MasukAnd every single person was walking.Everyone. The men from my truck, from all the trucks, and beyond them more, spilling out of side streets and doorways, hundreds, then more than I could count, every one of them moving the same way at the same slow even pace toward the blue light, and not one of t
SofiaThe thing nobody tells you about stowing away in the back of a wolf's supply truck is that wolves do not believe in shock absorbers.I'd been folded between a crate that smelled like gun oil and a stack of canvas duffels for going on four hours, knees up under my chin, one hand knotted around
AvaI came back into my own body the way you come up from under cold water. All at once, lungs grabbing, except the water was me, and I'd been drowning in myself longer than I knew.For a second there was no up. Too much arrived at once. After the white nothing of the place with Catherine, the world
"Alexander."My name, in the low voice, gone thin at the edges now. A command. Come. Hold the vessel. Put your hands on it and hold it still.The wall in my chest told my feet to move. A year of habit told them to move. I took one step up toward the seat. My body did it the way my body did everythin
AlexanderI had spent my whole life learning to read the exact moment a thing breaks, and the goddess wearing my bride was beginning to break, and I could not turn my head to look at her.That was the cruelty of the wall she'd built in me. It let me see everything and touch nothing. I stood where sh
"Ava." I said it out loud, to a concrete wall, and it came apart in my mouth. "I've got you. I'm here. I've got you, baby. I've got you."She couldn't hear the words. She never could. But she could feel a hand close around her in the dark, the way I'd once felt hers close around me from a hundred mi
AvaThe hallway was a nightmare.The first step outside the dorm room and every fluorescent bulb overhead buzzed like an insect inside my skull. The sound was so sharp I could feel it in my teeth, each flicker and stutter of the lights slicing into my head.Sofia’s footsteps on the tile were complet
HildaI paced the hallway outside the dorm for what felt like hours. In reality, it was probably twenty minutes, maybe less, but time warped out here—six steps forward, six back, and always the same stain on the wall, the same worn patch in the tile under my heel.I stopped knocking after the first
SofiaFor a while, I didn’t say anything. I checked Maya’s monitors, made sure the fluid line wasn’t crimped, and cleaned the residue off her mouth with a damp gauze pad. It was all routine now.When I looked up, Ava hadn’t moved. She was still pressed to the desk, her knuckles bone-white.“You don’
AvaAbove me, a bird landed in the sycamore tree. I could hear its heartbeat, the quick flutter, the scratch of its claws on the bark. I heard it swallow.I heard the feather ruffle as it shook out a wing. Somewhere underground, water rushed through a pipe, so loud I thought the earth itself was goi







