I spit out a curse, back up a step, and take a running leap for the tree.

  I don’t make it. My shoeless feet can’t get any purchase and I slide toward the ground, helplessly clawing for a branch, loose bark, anything I can latch on to. Splinters dig in beneath my fingernails. Below me, the scorpions have covered the hood in a tide of shadows. A few of them start to jump toward me. I snatch my legs up and they miss, falling back into the writhing mass on the ground, but all I’ve got to do is slide a few more inches and I’m toast.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. My breath is a high, reedy trembling in my ears. Maybe I should just let go. Stop drawing it out and let them kill me quickly. I don’t want to scream for hours, don’t want to watch myself fall apart before I finally die. And there’s nowhere left to go anyway, nowhere that I’d be able to ever get away from the world full of monsters—either the ones made of shadows or the ones made of flesh and bone like the mayor. But my body overrules my brain and my fingers hook into the tree, scrabbling at it, trying to gain enough purchase to support my weight.

  I drop a few inches lower. I open my eyes;
another Being is leaping off the hood. One of its pincers latches on to the hem of my jeans. I kick wildly, feeling the solid thunk when my foot connects with it, but I can’t manage to dislodge it. Panic wells up, drowns me, pulls me under.

  A hand grasps mine. Elliott. He came back. He hauls me upward, and I push at the tree with my feet, gaining purchase now that I have help. I scramble onto the top, bark scraping at my stomach and arms. The Being on my jeans flails wildly in the air, its stinger plunging downward, missing. Drops of acid hiss and eat into the tree bark.

  Elliott spots the Being. There’s a split second, a held breath, the space between one heartbeat and the next when he’s frozen. And in that second, the scorpion leaps from my pants to his leg.

  In my head, I hear the screams of the spider-bit girl. I see Braedan’s rotted flesh turning black. I see it happening to Elliott.

  A moment ago, I thought I wouldn’t care if he died. It isn’t true.

  My hand moves. It jerks forward. It wraps around the scorpion. The Being is cold and smooth, like volcanic glass, an impossibility writhing in my fingers. I wrench it off before it can sting Elliott and lob it back into the thrashing mass below.

  Elliott’s head snaps up. He stares at me.

  I curl my left hand—the one that was just holding a Being—into a fist. There’s no time to think about what I’ve done or why. “MOVE,” I shout, and then I’m following my own advice, running pell-mell down the length of the massive trunk, dodging broken-off branches and slipping on bits of loose bark. The wind whips at me and rain pelts my poncho, but I don’t slow down. Elliott’s footfalls shake the trunk behind me. The scorpions have started climbing the tree after us but we’ve finally got a lead on them.

  We run blindly into the fog. Within seconds, the dim light from the car’s single remaining headlight is gone and the thick darkness has swallowed us whole.

  I slow down, feel my way forward. The scorpions’ chittering has been swallowed by the noise of the storm. We might actually make it.