Amanda screams as she hits the pillars, her acid burning away at the wood until the air curdles with the sick smell of fumes. The wood grows back into existence almost hesitantly, just to be destroyed by the next pass of the paintbrush, and sure enough, Amanda brings it down with an inhuman vengeance. Barely a minute passes before she slices it again. All the wood comes back scarred, and she blows through it with the purple paint, sending splinters across the room. The next blow is fire, then ice. She cycles through every color but blue, until the room is a grieving rainbow that looks like it just went through a paintball match from hell. I clutch Shiloh in my corner, feeling his stomach rise and fall (he breathes only because it puts us at ease), and I try to feel a more personal grief. We don't interrupt each other, but I can almost hear the blood rushing in her ears. The paintbrush falls to the floor, where she kicks it away, and her fist tightens. The pillar doesn't shatter beneath the inevitable punch, and the newly reformed wood is battered until Amanda's hands give out. She flexes her fingers, her knuckles an angry purple, and her arms shake. She yells like a bobcat, using her non-dominant hand to hit it again, but all she manages to do is get splintered wood in her hand. Shaking, she slumps against the busted pole.

"Do you want to talk?" I ask. Shiloh slips out of my arms.

"No. I want to strangle someone." Amanda mutters, letting Shiloh lick her busted fingers. "Is that bad?"

"Not unless you actually do it." I say, leaning closer to her. I expect for her to throw me against the pillar, but she doesn't. "Don't cite me on that. I'm not a psychologist."

"Will?"

I lift my head. "Yeah?"

Amanda leans back against me, placing her head tenderly on my shoulder. Her hair falls across her face, but I can hear every muffled sob. I reach one beanpole arm out and around her back, closing my eyes, and try to grip her as tightly as I can. Amanda's arms move for my small ribcage, and she holds me so tight I feel dizzy.

"She would have loved this. She would have-" Amanda lets out a harsh laugh, which disintegrates into more sobbing. "We always joked about it, you know? Which one of us would be the first to die in the zombie apocalypse, if we were heroes, if we were magic, if we were anything besides ourselves. We would relay the tragic deaths we could have had in as much detail as two seventh graders could know... I... I died in her arms all the time. And it wasn't real. It was fine, dramatic, romantic, even, because nothing was this final."

I hold her a little tighter. My eyes shut to find they're moist.

"We would never die in something mundane as-as-- a fucking car incident. Just a pedestrian being run over." Amanda pulls herself away from me. "It doesn't make sense."

"Sometimes terrible things just happen," I say. Car accident. No way I try to imagine it seems right. My head's still spinning.

"No. No they don't! Nothing in our lives is like that anymore. Ever since this started..." Her fists clench. "It can't just be chance." Her voice is desperately hopeful.

"Amanda, please don't do anything reckless." From where I'm sitting, I can see the purple on her hands Shiloh hasn't been able to fix.

Amanda drops me like a toy, rolling back onto her feet. Her hair is a tangled mess, her outfit is crooked and stained with red alongside the splatterings of paint from her assault on the She draws herself up to her fullest extent, and wipes a stream of water off the surface of her mask and her hot, red cheeks. "I wasn't going to. I'm going home." She looks towards the entrance of the lair. "If I tried anything, Shiloh would send you after me, wouldn't he? So I can't, even if I wanted to."

My own saliva dries up in my throat. "Hey. I-"

Her brush hits the wall with a thwip, and as she runs it along the wall approaching the portal, the area burns and seethes, hissing like a thin sheet of water boiling on a pan. Amanda wipes her face again, twirls the brush back against her side, tipped with clear paint, and she runs out. The room is already healing itself, but the scarred wood, lacking whorls or an obvious groove, bares an unfortunate resemblance to human flesh.

I turn back to Shiloh. "How much do you know about this?"

"Nothing." Shiloh sounds flabbergasted, as if he can't believe the admission himself.

"That's not true, is it?" If I wasn't crying before, I am now. "We also both know that- that I can't stop you from saying whatever you want, doing whatever you want, because this is your mission, and I'm just your best pawn. I'm holding out, Shiloh, because I want to believe so badly that there's something genuine inside of you, that I'm not projecting onto that sunny veneer. I want to believe we're all a team, and that you care about us enough to tell us the truth."

