Refraction Read online

  “Did it work?”

  “She exiled me. What do you think?”

  The air between us thickens. I ignore the warning in it. “I think you should’ve guessed she’d exile you,” I tell him frankly. “Did you really think she’d make an exception, after you broke the law, after what she did to Braedan when he broke the law?”

  Up ahead, a shape rises out of the fog. I tense until I register that it’s a green road sign—not a Being—but it recedes into the fog behind us before I get the chance to read it.

  Elliott’s lips turn up in an expression that’s too sharp to be called a smile. “I was willing to take that risk if it meant ridding the island of every last mirror dealer. That’s why I became the shadowseeker, after all.”

  Ah, here we are again, at this conversation. “The shadowseeker?” Another sign flashes past, but I don’t even look at it, too focused on the topic at hand now.

  “Yeah. ‘The.’ After Braedan got exiled for possessing reflective material, I made it my personal mission to hunt down every black market dealer on the island. I went undercover, again and again, to locate the proof my mom needed to arrest them.”

  “And exile them,” I say, anger quickening in my gut. “Sam Garcia, did you arrest him too? He was underage. Seventeen. And your mom made him walk Valkyrie Bridge.” I remember the way I felt when the officers started dragging him toward the fog, when I saw the panic in his eyes. Not that I’d liked the guy, or even known him—but no one deserved what he’d had to face. Or what we’re facing now.

  Elliott’s arm is resting next to the window. His hand curls into a fist. “His business put the whole island in danger.”

  “You didn’t hunt him down, hunt any of us down, because we put the island in danger,” I accuse, my fingernails digging into the steering wheel’s leather. The speedometer starts creeping up again, and I have to force myself to slow back down to fifty. “You did it because you wanted revenge for your brother. Because you wanted to make your mom proud of you, wanted to protect her from us just like you ‘protected’ her from that politician—even though she, not the mirror dealers, was the one who fed Braedan to the Beings. Do you still want to make her proud, now that she’s exiled you, too?”

  “Shut up,” he warns, his voice low, his eyes on the road.

  “No,” I say more loudly, the anger sparking and brightening. “You helped her put dozens of people on that bridge. Your blind loyalty to her makes you just as bad as any dealer—”

  “No,” Elliott snaps, and stabs a finger at the window. “Shut up, and look.”

  There’s another green road sign just ahead. I glance at it—and slam my foot on the brakes.

  The car fishtails. The smell of burning tires filters into the Camaro. We come to a stop a few yards past the sign.

  My hands are clamped like a vise on the wheel. My foot is still on the brake pedal, bearing it all the way to the floor. I turn my head and look outside: towering pencil-thin pines, clumps of tufted wire grass, two-lane asphalt highway, fog. Nothing unusual.

  Except for that sign. I only had a second to read it, but it was enough.

  Elliott and I look at each other silently. After a long moment, I shift gently into reverse, take my foot off the brake, and ease the car backwards. The back of the sign approaches. I keep going until we can see the lettering on the front. I read it.

  YOU DID IT BECAUSE YOU WANTED REVENGE FOR YOUR BROTHER, the sign reads, in reflective white lettering on the green background.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GOOSE BUMPS RAISE ON MY ARMS. I SWIVEL IN MY seat, stare blindly into the fog for whoever could’ve … what, put the sign here? They would’ve had to have known in advance what we’d be talking about, our exact wording, exactly where we’d be when we said it.

  “How?” is all I can manage.

  Elliott’s gaze is still glued to the white lettering. “The other signs,” he says.

  I hit the gas again. We reverse back down the road at an unsafe speed, swerving crazily. Confusion and foreboding tangle in the pit of my stomach.

  The prior sign comes back into view. I slow enough to read it. THAT’S WHY I BECAME THE SHADOWSEEKER, AFTER ALL.

  “What,” Elliott says quietly, “the hell.”

  I hit the gas again, doing forty in reverse now. It’s reckless. I don’t care. My confusion strengthens, the foreboding mushrooming into fear.

