A soft scuffing made me turn my head. Taj sat nearby, pulling his right leg gingerly toward his
body, massaging his thigh and knee, both swollen to twice their normal size. When he sensed
my stare, he gazed back at me, the two of us just blinking at each other. Until his eyes dropped
to Seth.
Or… Seth's body.
My brother was dead. Murdered.
The grief was a dense blanket that wrapped too tight around me, muffling the world. My brain
slogged as if through a mire. Taj's horrified stare only made the suffocating pressure pull tighter
until I wanted to scream and cry and fight and curl up in the fetal position all at once.
Unwilling to let Seth go, to lay him down on this rotten floor, I looked around and saw bodies
draped over odd, humped structures. More lay strewn on what looked like short stairs. Some
were in pieces that made bile rise to the back of my throat. Others were stirring, a few already
standing.
Rhea hoisted Colter to his feet. Matthew and Arnold brushed off moss and checked their
weapons. Leon coughed and cussed as he rose on an elevated level of the dilapidated building,
near a hole in the wall that led into a space filled with rubble, including thick metal piping that
reminded me of… something. There was more of it throughout the vast area, threaded through
the curving walls. As I traced it, I noticed Priscilla turning a slow circle, similarly scanning the
place. When her head tipped up, my gaze followed and saw open sky. The building was
rounded, and the tops of the walls ended in twisted struts and jagged remnants of glass panes.
A loud groan drew my gaze to Gavin, pushing up to one knee and shaking soil from the rift
forest out of his hair. "What the hell was that?" He looked to Fintan, who offered no answer, just
sat staring at a darkened area beyond an archway at the far end of the room, his brow furrowed.
"The better question is, where the hell are we?" Priscilla rounded on Colter and snapped, "I told
you we needed to get out."
Colter didn't even glance at her as he spun a frantic circle. "Where's the drake?" he asked,
raking fingers through his hair as he spun a circle. "Did we lose it?"
The dragon's corpse was nowhere in sight.
"It must not have come through with us," said Rhea.
"Through what?" asked Leon. "We didn't actually step through the rift."
"The rift… collapsed," Fintan said hesitantly. "Maybe both of them? I think we got sucked
through."
"You don't know that," Colter scolded.
"It definitely felt like passing through a rift," Gavin jumped in defensively.
"Shouldn't we have fallen out of the sky between the towers in that case?" said Leon. "Not that
I'm complaining."
"Not necessarily," said Fintan, getting to his feet and moving to examine one of the strange
structures set at intervals throughout the room. "We didn't exit normally."
"But then where's the drake?" Colter repeated, voice hovering just below a shout, nostril flaring.
"The rift spat us out," said Rhea, brow furrowed, "but maybe the beast stayed because it's part
of the rift?"
"Are you sure we exited at all?" asked Arnold, a creeping panic making his tone uptick at the
end. "What if we're stuck in one of the rifts?"
His fear started to infect the space. Anger and worry rose like steam, stiffening everyone's
posture.
"I think this is… Lumen Central Station," said Fintan, holding a piece of warped, cracked plastic.
Suddenly, it clicked: the structures were information desks and brochure holders, the chrome
detailing dulled and the bolted foundations sagging beneath the weight of rubble from the
collapsed dome ceiling.
Thinking to get a view of the street, I looked opposite the archway to a familiar row of seven
doors set into the curving front entry. Their frames were warped, the glass set into their
decorative metalwork either shattered or clouded with filth, making it difficult to see beyond
them.
"No way," said Gavin, skepticism dragging on the last syllable.
"No, he's right," said Rhea.
"When is he ever right about anything?" huffed Leon. "He doesn't know which way's up if Gavin
doesn't tell him."
"Let him explain," said Gavin, his glare a warning that Leon only rolled his eyes at.
"Can't be the station," chastised Colter, heedless of both of them as he continued to look around
like the dragon might be lying just out of sight. "Must be one of the abandoned cities. How long
would it take for all this moss to grow?"
"Look, that's the bubble tea place!" said Priscilla, pointing to what was once a storefront, a
twisted metal sign on the ground in the entryway. "We are home. But what happened?"
It looked like a bomb had gone off. No… it looked like Lyman. Like the Lightbridge rift had burst
and expelled its environment onto ours.
Hanna. Her name tore through my head and made a rip in the heavy covering of grief,
quickening my breath and my thoughts. Where was she? She'd been in the Towers. Had she
evacuated in time? We'd been in the rift an hour, maybe two, before it collapsed. That was long
enough for her to get away, right?
I needed to find her. I started to extract my legs from beneath Seth.
"We should get back to Lightbridge, report in," said Rhea.
