Page 1 of Into Ember

Chapter 1

Elara

I am screaming.

I’d like to think I’m the kind of woman who falls through a hole in the sky with some composure. I am not that woman. I have never met that woman. I’m screaming the whole way down — or up, direction has stopped taking my calls — and there are stars everywhere, above me and under me and rushing past my ears. The one useful thought I manage to have in all of it is that the sky is on the wrong side.

Then the ground finds me.

All of it. All at once. Flat on my back, and the impact goes through me like a dropped piano, and the air leaves my body in one long wheeze and does not send word about when it’s coming back.

Stars. Real ones and the other kind, spinning together.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

If I had any breath, I would lose it all over again.

I get maybe two seconds of lying there being a crater.

Then something lands on me and my eyes slam closed.

Something big. Something heavy. Something warm, hitting me chest to chest hard enough to bounce the last of the air I didn’t have, and my arms are pinned and my lungs are a rumor and there is a body on top of me.

A whole body.

An enormous one.

Around us, the world starts raining men.

One thud. A second, close enough that dirt jumps near my head. A third that sounds like a building sitting down. A fourth that barely lands before it’s moving.

“Remind me,” Gunnar’s voice says, from somewhere to my left, ragged, “never to run through a fucking portal again.”

A portal? What are we in, some science fiction made-for-TV movie now?

A groan. Someone spits out what I hope is grass.

“Who the hell thought that was a good idea?”

“We all did,” Brock says, still catching his breath.

“Elara!” Erik, and it cracks across the clearing like a whip, closer already, coming fast.

“She’s fine,” Rayner says, too calm compared to everyone else. “Probably. She broke Leif’s fall.”

I would like to respond to any of this. I would like to say I’m fine or what portal or WHO IS ON ME. Unfortunately, figuring out that last one requires opening my eyes, and I have become very committed to not doing that.

Ugh, fine. Reality doesn’t stop working if you ignore it, but keeping your eyes closed helps… right?

My eyes open against my will and I can’t see the stars anymore.

All I see is Muffin’s eyes.

Deep blue, that impossible blue, the blue I noticed in the hallway this morning and overruled on a technicality, because no collar means no owner and the system had spoken. They’re six inches from mine and they’re exactly the same eyes, and they are on the wrong face.

A man’s face — jaw, cheekbones, the whole arrangement — and the eyes haven’t changed at all. They’re watching me put it together the way they watched me do everything today. Patient. Like the show is me.

“…Muffin?”