  The third sign rises out of the mist. Before the car comes to a complete stop, Elliott has the door open and he’s climbing out, striding through the waist-high wire grass to read it. It’s incredibly dangerous in this fog, with the mainland full of who knows how many Beings lurking who knows where, but I clamber out too. Fuzzy tufts of grass shed onto my jeans as I come around the car and join Elliott in front of the sign.

  THERE SHOULD BE ROAD SIGNS AROUND HERE AT SOME POINT, AND I DON’T WANT TO MISS THEM.

  “I never said that.” My voice is too loud. It rings in my ears.

  Elliott frowns. “It doesn’t match the others, then. So, what? It’s … a pattern? A puzzle? A message? This one is important for some reason?”

  “No,” I correct his assumption, unable to tear my eyes away from the reflective white letters. “I never said that out loud.”

  Elliott looks at me. He looks back at the sign.

  “I thought it,” I tell him. Something—my heartbeat?—is roaring in my ears. “I thought it, in this exact wording, and then it appeared on a road sign ahead of us.”

  Elliott stares at me for a long moment. Then: “Get back in the car.” The words crack through the fog like gunshots.

  I bolt. The doors slam. He buckles his seat belt. I do mine too, but it doesn’t make me feel safer. I shift back into drive and put my foot on the pedal, shoving it to the floor.

  Forty miles per hour. Fifty. Seventy. The engine sputters and then catches again, running on fumes now.

  “The road signs know our thoughts,” Elliott says at last.

  “I don’t—I don’t know.” I keep my eyes glued on the road, afraid to look at anything other than the asphalt.

  “Is this the aliens messing with us? Are they mind readers or something?” His voice is too calm. He shouldn’t be calm. He should be raging, panicked, petrified.

  Mind readers. I don’t want anyone in my mind. It’s bad enough I have to be in there. If the aliens can read my thoughts, root out my compulsions, spy on my fears … I don’t stand a chance.

  The engine sputters again. I press the pedal all the way to the floor, as if I can keep it going by sheer force of will. “We need to find some fuel right the hell now,” I say, my voice tight. I glance around, desperate for a gas station or another vehicle we can siphon fuel from. Anything that would keep me from getting stuck in the middle of this road, forced to walk unprotected through fog and Beings and maybe-telepathic aliens.

  The engine dies.

  Silence. It crackles all around us, static in the air, ringing in my ears.

  I keep one hand on the steering wheel as the car coasts. With the other I reach down and snatch the starter wire, sparking it against the ignition and battery wires. The engine coughs for a few seconds. The radio turns on automatically again, and the chorus of “Stand by Me” plays at full volume.

  The engine sputters back out. The music keeps going, fraying my nerves. I reach out a hand to smack the off button.

  “Wait,” Elliott says suddenly before I can touch it. “That happened earlier, too, didn’t it? The music. It came on in the garage, when you first started the car.”

  I nod, not seeing how music matters at all right now, white-knuckling the steering wheel as the car slows to sixty and then fifty.

  Elliott is frowning at the dashboard. “This car doesn’t have a CD player or a tape deck, though,” he says. “Just the radio. But somehow …”

  He turns the music off. Silence fills the car, louder than before, until Elliott presses the button again. “Stand by Me” continues.

  No. Not “continues.” It st
arts up again—in exactly the same spot it did a moment ago, at the beginning of the chorus.

  Elliott slides the little lever to switch through the FM stations. The chorus starts over and over again on each and every one.

  I’m frozen at the wheel. “That’s … how are you doing that?”

  Elliott shakes his head, still looking at the dial under his hand. “Callahan. The entire mainland is dead, empty. Covered in fog. There shouldn’t be anything on the radio.”

  The second he says it, the song cuts out to static.

  I turn my head slowly. I stare at him. The static is so loud, it’s making it hard to breathe.

  “A song that plays on every station,” he says, still too calm, too logical. How can he be so logical right now? “Road signs that can hear what we’re saying and our thoughts. And there were no bodies in the hospital, and too many cars in the garage. What else has happened that shouldn’t be able to happen? What else might give us a better idea of what we’re dealing with out here?”

