The plan is set. In the morning, Devin and Sheridan will split off again, this time toward a patch of river that looks narrower than the rest. If all goes well—which is a massive “if”—they’ll cross as fast as possible, find help, and get Ollie and Aidan rescued. All Ollie has to do is keep himself and Aidan alive until then. It seems simple enough. He and Aidan decide to plan out a trap to stop the mimics, or at least slow them down.
The whole time, Ollie thinks about Hannah.
The horrific implications of not-Hannah’s existence roll in one by one. Almost every conversation he’s had with the kind, wide-eyed girl from California, he begins to realize, was a performance. All the stolen glances, half smiles, unexpected kindnesses,… all of it was a lie.
Ollie fights to keep his food down.
Sunset settles between the trees as Ollie helps Aidan to his tarp. Once Sheridan leaves to refill water bladders and Devin goes to collect firewood, he’s practically alone with the monster. She hasn’t moved in hours, head lolled back against the bark of the tree she’s bound to, but he feels her watching him.
But Ollie won’t let this thing get to him. He won’t think about what the mimic did to Hannah, how it must’ve happened feet from where he slept. How he closed his eyes that night thinking about how it might feel to hold Hannah and woke up looking into the eyes of the creature that killed her. He racks his brain trying to understand how he missed it. How he didn’t hear.
“You don’t want to ask me anything?” not-Hannah finally asks.
Ollie refuses to look at her long enough to see if she’s being sincere.
She shifts against her ties. “It’s just the two of us. I know everything about her. You could ask me anything.”
Ollie snaps, sharp, like one tendon rolling over another.
He looks at the mimic finally and his face burns. She looks just like Hannah, from the deep black of her eyes to her round upper lip, the way her lashes were full and dark, the way her cheeks were always a little rosy, even when she was sick. Looking into the mimic’s face, he should be able to tell the difference. But he can’t. It isn’t like the mimic impersonating his father. Every ridge and line of her face is exact. If it weren’t for the missing necklace, Ollie wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
“Don’t talk about her.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t deserve to.”
“But you do?” Hannah asks. She arches her brow with a kind of smugness the real Hannah never would’ve worn. “I know everything about her. You only knew her for a few days.”
“She—”
Ollie starts his sentence, but he can’t figure out what to say. He can’t find the shape of his anger, even as it burns in his throat.
“In fact,” the mimic muses, unconcerned, “I think you’ve known me longer than you knew her.”
Again, Ollie finds himself sinking. She’s right.
“I was awake,” Hannah says distantly. “The night the others tried to take you.”
Ollie’s stomach turns. “What?”
“I was listening.”
Ollie’s head spins from standing for so long and he doesn’t want to keep talking to this pale imitation of a girl he … he doesn’t know now. Hannah saved him that night. She’d thrown the fire at the mimics. It was the first time they saw the mimics burn, and he realizes now how she knew to do it.
With each thing he learns, it gets harder to get his head around it. He’s spent nights looking into the dark of Hannah’s eyes picturing the ways they might come to know each other on the other side of these woods. He was so sure of her. But it’s not just that she’s gone; it’s that she was never there. The night she held him as he cried about his father, the day at the creek when she encouraged him to dream, the way she touched his cheek before kissing him, it was all the mimic.
“You could’ve let them take me,” Ollie says. “You wouldn’t have been so outnumbered in camp.”
Hannah laughs. “Their strategy wouldn’t have worked. Desperation for a body made them reckless. They were more interested in taking you quickly than taking you well.”
Ollie shakes his head. “The things they said…”
“… were hurtful, but not enough to make you give up,” Hannah says. “They barely knew you. You wouldn’t have caved in to them. I listened and decided if I should help them or help you.”
She sighs and closes her eyes.
“Before we commit to a form, we can change shape freely. We see humans … differently from the way you see each other. When I look at you, I see dozens of faces. They color you like paint. I don’t always know what they mean, I just know they’re important. Your grandma, your father, a few of your friends from school. The others here, too. They mean something to you now.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Ollie says.
“You don’t have to,” Hannah says. “I can’t see much about you anymore, anyway. Most of what I know now is from the things you told Hannah. She liked learning about you. She liked that you wanted to know things about her.”
Ollie’s hands ball into fists. “You don’t know what she thought.”
