Refraction Read online

  “Come on,” Elliott calls. I have to finish my fifth round of double-checking before I can tear myself away from the dead bolts, turn around, and walk down the stairs.

  It’s a basement. Bunk beds in one corner, with thin green military-esque blankets and pillows. A bathroom with a tiny shower. A dresser, with fresh clothing folded on top of it. A big, humming matte-black contraption in the far corner that I’m guessing is the emergency generator responsible for the electricity. And taking up half the room: rows and rows of metal shelves, all loaded with prepackaged food.

  Elliott grins. “It’s a decommissioned prepper hideout. I visited it once on a Scout outing somewhere outside Madrigal, but it was years ago and I couldn’t remember exactly where it was except that it was across the street from a gas station. So I just walked into the woods hoping to find it somewhere nearby, and—here it is. Just like I remembered.”

  I stare at him, aghast. “You did what?”

  He takes in my expression. His smile fades. “What’s wrong? I brought us a prepper hideout just by thinking about it, for God’s sake. This is the best news we’ve had all day!”

  I try to gather myself. “This is nice. Very helpful. Food, gas, electricity, locks on the doors to keep out the Beings. But have you even bothered to think about what else we can do with our thoughts? What I could do with my thoughts?” The words get louder until I’m shouting, my voice wavering under the strain. I feel like I’m going to break—the anxiety, the horror, it’s so strong it’s finally just going to snap me in half.

  Elliott’s eyes narrow. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No!” I’ll have to tell him. He needs to understand. I start pacing. “Look. I have OCD. Obsessive fears and compulsions that I do to try to stop my fears from coming true. I used to have to keep my keys in different pockets so I’d always know which doors were locked. Had to check doors after I locked them, to make sure they were really locked, over and over again. Three times. Five times. When things got really bad, sometimes it was all night long.” I wave at the door above us. “I tap door frames to make sure I’ll be safe in each room.”

  He frowns. “I noticed you tapping the doors, but I didn’t know it was OCD. What does that have to do with anything though?”

  “OBSESSIVE FEARS,” I repeat at a yell. “Didn’t you hear me? Obsessive. Meaning I can’t stop thinking about the things I’m afraid of. Like unlocked doors that will let a Being in. Or a hundred hidden mirrors that we don’t see until it’s too late. Or this whole place caving in on us, leaving us buried and suffocating. I’m very imaginative, I promise you.”

  The danger finally registers for him. “Oh,” he says at last.

  “Yeah. Oh.” I ball up my hand and punch the railing as I pass it during my pacing. I have to do something, have to find a way to negate the danger. But how can I negate the danger when the danger is coming from my own thoughts?

  Oh, God. This is my worst nightmare.

  “I went to therapy for months before I got better,” I tell Elliott, my voice raw with agony. “I had to learn to accept my fears. To be okay with uncertainty instead of turning myself inside out trying to be certain I was safe. I had to figure out how to let my intrusive thoughts exist without trying to force them away.”

  “Well, can’t you do all that now?”

  “No!” I shout, wheeling on him. “Because now my obsessive fears might actually come true.” I turn back to pacing. Maybe if I can wear myself out I’ll calm down, be able to control my thoughts better.

  Elliott steps forward and grabs me by the shoulders, forcing me to stop. “But they could come true before too.”

  “What? No! No, I’ve never been able to make gas cans and farmers market stands and prepper hideouts appear by—imagining them into existence, or whatever!”

  “That’s not what I mean. You just said you had to learn how to be okay with uncertainty, right? So your obsessive fears faded not because you were ever able to make sure they could never happen, but because you accepted the possibility that, however small the chances, they might.”

  I stare at him. Slowly, my therapy reasserts itself. “Yeah,” I say finally.

  “And what you’re doing now, trying not to think about dangerous things. Is it working?”

  “Not at all,” I say bitterly. “The harder I try not to think about something, the more I think about it.”