  The answer strikes me. I stare at the steering wheel under my hands. “The car,” I say numbly.

  Elliott’s gaze snaps to me. “What?”

  “This is my brother’s car.” I swallow. “It’s the same—color, model, year, everything. Even his tool bag, it was exactly where he kept it. But it can’t be the same car. We watched that car get junked a year ago. And … and, ‘Stand by Me,’ that was his favorite song. He was always listening to stupid old music. Campy stuff.”

  The static is filling up the car like a third presence. I risk taking a hand off the wheel to slap the off button. The silence that takes its place seeps in the same way the darkness did back at the hospital last night, filling up all the cracks, suffocating me.

  “And the key, too,” I remember, trying to force myself to think straight, clinging to lucidity like a drowning man grabbing for a raft. “The key that opened the door on the hospital roof, it shouldn’t have worked. It was my key, to my loft. It had fallen out of my pocket right before you saw it.”

  Elliott’s eyes narrow in thought. A strange expression steals over him. He stares at the dashboard again for a long moment, like he’s trying to concentrate on a difficult riddle, and then, suddenly, he squeezes his eyes shut. “I’ve never been on this road before,” he announces. “I have no idea where it goes or what’s on it.”

  My brow crinkles. “Is that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?”

  He shakes his head. “No, just—look, tell me what you see on the side of the road.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it. Outside, the things we’re passing. Tell me.”

  I hesitate—but there’s an odd note in his voice, something that sounds almost excited. It makes me think he might’ve figured something out. I decide to humor him just in case he really has, and squint through the windshield. We’re coasting at about thirty miles per hour now. After a moment, a bulky, mechanical shape looms through the fog on the side of the road. “It’s—”

  “A broken-down dump truck,” Elliott interrupts.

  I cut a glance at him—his eyes are still tightly shut—then look back at the rusty green and brown truck as it disappears behind us. “Yeah. I thought you said you’ve never been down this road before.”

  “I haven’t. A playground, a mile marker. A little farmers market stand with a yellow sign.” His eyes are still closed. As he names each thing, they rise up in front of us and pass by. The playground has a bright blue slide and three red swings. The mile marker says 221. The roadside stand has a sign that reads A LITTLE FARMERS MARKET STAND WITH A YELLOW SIGN in bold white lettering.

  “What the f—” I start, hitting the brakes so violently that the seat belt cuts off the rest of my words. The farmers market sign is already gone, vanished into the fog behind us. I twist around, straining my eyes, trying to see it.

  “A gas can,” Elliott finishes, and then opens his eyes. He glances at me—and then his gaze goes past me, over my shoulder. Expecting a Being or an alien or, shit, I don’t even know what at this point, I whip around and follow his gaze.

  But it’s not an alien. It’s …

  A gas can.

  For a second I just stare at it. It’s old, dull red and smudged with dirt. It’s sitting next to the caved-in ruin of what used to be a gas station. The nearby pumps are overgrown with vines, useless without electricity to power them—but that doesn’t matter, because I can see from the way the light hits the gas can that it’s full.

  “It’s a trap,” I say finally. My voice sounds tight and foreign. “It has to be. The aliens are planting this stuff, everything you said just now, to lure us out of the car.”

  But Elliott is shaking his head. “They don’t need to trap us. We’re sitting ducks already—and anyway, we were out of the car just a few minutes ago, at the road sign. They could’ve ambushed us then if they wanted to.”

  “Then they’re messing with us. They want to watch us run.”

  If that’s their plan, they’ve devised a good strategy. I want to run. I know there’s nowhere to go, that we’re outmatched and possibly surrounded, but it doesn’t matter. I need to get out of here. I need to at least try to escape. Unbuckle, I think, but I can’t pry my fingers off the steering wheel.

  A door slams. I jerk upright, but it’s just Elliott. He’s striding around the car, grabbing up the gas can. Judging by the way his muscles strain when he carries it, my guess about it being full was right. He stops at the back of the car and shouts, “Open the fuel door!”

