I stumble.
My legs are barely keeping up as the terrain shifts beneath me. My ankles wobble with every hard, uneven landing—and I need light.
I can’t do this in the dark.
Bootsteps thunder from every direction.
I don’t know which are ours.
I don’t know which are his.
I can’t keep up.
My breaths are tearing out of me in ragged gasps. But the oxygen isn’t feeding me, and my vision is blurring.
I start to sink, my legs giving out, my head spinning—but before I can fall to the volatile earth, I’m suddenly lifted.
Darkness and gravity twist all around me, until I come down a hard shoulder.
A grunt catches in my throat.
I dangle, folded over.
But the panic doesn’t ebb.
The shudder of the quake trembles all the way up Samick to me, rigid over his shoulder, hands fisted on his leathers.
Wind rushes over me, whips at my raw cheeks, and distantly, I hear a woman’s cry.
A human.
A kuri.
My chest is tight—but not for her.
It’s the suffocating, crushing pressure of Samick’s shoulder smacking into my middle with every step of his run through the crumbling woods.
Mika’s voice slices through the dark. A hollow shout, a single word.
She’s close.
Not close enough that I can reach out and touch her—not that I would let go of Samick’s leathers in this crashing chaos—but she’s sticking with us in the dark.
We don’t stop.
I don’t know what she said, who she was shouting at, but not a fucking heartbeat after, a crash rips through the woods—
My heart jolts to a stop.
Because the earth splits open.
My eyes widen.
The tear of crimson stretches through the blackness, wider and wider, like its eating the dark.
Holy.
Fucking.
