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“I’m supposed to believe that you’re on my side?” I asked.

“You don’t have to believe anything,” Eli said. “You should have a clear shot to the door. Go.”

I didn’t have to trust him to know it was the right call.

Walking through the halls was like pushing my way through a thicket of brambles, but I came to the door without encountering anyone else, just as he’d said. My hand on the knob, I paused. I wasn’t alone. I turned.

My mother stood in the shadowed hallway. Her face was pale, the skin around her eyes almost bruised with exhaustion. “Mom,” I said, and hated how plaintive it sounded.

“Don’t call me that,” she said.

I needed to go. I could hear footsteps in the distance. Caleb would find me soon. “I didn’t know,” I said. “I thought I was real. I thought I was your daughter.”

“But you weren’t,” she said, half snarl and half sob, and her whole body rocked with the force of her words. She drew closer.“You’re not even human. Simon—I remember a whole life with him I never lived. They’re just memories you shoved into my head without even knowing you were doing it.”

“I love you,” I said desperately. Let her believe that, at least. “I know I’m not really your daughter, but I love you, and I’m so, so sorry. If I could give you back those years, I would, but I love you, and that’snota lie. You’re my everything and you always have been, and no matter what, no one can tell me that wasn’t real.”

Her eyes were filled with doubt. She made an odd grasping motion, as if she’d thought to reach for me, and then stopped herself.

“They kill little girls, Mom,” I said. “Tell me you didn’t know.”

“Of course I didn’t. Caleb’s going to stop it,” she said.

“He already killed his own daughter,” I said.

“That’s not true,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re lying again.”

I made a strangled sound, grief and frustration knotted together. “I guess he didn’t tell you that part.”

She breathed hard, her jaw tense. “I can’t tell anymore what’s real and what’s not. Which of these feelings are mine. Are you still doing this? Are you still making me love you?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Please, Mom. Just let me go.”

“Helen...”

Caleb appeared at the end of the hall. His eyes caught on mine. I stiffened. Mom saw him, too, but he didn’t see her, not yet.

She lunged into the path of the gun at the same instant he pulled the trigger.

33

THE PATH OFa bullet is a matter of mathematics. Cold equations without mercy. Caleb pulled the trigger in the instant my mother lunged for me—whether to stop me or protect me, I didn’t know. She stepped in front of me, and those unyielding numbers charted her death: How the bullet would strike her in the back. How it would shatter her spine and keep going, tearing through her liver, leaving only blood and ruin, nothing to be saved.

The path of a bullet cannot bend.

But reality can.

I screamed. The sound that ripped from my throat was not a voice at all. It was pain and love and grief and guilt, the sound of the heart of a storm and the sound of its ending.

The bullet unmade itself in the air, unfurling into a coil of gleaming darkness that hung, suspended, inches from her skin. We all froze. We stared at the thing the bullet had become, glints of metal still shining within the twining shadows.

My mother looked at me in horror and wonder. I could seebeneath her skin. It would be a simple thing to reach out. To delicately carve away every hint of doubt and fear and stitch devotion in its place. Like I was taking a scalpel to her mind. She could love me again, if I made her.

I turned and fled.

—

Branches tore at me. I tripped over roots and scrambled over the muddy, frost-rimed ground, and all through the forest, the shadows hissed and churned.