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Terror bites at me. I can’t do this—not now. I don’t know what shape Dad and Carly are in, don’t know if they’ll live or die, don’t know anything about their injuries. I’m a scattered mess. How am I supposed to fight Drau like this?

I’m a danger to Jackson, my team, myself.

Jackson grabs my hand and pushes me behind him, using his body as a shield. Except, am I behind or in front? Hard to tell when the room has no doors or windows, no beginning or end.

The light ramps down. A door appears. Not because it was always there and the light was making it hard to see. It literally appears, a piece of wall sliding open to reveal a rectangle of complete blackness.

I freeze. I know this place. I’ve been here before. In my nightmares. I stare at the dark doorway remembering the fear I felt, the certainty that danger lurked on the other side. Remembering that when I walked through, Lizzie was there with her Drau weapon in hand.

I’m about to signal Jackson to see if he thinks it’s okay to talk; then I realize of course it is. We have no weapons, so we’re not here to fight. And if the open door is any indication, whoever—whatever—brought us here knows we’re here.

Whoever brought us here . . . the Committee? How could they? How can they think I can do this now? I make a low sound—part moan, part howl.

Jackson pushes his glasses up on his head and turns to me, his expression intent. He grasps my upper arms. “Miki, I know this is rough—” He shakes his head. His jaw tenses. “I know your mind isn’t here. But we don’t get a choice. Do you understand? We don’t get a choice.”

I nod. Jackson shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around me. Only then do I realize how cold I am. I have the incongruous thought that he was wearing his jacket when we got pulled, but mine was on the seat beside me.

“You can do this,” he says. “We make it through. We go back. Your dad and Carly will be waiting for us.”

I stare at him, into his mercury-bright eyes. “Will they?” I whisper, not so sure. “And if they
are
alive when we get back, what shape will they be in?”

New guilt swamps me. I don’t feel like the accident was my fault now. Jackson disabused me of that. Now I feel guilty because I doubted my dad, blamed him, suspected him.

But he’s as much a victim here as Carly.

“They’ll be alive when we go back because they were alive when we left.”

Of course. We’ll respawn in the exact instant we left.

I notice he doesn’t make any comment about the shape they’ll be in. We have no way to know and there’s absolutely nothing either one of us can do about that.

“I’m scared,” I whisper. “I don’t trust myself to keep it together.”

A muscle in his jaw jumps.

“You cannot do anything for them from here. The only thing you can do is keep yourself safe. Focus on the moment, this moment, just this one. Then on the next one. Then the next. You can’t change the situation, so work with it. Think only about this.”

I catch my tongue between my teeth and nod. “I’ll try.”

I will. I just don’t know if I’ll succeed.

I think of Dad and what it will be like for him if he wakes up and I’m not there. I think of Carly and all the things I want to do for her when I get back. And I realize I have to do more than try. I have to succeed. I can’t die in the game. I won’t be the one who leaves.

“I will keep you safe, Miki,” Jackson says, and then presses his lips to mine. “I swear it.” He pulls back; his expression shifts, growing harder, colder. He tips his glasses back down, clasps my hand tight in his, and heads for the door.

“You stay close,” he warns.

“Close enough that you can hear me breathe,” I say.

“Stay behind me.”

I slide my fingers between his, then curl them in. “I’ll stay beside you.”

He glances at me and smiles, a spare curl of his lips that hints at the dimple in his cheek. “Beside me, then.”

“What is this place?”

“Don’t know,” Jackson says, his tone terse. “Never seen it before.”

“I have. In a nightmare.”

He turns his head and I can feel him studying me even though I can’t see his eyes. “Tell me.”

“It was exactly like this. The walls. The floor.” I jut my chin forward. “The door. When I went through—” I break off, hesitate.

“Tell me,” he says again.

“When I went through, the girl with the green eyes was waiting for me. She had a Drau weapon. She aimed it. Fired.” I shiver, remembering, and as I do, I can see the spray of tiny droplets of bright pain shooting toward me. Skimming my left shoulder. Missing me. “She wasn’t firing at me,” I say. “She was firing at something behind me.”

Jackson nods. “We’ll count your dream as a warning.”

Cautious, we make our way to the door, separating just before we get there, Jackson going to one side, me to the other. I’m not sure why we bother. We have no weapons and there’s no doubt that whoever brought us here knows we’re here.