“Yes, I do,” Hannah says, and it’s almost like there’s a glimmer of remorse in her. “In theory, I knew what it was like to commit to a form. When we absorb the one we’re becoming, we see all of them. Beginning to end, everything they ever felt, everything they remembered, every little detail that clung to their mind over the years. I didn’t realize how … overwhelming that would be. At first, I felt the joy of Hannah’s childhood, the way she loved her siblings and her first cat and the sparkly notebook she used for math class. And moment by moment, I felt Hannah’s joy die. It wasn’t a quick thing. They crushed it out of her so slowly she didn’t realize it was happening, but feeling it all in a matter of minutes … I know you’ll blame me, but he killed her as much as I did.”
Ollie tries to process what she’s saying, but his attention snags on one piece of it. “What do you mean by ‘absorb’?”
Hannah blinks. “I don’t think I should tell you.”
“You have to.”
“You won’t like it.”
“What part of this do you think I like?” Ollie snaps. “Everything you’ve told me is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. So just … I need to know what happened to her. I need to—”
“We consume the one we become,” Hannah says flatly.
The world drops out from under him.
“It’s painless, Ollie,” she says. “If you’d agreed to let that mimic take your place, you wouldn’t have felt a thing. Just joy and warmth, like sinking into a pleasant dream.”
“You ate her?”
Hannah says nothing.
“You’re lying,” Ollie snaps. “Say you’re lying.”
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Hannah says. “I … when it was done and I realized what I’d done, I wept for hours. I was so ashamed, and that feeling was so human. I realized I was feeling things as she would and it was excruciating. I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it. And then, when you woke up, you comforted me.”
Ollie’s stomach twists in a knot. He remembers it now—the morning Aidan was lost, the morning it rained, the morning Hannah was sick. He’d never seen her so miserable. All he’d wanted to do was make her feel better.
“The way you spoke to her—to me—changed my mind,” Hannah says, a hint of warmth to her voice Ollie hasn’t heard since she revealed herself. She looks at him and there’s a weight to her stare. “I decided to do this for her. Make it out of this forest, go back to Sacramento, and tell her family I’ll never speak to them again. I decided I’d go out into the world and do all the things she didn’t get to. I want to be her as she was when she was alive, but more. So, when I was deciding if I would help the ‘mimics’ or help you, I chose you.”
Ollie is almost convinced by it. And then he feels the dizziness again, the buzzing in his brain, the unearthly quiet. “You do that when you’re trying to control me, don’t you?”
Hannah sighs. “It’s weaker now. The more I become like her, the less I can do.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because I’ve appreciated the time we’ve spent together. And because I’m sorry that I hurt you.”
“Are you?”
“I am.” Hannah looks down. “More and more, I find myself becoming what she was. I knew the convergence of our minds wouldn’t happen all at once, but it’s jarring. The violence … it doesn’t come easily to me anymore. She wouldn’t have hurt you. It feels wrong that I did.”
Ollie looks away to keep his composure. Maybe it’s the head injury or the exhaustion, but his feelings sit so close to the surface now. He wants to believe her, but the pain twisting its way through him is suffocating. He was in the same camp as Hannah when this happened. He should’ve heard her. He should’ve saved her.
“She should’ve gotten to do it all herself,” Ollie says finally. “You think she wouldn’t have been able to, but she would’ve. You can say anything you want about doing this for her, but you took it away from her.”
Hannah says nothing. Her head hangs low, knees tucked together. Ollie briefly thinks it might be genuine remorse she’s feeling. When she looks up, though, her expression is cool and distant. Any traces he saw of the old Hannah in her face are gone now.
“They promised no one would hurt me,” Hannah says.
Ollie swallows. “I didn’t.”
“I wish you would give me a chance to leave this place,” Hannah says. “I wish you would give me a chance to prove I can be just like her.”
Ollie turns away from her at that. The fact is that he’ll be here alone with Aidan and not-Hannah tomorrow and he can’t rely on her strange pacifism. He can’t count on her to save them again, and he can’t think about what they’ll do with her when they cross the river. He can’t think about losing this imitation of Hannah, and he can’t think about the real Hannah being gone, swallowed up by a beast.
He needs to get out of this forest before he loses his mind.