I respawn in a place that’s blinding and bright, so white it tears at my eyes. This feels different. Real. Not like part of the dream. I blink. Blink again. There’s no floor, no walls, just a gaping black square straight ahead of me. I don’t want to walk through it, even though I know I should. I don’t want to see what’s on the other side. I’m afraid. It’s something terrible. Something I can’t bear to know.

I walk through, heart pounding, and there she is, Lizzie, watching me with Drau eyes.

She lets out a little laugh of relief. “You’re here.”

“Where’s here?”

She’s holding something metallic and smooth. Fluid. Jellylike.

Her mouth tightens. Her eyes flick to a point above my shoulder as she raises her hand and shoots, sending a thousand pinpoints of bright agony speeding toward me, burning my left shoulder as they overshoot the mark.

I jerk awake, disoriented, afraid, heart slamming against my ribs like a caged bird. It’s dark. I’m cold. Shivering, I reach for my comforter.

There’s a tap at my door. “Miki?” I glance at my bedside clock. It’s just after midnight. “You okay?” Dad pushes the door open and light from the hall spills in, leaving him a dark silhouette in a dark frame, surrounding by a soft, yellow glow.

“Nightmare,” I croak.

He frowns and takes a step into my room. “The usual?” The usual is the one where I dream I’m being buried, clumps of earth hitting the lid of the coffin that holds me.

I shake my head.

“The car accident?” he asks, taking another step into the room. The car accident is the one where I shared Jackson’s dream about Lizzie and the night Jackson first got pulled into the game.

I shake my head again. “Neither. Just a regular, run-of-the-mill nightmare.” But that’s a lie. There was nothing regular or run-of-the-mill about it. That last part where I respawned in the white room—it felt real.

Dad starts to back out of the room, pulling my door shut as he goes.

“Wait . . .”

He ducks his head back inside.

“Just . . . um . . . leave the door open, ’kay?”

He nods, and I’m grateful that he doesn’t comment.

Once the door to his room is closed behind him, I ease the neckline of my pj top over to one side, baring my left shoulder and the healing burns that mark my skin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I BEAT JACKSON ON OUR LORD OF THE FLIES ESSAY FOR MR. Shomper, an A to his A-. He takes it in stride, vowing to beat me next time.

“Seriously? I worked on mine for weeks, outlining my arguments, planning every paragraph,” I say. “You banged yours out the night before it was due.”

“You have a problem with that?” he asks, his arms crossed over his chest, his shoulder propped against the doorframe of our English class, his black-on-black Oakleys hiding his eyes.

“No problem. I’m still the one with the better grade.” I sashay past him, my grand exit ruined when he lets out a low whistle and catches up to me to whisper, “I love watching you walk away.”

“Me? Or a certain part of my anatomy?”

“Anatomy,” he says and, when I shoot him a look, continues, “Hey, I’m all about education.” Then he slides his fingers into my back pocket, grabs my hand, and guides my fingers into his back pocket, and we walk down the hall, appreciating each other’s . . . anatomy. I haven’t told him about the nightmare or the now-healed burns I woke up with. Maybe I think it’s too weird or crazy or strange. Maybe I don’t want to tell him I’m dreaming about his dead sister. I don’t know how it would make him feel and I don’t want to hurt him. I do know the marks are gone now, as if they had never been, and there are a million ways I could have hurt my shoulder without realizing it, ways that don’t involve Drau weapons and the game.

A couple of days later, I’m heading to the caf when I see Jackson, fingers curled over the door of an open locker, head bent as he talks to Kathy Wynn. She hands him a folded slip of paper, closes her locker, and scurries up the hall to where the Queen Bee and her friends are waiting. Marcy smiles at one of them and nods, her gaze locked on Jackson as Kathy says something to her.

Guess I know why they’ve been hanging out at the picnic table after school whenever Jackson decides to run laps with Luka.

Marcy tosses her hair back over her shoulder, taking her time, running her fingers through the shiny strands. Her teeth catch her lower lip. Her eyes never leave Jackson’s face.

In health class last year we had to break into groups and discuss self-esteem and the media. Marcy was pretty frank in her self-assessment, saying that she isn’t exactly pretty. She claimed her eyes are too small and too close set, her nose pointed, her lips thin. She wasn’t fishing for compliments; it was more of an explanation of why she didn’t try for the career in modeling her friends were always saying she should go for.

Pretty or not, between hair and makeup and clothes, she knows how to work it, and she does—not too much skin, not too much makeup. Just enough.

And Marcy’s a girl who knows what she wants and never fails to get it. She does as she pleases, especially where boys are concerned.

In the past, I’ve actually been a little awed by her single-minded determination and the way she carries herself, like she’s the most confident girl in the world.

The way she steamrolls over anything, or anyone, in her way, not so much.

But I have a philosophy about relationships based on something Mom told me when I went steady with Sam Pitt in eighth grade: no one can break up a couple unless that couple’s already got some problems, whether they recognize them or not.