I’m about to say exactly that when Jackson says, “They know we’re here. Let’s just do this. Find out who they are and what they want.”

“Great minds think alike.”

We walk through the door to a curving corridor. The sight lines suck. We can’t see what’s waiting around any corner, because there are no corners.

Despite Jackson’s jacket, I’m shivering. The air’s cold and dry and smells artificial, like there’s a hint of air freshener being pumped in.

We don’t pass any windows or doors, just smooth, white walls, white ceiling, white floor that all meld together seamlessly so I can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.

At one point I pause and stretch my hands out to both sides, wondering how wide the corridor is. My fingers extend as far as they can go, but I don’t hit anything solid. So it’s wider than my arm span.

We keep going, following the curve, until ahead we see a massive arced bank of what appears to be computers. There’s a person there with her hands on some sort of control panel. She’s dressed all in white, her back to us, her hair pulled in a high ponytail.

She twists at the waist and turns her head back toward us until we have a three-quarter view of her face.

Jackson stops dead.

Her nose. The shape of her face.

Her eyes.

“There you are,” Lizzie says, and smiles.

JACKSON PRACTICALLY VIBRATES WITH TENSION. HIS BREATHING’S shallow and faster than normal.

He wants to kill her, this shell who wears his sister’s face.

I can feel his emotions like they’re my own.

“Stop,” Lizzie says, her smile turning to a glare. “No one’s killing anyone. Typical Jackson, bristling like a hedgehog.”

I blink at that description. Not one I would have thought of. “We don’t have much time. I can’t keep you here for long,” she says.

“Where’s here?” I ask.

She shoots me a look so reminiscent of one of Jackson’s looks that it hurts my heart to see it. “Does it matter?”

“What do you want?” Jackson asks, his voice harder than I’ve ever heard it, his expression liquid-nitrogen cold.

“I know things. You need to know them, too.” Her expression shifts to one of concern, and she turns back to the control panel ahead of her, touching things, skimming her hands over molten, glowing surfaces. “We have to hurry.”

“And why would I believe anything you tell me?” Jackson asks.

“That’s a problem, isn’t it? I have about three minutes to gain your trust.” She pauses. “The box of candy we were sharing the night we got in the accident . . . it was chocolate-covered peanuts.”

Jackson crosses his arms over his chest. “Good guess.” He doesn’t seem impressed.

“The summer you were twelve, we took a family trip to the Grand Canyon. I was scared of heights and didn’t want to go near the edge. You held my hand.”

This time, Jackson doesn’t say anything.

But I’m not convinced that info is something only his sister would know. I saw pictures of his family at the Grand Canyon. Maybe somehow, a Drau did, too.

Lizzie glances back at the panel in front of her and her breathing speeds up. “You were born with an opaque layer over your corneas,” she says, talking very fast now. “But you could see perfectly well. Your eyes changed a little at a time until you were about six, and then they’ve been Drau gray ever since.”

I remember the day Jackson told me that. We were sitting at the top of the bleachers. “You knowing that doesn’t prove anything,” I say. “Jackson told me that story. In fact, he told it to me in an open, public space. You could have been listening.”

“I could have been?” Lizzie asks, her brows shooting up.

“You,” I say. “The Drau. Same thing, right?” I glance at Jackson. He’s rigid and silent and I can’t imagine how hard this is for him, facing down Lizzie’s clone, a shell with a Drau consciousness inside it. “That’s why we have to be careful what we say outside the game. They can always listen.”

“Not quite always.” She turns back to the panel. “You’re a harder sell than I expected, Jax. I thought you’d be so happy to see me, that we’d have this awesome reunion.”

“It isn’t a reunion,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s a first meeting. You’re not my sister.”

“No?” The word sounds strained. Like she’s in pain. “Okay . . . how about this? You had a fuzzy brown bear with a blue ribbon around its neck that you slept with until you were nine. You got it when you were three. You called it Calcaneus because Dad busted his heel falling off a ladder and that was the bone the doc said he broke. Believe me now, Jax?”

His breath hisses through his teeth. Was that Lizzie’s nickname for him? Jax? And that story about the bear . . . is it true? And if it is, there aren’t too many ways she could have known it.

With her hands still on the panel, she twists again to face us, and I get a clearer glimpse of what’s in front of her.

