“A shipping rest stop,” Roc says.

“Whatever it is, I’m glad it’s here,” Trevor says. “I’m about to be dead to the world for a long time. Wake me up when something exciting happens.”

We unpack our bedrolls and lay them in a circle around the barren fire pit. Roc, always a gentleman, settles in close to Tawni, but not too close. Trevor collapses a bit further away, his breaths deepening almost immediately. I place my bedding a respectful distance from where Adele is standing, holding her own pack. To my surprise, however, she drops her pad in a heap next to mine, lowering to her knees to smooth it out, avoiding my gaze.

As I lie down facing away from her, she nestles in close to me, tracing my legs with her own. The gentle beat of her heart taps lightly against my back, sending slight vibrations along my skin. The feelings from before reappear: warmth, flittering excitement, floating.

My strength sapped, I close my eyes and feel wakefulness start to slip away.

“My mom said it’s no accident that we met,” Adele whispers in my ear.

“Mmm,” I murmur, unsure of whether I’m awake or in a dream.

Chapter Seven

Adele

Despite the warmth in my heart and body as I lie next to Tristan, sleep doesn’t come easy. For a while I can’t turn off my brain, as I think about the conversation I’ll need to have with Tristan now that I’ve told him what my mom said to me. In my mind it goes something like this:

Tristan: So if it’s not an accident that we met, then who caused it?

Me: I dunno.

Tristan: Did you ask your mom?

Me: Nope.

Tristan: So what does this mean for us?

Me: I’ve got no clue.

Yeah, not very productive. I vow to pretend like I never told him.

Eventually, however, I do slip into something of a half-sleep, my mind alternating between awake and asleep. At one point when I open my eyes, a dark figure looms over me, holding something long and sharp. I try to scream as the blade hovers over me like a guillotine, dripping something wet and sticky on my face. I place a hand on my cheek to wipe away the moisture, and when I pull it away, it’s red with blood. In the split-second before the blade slashes downward, my brain sizes up the situation. The intruder, the blood, the blade: at least one other of my friends is dead, maybe all of them.

With the long knife arcing toward my chest, I have no time for grief, no time to grasp the reality of my horror-filled life, no time to be human. Instinctively, my body reacts to the attack, rolling to the side and narrowly avoiding the death blow as it rips into my bedding, tearing straight to the rock floor and shattering into shards of metal that tinkle like broken glass as they scatter around me and my attempted murderer.

Pushing hard to my feet, I take a few quick steps back to buy time while I size up my enemy, but it’s unnecessary, because the looming shadow doesn’t advance, just stares at me with invisible eyes.

“You killed my friends,” I state, my words like splinters of metal. My body is empty, like there’s nothing left inside me; no heart, no blood, no tears—I’m just a hollow shell of flesh and bone. I know in that moment I will kill this man, and then I will kill the President.

Silence fills the dark gap between me and the swordsman. “Answer me!” I roar, my face and hands clenched and full of rage.

Instead of responding, the shadow laughs, heavy and arrogant and evil. He takes a step forward but I remain firm, revenge my only motive; there’s death on my fingertips, making them twitch and jerk.

Another step takes him into a beam of light from an unseen source, perhaps a hastily discarded lantern.

I gasp when I see his face.

The attacker is President Nailin.

This is it. This is my moment. The culmination of our mission in a strange fated meeting. My friends dead; me soon to be. But not before him.

Screaming out senseless words, I charge, wrenching my knife from its ankle holster in the same motion. The President keeps laughing even as I approach him, and I hesitate for a moment, wondering why he would let me kill him so easily. And where are his guards? His soldiers?

In the moment of hesitation, I leave myself open. With a speed that seems inhuman, he pulls another sword from behind his back, where I couldn’t see it, and thrusts it forward like a javelin, piercing my gut just above my bellybutton.

I know the pain has to be intense, but I don’t feel it. I feel nothing. No pressure, no agony, nothing.

Leaving the sword—which is bouncing up and down slightly—embedded in me, President Nailin moves forward, leaning his sweaty, red face close to mine, so close I taste his hot, foul-smelling breath on my tongue. “I will kill you,” he breathes.

I don’t understand why he would say that, because he’s already got me on a skewer like a stuck pig; threats aren’t necessary. I look around us and I realize: it’s not real. The cave is gone and we’re surrounded by white pillars, sparkling with diamonds. Huge wooden chairs surround us, each occupied by lavishly adorned men and women, wearing jeweled necklaces and bracelets, brightly colored silk tunics, and gaudy fur hats. Spectators.

I shut my eyes so tight I feel like I might squash them in their sockets, will myself to awake from this nightmare, to return to a place where I’m warm and safe in Tristan’s arms, a place where my friends are alive.

Wake up, wake up, wake up!

WAKE UP!

My eyes flash open to murky darkness, broken only by the flickering glow of soft candlelight—our night light. I’m breathing heavily, almost panting, my heart racing unnaturally in my chest. As I deepen my breaths, Tristan’s long, slow exhalations whisper next to me. We’re no longer tangled together, but I’m still warmed by the waves of heat radiating off his body.

Warm and safe.

For now.

Although I’m pretty sure I’ve only slept for a couple of hours—if I’m lucky—I’m wide awake now. My eyes feel like they’re being held open by matchsticks, unable to close even if I want them to.

I sit up and Tristan stirs, his eyes fluttering for a moment as he rolls onto his side, away from me, but he remains sleeping. The others are asleep, too, Tawni the closest, on her stomach, her arms along her side. My heart rate’s back to normal, but with my normalized breathing comes an empty feeling inside my gut. It’s not hunger, I realize, but loneliness, a loneliness I haven’t felt since before I met Tawni and Cole in the Pen. I know it doesn’t make sense because I’m surrounded by my friends, but it’s there, like a creature of evil inside me, eating away at my soul.

My father’s face flashes into my mind and tears well up before I can even consider holding them back. The loneliness is because I know I’ll never see him again, never hear his words of wisdom, his heavy laugh.

Grief’s a funny thing. You think you’ve got it under control, and then it’s right there again, creeping up on you when you least expect it. It seems like no one really knows how to grieve, or even if there is a good way to do it. Me, I stayed in bed for a long time, but when I got up, I wrongly assumed I’d left the grief in the bed. Really it followed me like a shadow, waiting for a moment of weakness to pounce.

I wipe away the tears, thinking of how to best distract myself. I consider waking Tawni so I have someone to talk to, but she needs her sleep. My hand absently fumbles through my pack, extracting items and returning them. Then my fingers close on an unfamiliar item: a book. The diary my father gave Tristan, which he gave to me. I’d read maybe twenty pages of it since, and was shocked by the truth of Year One, of what the girl, Anna, had to go through. It’s just the distraction I need now.

I flip to the earmarked page and begin from the top of the entry. It reads: