A figure sprinted across the roof, emerging from the access hatch.
Riven.
He was running, stumbling over the debris of the shattered machine. His mouth was open, shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him. The sound had been scrubbed from the world.
He looked terrified.
I tried to lift my hand, to tell him it was okay, but my arm wouldn’t move.
The blackness washed over me, total and soft.
Just before the dark took me completely, I felt a touch on my cheek. Not Riven’s cool hand. It was warm. Rough. Calloused. A phantom thumb brushing away a tear.
Goodbye, my daughter.
I closed my eyes, and the world went away.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Riven
The silence was worse than the scream.
The explosion of Light had blinded me, a whiteout that scoured the roof of shadows and sound. When my vision cleared, the Extractor was gone. The chrome spire was a vaporised ruin, leaving only a twisted stump of metal smoking in the charged air.
Selene lay in the gravel.
“Selene!” Her name was a raw, desperate scream that tore through the ringing in my ears. I scrambled over the debris, ignoring the heat radiating from the slagged metal, my boots skidding through the loose, shifting stones. I saw her fingers twitch—a ghost of a movement—just before her eyes closed and she went still.
I slid to my knees beside her. She looked small, her strength entirely spent. Her skin was grey, drained of all colour, the golden fire that had consumed her moments ago completely extinguished.
I reached for the resonance.
I expected to feel the steady, warm glow of her presence—the frequency that had lived at the back of my mind since the Cistern. Instead, I felt a shudder. A dying ember in a cold grate.
Terror seized my chest.
“No,” I whispered, my hands hovering over her, afraid to touch in case she shattered. “No, no, no.”
I pressed my fingers to her neck. Her skin was ice. Her heartbeat was there—but it was a thready, fluttering bird against my fingertips. She was fading.
Then, the chasm opened within me. It was an abrupt weightlessness, as if the ground had vanished beneath my feet. With every fading beat of her life force, the anchor holding me to this world began to fray. I didn’t care what the old texts said about our connection; the theories were just words on paper. But as her pulse slowed beneath my fingers, my magic screamed the truth.
I gathered her against my chest, my hands trembling as they buried into her hair. For thirty years, I thought I knew what the dark was. I thought it was the isolation of Korenth’s cage. But watching the golden fire fade from her skin, I finally understood true emptiness. She was the only thing that had ever given my shadows a shape and a purpose. If she slipped away now, I wouldn’t just be alone—I would be a ruin.
“Selene,” I choked out.
The roof was too exposed. The building groaned beneath us, the structure settling from the blast. She was dead weight in my arms as I scooped her up, her head lolling back against my shoulder.
The maintenance shaft was a no-go. I headed straight for the main artery—a tactical gamble, but with Selene’s survival on the line, speed was the only metric that mattered.
I headed for the reinforced doors of the roof access. A kick sent the door flying back, hitting the wall with a clang. I stormed through the penthouse maintenance level, reaching the private lift bank. The doors were sealed. Locked down.
I used Shadow. I drove a spike of solid darkness into the seam of the doors and forced them apart. The metal screeched, gears stripping, but they gave way. I carried her inside and hit the button for the groundfloor.
The doors juddered shut. The car began to descend.
The stillness in the lift was suffocating. The mirrored walls reflected us back—a man covered in soot and blood, holding a woman who looked like she was already gone. I slid down the wall, pulling her into my lap.
