The lantern light stretches my shadow long across the wet stone as I move away. Every step feels heavier than the last, the bond between us pulling taut like a thread stretched across distance.
I know he’s still standing there, watching. I can feel it. The awareness hums through the bond with a quiet intensity that makes it almost impossible not to turn around. But I don’t. Because if I look back… if I see his face right now… I won’t let him go. And the rebellion needs him more than I do.
So I keep walking into the darkness of the tunnel, pretending the ache in my chest is just the bond pulling and not something deeper.
Not something that feels dangerously close to longing.
CHAPTER
FOUR
I wakebefore dawn with my throat burning. For a few seconds, I don’t know where I am.
My body is already reacting before my mind catches up—lungs dragging in air too fast, fingers curled in the blanket like I’m bracing for something to hit me again. My heart is pounding hard enough that I can feel it in my ears, each beat intense and insistent in the quiet room.
The nightmare lingers the way they always do. It doesn’t fade immediately. Instead, it sits there in the dark with me.
It takes a moment before the warehouse ceiling resolves above my head, familiar beams cutting across the dim grey light that leaks through the high windows. Dust floats lazily in the air, catching the faint glow from the street lanterns outside.
Not the forest.
Not the green sky.
Not Thomas.
I exhale slowly and sit up, touching the crooked scar on my face.
The blanket slides off my shoulders as I push a hand through my hair, pressing my palm briefly against the back of my neck as the last echoes of the dream settle.
It’s been ten years. Ten years in Terrafeara. Ten years since that night in the forest.
And still, my brain sometimes decides it wants to replay the moment my life split clean down the middle.
I swing my legs off the bed and sit there for a minute, elbows on my knees, breathing slowly while the adrenaline drains out of my system.
The warehouse is quiet. Too quiet now that Varek isn’t here.
The thought rests before I can stop it, which is ridiculous. He’s been gone less than a day. Still, the absence lingers around the room like a missing piece I’ve grown used to ignoring.
I push the thought aside and stand. The wooden floor creaks faintly beneath my feet as I cross to the basin and splash cold water on my face. The chill helps a little, dragging my thoughts back into the present.
But the dream has already done its work. And once the memory starts moving, it doesn’t like to stop.
Three weeks. That’s how long Thomas and I lasted when we first arrived here. Three weeks of surviving in a world that made absolutely no sense.
The rift storm had swallowed us on the highway outside Kalgoorlie. One minute we were driving through red dirt and open sky, the next the world had twisted itself inside out and dumped us somewhere with a green sky and trees that hummed faintly in the wind.
The cruiser had saved us at first.
Thomas’s patrol car was stocked the way outback police vehicles usually are—water, emergency rations, blankets, a basic med kit. Enough supplies to keep someone alive for days if they broke down halfway between towns.
Of course, the car itself had stopped working the moment we arrived. Whatever rules electricity followed in this dimensionweren’t the same ones it followed in Western Australia. But the supplies had lasted a while.
We’d rationed the food and stretched the water.
And Thomas had burned through the two bottles of whiskey he kept hidden under the passenger seat by the fourth day.
After that… things got worse.