"Report what exactly?" demanded Matthew. "What's the story now, Colter?"
"Yeah," said Arnold. "There's bodies all over the place, out in the open inside the train station for
God's sake. If anyone looks at them properly, they'll see a beast didn't do this."
"We should cut them up more, make it look more savage," said Priscilla.
I froze, one leg still beneath Seth. I looked down at his face, finding the two moles beneath his
eye, and gripped him tighter at the thought of a knife slashing them away, leaving gaping claw
marks across his cheek, his teeth exposed, throat torn open.
Warm breath at my ear made me jump, but Taj clamped a steadying hand on my shoulder and
brought a finger to his lips. "We should run for it," he murmured, so low I barely caught it. "Can
you help me? I hurt my leg when they…" He swallowed hard, not needing to finish the sentence.
I bit my lip. I wanted to help, but I didn't want to leave Seth to mutilation. I opened my mouth to
tell him to go for it alone, and I'd try to distract them, but Colter shouted, "No! Everybody shut
up!" and Taj's eyes went wide. He started scooting away from me.
"He screwed us somehow. That light wasn't normal."
I followed Taj's eyeline to find Colter striding toward me, head lowered like a charging bull. I
wriggled free and stood, stepping in front of Seth's body to meet him, fists at my sides.
"What did you do, Torrin? Did you use the rune you stole?" He grabbed my jacket front and
hoisted me easily onto my toes, so my nose was closer to his snarl.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Taj get onto unsteady feet and take one limping backward
step toward the exit to the street, eyes bouncing between the ardents. Then Rhea posted up to
Colter's left, blocking my view of Taj and the doors, but I didn't intend to run.
My whole body was shaking with the urge to do something stupid. To make them pay.
Somehow, some way. And Colter had given me an idea. Maybe I could use the rune. Maybe the
sickening sensations running through my gut right now meant it was trying to work.
"No way he activated that rune," Matthew called out. He and Arnold were trying to peer deeper
into the train station, the entrance to the turnstiles partially obstructed by hunks of marble tile,
drywall, and more of that abnormally large metallic piping. "Can a Red even absorb a rune? One
he swallowed?"
"Cut him open and see if it's still in there," said Leon, stalking toward me with Priscilla.
I focused my concentration on my gut, trying to spread whatever power might be lurking there,
to channel it like a raden user.
"You sound like a broken record," scoffed Gavin, flashing Leon an unfriendly smile as he joined
the ring forming around me and Colter.
It wasn't the first time I'd found myself surrounded by ardents, my fate bound to whatever Colter
decided. This time, when Colter's green eyes scanned my face, I took his advice, looked death
in the eye, and matched his glower, fury thudding through my head like a second pulse.
"You don't even know what you did, do you?" He shoved me away, and I almost fell on top of my
brother. "Useless little Red."
A roar filled my head. My blood was on fire.
Prove to everyone—especially yourself—that you can keep a cool head even in the thick of it.
I distributed my weight, cocked back a fist, and punched Colter square in the jaw.
Bone met bone, but it was mine that crunched with bruising force, me who cried out in pain.
Colter barely flinched, head turning an inch to the side and then levelling back on me as a
coldness smoothed out his angry snarl into a more sinister mask.
He backhanded me across the jaw in a move too fast to track. Gavin's laughter mixed with a
whine in my ears as the building tilted around me. I landed right next to Seth with a thunderous boom that shook the floor. Groggy, my thoughts ground to a halt, then wound backward. That
sound couldn't have come from me.
Another quake, then another. Like footsteps. Big ones. Galloping ones. Getting closer.
Then the metal struts at the top of the wall groaned as a massive parabeast pulled itself over
the lip with giant forelegs that looked like they wore craggy, rock-plated vambraces. The toes of
the feet curled into prehensile fists, hauling up a beast that might have crawled out of hell—its
body a dark umber plated in black rock, eyes burning like embers, curved horns like a demon,
and visible veins of raden running through its entire form. Its wide head was half mouth, and its
maw opened to reveal rows of both tearing and crushing teeth. The roar that burst from it
sounded like a bull elephant's trumpet and made the remnants of glass still around the building
vibrate and shatter.
Its much shorter back legs scrambled onto the lip of the wall and launched it into the station
before anyone could react to Colter's shouted orders for a defensive formation. Its front feet,
curled into iron fists, smashed down near the lobby's back entrance and pinned Matthew to the
marble floor. He screamed through a bloodied mouth, flaring his raden and futilely trying to get
his hands and knees beneath him to push up, get free.
The beast slammed its huge forelegs down on Matthew in a rapid succession of punch-like
motions that shattered his raden and left his body a bloody pulp mashed into the hole the
creature had pounded into the floor.