But the truth doesn’t care about what I want.
“It’s Earth,” I say.
The words hit the ground between us like something fragile and explosive all at once.
Jamie stares at me. Jack goes still. Sonny swears quietly under his breath. Caly’s focus snaps back to the tear with renewed intensity.
Above us, the rift pulses again, widening, stabilising in a way that makes my skin crawl.
It’s not closing. It’s still opening. And I know, with a certainty that sinks deep in my bones, that this isn’t random or coincidence.
This is a door, and it’s open.
My heart hammers, my chest close to cracking, my thoughts racing too fast to keep up with. Because this… this is everything I’ve ever wanted.
And everything I might have to walk away from.
The bond flares again, stronger this time, a visceral reminder cutting through the chaos in my head.
I close my eyes for half a second, dragging in a breath that does nothing to steady me. When I open them again, the tear in the sky is still there.
Still growing.
Still waiting.
And there’s no doubt left. Not a single shred of it.
“That’s home,” I say quietly.
And for the first time since I arrived in this world, home is staring back at me.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The sky won’t hold.
It’s the first thought that resonates cleanly through the chaos in my head as the tear above us shudders and widens and then, with terrifying abruptness, begins to fray at the edges. Light spills through it in erratic pulses now, no longer a steady wound cut into the green expanse overhead but something unstable, something fighting itself as though two worlds are trying to agree on where the seam should sit and failing.
Wind tears through the trees hard enough to bend branches. The forest floor shivers beneath our boots. Somewhere above us, lightning cracks again, this time so close, the afterimage scorches across my vision.
“It’s changing,” Sonny says unnecessarily.
No one answers him.
No one needs to.
Every one of us can see it.
The rift is not opening wider anymore. It is buckling, the edges beginning to collapse inward in uneven jerks, shrinking and stretching at once in a way that makes my stomach lurch.
Jack moves first.
He turns to Jamie with a look on his face I have never seen before, not even in the worst moments since I met him. Fear is in there, yes, and desperation, and the kind of fierce, protective love that turns a person into something immovable, but underneath all of it is grief. Not the aftermath kind. The anticipatory kind that arrives when someone knows they’re about to lose something and has to make themselves do it anyway.
“Mate,” he says, and his voice is rough enough that Jamie’s head jerks towards him immediately. “You have to go.”
Jamie still has the medallion clenched in one hand. It throws strange light across his knuckles, across the tendons in his wrist, across the frightened set of his mouth. He looks from Jack to the tear in the sky and then back again, and whatever fragile control he has been holding onto cracks. “No.”
