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I staggered backward, pressing my spine into the rock behind me. The rock I had just ‘walked’ through was smoother than the surrounding rock, but other than a few faint symbols, there was no way to tell that it was there. And that was a problem. How was I ever going to find the entryways again if they were all so well hidden? And how was this dead end bringing me to Ember?

Turning around to touch the smooth stone again, I waited for the fizz of magic to answer me, but there was nothing. Only cold rock and my pulse pounding in my throat.

“Perfect,” I muttered, dragging a hand through my hair and twisting my curls around and around, pulling them out of my face. Forcing myself not to panic. Panic made me careless, and careless got people killed. This was not my day to die.

Below me, the Wilds spread out in a sweep of broken cream-coloured rock and stubborn silver-green scrub. Tumbleweeds swept around towering boulders. Beyond those, the land dipped into deep ravines and rose again into jagged ridges that cut into the pale morning sky. Mist clung low in the hollows, and every now and then it shifted, making me shudder.

My gaze swept over the rocky ledge. There was only one way off it—a narrow goat path that wound down the side of the mountain in cruel, uneven steps. The kind of tiny stones that would crumble under my boots and send me plummeting to my death.

I breathed in through my nose and forced my mind back into order. Ember. I needed to get back on track.

The image of her climbing through the library window flashed behind my eyes—her face pale with fear and defiance. She had always trusted me to make impossible things happen, but there was no way of knowing if each of us had accomplished what we had set out to do.

I adjusted the satchel over my shoulder, checked the knife at my hip, and started down.

The path was as bad as it looked. Loose shale skidded under my boots, and more than once I had to flatten myself against the mountainside and remind myself to breathe. The air was different out here. Not like the Barren, with its dust and dry winter frost. The Wilds’ wind was tainted with old, toxic magic.

I had walked the FootPath tunnel for hours and then slept for hours; I was leagues from the mountains and the Ruckus. It should have tasted like freedom, but it didn’t.

Freedom didn’t smell like this, and it wasn’t laced with fear.

The Wilds were a deadly and deserted land. My shoulder itched to tell me that someone was watching, but there was no house as far as I could see.

By the time I had reached the valley floor, my shoulder was pulsing with alarm, and my calves were burning, and my hands were scraped raw from catching myself against the rock. The mist had begun to lift, and with it came sound—the far cry of a hunting phoenix, the rustle of brush, the low groan of trees rubbing together somewhere ahead.

It was all so strange.

Then another shrill scream cut through the morning.

The cry was too harsh for any bird I knew, too full of rage and warning. It echoed off the cliffs, bounced across the rocks, and raised the hair on my arms.

Phoenixes.

Not one of the Barren Blaze birds either—the ones Torran said were tracking me. Their cries were deeper, crueller, perhaps even tortured, but definitely far more unstable. Those phoenixes should probably all have been bonded to a rider, but when they left the hatchery in the volcano, they had never flown to the mountain selection cave. They’d just… flown away. It was said to be one of the stages of the curse.

I stepped forward slowly, my gaze lifting to the sky.

At first, there was nothing but clouds torn thin over the peaks, and strips of pale blue between them. Then a dark shape burst over the ridge to my right, so fast I froze instead of searching for a hiding place.

Its wings were vast.

It banked hard, and the under-feathers flashed smoke-grey with black edges so dark they seemed tinted blue. The body was leaner than the Blaze Phoenixes I had seen circling Craven City; this one was built for speed rather than war. It screamed again, and another answered from behind me.

Rogue phoenixes.

Dangerous enough that even in my homeland, where we worshipped the Skyworld, the Otherworld gods, and the Phoenixes they sent down, people told stories of them to frighten children. Telling tales of them ravaging villages throughout the nights of Yule and stealing away the unrepentant and disloyal.

But the thing above me was not a creature from a priest’s imagination. It glided right, eyes silver and shining.

Did it see me?

But then it was gone, skimming over the distant treeline, heading toward an answering shriek from somewhere deeper in the Wilds.

I let out a shaky breath and pulled my oversized fur-lined coat around me.

Tugging at the chain of my amulet, I gripped it in my palm. “Couldn’t you be a compass?” I whispered to the swirling white magic inside it. “Because I’m getting tired of guessing where the hell I’m going.”

There was no answer, only a gust of wind and the smell of moss-covered stone.