I'm sorry, I think. I'm so sorry. But I need your body to do something, and you're going to have to trust me.
I don't know if she can hear me. I don't know how the merge works from her end. But I push forward, toward the edge, and I feel her feet carry me there even as her instincts scream to stop.
The stone walkway ends. Below, the ocean churns. Dark. Cold. Unknown. Every reasonable part of my brain is telling me this is insane. That I'm going to hit the rocks. That the water will swallow me whole. That there's nothing down there but death.
But Thalia said no more chances. And Peeble said the ocean doesn't care about your logic.
And somewhere out there in another iteration, in another fold of time, Kaelren is looking for me. My Kaelren. Lost in the same tangled mess of timelines I've been stumbling through, and he's looking for me, and the people I love are holding down the fort back home and praying I find my way back.
I look up at the night sky one more time. The stars are bright here. Brighter than they've been in any iteration. And for just a second, standing on the edge of a cliff in a borrowed body, fifty feet above dark water, I feel calm.
I look back at the lighthouse. At the warm glow still visible from the lantern in the room where Kaelren sleeps. At Peeble, who has turned both compound eyes toward me with an expression that might be understanding, or might be alarm, or might be both.
"Elle?" they say. "What are you doing?"
"Taking the leap," I say.
And I jump.
The air catches me. The stars blur. The ocean rushes up.
And the world folds.
We hit dirt.
Not stone, not starlight, not the spongy decay of carnivorous soil. Actual dirt. Dry, cracked, sun-baked Arkansas dirt that smells like clay and summer heat and something so painfully familiar that my chest locks up before my brain catches the reason.
Grandma Jo’s garden.
I’m on my hands and knees in what used to be a flower bed. Dried stems crack under my palms. The elm tree stands ahead of me, massive, ancient, its canopy throwing shade in the late-afternoon light. The porch is there, the wind chimes, the ceramic frog on the stone ledge. Everything exactly as I last saw it.
For three full seconds, I let myself believe it.
Then Peeble screams.
I’m on my feet before I register moving. Peeble is on the ground three feet to my left, on their back, legs twitching.
Their left wing.
The vine in Iteration Fourteen caught the tip before we went through the pool. I’d seen it; the quarter-inch of membrane ripped clean. I’d heard the shriek. But in the portal's chaos, I’d assumed it was surface damage.
It’s not cosmetic.
The tear has spread. What was a quarter-inch gash is now a jagged line running from the wing tip halfway to the joint, the membrane split and curling back on itself. Fluid seeps from the wound. Not blood, exactly, but something luminescent and pale gold that drips onto the dry soil and makes the dead grass underneath it shiver.
“Kaelren!” Peeble’s voice is higher than I’ve ever heard it. “Kaelren, my wing—it’s—oh gods, I can see the inside of my wing. I cansee the inside of it. That’s not supposed to be visible! Those are private wing-internals!”
I kneel beside them. “Stop moving.”
“Stop moving? My wing is falling off, and you want me to stop moving? That’s like telling someone whose arm is hanging by a thread to just relax and enjoy the scenery!”
“Peeble.Stop moving.”
They stop. Not because I asked nicely, but because the pain hits. I see it happen. The adrenaline dropping, the reality arriving, the moment their body catches up with what their brain already knows. Peeble goes still, all six legs locking, their compound eyes fixed on me with a focus that cuts through every layer of snark and bravado.
“Fix it,” they whisper. “Please.”
I’ve never heard Peeble say please without sarcasm attached.
