Page 173 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

The ground was hard when I fell, my teeth clacking against my cheek. The night whirled around me, leaves and grass and stars trapped in motion like water circling a drain. I pushed to my hands as someone swooped in at my back, pulling me to my dizzy feet.

Hadrian.

“Come on!” he yelled, and I realized the world was blaring with noise. Wind swept his hair and jacket to the side.

“No,” I screamed as he pulled, guiding me away. “Kye—”

Rain whipped at us, sharp as knives, blurring the island into muted slurs of green and black and gray. I searched for a glow, a sunlit flare among the thrashing torrent, but there was none. Someone else lifted me, heaved me against their chest. Dark red hair plastered over their face, wild as I kicked and fought for control of my own feet.

“I’ll find him,” Diara said. Her voice was clear and close, but I never saw her. Hadrian lurched to grab her through the branches, swearing under his breath as he failed.

The world screamed. Trees groaned and cracked, forced from their roots. Branches swung through the air, bashing against rocks.

Kazimir set me down under a cool shadow. The mouth of the cavern. He turned and knelt, drawing Pheolix’s shirt from the drone’s stomach.

“Where is she?” Pheolix asked, pale and shaking.

I swallowed, my skin still vibrating with incendiary heat. I blinked, hot tears escaping from the cage of my sudden anger. “Out there.” With Kye and my parents. “Where’s everyone else?”

They glanced at each other. “They went to look for you in the opposite direction.”

“All of them?”

Hadrian hesitated.

A sharp hiss made him turn, Kazimir drawing the blade from Pheolix’s belly. The drone’s eyes fluttered closed.

“Keep him awake,” Kazimir urged, fingertips soaked in blood.

“Stay here, Hadrian,” I said, turning to leave. Nori, come back to the volcano.

She’d been strewn on the beach, a knee in her throat the last time I’d seen her. I didn’t wait to see if she answered me, though, slipping through the cavern mouth and into a storm.

Kye!

I’m here. The thought answered mine, tension around its edges.

A hand wrapped over my wrist, Hadrian storming into my side. “I can’t—I can’t lose him again,” I yelled against the wind, bracing to fight him off.

But he nodded, drawing me close to his chest, battling the gale. “I know,” he murmured before surging ahead, pulling me through rain and leaves and blinding wind, leading me not back to where he’d found me but carving a wide circle instead.

My heart leapt as luminous gold broke through the foliage. We peered through just as pale ginger curls flew past us, slamming into a tree.

“Diara,” Hadrian murmured, the caution in his body exploding into urgency. He shoved through the trees, but he was lifted off his feet just as quickly, beads of water anchored to his chest and arms, nailing him to the grass.

The rain had turned into glass, solid and heavy, collecting along the island floor like pearls fallen from the sky. I straightened, banishing any thought. Stepped through the brush, chin high. Into falling glass and stolen sun beams and the promise of ash that would surely tear my skin from my flesh.

My heart hammered.

A drone was waiting on the other side. He reached slowly for me through the storm. But an odd expression warped his eyes, and he gazed down at his own hand.

His outstretched fingers were crumbling to dust.

The drone watched, almost mesmerized by the sight of his arm collapsing through the air, eaten away by the rain.

Then he was hurled away from me, a tall man in his place. One with salt-and-pepper hair, eyes like ice.

“So kind of you to join us,” Thaan said.