  He turns me around, hands still on my shoulders, and propels me toward the bunk beds. “Then stop trying. You can think about all the terrifying things you want. They might happen, they might not, but trying to avoid thinking about them apparently only makes it worse. In the meantime, I’ll concentrate on keeping everything locked and safe and hiding us from the Beings. So between you thinking of scary things and me thinking of safe things, we’ll probably have about the same odds of getting eaten by a Being that we would’ve had if we weren’t able to control anything with our thoughts.”

  His words startle me enough that I don’t fight him when he pushes me across the room. Instead, I mentally go back over what he’s said and prod his plan for holes. It might be because I’m so exhausted I can’t think straight, but his idea actually sounds reasonable. Some of the terrible pressure, the responsibility of trying to keep my thoughts from acting on my world, eases. Not all the way—but enough to let me relax, just a little.

  He pushes me onto the bottom bunk. “Go to sleep,” he orders, almost gently. “I know you didn’t get any rest last night, which can’t be helping this situation. I slept plenty, so I’ll stay up and focus on keeping things locked down until we can get back on the road.”

  I look at the bed. I am exhausted. And his plan sounds like it might work. I can’t be sure I’ll be safe—but then, I never can be, can I?

  Elliott settles down into a chair next to the bed and puts his hands behind his head, leaning back. He’s telling the truth. He’ll stay here, awake and watching, keeping us safe while I’m asleep. A surprised sort of security steals over me. I remember huddling with Ty in my room while a hurricane raged outside. I can still feel the way he ruffled my hair: It’ll have to go through me first.

  “Thanks,” I say to Elliott, the word laced with something I can’t quite name.

  “Go to sleep,” he repeats firmly.

  I close my eyes and obey.

  When I wake up, it’s storming again—a fact I’m able to deduce from the four inches of steadily rising water that’s flooded the floor.

  I sit up in bed. “Great. My shoes just dried,” I say aloud, looking balefully at the sloshing brown water. Then the sleep clears, and I remember where we are and how we got here, and the conversation I had with Elliott earlier. Anxiety slams into my brain like a car crash. But this time, it comes with anger.

  This is a ridiculous situation. It should be impossible. It seems designed especially to torture me, and I have no way to fight back. I’m forced to rely on Elliott to keep me safe, which is beyond humiliating. I should be able to fend for myself.

  I rub my hands through my hair, trying to force myself to focus on the techniques I learned from my therapy sessions with Dr. Washburne. Anger is useful, I remember. I just have to channel it in a productive direction: at the OCD that’s disrupting my life, not at myself for being vulnerable. That’s what helped me recover in the first place—getting angrier at my OCD than I was afraid of it and using that energy to push myself through the hardest parts of exposure and response prevention therapy. I don’t know how much good it’ll do me in this situation, though.

  Elliott breaks into my thoughts. “I can’t do anything about the shoes, but there’s fresh clothes over there.”

  I glance up. He’s draped in an oversized black poncho, standing next to the metal shelves, rifling through boxes and stuffing supplies into a big green duffel bag. He motions at the dresser, where a fresh set of clothes waits.

  I narrow my eyes at the dresser. “Are those clothes imaginary?” I ask. “If I put them on, will they disappear later?”

&n
bsp; He shrugs, grabbing a few packets of what look like dried banana chips and tossing them in the bag. “Warm and dry and imaginary is better than wet and cold and real, in my book.”

  I swing my feet out of the bed and onto the floor. My stomach grumbles and I slosh through the water toward the shelves in search of breakfast. Or—dinner? I have no way of telling time in this bunker.

  “We’re going to have to head out pretty quick,” Elliott informs me. “We need to reach the airport before the hurricane strengthens.”

  “Why can’t we just wait it out here?”

  He nods at the ankle-high water. “Apparently there’s a reason this place was decommissioned. It just started raining again ten minutes ago. At this rate, we’re going to be swimming in about an hour. Plus if the eye wall is headed this direction, it might damage the planes—which means we’ll need to try to take off as soon as we get there, before it hits. Luckily I have at least a little experience flying in storms.”

