“Look,” I said. “Are you going to let me in, or what?”

“You can leave the same way you came,” Griffin said.

I don’t know how I got here.

I put my hands down, looked back at the heap of rags by the main garage door.

“There’s a dead soldier back there,” I said.

Ben let the tip of his spear clink down on the concrete floor between his feet.

A warning.

“He’s there ’cause that’s the spot where I killed him two days ago.”

Two days. What was two days ago?

“He didn’t have any gun or nothing, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Griffin said.

“And we don’t have any food,” Ben added. He scraped an arc across the floor with the point of his spear, and I could see how it was stained with what looked like dried blood.

Griffin pulled Ben’s shoulder down toward his face again. “It’s going to rain pretty soon.”

“That’s not our problem, Griff.”

I looked down at the hammer. I looked at Ben.

Come on, Ben. You have to remember me.

He kept his eyes pinned on me, too.

“That door. There. You can go now and we won’t tell anyone we saw you. You take one more step toward my house and I’ll have to kill you.”

Ben Miller wasn’t joking.

I glanced at Griffin, then at Ben. The tip of the spear angled toward the side door. Outside was Forest Trail Lane, but there were never any forests in Glenbrook.

And this wasn’t Glenbrook.

When I pulled the door open and looked out, I could feel Ben’s eyes on me, the same way you’d watch a dangerous animal until it decided to change direction.

I said, “Try to remember me, Griffin. Ben. I’m your friend.”

Then I went outside.

*   *   *

Everything is scarier, more brilliant and unsteady, when you’re alone. After that door swung shut behind me, and I could hear Ben and Griffin on the other side, pushing things around, building a barrier between me and them, I felt like I was walking out into my death.

I looked back along the boys’ house, where I remembered a flagstone trail led through a wrought-iron arbor to a backyard pool. It was the same house, but sections of the roof were missing. The curved red pottery tiles had spilled down in scattered shards and exposed the tarred and buckling plywood and flapping strips of black felt.

There was wind.

Every one of the windows had been broken, and in places, the concrete stucco of the house’s siding had been pounded in as though pummeled by stones or shrapnel. There was no arbor, no flagstones, and when I walked around the corner I saw that the pool had been drained, now filled with broken debris: a realtor’s FOR SALE sign; part of a wire-mesh picnic bench like the ones they had in Steckel Park; a life-sized fiberglass horse—the kind that you’d see on top of a feed store—but this one was headless; and an overturned station wagon that was missing three of its wheels.

And there was no fence, no sidewalks, no street I could see.

Forest Trail Lane.

I could tell where the street was supposed to be. A tilted fire hydrant, the skeletons of things marked a familiar path that was now covered beneath the gray salty ash that was everywhere in Marbury. I thought about my truck, how we’d all squeezed into the cab, sand sticking to our skin, when the four of us drove back to the boys’ house from the beach.

Before I broke the lens.

I couldn’t help myself, and I immediately felt stupid for doing it. I spun around and yelled, “Conner!”

Nothing.

“Conner!”

Wind.

Ash.

I whispered, hoping for anything that might connect here to anywhere I knew, “Seth?”

Seth had always been there before. He was the ghost, a part of me, who linked me between the gaps, Marbury, home, wherever this place was or was not.

But it was empty. Seth wasn’t here, either.

I sat down in front of the house. I knew Ben and Griffin were watching through one of the cracks in their house, ready to fight, to defend themselves.

Against me.

The neighbors’ homes were there—some of them. Most had been broken down to the foundations. The others were empty—I could tell—and not just because I could see right through them. There’s a silent message you get from an abandoned house that lets you know exactly how things are.

A refrigerator lay on its side in the middle of what would have been the street. Its door had fallen open. There was a man’s head inside. I felt the need to go there, make sure it wasn’t someone I knew—someone else Jack dragged along with him into this pit.

They had their own aesthetic sensibilities, I thought. The harvesters, the Hunters. They didn’t eat everything. They didn’t wipe everything clean. They decorated.

I didn’t recognize the face. The eyes were squinted shut like they had been stung with vinegar, and the man had puffy cheeks that stretched his mouth into a narrow smile and showed a row of bloodied teeth that all looked ridiculously small.

Welcome back.

It’s the same old Marbury.

Jack’s hometown.

I started walking.

And I knew where I would go: Conner’s house was closer, and then to see if I could find Wynn and Stella’s.

All the way down Forest Trail Lane it was the same. Houses were burned or abandoned, things were strewn everywhere in chaotic order, and nothing moved except the small things that vibrated on the wind.

My foot struck against something in the ash. I nearly fell, but caught myself with my hand. The salt burned in my cut. It was bad. It should have stitches. I thought about how Griffin had never been afraid to do things like that—stitch us up when we got cut.

Whenever that was.

It was a book. I brushed it off and lifted it from the dust. A dictionary.

The cover warped like a dried orange rind; the pages inside pasted together as though the book had been dragged up from the bottom of a sea.

There was a flash of light and something exploded overhead, louder than any sound I’d ever heard.

I jerked, curled myself down against the ground.

I need to get out of here.

Out of breath, I watched the sky.

It came again. Lightning. But it was bigger, thicker than any lightning I’d ever seen, and the boom of the thunderclap felt like hammers pounding my brain.

Another hammer, I thought. Maybe it will break me in half, too.

And I’d never seen lightning in Marbury before. Not ever.

The burning light was so thick, so bright, it looked almost crystallized, as though, if I had the right timing, I could swing that hammer and shatter razor-sharp icicles of pure energy from the bolts. And every time they flashed, I felt the electric charge stiffen and prickle the hair on the back of my neck.

At the end of Forest Trail Lane, the old highway ran north and south. It was the main road through Glenbrook before they’d constructed the 101.

This isn’t Glenbrook.

On the corner stood the lower half of a two-story. The only thing I could see on the exposed upper floor was a toilet and an overturned bathtub. It still had a ring of dirt around the bottom.

“Prime location for Glenbrook real estate,” I said.

My voice sounded strange, tighter. But I knew I’d need to get under something until the lightning stopped, and the bottom level of the shattered house was the closest thing that looked capable of hiding me, so I carried the dictionary under one arm and ran for the doorway.

Another flash of lightning exploded. It hit the street back where I’d come from, sending up a glowing mushroom cloud of ash that seemed to set the air around it on fire.

This was like no lightning I’d ever seen anywhere.

Where the curb would be, I found a rusted yellow Tonka dump truck and one boy’s tennis shoe with a picture of a ninja on the side. The ninja had red eyes. The boy who wore that shoe at one time couldn’t have been more than five.