  “What are you doing?” I call, struggling to keep my voice down. “Get back in the car, idiot!” He’s going to get eaten. All that work to save him back at the garage, wasted. I laugh, then immediately snap my mouth shut, hearing the edge of hysteria.

  He doesn’t answer for a moment. Then, slowly, his voice muffled through the window, he says: “I have an idea.”

  “Is your idea that you’re about to get us both eaten?”

  “Open the fuel door and I’ll tell you,” he says stubbornly. With a muttered curse, I do as he asks.

  He pours the gas. He drops the can when he’s done and opens the passenger door, remaining miraculously uneaten, at least for now. I wait for him to get back in but he just leans down to look at me, his eyes bright and gleaming. “My idea is that I know what’s happening.”

  “Which is what?” I demand, too loudly, my hands still clamped on the steering wheel.

  He waves a hand at the playground and the mile marker and the roadside stand that are somewhere behind us, swallowed by the fog. “I thought about things I might expect to see on the side of a road. Pictured how they might look as I said them. And then they existed. Exactly the way I imagined them.”

  I finally catch his meaning. Fear slithers down my spine, and a leaden sort of shock seeps into my veins. My hands fall from the wheel and drop, dead weight, to my lap.

  Elliott looks back at me. “It’s not the aliens that are changing this stuff,” he confirms. “It’s us.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I YANK MY SEAT BELT OFF. IT’S TOO CONSTRICTING, cutting off my breathing, but when I thrust myself out of the car I can’t get any more air than before. “How?” I demand. “How is that possible?”

  “I have no idea,” Elliott answers, straightening up. He’s animated, excited. He turns and starts toward the woods, leaving the passenger’s side door hanging open, talking over his shoulder as he goes. “But it has to be true. That key on the roof worked because I expected it to work. There were no bodies because that’s the way I remembered the hospital, from when I was there last time. You found a car just like your brother’s—with his tools, his favorite songs—because …”

  “Because that’s the only car I know how to hot-wire,” I finish, my lips numb. “Because I was looking specifically for something like it.”

  “And earlier, that first road sign, you said you’d thought that, right? That there should be road signs and you didn’t want to miss them?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah,” I manage.

  Elliott disappears into the fog between the pine trunks. His voice weaves out toward me. “So up pop road signs, right when you were thinking about them. But you had no idea what they should say, plus I bet you were concentrating more on our conversation than the road—so the things you were thinking about the hardest, that’s what went on the signs. We’re controlling our surroundings, or at least small elements of them—with our thoughts, our memories, our expectations.”

  I turn in a circle. I stare out into the fog. Patches of it blow across the street and the forest, thickening in spots, wisp-thin in others. The things Elliott willed into existence are less than a block away. If I go inside the little ramshackle stand, will its shelves be stocked? Are our imaginations powerful enough to create a hundred minuscule details with a single sweeping thought?

  Dread clutches a tight fist around my chest. My thoughts are not about gas cans and mile markers. They are not helpful, not easy to control.

  Especially when I’m worried they could actually come true.

  “Yes!” Elliott exults, striding back toward me, his form fuzzy through the fog. “Callahan, come check this out!”

  My legs move. I follow him, trying to keep my mind blank. Empty. A white slate, a clean landscape. But fear and exhaustion are fizzing at the backs of my eyes, making it even harder than normal to keep my thoughts straight.

  It was bad enough when I thought the aliens could read my mind. But me … I trust me even less than I trust aliens. I’ve had my own brain turn against me before, and it was the worst experience of my life. And that was when my thoughts couldn’t accidentally come true.

  Elliott is standing in front of a cement slab the size of a small house, inlaid in the grass. At its edge is a reinforced metal door that opens upward. He pulls on the handle and disappears down some stairs.

  A light turns on. A light. Electricity, where there should be none.

  A white slate. A clean landscape. Don’t think. I tap the frame, follow him down and close the door behind me. There are two dead bolts. I slide them shut. Drop my hand. Then reach up and double-check that I really did lock them. That they’ll stay locked when all I can think about is them accidentally sliding back open.