  I raise my brows. He seems suddenly much more eager than before to fly us to London. I’m glad he’s come to his senses, but I’m positive that taking off in the fog, in the middle of a hurricane—even a small one—isn’t going to be nearly as easy as he makes it out to be.

  At least we have provisions now, though. I reach the shelves and tear open a box. It’s prepackaged freeze-dried meals. I make a face; at least back on the island, we had fresh-caught fish included in our rations. I pull another box over to check it and then stop. If I think hard enough about a steaming plate of lasagna, will it appear in here?

  Unease mingles with my anxiety. The mixture slowly eats through my veins, like rust through an old fence. I shake my head. “You know what I hate most about all this?”

  Elliott’s on the other side of the shelf. He glances at me from between the boxes. “Besides the evil monsters made of darkness that want to devour us?”

  I ignore him. “I hate not knowing what’s real. If I eat this food, will it actually nourish me? And the bodies, back at the hospital—if they were only missing because you remembered the hospital without them, then where did the actual bodies go? Were they there the whole time and we just couldn’t see them? Did they stop existing? Can you do that?” It’s terrifying, to think my mind, or anyone’s, might have that much power.

  I look back down at the box between my hands. Here’s one way I could find out just how powerful my thoughts are. Biting back my trepidation, I concentrate on Mom’s lasagna, the kind she used to make after she’d left us alone all night to go clubbing or had to work a double shift at one of her jobs. Guilt lasagna, my brother and I called it. It was my favorite meal because the only time I ever felt like we were a real family was when we were all sitting together eating it.

  When the image is so strong in my mind that I can almost smell the meat sauce, I open the box. It’s full of freeze-dried peaches. I push it to Elliott, trying to hide my relief. “You need to imagine us some better food, because apparently I’m no good at it.”

  “Sorry, you’re up a creek. Both literally and metaphorically,” he adds, wading through the now shin-high water to grab two flashlights and a handful of batteries from the next shelf over. “I did some experimenting while you were asleep. I figured instead of driving to the airport, why not try to just conjure up a plane right here? But it didn’t work. Apparently we can only change things—and only relatively small things, as far as I can tell—when our subconscious can reasonably expect those things to appear in that particular way. So I can find a prepper hideout across from a gas station just the way it was during my Scouting trip in this area, but I can’t summon a three-layer cake from thin air or, unfortunately, imagine up a cellar door that doesn’t leak.”

  “So there are limits.” I cling to the thought with all my might, and try to ignore what a weak reassurance it is. Accidentally imagining the door unlocked is well within the realm of reasonable, and it can get us killed just as easily as anything else out here.

  Elliott pauses in the act of zipping the duffel bag closed, apparently hearing the tension in my voice. “You okay?”

  I grab the clothing. He’s right about warm and imaginary being better than real and soaked, I suppose. “No,” I answer, “but let’s go anyway.” I turn and start toward the door before I can lose whatever scraps of courage are left to me.

  Behind me, he sighs long-sufferingly. “It’s fine, don’t worry, I’ll carry the enormous bag full of supplies for both of us, which I painstakingly packed all by myself.”

  “I’m just looking out for you,” I reply over my shoulder. “You’ve got all that muscle … wouldn’t want it to atrophy from disuse or anything.”

  A folded poncho hits me in the back of the head. I catch it before it slides into the water and pull it on, smothering a smirk. I tuck the clean clothes into the poncho’s large internal pockets.

  Then I’m standing beneath the door. Streams of rain waterfall down from its seams, splattering my poncho. I wrap my fingers gently around the handle. It’s still locked, both dead bolts drawn closed. Thanks to Elliott’s concentration.

  I glance back at him. He’s shrugging the bag’s strap over his shoulder, wading toward the stairs behind me, not saying a word about how my presence is a liability or how maybe he’d be better off on his own. I was asleep on the bed for who knows how many hours and he didn’t abandon me.

  Yesterday, he was my enemy. I was a mirror dealer and he was the shadowseeker. But now … I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of him. I’ve told him about the most vulnerable parts of myself, and he accepted them without a quibble. We’d both likely go back to trying to kill each other in a hot second if we weren’t dependent on each other for survival—after all, he did get me arrested, and I did sell his brother a telescope—but still, at this moment and in this place, something feels different between us.