Shiloh's ears drop, and his dark eyes swell with desperation. Defeated, he whispers, "I want to."

"What's stopping you?"

The room goes still. Silence here is different from silence in the 'real world'. There are no outside noises, no machines whirring like there would be in a house, just the faint, distant breath of a beast too large for the human mind to comprehend and the uneasy sensation that you have become detached from space--that despite everything around you being tangible, you aren't really there at all.

Shiloh lowers his head. "I had nothing to do with the death of Megan Briggs, nor did Ignatius. I know this is hard on you, Will, and I will be doing my best to ease you all, emotionally through the grieving process, but only so far as it is acceptable to you. Amanda needs time to heal, meanwhile, we will continue on this path alone."
"Thanks, Shiloh."

Shiloh looks up at me like a forlorn puppy.

I step back into my father's office.

During the week, it's the room that gets the least use, and I'm at least thankful to be able to leave and enter the Veins without having to make constant alibis. My mother's working downstairs, in the family room, and if I had to guess, Adam's upstairs. I breathe in the scent of cologne and laundered work clothes, of old books. It's distinctly my father, but being here brings me closer to him than his physical presence. It's the same with my mom. Sometimes I step into their room at night when I'm not sure if I'm dreaming, because I want to relive moments from the life of a different child, who could go to his parents about nightmares.

I flick tears off of my face. When it comes to souvenirs I took back from Shiloh's world, I think I prefer the scars. My phone, and not my Diosite, buzzes in my pocket. Karen must be furious at us.

Nope. Instead, her only message is: I heard.

I feel my face slacken. Give us a few days.

Do we have a few days?

Yes. I'm working on the plan anyways.

Tough.

I have to be, don't I?

I stare down at the screen. She starts writing, then stops. She starts again, definitely backspaces a few time, and stops. You are.

If anyone else feeds me another well-meaning lie, I am going to punch them in the face, but I still find myself opening the door to our room. I feel three inches smaller just by opening. My brother's presence dominates the area, stress emanating off him in waves. If there was ever a time I believed in twin ESP, it would be now... but in that case, twin ESP is the worst. "Adam?"

He's watching the ceiling. My fingers clasp my Diosite, staring at the dark rifts he can't see. Our room has always been a bit of a thunderstorm, even by closed-room standards. It makes me want to paint the ceiling clean, but trying to paint over an extradimensional rift would be tricky, to say the least.

"Are you okay?"

"No," Adam says. "What the fuck kind of a question is that? Are you re--"

"Adam, don't," I beg him. "Come on, I'm trying to help, please don't."

He mumbles something under his breath, which might be profanity but doesn't sound like any curse I've ever heard.

"What... what was that?" I sound sassy. I sound so sassy. He thinks I'm mocking him. I wasn't mocking him. What if he gets up? What if he gets angry? My heart beats like that of a cornered mouse in a house full of cats.

His eyes rise, dead in their sockets. "There's nothing you can help me with. It was just-- I wasn't even there. She was walking home from the library, guts out on the road, someone mowed over a pedestrian--" Adam Rosenbloom pauses after every word. He's not crying, but he says every word as if he's trying to bend it sideways and crumple it into an incomprehensible ball. His brows fold together. "--wasn't there. I'm only responsible for letting her walk home alone, for not objecting or running over there or saying something, and now I get to live with that for the rest of my life. Someone blow my brains out."

"No one blames you."
"They should."
"You just said you weren't even there--"

His hand clenches the side of the bed and he draws himself up. "You don't know what I'm going through."
"I might if you'd tell me."

"Get out of my room."

"It's my room too!"

"That's fine. I'll leave. There's a guest room in the basement."
"Adam, you can't shut me out--"
"Watch me." Is that a threat? A warning? How do I get to him? I try to form words but my mouth is moving faster than my vocal chords, which are tangled together, and I end up with my eyes half-closed like I'm bracing for impact. Am I? The air is still between us. With the same stilted voice, he asks, "I know this is the position you've been coveting ever since you were five, but can I be the victim for once in my life? Cool. I'm the victim now. I'm grieving right now and my dumbass, self-preoccupied, needy, entitled little brother is assaulting me with questions, trying to get a word in edgewise so he can feel good about himself for helping, even though he has no fucking clue what the last few months have been," Adam's eyes fix mine. "You want to help, right, Will? Great. Then fuck off."