Page 4
“No!” I shout, and before Sola can pull me back, I wrench myself out of her hold and run down the path to the front door.
Inside, the brass dish from the hall table is on the floor. A drawer is hanging half out of the cabinet, cracked at one corner, with keys and ribbon and sealing wax scattered across the tiles. Beyond that, chairs sit crooked and drawers gape open where they should be shut.
Nothing is where it belongs. It’s like the house isn’t ours anymore.
Pa stands in the middle of the hallway, breathing hard and looking around the wreckage as if he’s trying to make sense of what happened. His eyes keep returning to the drawers hanging open along the wall before he crouches beside the cabinet, staring at the papers scattered across the floor with a frown that doesn’t look anything like relief. “They went through everything.”
“What did they take?” Ma asks.
He studies the papers a moment longer before shaking his head. “Nothing.”
Sola turns and catches me before I even know I’m shaking. She pulls me hard against her side. One arm wraps around my shoulders, and she presses a hand over the back of my head. “Hey. Hey. I’m here.”
Wake up.
Somewhere deeper in the house, something crashes to the floor as Ma and Pa continue searching through the mess. The sound makes my eyes sting, and suddenly I’m crying.
“Don’t let go,” I whisper, and my fingers knot in Sola’s sleeve.
“Never.” She pulls me closer and lets me bury my face against her shoulder.
Through the blur of tears, I look across the road, to where everyone else is hurrying and shouting around us. One figure stands perfectly still, watching.
I shiver and hug Sola a little tighter. “I love you,” I sob.
“I love you too, silly.” But she squeezes me just that little more.
And I believe her.
At twelve years old, wrapped in my sister’s arms while strangers had turned our home inside out, I can’t imagine a future where Sola isn’t there.
Wake up.
1
ROWAN
The dream always ends there.
The broken lock. Ma’s voice. Sola’s hand grabbing for me.
Wake up.
For eight years, that’s how it comes apart. Never the whole thing, just fragments. A bell somewhere too far away. The blare of horns. The feeling that something has already been taken before I understand what I’m looking at.
Sometimes I even wonder if it happened the way I remember it, or if my mind has changed it over time.
Even now, standing in the rain, staring at the glowing holoscreen on my wrist, I feel half caught there, like I woke up wrong and never fully made it back.
When I look up, the city blurs for a second, lights smearing in the mist like a bad signal. Then everything snaps back into focus—the street in front of me, the bar across from me, wet pavement gleaming beneath the lane lights, and people hurrying through the rain.
Sero rises ahead of me in glass, stone, and impossible scale. One of the largest worlds in the Reach, it feels less like a planet and more like a city that never found its edges. Hover traffic moves overhead in thin lanes of white, red, and cold blue, silent from this distance except for the low electric hum rolling between the buildings.
I remember staring at the sky as a kid and wondering what life would be like on other planets. Never, in a million years, would I have thought it could be like this.
Just looking up makes my head spin. Everything here is too fast, too high, too polished.
And somehow, standing across from the bar I’d come to find—Black Chapel—with rain dripping off my jacket, I still can’t decide whether coming here was the smartest thing I’ve ever done or the stupidest.
