As the water recedes, sand and rock spilling away, the base of the island is exposed, but it’s not made of reef or stones—it’s a smooth structure of metal.
A ship.
Silver-sided and domed near the top. A behemoth.
“There it is,” Holt says, his voice almost a shudder—not shocked, but amazed to see the thing he’s surely tried to imagine in his mind. Yet never seen until now. He wipes the rain from his forehead and steps closer to the receding shoreline, his miscolored eyes focused on the sleeping giant resting on the bottom of the ocean.
The ship we have both been trying to find, now visible. Only hidden by rocks and sand over time, obscured to look like an island.
The wind picks up; the sky shivers like thousands of bees swarming over the beach.
I look to Noah again, his eyes reminding me of the sky: stormy and cloud-knotted.
The two men who’d been holding Noah drop their arms, the knife lowered—too distracted by the rain lifting up into the sky, the silver ship perched on the seafloor with barnacles growing along its belly.
But Holt finally snaps his eyes to me, sensing my movement. “Did you turn it on?” he asks, the whites of his eyes too wide. “Did you find the map inside?”
I stare back at him, not wanting to tell him anything, but knowing that Noah and I aren’t free of him yet. “Yes,” I say, voice toneless.
A glimmer appears in his eyes, a dark wistfulness, like he senses how close he is—to finally escaping the sickness that’s taken half his sight, that’s killing him. But before he can start across the seafloor… the sky releases a loudcrack. Like a massive piece of wood splitting in two. Like thunder ripping through my bones.
The beach shakes beneath us, so violently that I’m certain the ground will open up. Death from above and below. The men beside Noah wobble, terror in their eyes, while Holt lifts his palms, as if beckoning down the sky. “What the hell is happening?”
He might know some of the history of our ancestors—he might know more than most, told to him by August—but he’s not an Astronomer. He hasn’t spent every night of his life peering up at the stars, watching as we slipped closer and closer toward the dark, bottomless orb in the sky. He doesn’t know that the shadow—the thing that shimmers in the early dawn hours when it slants throughthe atmosphere just right—is finally right over top of us, cresting the horizon. And now the rain is being pulled up into the sky, the ocean yanked back by the force of the black hole’s gravity. All of it disintegrating. And I suspect, there’s only minutes left before… we’re next.
The air crackles, sizzles, in my eardrums.
No time left.
My eyes flash to Noah, then out toward the ship. There is pain in his eyes—not the kind made from the blade of a knife, but from watching me swim out across the sea while he was forced to do nothing. Helpless. But he nods back at me, understanding. And in the next second, I swallow down a damp, jagged breath, and we both bolt away from the beach, heading out toward the sea.
Toward the ship.
TWELVE
The ocean has abandoned the seafloor, drawn well past the ship, past the place where the ground slopes away.
Noah and I run, the air static against my skin, while he keeps glancing up at the bleak, shivering sky, watching as the last of the rain is pulled up through the atmosphere. “Hurry,” I say, reaching back to grab his hand and pulling him after me.
We don’t have time,my head repeats in a screaming loop.
We cross the exposed bottom of the sea, where water had churned and heaved only moments ago, but now we scramble over rocks and sharp reef.
But through the rush of the wind, I hear Holt’s voice behind us. “Go after them!”
Yet when I look back, none of the men are in pursuit. Two of them have even begun retreating up the beach, away from the ocean, terrified of whatever is happening to the sky and the sea—what will soon happen to all of us.
We reach the front edge of the ship, and using the clumps of reef and rock and barnacles, we pull ourselves up its sleek side. Near the top, Noah heaves me over the edge, and I stand on what had oncelooked like an island but now is partly flat, the sand washed away, only a few rocks remaining.
“What’s happening?” Noah asks when he pulls himself up, looking out at the ocean where the water has slid farther back than I can even see. Only tide pools remain. Small pockets of water and sea life. A strange, horrifying sight. “What is this?”
My lungs feel tight, head pounding. “The shadow in our sky is a black hole,” I tell him, the wind capturing my voice and carrying it away, up into the dark mass above. The truth—the thing that Mom said was too big for anyone else to carry, the thing that would only make others hunt us with a desperation that would make even the valley unsafe—finally released from my chest. “It’s killing us,” I say. “It’s always been killing us, moving closer to our planet every year, every hour, making us sick.”
Creases form between Noah’s eyebrows. “But what is this?” His eyes flash down to the silver, gleaming ship.
“It’s…” I force myself to take a breath, knowledge threading through the very center of my bones. “… the ship our ancestors arrived on.” He only blinks at me, needing more, needing to understand, while the sky rips open above us. “They came from up there,” I say, pointing into the writhing dark. “From a planet… called Earth.” This is what August never told him, or maybe August didn’t know—maybe the stories were lost to the Architect long ago. Altered and forgotten, as stories tend to do over time.
“I don’t understand,” he replies, his dark hair stirring across his forehead, over his eyes, making him look like he’s caught in the eye of a peculiar storm. Waves of light dancing across his face. “What happens now?”
