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“Stay behind me,” he says. “And whatever it does, don’t use your lightning.”

The creature’s head breaks the surface, and Logan’s on his feet in front of me, fire erupting from his hands in a torrent that slams into the creature’s face with a hissing, crackling impact that sends steam billowing into the mist.

The creature—the drakon, as Logan just called it—recoils, and a wail tears from its throat that vibrates through the hull, the smell of scorched scales filling the air.

It’s working. Fire hurts it.

But the glass sphere is breaking at the seams. Each time I inhale, my chest waits for the crack that ended the last breath I took in the previous timeline. My skull throbs where the impact landed. My spine keeps flinching from a blow that already happened, in a body that never took it, and my instincts are screaming at me to blast the drakon with every volt I own.

Instead, I clench my fists until my nails carve crescents into my palms, trapping the current inside skin and willpower. I rebuild the sphere twice, three times, reinforcing the glass with every technique from every training session at Blaze. But the current ignores all of it, leaking from my palms into the bench, through the wood, and into the lake.

Pull it back. Contain it. Stop feeding⁠—

Logan blasts more black-lined fire forward, and it hits the creature’s neck in a concentrated stream that blackens its scales on contact. The creature writhes, its coils churning the water, sending waves slapping against the hull.

It’s hurt. It’s actually hurt. Logan’s plan is working.

Then it dives, plunging headfirst into the depths, coil after coil sliding down after it until the last of its bulk vanishes from the surface. The water boils white where it went under, steam hissing in drifting sheets. Bubbles the size of my head burst across the surface in long trails.

Eventually, the churning fades, the lake goes flat, and the water’s glowing. Silver light’s pulsing across the surface in every direction, spreading outward from our hull in branching veins. It’s my electricity, threading through the black water in bright, crooked lines that fork and multiply the deeper they sink.

It would be beautiful… but there’s no sign of the hopefully dead drakon anywhere.

“Did you⁠—”

“No.” Logan’s breathing hard, and his fire dies in his hands. “I hurt it. That’s all. I didn’t kill it.”

My heart’s pounding, and my electricity’s still leaking, draining through the hull in a steady, uncontrollable bleed. Every pulse that leaves my palms flares in the water below. The glass sphere is shattered in my chest, and I can’t rebuild it, because my hands are shaking too hard, and the drakon’s still down there.

Logan’s hand closes over mine on the bench. “Your electricity is channeling into the water,” he says, way too calmly for the situation at hand. “You have to pull it back.”

“I can’t.” My current surges harder, as if saying it out loud gave the leak permission. “Every time I reach for the sphere, my ribs—” My breath hitches at the spot where the third snap happened. “I reach for control, and my body reaches for the crush instead.”

“Look at me.” His voice drops into the steady register from our midnight sessions at the Scorched Circles, his grip tightening over my shaking hand. “The night on the Crown, when Thad was killing you over and over, you said you’re lightning made flesh. Storm given form. Fire asks permission—” His thumb presses into my palm, right where the current is bleeding out. “—but lightning takes it. So, take it back. It’s yours.”

I hold his gaze, and the rest of it falls away—the lake, the drakon, and the sword waiting below. There’s just Logan’s hand on mine, his gray eyes steady on my face, and the current running between our palms in a slow, living circuit.

“Keep your hand there,” I tell him, taking my first full, real breath since being crushed. “My lightning apparently likes you better than it likes me right now.”

He gives me a small smile that makes my heart flip, and I close my eyes, reaching for the sphere. Its glass walls start forming, and Logan’s hand on mine helps, the cool pressure against my skin slowing the drain. Even through my closed lids, I can sense the change in the water—the silver veins thinning, the glow dimming vein by vein as the current crawls back up through the hull toward my palms.

“Good,” Logan says. “Keep⁠—”

The lake shudders, my eyes fly open, and the sphere shatters.

All the electricity I was pulling back floods out of me in a final, panicked burst that races through the hull and into the water. Silver light detonates outward from the boat in a ring, every vein I fed into the depths flaring at once.

No, no, no. I had it. The sphere was holding, the veins were dimming, and⁠—

There’s no time to finish the thought, because the water’s rising, a wall of it on every side, silver current forking through the towering mass in bright, veined bursts. The wave’s crest bends inward over the boat, blotting out everything, a closing fist of glowing water with us at the center of its palm.

“Jade, grab⁠—”

The electric wall slams into us, and the world becomes impact. Cold punches the air from my lungs. The boat’s bench tears out from under me. Logan’s fingers rip away from mine, and the wave drives me down with the weight of the entire lake behind it, my own electricity crackling across my skin as the water swallows me and fills my world. There’s current everywhere, wrapping my arms, my throat, and my face, buzzing against me in frantic pulses that seem like they’ll never stop.

Then the silver gutters out and spreads thin, and I’m tumbling through the gray, and I can’t tell which way is up. The mist above the lake and the water below it are the same flat, colorless nothing. My heart slams harder with every second I can’t find a direction, and the count starts in my head before I can stop it.

Eaten by a Hydra. Stabbed by my professor. Thrown off the Crown. Crushed by a drakon.