Wakefulness hits me like a train, flinging me sideways and sending me sailing off the bed onto the floor. My phone clatters down beside me. There are more cracks on the screen, a new spider web of fractures.

Finn just tried to use his powers on me.

Finn just tried to brainwash me.

Finn just tried to break up with me.

Finn just – Finn just –

I shove the edge of my hand into my mouth and bite down hard, trying to swallow the sound that wants to explode out of me.

What does he expect me to do? Just act like he and I never happened? Just blithely go about my life like the whole fairy thing was some minor inconvenience? Just somehow fix everything without him? Without his magic powers? Without everything he can do?

I should have slapped him harder. I should have yelled in his face until his eardrums burst about how he doesn’t just get to leave me. I should have –

He’s never going to come back into my dreams. Not after that. He’s never going to reach out again.

If I don’t break into fairyland, I’m never going to see him again.

I have to go. Right now. I have to march into the hospital, and I have to shake Mr Hunter so hard his teeth come loose until he wakes up, until he tells me what the Riders know, until he tells me how to tear a hole in the universe so I can set fire to that field of poison flowers and punch my boyfriend in the face.

I wrench open my bedroom door, and –

Come face to face with Phil.

She looks at me.

I look at her.

‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

‘Fine,’ I say, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I heard a noise.’

‘I was napping. I fell off the bed.’

‘I thought –’ she breaks off. ‘I thought maybe something had come. To get you. Because of …’

‘I’m okay, Phil,’ I say. ‘The fairies are gone. They’re not going to hurt me. They’re not coming – they’re not coming b-back.’

I try and hold back the sob, to bury my face hard enough in my hands to force it back down my throat, but it won’t let me, and I choke on it, and another, and another –

Her fingers brush across my shoulder.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I force out. ‘Y-you have enough to d-d-deal with. Let – let me –’

‘Do you want to be by yourself?’

Yes, I should say. Yes, just leave me alone. I’ll figure this out. I’ve got this.

‘N-no,’ I choke out. ‘P-p-please. Don’t leave me alone.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, after a long, long, long time has passed.

‘You’re allowed to be upset,’ Phil says, picking at a loose thread on my doona cover.

‘No, I’m not,’ I say. ‘Not in front of you.’

She doesn’t say anything, just keeps picking.

‘But that’s not what I’m sorry for,’ I say, when I’m sure I’m not going to cry again. ‘I wanted to say … I’m sorry about – about everything. Everything that’s happened. Everything I’ve done to you.’

‘You didn’t kill my mother,’ she says quietly.

‘I might as well have,’ I say. ‘If you weren’t friends with me – if I wasn’t mixed up with all this fairy stuff – then – then she’d still be –’

‘I killed her.’

She doesn’t look up, just keeps picking at that same thread, over and over again.

‘I killed her,’ she says again. Her voice is even, firm. ‘You tried to explain things to me. After that night at the creek with Jenny and Kel, you tried to explain things to me, and I wouldn’t listen. I let myself get angrier and angrier, and I drew those people to my house and they killed her. I killed her.’

‘No, you didn’t, Phil.’

‘It’s an equation,’ she says. ‘I got so angry the Riders decided they wanted to eat my heart. If I hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been there. And she’d still be alive.’

‘You wouldn’t have been so angry if I’d just explained all this fairy shit to you in the first place,’ I insist.

‘You were right not to.’ Her voice hasn’t changed at all. It’s still even, calm, eerily mechanical. ‘I wouldn’t have believed you.’

‘Phil –’

‘I saw them do it,’ she says. ‘I saw them kill her. She called me, and I came downstairs, and they were there, all six of them. They were waiting. And Mr Hunter had his elbow around her neck, like Julian used to put his elbow around my neck in photos, and for a moment I was like, “Wow, Mum’s dived back into the dating pool, interesting choice.”’

The thread she’s been picking at comes suddenly loose from the doona, and Phil starts twisting it in her fingers.

‘But then I saw their knives,’ she says. ‘The leader looked at me and told me she knew I had a taste for blood, and then Hunter pulled my mum’s head up and one of them cut her throat, and the blood poured out, and then the rest of them started in, cutting and stabbing, and I just stood there and watched. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t feel anything. I just watched.’

‘Phil, they were in your head,’ I say. ‘I could hear that the second you picked up the phone. The Riders had you – I don’t know, hypnotised or something. None of it was you.’

‘I thought it was a dream,’ she says, twisting the thread back and forth. ‘Everything is so hazy and so blurry from that night that I still think it might be a dream. I’m waiting to wake up.’

For the first time, she meets my eyes.

‘Am I going to wake up?’

Slowly, I shake my head.

I don’t know what I was expecting her to do. Cry, maybe. Scream. That’s what I would have done. But she just goes back to twisting the thread in her fingers.

‘Do you remember when we did The Crucible last year in English?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘You know how they kill that one guy near the end? They pile all the rocks on him, and he keeps asking for more? More weight, he says, until he’s crushed to death?’

‘I remember.’

‘He’s so calm about it,’ she says. ‘Like he doesn’t feel anything, even though he’s being crushed.’

The thread snaps in two in her fingers.

‘That’s what this is like,’ she says. ‘I can’t stop seeing it. Can’t stop seeing them cut her to pieces. But it doesn’t feel real. I can’t feel it. All I can feel is the weight of the rocks on top of me, getting heavier and heavier. More weight, more weight, more weight.’

‘Oh, Phil,’ I say.

‘I’m worried about what it’s going to be like when I realise I’m being crushed,’ she says. ‘I worry about what I’m going to be like. I’ve been trying to shut myself away. To minimise the blast radius. Because if I feel it too much … I’m worried about what’s going to happen.’

‘The Riders can’t come back, Phil,’ I say. ‘They’re broken apart. They can’t hurt you any more. You can feel as much as you want.’

She doesn’t say anything.

‘Or as little,’ I say. ‘There’s no right way to grieve.’

‘I’m not sure I am grieving,’ she says. ‘Not yet, anyway. I’m just …’

‘Numb?’ I suggest.

‘I need something from you, Pearl.’

‘Anything. Of course.’

‘I need you to distract me,’ she says. ‘I need you to give me something else to think about. Something else to take up space in my brain.’

‘If you want distractions, I’ve got plenty,’ I say. ‘But I can’t put more weight on you, Phil. I can’t.’

‘Every second I spend in my own head is more weight,’ she says. ‘Every second I have to spend remembering is another second closer to feeling it, and I can’t feel it. I can’t.’

‘Phil,’ I say, ‘it’s all right to feel it. It’ll be horrible, sure, but it’s all right.’

‘No,’ she says decisively. ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about it at all. So give me one of your problems to solve. Give me a puzzle. Give me – I don’t know, a Sudoku if it’ll somehow help you get Finn and your sister back, or this is going to crush me. Please.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sure.’

I take a deep breath.

And I tell her everything.