The world trembled.

Pots fell over with clattering crashes, and bits of debris fell from the ceiling, coating Malik’s face with dust. He ducked beneath the table as the world convulsed around him. Was this an earthquake? All his instincts screamed at him to run fast and run hard, but where was there to go when the earth itself was what you were running from?

Just as he resolved to dart from the house, a voice cried, “Malik!”

All thoughts of his own safety fled from his mind at the sound of his mother’s voice.

“Mama!” A chasm opened in front of him, and he leaped across it, his teeth clattering as he crashed on the other side. He had almost reached the cellar where Mama’s screams came from when a second voice cried out to him from the washroom.

“Malik, help!”

Nana. Malik pivoted toward his grandmother’s voice, but as he approached, Leila’s voice moaned for his help somewhere from the back of the house and then Nadia’s as well.

Malik froze as every member of his family screamed for him at once. Nana was the oldest, so it made the most sense to go to her first, but he couldn’t live with himself if Mama died when he could have helped her. But what about Leila? His older sister never asked for help, especially not from him. However, Nadia was the baby of the family, the one who needed protection the most.

At the rate at which their house splintered around him, he’d only have time to save one.

“Help, Malik!”

“No, help me!”

The walls curved in on themselves, and the cries of Malik’s family turned to screams of pure desperation. His chest tightened at the weight of the choice before him.

Mama. Nana. Leila. Nadia.

He couldn’t save one if it meant leaving the others to die. He wouldn’t.

And no member of his family, his real family, would ever encourage him to abandon any of the others. No matter what tragedy befell them, the five of them had always banded together, and that reminder pulled Malik from his reverie.

This wasn’t his home, and that wasn’t his family dying. He was in the middle of the Final Challenge, and he had to find the exit to this maze now, before the next vision was too real to pull himself out of.

Malik braced himself as another tremor wracked his body. His eyes scanned the ever-crumbling world around him until he found the small creek on the edge of their land. Even as the quake worsened, the water’s surface remained still as a mirror. Malik ran to the creek, his family’s screams growing louder the farther he got from the house.

“Malik! Help! Help! How could you just leave us? Malik!”

Abandoning the last of his hesitation, Malik jumped into the still water. A sound like glass shattering filled the air, and he flipped over once, twice . . .

Malik’s feet hit the ground in a world of sunlight and sand.

The arid landscape of the Odjubai Desert was more than disconcerting after the familiar greenery of Eshra. Golden dunes as large as houses crested the horizon, and the sun was a white dot in the center of the sky, making it impossible to discern north from south. There was no sign of Ziran and no distinguishing marks to show which corner of the desert he might be in.

None the stories of the Odjubai had prepared Malik for how small one felt standing among its dunes. No matter where one was in Eshra, the mountains were always in the distance, a protective cocoon watching over their people and their land. But out here, the sky was so big, and he was so small.

He could go anywhere he wanted, yet every direction felt wrong.

Malik headed one way. He paused and went another, only to end up where he’d started. The back of his neck blistered beneath the scorching sun, but he had no turban or hood with which to protect himself. His tongue grew heavy in his mouth, and he stumbled more than once attempting to reach far-off oases that always fizzled into mirages when he drew near. Each time he fell, the sand left minuscule cuts on his skin that stung sharp as needles.

A familiar child’s weeping cut through Malik’s thoughts. Nadia. He fell to his knees beside the poor creature, who had curled into a ball with their head between their knees.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

The child raised their head, revealing dark curls and moon-owl eyes blacker than night.

Malik bolted back as if struck by lightning. He was looking at himself as he’d been around Nadia’s age. Judging from the gaunt look in the boy’s eyes and the bandages wrapped around his small feet, this had been right after the incident with Nana Titi, when the village elders had tried to “fix” him. The same age he’d been when the panic attacks began.

The child scrambled away from Malik, screaming, “Get away from me!”

“I’m not . . .” Malik began to protest, but the child ran behind the nearest dune, kicking huge clouds of sand behind him. Malik followed after the apparition, even as his senses screamed at him not to fall for any more of the maze’s tricks.

“Don’t touch me! Everyone says you’re not real!” the child screamed.

“Please, just wait!” Malik cried, but his younger self leaped into a crag, and he lost sight of him. He turned around and collided with a second figure.

This was him again but older, nearly the same height as he was now. Dark bags lined the apparition’s eyes, and it barely acknowledged Malik as it muttered to itself.

“Breathe.” His younger self picked at the skin on his arm, leaving behind bleeding, red marks. Malik reached for the band Tunde had given him, but it wasn’t there. “Stay present. Stay here.”

The apparition paced in a circle, its eyes growing more frantic. “They’re going to send you away again if you can’t stay in control. Papa will come back if you can just stay in control.”

If the last apparition had been him when the panic attacks began, this one was him when they were at their worst, the year after Papa had left. Of all the maze’s tricks, this one was the cruelest yet. Malik didn’t know the way out of the worst moments of his life now any more than he had then.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” he said. “I won’t lie about the spirits anymore. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good.”

Malik tried to reach out to his younger self, but his arms wouldn’t move. He wished he could reach beneath his skin and claw his magic from his body. No matter how many beautiful illusions he made or people he enchanted, nothing would ever change the fact that his powers had taken more from him than they had given.

“This is all your fault.”

The apparition vanished. In its place was himself as he was now, but with longer, unwashed hair, a withered frame, and sunken eyes—Malik as he’d been on Solstasia Eve, hungry and grimy and hopeless. Before he’d ever met Idir or known what it was like to have people actually listen to him.

The phantom took a step forward. “You think you’re getting better, but you’re not.”

Malik backed away, but there was nowhere for him to go. His other self steadily advanced on him, his voice growing with each step.

“Even if you did get better, you wouldn’t stay that way. Eventually, you’re going to spiral down so deep you’ll never find your way out.”

Malik summoned the spirit blade and slashed at the apparition, but it dodged the attack easily. His phantom grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him forward. “You have no one to blame for this but yourself. You could have ended all this days ago, but you didn’t.”

Now it was Karina with one hand pressed against his chest, another in his hair. Despite himself, he let out a groan, and she smiled sweetly.

“Is this what you want?” She arched her body against his, her lips dangerously close to his jaw. “Do you love me?”

“I—”

“More than you love me?”

Karina vanished, and Nadia took her place, standing several feet in front of him. Malik fell to his knees. “I don’t!”

“Then why won’t you kill the girl? Why do you keep letting Idir hurt me?”

“I—I—”

“You’re my big brother, and you’re just going to let me die.”

Now the mirage was him again, and it delivered a sharp kick to his stomach. “Nadia is going to die because of what I’ve always known: that you’re useless in every way, and everyone you love is better off without you.”

Blood mixed with sand in Malik’s mouth as his phantom rained blow after blow down on him.

“Do you hear me?” the mirage screamed. “Worthless! You think your family deserves to put up with you? You think Karina would want to be with someone like you?”

The mirage’s form flickered—now it was Idir, and now it was Driss. Now it was Papa, each blow more painful than the last.

“Just. Another. Damn. Kekki!”

The apparition paused but did not let Malik go. Even breathing hurt, but Malik forced himself to look at the phantom, which had shifted back to its true form.

He looked at himself.