I gasp as I realize her hands aren’t just on the panel, they’re
in
it. Part of it. I can see her bones through her translucent skin, and crawling all over them are what appear to be tiny spiders.

“Nanoagents,” she says. “They don’t really hurt, just sting a little. They connect me to the machine. Efficient, if a little weird. And they’re much smaller than they appear here. They’re magnified by the panel.” She pins me with her gaze. “Miki, right?” She cocks her head in a beckoning gesture. “Come here.”

I take a step forward without really thinking about it.

Jackson grabs my arm and stops me.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

She makes a dismissive noise, the kind Carly makes when her younger brothers annoy her.

“I can’t leave the panel or you’ll move through to the lobby.”

“Explain,” Jackson says.

“I need to show you something before I explain.”

“Why?” Jackson asks.

“Because it’s the only way you’ll believe a word I say.”

“Show us from there. We’ll stay here.”

Again, she makes that sound.

She closes her eyes for a second and shakes her head rapidly from side to side. “You haven’t changed much in five years. Still arguing with everything I say.”

“And you haven’t changed much in five years,” Jackson clips. “Which is why you can’t be my sister. You look exactly as she did the night she died. Like a teen, not a girl in her midtwenties. Lizzie would have aged. A shell wouldn’t.”

She sighs, glances at the panel again, then back at us. “I need a hand. Mine are occupied at the moment.”

“Use my hand. Miki stays right here,” Jackson says.

Lizzie smiles. “Right. Because she’ll be perfectly safe there as opposed to here.”

She has a point.

Jackson doesn’t move, and his grip on me doesn’t loosen.

“Fine,” she says, gritting her teeth now, thrusting her hands deeper into the panel, her skeletal fingers grasping some unseen thing. “I was just trying to spare your modesty, Jax.”

Her hands move quickly. She hunches forward.

“Now, Jax. Right now,” she barks, her hands jumping right, left, right again. “Hurry!”

I don’t know if it’s her tone or her use of his nickname, but something makes Jackson move. He sprints toward her as she says, “Lift my shirt. Do it!”

The white walls burn my eyes. The sound of her voice is so loud it hurts.

“I’m losing you!” Her words come at me way too slow, but the urgency isn’t lost. She’s panicked. Frantic.

“Shells don’t have navels. No umbilical cord. No belly button. You remember when I taught you that, right? I told you in the lobby, right before your first mission.”

She cries out and thrusts her hands deeper into the mass of skittering, clawing nanoagents. “Crap,” she snarls. “You’re gone. And I didn’t get to tell you a damn thing.”

Jackson grabs her shirt.

“Lift it,” she orders.

After a split-second hesitation, he yanks it up.

The world tips and tilts, but not before I see exactly what I knew I’d see. Her belly button. Lizzie isn’t a clone, a shell, a Drau.

But as I stare at her skeletal fingers enrobed in the moving layer of spidery nanoagents, I don’t think she’s quite human, either.

“The Committee,” she says, her tone tight and pained and urgent. “Don’t trust them, Jax. They aren’t what you think. Neither are the Drau, the battles, the game.” She jerks her hands from the console with a cry.

“Lizzie,” Jackson rasps.

I catch a glimpse of his stricken face and then I’m falling, falling, falling away.

I respawn in the lobby. Grass. Trees. Boulders.

I feel like I’m going to puke, like my head’s going to explode. I haven’t felt this awful since the first time I got pulled.

Swallowing, I push to my feet, just in time to see Jackson push to his.

His face is sheet white, his lips drawn in a taut line.

He opens his arms and I run to him, heart pounding, pulse racing.

He pulls me close. Holds me tight.

And whispers against my ear, “Incoming. Gear up.”

I say that up front because a few words of thanks cannot suffice to convey the depth of my gratitude to the many people who have helped me along the way.

First of all, I want to thank Robin Rue, my agent, who listened to my distraught ramblings with patience, didn’t so much as blink when I said I wanted to write about aliens, found the perfect home for my manuscript, and promised me we would have fun. She’s a woman of her word. I’m having fun, Robin. And a huge thank-you to everyone at Writers’ House who works hard on my behalf, with a special shout-out to Beth Miller, who has a heart of gold and steps up when I need her, going so far as to answer my frantic questions on Christmas Eve—I’d say that’s beyond the call of duty.