I try to sit up, but my head pounds—an internal warning bell clanging hard enough to rattle my teeth—and I crash back into the sand.
I crane my neck. Nothing but dunes.
Gone are the candles.
Gone is the night.
This isn’t Ember. This isn’t even New York.
I scrunch my face, shut my eyes tight, and tense every muscle in my body one at a time, just like my former therapist used to tell me to do when I needed to ground myself in the here and now.
I release slowly, blowing out a steady breath, keeping my eyes shut as I wait for the sounds and smells of Manhattan to knit themselves back together around me.
But there’s no car exhaust. No blaring horns, or distant shouts. Just heat, silence, and—
A shadow moves over me.
My eyelids fly open.
A figure bends, their outline haloed in a spill of sunlight.
I blink hard, but my vision swims. All I can make out are the dark shape of a robe shifting in the wind and two eyes glowing like hot coals pressed deep into shadow.
Dazed, I squint up and croak, “Who are you?”
It’s quiet; there’s only the hiss of sand sliding over itself. Then her voice drifts down—light and airy, curling around the syllables like smoke. “It has been so long since I have had a name.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I lift a hand to shield my eyes, trying to push myself upright, but the world tilts violently. Nausea swells in my throat, and I collapse back against the sand.
“Fate has led you here,” she says. “To us. To me. But why? I cannot remember.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, heat drying my tongue. “There’s something wrong. I don’t… I don’t know where I am or—”
“I have kept the wheel turning,” she interrupts, her voice carrying over the wind. “Counted the cycles. Lit the path for those who will choose change. For those who will risk everything to step beyond what they know.”
A familiarity in her words snags in my chest, pulling me back to the card that’s been stalking me for weeks.
She straightens, the sun flaring behind her so bright it blots out detail. Even as she tips her chin toward the sky, her features stay hidden, swallowed in shadow as if the light itself refuses to touch her.
I repeat her words under my breath. “The wheel… The path for those who will choose change.”
I groan again, the sound scraping up my throat. “Of course my brain would conjure a tarot card hallucination.”
Her fiery gaze snaps back to mine. The shift is sudden enough to make me flinch. “I am as real as you are.”
The words ignite the flicker of heat in my chest. It builds, an urgent, insistent force that thrums so loudly I swear it’s echoing between us.
I grope at the sand for anything with weight, anything that could prove that this is real.
“Seriously…” My voice is thin, breathless. “Who are you?”
“I have told you.” Her eyes burn hotter, twin flames fixed on me. “I am—”
The word blossoms in my mind before she can speak it. It’s there all at once, as familiar as my own name.
“Fortune.”
We say it in unison, the syllables hanging in the air like they’ve been waiting for us, heavy on my tongue like a truth I’ve always known.