  I flip the dead bolts and push the door open.

  The wind catches it immediately, ripping it out of my grip and nearly yanking my arm out of its socket in the process. I stagger and throw my hands up to shield my eyes from the driving rain. The wind is screaming like a wildcat, tearing at my poncho. It’s pitch-black out; I must’ve slept through the whole day and into the night.

  Something scuttles across my shoe. I jolt and shake it off: a little brown scorpion, probably looking for somewhere dry to shelter. It skitters down the stairs and onto a floating pile of debris. “Good luck,” I mutter.

  Elliott glances up at my words and spots the floating scorpion. His eyes go wide and he leaps sideways away from it, splashing loudly and nearly knocking the dresser over when he runs into it. The waves he makes topple the debris, dunking the scorpion into the water where we can no longer see it. At this development, Elliott launches himself toward the stairs, vaulting over the railing to land on a dry step behind me. He shudders, shaking the folds of his poncho as if the scorpion might have teleported into his pocket.

  He spots me watching. “Shut up,” he mutters, flushing, and pushes past me into the night.

  I raise my hands in surrender as I follow him. I have a thousand snarky observations I could make about his fear of a relatively harmless creepy-crawly, but he didn’t make fun of my issues, so I won’t make fun of his.

  We stagger through the storm. It’s a good thing Boy Scout seems to have an internal compass, because there’s no way I’d be able to find the car again in these conditions. The poncho whips around my knees and arms as I lurch from tree trunk to tree trunk, using the pines to steady myself against the wind. Bits of bark flake off on my hands and the rain quickly washes them away.

  I squint through the fog. It’s patchy here, thinner than earlier today, but I still can’t make out anything farther than a few yards ahead of me. If a Being attacked right now we’d be completely and utterly screwed. We haven’t seen any on our drive yet, though, just the one in the garage this morning. And that kind of freaks me out—it’s like they’re toying with us, waiting for the right time to strike.

  “U
p here!” Elliott shouts, his voice wavering through the wind. Headlights flick on and I follow the beams to the Camaro. The passenger’s side is closest, so I throw myself into it and slam the door. The noise of the storm cuts to about half as loud as it was before. I start to take off my poncho, then think better of it and quickly use it as a tent to change under. The dry clothing feels soft and cottony, but my skin still crawls where the imaginary fabric touches it.

  Part of me wishes I could be excited about the possibilities of thinking things into existence, the way Elliott is. The way almost anyone else would be. The people back on the island, they’d all be thrilled to have soft clothes, extra food, running vehicles. As far as I’m concerned, though, it’s just a massive relief that this mind-control magic or whatever it is never worked there. It would’ve made the whole last year a living hell.

  I pause at the thought, frozen in the act of stuffing my poncho in the backseat. A theory spins itself out in my mind.

  Elliott interrupts my thoughts from the driver’s seat. “I went ahead and started the engine,” he explains with a nod at the twisted-together wires that are dangling from the exposed steering column. “Guess I did it right, since nothing exploded. I tried to make another gas can appear too, just to top us off, but apparently that’s only reasonable enough to work once. We should be okay for fuel anyway though.”

  I’m still in my own head, but at his words I glance at the gas gauge. We have just enough to reach the airport, which is about a two-hour drive from here, if I’m guessing correctly. We’ll be backtracking, retracing most of the path the helicopter flew to dump us out here. Once we take off we might even be able to see Cisco Island.

  Elliott eases the car onto the road and accelerates. The wipers work frantically to combat the rain, but it’s a losing battle. We creep along at about twenty miles per hour, which makes me itchy with nerves—the Being we fought earlier could run much faster than this—but the weak headlights and heavy rain make it hard to see and we can’t risk wrapping the Camaro around a tree. At least we don’t have to worry about traffic. Other than the dump truck, there’s not a single other vehicle on the road.