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“Yes,” I whisper, and he gets off me, lifting me to my feet. I can move a little more now, so I lean on him, and we start limping toward the docks.

“Everyone alright?” Wes yells, some of the students picking themselves off the ground, covered in mud, others already running down the ramp.

“We lost Everly!” Hernandez yells.

“There she is!” someone says. “The north lodge.”

We look over to see her running through the door into the building.

“We need to stop her,” I say, but Wes shakes his head.

“We will,” he says. “But first, we have to get all of us to safety. That fire is going to spread along the tunnels. The wind is going to carry it to the other buildings. It might be too wet to catch, it might not, but the whole compound could go up in flames, and there’s no fire department to put it out.”

“Good,” I mutter.

He glances down at me as we reach the ramp and gives me a shaky smile. “Music to my ears, Syd. Music to my ears.”

We run down the rest of the way, the students gathered aroundMithrandir, which is hastily tied to the end of the dock where the floatplanes usually tie up. The storm is dying down, and though the swells are large, the waves are less choppy, and the wind is lessening.

“I’m sorry I hit you on the head,” I tell him. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Didn’t trust you.”

He squeezes me close to him. “You have nothing to apologize for. I’m sorry I’ve had to lie to you the whole time.”

We stop in front of the crowd. I see everyone, their shocked and worried faces lit up by the fire on shore: Lauren, Munawar, Rav. Justin, Natasha, Toshio, Noor. Patrick, Albert, and Christina. Hernandez, who I realize is someone new to Madrona since I had never met him before, and Janet, who was one of my good friends.

I meet her eyes, and she nods at me. Now I know I was the reason she had run out of the lab crying that day. She couldn’tstand to see what they had done to me. Couldn’t stand to see one of her friends die and be brought back to life as someone who didn’t know her.

But I know you now, I think.And I promise I’m not the same person.

“I’m sorry I had to lie to all of you,” Wes says to the group. “You’re all brilliant minds. You deserved so much better than this.”

“I guess we were liars too,” Lauren says, looking at me. “They told us that you were a special case, Sydney. They said that you had a traumatic brain injury and you thought it was 2022. None of us were allowed to mention the year or talk about what was happening in the world.”

I think that over. “Clayton kept calling me special.”

“He played hardball,” Wes says. “He had a harder time lying to you than anyone else.”

He was constantly trying to tell me the truth. He just had a weird way of doing it.

“Wait a minute,” I say, looking back to Lauren. “You said you missed watching the Kardashians. You mean that’s still playing in 2025?”

She lets out a small laugh. “Sadly, yes.”

“What else have I missed?”

“The Last of Us,” Munawar says excitedly. “We could have a watch party!’

“No,” everyone says in unison.

“Good lord, Munawar, what is wrong with you?” Rav asks.

Munawar shrugs. I’ve played the video game, and the parallels between that and the poor mutated creatures in the forest are too close for comfort.

“So what happens now?” I ask Wes. “What about the animals around here? They were experimented on.” I pause, horror seizing my chest. “Oh no, was I the one experimenting on them?”

“No,” he says adamantly. “That was Wes and Everly, and that was after you died. And as genius as you were, sweetheart, you are not a doctor or a neurosurgeon. You didn’t do any of the operations or testing. It was just your formula that made it possible.”

But I’m the one who dragged a dead girl over to them, I think, remembering bits and pieces now of what happened when I discovered Farida had died. I’m the one who…who…