almost expecting to see a dragon descending. Instead, a large drop of rain landed in her eye, followed by another on her chin. Her shirt was soaked in seconds, sticking to her like a second skin.
“Let’s get inside!” Finnegan yelled. He was barely audible above the roar of falling water. “There’s got to be somewhere with a roof.”
They scrambled through the streets and into a tall, lopsided building. The door was missing, but the rush of water quieted as they ducked inside.
If not for the decay of fifty years, Aurora could almost imagine that someone still lived in the house. A table stood in the center, slightly crooked, and the back wall was covered in shelves. A pile of rotting clothes waited on the table, as though someone had washed them and got distracted before the clothes could be put away.
Finnegan ran a hand through his hair, sending more droplets pattering to the floor.
Lucas sat on one of the abandoned chairs, apparently trusting it not to break, and Finnegan walked around the ruin, investigating the remains.
Aurora leaned against the doorframe, looking out at the sheets of rain. Alyssinia seemed far away. The capital, with rules and walls and Queen Iris’s disapproval, seemed even farther, impossibly far, like it too had been part of another world, part of the dream while she slept, and she was finally, slowly waking up. This place was another kind of nightmare, she thought, but at least she could walk freely in it. At least she could be here to see it.
And she wanted to see more.
“I’m going to explore,” she said, after ten more minutes of heavy rain.
“I don’t think that’s wise—” Lucas said, but she was already stepping out of the door. She turned on the balls of her feet.
“Dragons don’t come out in the rain,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Want company?” Finnegan asked.
She shook her head. “I want to wander around. By myself. I’ll be back soon.”
The rain clung to her clothes, her hair, her skin. It pounded on the ground, drowning out all other noise. The sky was clear and blue, even as thunder rumbled across it. One of those freakish storms, the kind that should be impossible, like the dragons, like this place.
The abandoned town was a maze, and the rain blurred her vision, making it hard to even guess where to go, so she moved on instinct alone, running her hands along the stone. She could feel so much in the twists of the walls, the melted smoothness, the nicks and dimples, the occasional place where more names, more messages, had been scratched. Perhaps this town had stood when Alysse herself was born, when Aurora’s ancestors set off across the sea.
Her wanderings led her to the edge of the town, where the ground sloped upward, gently at first, and then steeply, forming a hill that was almost a cliff. From this angle, it seemed to stretch up forever, blocking her path all the way to the sky. But there were a few ruined buildings on the slope too, more damaged than the rest, the ground so hard that even the rain had not yet churned it into mud. And some cracked stones remained, forming something that might once have been a path.
Aurora wanted to climb it. She wanted to stand at the top of the hill, to look over everything, to see it all for what it really was. A girl in her tower, looking out at everything she might touch one day.
She scrambled up the path, hooking her toes into the cracks between the cobbles to stop herself from falling. The rain slowed to a drizzle, quieting as quickly as it had come, but Aurora pressed onward, her knees aching with the effort. She glanced over her shoulder, and already the town was shrinking behind her. She could see the places where the roofs had bent and collapsed, the buildings that had lost their roofs altogether.
She kept climbing.
The rain faded away. The sun shone warm and bright, soothing Aurora’s skin.
Above, she saw a cave.
“Aurora!” Finnegan, far below her, shouted into the space between them.
“In a moment,” she said. “I just want to see.”
She could hear Finnegan following, his feet pounding on the ground, and she frowned. She had told him she wanted to be left alone. How like him, how arrogant, to assume that he could interrupt her after all. And she was so close to the top now. So close. The cave loomed beside her, the inside black