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Except for the sound of Quinn’s rasping breaths as she fell, too.

I scrambled toward her, staring at the sizzling wound in her stomach. Blood was already bubbling out of the blackened hole, and her mouth opened and closed multiple times before any spluttering, gurgling sound came out.

“Ray…”

“Stay with me, Quinn.” I ripped my gaze from her wound to refocus on her face. “It’s okay. Just breathe.” I grasped her curling fingers. “We don’t let go of each other’s hands, remember?”

Recognition flared in her own gaze before she locked it on the ceiling.

We both knew from past experience that she would let go of my hand.

“Tell Wilder… goodbye for me” was all she said in response. “And my… brother.”

I wanted to tell her no, she didn’t need to say goodbye, that she would live long enough to get to tell Wilder and her brother hello again. At the same time, I knew she didn’t need false niceties or reassurances or anything other than what she was asking for.

“Okay.” I nodded. “I’ll tell them goodbye for you.”

A sigh trickled from her mouth. “It was good… to make… that choice all by myself… right?”

Understanding flashed through me. After a childhood of someone else controlling her and a too-short adulthood of trying to find herself among the mess her mother had left behind, Quinn wanted—needed—her last action to be her own. More than that, she needed it to be an action that mattered.

“Yes,” I said, tears clawing at my throat. By getting close enough to those elites and distracting them long enough for us to escape, she had saved us all. Had saved me. A few seconds longer with that bar around my throat and I would have been gone. “Yes, it was really good, Quinn. Thank you.”

The ghost of a smile settled on her lips. Her fingers went limp in my hand.

And her blood painted the floor long after she’d taken her last breath.

CHAPTER

59

COEN

“Get up, Coen. There’s nothing you can do for her now.” Barberro clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve got to go.”

I pushed myself back up to my feet from where I’d been kneeling beside the captain right outside the prison doors. Two sword-length tusks were embedded through her body, pinning her to the ground slick with melted snow. The monster they belonged to lay in a mangled heap beside her.

She’d managed to throw her cutlass through its jaw right before she’d died, and my own jaw clenched. I’d never liked the captain, that much was clear, but her death came as a blow to the boy I’d once been. The one who’d once thought she posed the greatest threat to my friends and me.

Now, she was just another body among all that littered the mountain.

Slowly, I turned to survey the scene surrounding us.

Barberro and Nara were panting beside me, both of them uninjured and wiping sweat from their brows. Kanuk was picking through the elites sprawled on the ground, making sure they were all truly dead. Terrin was kneeling beside a sobbing exiled one who had shed his monster form the moment I’d sliced through his brands. The Esholian Institute students were helping each other disembark, flooding from the ship like a new tide.

Something else drew my attention, though.

As elite after elite had toppled over dead, more and more of Bascite Mountain seemed to be defrosting beneath the moonlight, the Good Council’s Element Wielders no longer alive to keep it in an unnaturally icy grip.

Slush sparkled where the snow had been. Ferns poked up from melted patches. The trees beyond the ship were shedding their icicles, trunks regaining warmth, buds blooming like stars where leaves had once fallen off.

Agathea Temberlein cackled with glee, clapping her hands and summoning a swarm of all kinds of nocturnal winged creatures from who-the-fuck-knew-where: owls, moths, bats… They hooted and fluttered and squeaked overhead like a whirlpool of a crown, prepared to attack on her command.

Except there was no one left to attack out here.

“Are all the elites dead?” Nara asked.

“No.” I shook my head.