But a growl rumbled in the girl’s throat, and then she was gripping his shirt with both fists, her weapon discarded, her face close to his, the breath shared between them. She was so close he could see subtle hints of blue swimming through her brown eyes. Blue like the sea, blue like the sky, a pale color so drastically different from the shadows now swimming from his skin.
He felt like he was back in theStarfallagain, watching his parents bleed out. But this time there were no shadows to hide in, because they’d all disappeared.
Now he was bleeding those shadows.
Now… he had a monster hiding inside of his own skin.
What had this girl done to him when she’d killed him?
“You have a final chance to speak the truth,” she whispered. “After that, you will know true pain.”
She lifted the blade, angled it towards his chest.
“Sonara!Stop this madness.”
Two figures emerged from the shadows: a beautiful girl with dark hair, and behind her, a woman that looked like she wore a skull for a head.
He was hallucinating now. Would they tear him apart, would the woman with the skull-headdevourhim?
He wanted to live. Oh, God, he wanted tolive.
The sickness swelled, the heat inside of him rising. The entire cave seemed to tremble, as Karr’s body shook.
And just before she pressed her weapon into his chest…
Karr screamed. He put all his terror into that scream, all of his desire tolive.The rift widened, and something felt like it broke inside of him. A heavy, weighted darkness dropped from a fraying string. It tumbled down, down, into his soul where it settled beside something warm and waiting and entirely brand new.
Yes,it seemed to whisper.Here I am.
Release me.
Karr’s body shook as that heat spread from him, pooling in his fingertips, his toes. He yelled and tried to shove the pain and the fire away.
A loud crack resounded, and the woman shouted and dove to the side as the ground actually fractured beneath Karr’s sprawled legs.
The fault line spread until it reached the far side of the cave, where it drove upwards into the rounded wall. The wall shifted, that raw crack of power splitting it in two, wide enough to reveal a small hidden alcove of rock just beyond.
And at the end of it, standing in the shadows as if it had been there for ages, just waiting to be discovered… a door.
Chapter 24
Cade
The message was scrawled in something so dark it could only be dried blood. The translator in his S2 shifted the strange letters around, morphing them slowly until Cade Kingston could read the ransom note, clear as day:
Free the prisoners or he dies.
You have until the suns set.
A lifetime, Cade Kingston had spent protecting Karr, only for it to come to this.
He couldn’t lose him a third time. And yet here he stood, holding Karr’s discarded S2 helmet in his hands. To remove it would mean death, for the air on Dohrsar was poison.
His hands shook as he replayed the recording he’d pulled from the loading dock camera.
As he saw Karr just after he’d left him last night.
In the recording, Karr stumbled, scraping at his helmet as if there were somethinginsideof it attacking him. He fell to his knees,then crawled for the loading dock door in desperation.
