To their right, the door was blasted open, smoke pouring through the entryway as Cade and his soldiers sprinted in.
But Karr was not paying attention.
For the escape pod shook, a feeling that sent Sonara’s stomach dropping to her toes, and then they were tipping forward, as the very side of the storage bay opened, practically spitting the pod out, shoving itawayfrom theStarfalllike a swatted fly.
Sonara screamed, clutching the straps in terror as theyfell.As her stomach shot into her throat, and the small glass window in front of them revealed the ground drawing ever closer.
“Hold on!” Karr yelped.
At the last second, the pod jerked upwards as if it had sprouted wings. Sonara swallowed her scream as it carted them across the sky, through where the light-wall had once been.
Past the Dohrsarans below, they soared, over the valley and the hundreds that had been imprisoned, but were no longer held within the electric cage.
“Oh, hell,” Karr groaned. He slammed a button on the dash, then pulled up on the small wheel before him, but the pod did not respond. The lights guttered out again, and then they were sputtering, bouncing like a wagon driving across uneven sand, as the pod died. Karr looked to Sonara with a strange sense of eerie calm as he said, “We’re going to crash.”
They’d defeated the atlas orb.
They’d shut down the light-wall and escaped.
So why,Sonara thought numbly, as the pod neared the ground…why are the prisoners not running free?
The answer never came.
Sonara’s body lurched forward into darkness as the pod slammed into the sand.
Chapter 33
Karr
Karr woke in the half-place again, standing on the grey sand shore.
“You’re nearing the end, lost soul. See how the sky falls?”
The Child of Starlight stood beside him, her nebula eyes turned to the night. The wind tugged at her hair, shaking the stars and planets that made up the strands. She pointed, a ringed planet shining on the tip of her finger.
Karr followed it with his gaze.
Above them, far above… a tiny star turned from its place in the sky. It shifted. Then it began lowering itself towards them, a tail of firelight sparkling in its wake.
“The sky isn’t falling,” Karr said with a small smile. For he’d seen that image countless times before. He’d been the boy inside of it, staring out a viewport as a new world beckoned below. “It’s a starship breaking through the atmosphere.”
The girl sighed and closed her eyes. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Karr asked.
Across from them, the waves, in half-roiling white and half a calm, cool black, continued their constant dance. “Your magic calls to the planet itself.Reach out with it. Touch the breeze. See that it trembles as the darkness draws near.” She reached for Karr’s hand.
Pain slammed into his chest, a piercing stab of blazing fire. But before he could gather the strength to scream, the scene shifted.
And suddenly they were standing in the shadows of a cave, peering out at the half-sea from within.
“Memories are hard to come by, when you have lived so many lives,” the girl said sadly. She tucked a star-strand behind her small ear. “Come, little Shadowblood. Let us see what will be revealed to us this time.”
She pointed, and to the right, two blurry figures arrived. They looked to be little more than ghosts, their color sapped, their voices muted as if they were behind a veil.
The first was tall and lithe. A young man, perhaps seventeen, with a jaw so handsomely square it could have been stone-carved. His cloak trailed behind him, snapping in the ocean wind as he walked. Slowly, with great pain, he seemed to move, as if he’d been injured in battle.
Beside him appeared a smaller figure, smiling as she flipped through a worn journal, not caring where she walked. She was a young woman, perhaps still considered a girl, her curls concealing her face as they tumbled about in thick, unruly waves.“You’re getting better.”Her voice felt like it was underwater as she pointed at a leather-bound journal in her hands.“This one looks exactly like me.”
