snow from the burning rooftops, the buildings buckling beneath the weight of a raging fire—both sides of the street were burning, the fire howling, windows bursting open and raining glass down onto the cobblestones below—
“RUN—RUN, RUN.” Someone barreled past Crier, bare feet slapping the cobblestones, and she realized she was surrounded by humans. There were humans everywhere, a flood of them in the street, their faces streaked with ash and tears.
Crier grabbed at a woman’s sleeve, or tried to, but her fingers passed through it. She shouted at her—“Where am I, what is this?”—but the woman did not look at her. Did not even seem to hear her voice.
This had to be a nightmare. Crier had heard of those, though she’d thought they only plagued human minds, like a chronic disease.
The nightmare city burned, and somewhere in the chaos Crier heard a child crying. The noise made her wheel around. There, across the street, stood a man. Human like the rest of them, with the fair hair common in Varn. His eyes were the pale gray of morning. She could pick out the color even through the smoke.
In one hand, he held the crying child, gripping its tiny arm. “Shh, Clara,” he whispered. It’ll be all right. Mama’s coming.”
He stood still only for a moment, eyes on the roiling sky, the collapsing rooftops. His chest was heaving, his knuckles white around the child’s arm. His mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. At first it just looked like he was screaming, and then Crier realized he was saying something, a single word, over and over again, his lips forming the same shapes. A name.
Siena?
A silhouette appeared in the smoke. Like a specter: first a shadow, then a body. A woman, emerging from smoke that looked like a wall of dark ocean, a massive, unstoppable wave. She was covered in pale ash and her head was bowed. Crier could see only a shock of wild hair.
Then she straightened up, and Crier stared. Because she knew this girl. It was Ayla. Caked with ash, blood all over her face, but it was Ayla.
Wasn’t it?
No, Crier realized, as the girl drew closer. No, this person was not exactly like Ayla. Her hair was longer. She was taller, almost as tall as Crier. There was something about the shape of her face that wasn’t quite right. She was not Ayla—but, stars and skies, she could have been Ayla’s sister, or mother, or—
The child wailed and Crier wrenched her eyes away from the Ayla-like woman.
“Siena.” The man took a step toward the young woman, they were barely ten feet away from each other now, eyes locked on each other’s faces, and the woman grabbed his hands.
“Leo, take this. I have to go back for the blueprints. But take this.” The woman—Siena—handed him a large blue jewel, bigger than a fist, glimmering like a giant crystal of heartstone, only as sea blue as heartstone was red.
“No, Si,” he said, holding the shining, cerulean stone in his hands. “Stay with us, stay—”
But the woman had gone again, back into the flames of the burning village, and the child, Clara, cried out “Mama!” and then an explosion in the distance, and—
Something happened inside Crier’s chest. A chasm yawned open.
All her inner workings seemed to stop at once.
She doubled over, gasping. There was something inside her. She could feel it scraping away at her rib cage, rising like bile in her throat. A monster trapped within her flesh. Crier sobbed and realized her vision was blurred. Her cheeks were wet.
Crier clutched at her chest, fingers scrabbling at her shirt, the skin beneath, as if she could somehow rip herself open and remove this thing from her workings. It was too much. It was too much and it felt like poison, an oily black substance inside her lungs. Drowning her from the inside out. She couldn’t breathe around it. She couldn’t breathe.
Calm, she had to be calm. She remembered suddenly, but it was as though her memory was a distant dream—how the necklace had slipped off Ayla’s neck while she slept, how easy it had been to pick it up, to study it in the moonlight, how she’d tried to fix the broken clasp—the drop of blood—
Eyes squeezed shut, Crier tried to focus on the weight of the pendant in her hand, soft gold, still warm from Ayla’s skin; she tried to focus on letting go of it—letting go—she was letting go—