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“That part wasn’t scheduled. Ash being out there when the front came through, the tree coming down, his tracker going dead, none of that was the plan.” Ryven leans back and stretches his legs out. “You know what was in the plan even less? The two of you in a cave.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“No,” he agrees, grinning at the window. “It’s the only part of that week that anybody upstairs didn’t arrange.”

“But the storm was.”

“The storm was. That’s the part you need to understand. The danger is manufactured. What it does once it hits you isn’t.”

I look back down at Tempest.

“Five hundred people walking through a forest for a week doesn’t sell,” Ryven continues. “They want weather. Panic. Poor visibility. People making stupid choices because they’re cold, blind, or scared. That’s what keeps everyone watching.”

“And when it goes wrong?”

He looks at me. “Then it goes wrong inside the Hunt, and everybody still calls it part of the Hunt.”

My hands go cold as I rest them on my knees. “Was this year’s a good show?”

Ryven looks at me. “That’s an unpleasant question.”

“You’re an unpleasant man. Was the show good?”

He smiles at the window and doesn’t answer. That tells me enough.

Tracing the river’s shape with my fingers over the glass, I wonder what it would feel like to swim in it. To feel my body weightless in the sun, without the heat closing in on me.

Right beside me, Ryven’s multi-slate lights up. He taps something out with one hand, then puts it away and looks back through the window.

Onyx has seen this. The thought hits me so hard I smile at the glass. Has he seen the water? The green? Has he stood at a window like this, his hand against it, watching water nobody rations and trees nobody cuts down?

And somewhere down there, Asher has him safe and breathing, about to receive the treatment I couldn’t give him.

I keep my hand on the glass the whole way down.

Then, finally, the doors open, and Tempest smells like rain on something living. I’ve never smelled anything like that in my life. I’m still holding my pack strap with both hands, like somebody’s about to take it.

“This way.” Ryven starts walking without looking back to see if I follow.

Glass corridors run in every direction, wide enough that our footsteps barely fill them. Two men in gray fall in behind us without being told and don’t speak.

“Where is he?”

Ryven holds open a door. “Waiting for you.”

I go through it fast because there’s only one person on this planet I’m here for.

That’s what I tell myself.

The room is long and full of morning light. One whole wall is glass, floor to ceiling, looking out over green that seems to go on forever. The polished floor reflects the view back at itself. Flowers I don’t know the names of stand in glass vases, freshly cut, drinking more water than Calder would waste in a week.

And at the far end, one hand pressed against the window exactly the way mine was an hour ago, stands my brother.

Light, he’s on his feet without the machine.

“Onyx.”

He turns, and his whole face lights up when he sees me. “JaJa.”