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The smell of flowers was all around her.
Lily opened her eyes and saw green stems and bright blossoms waving gently in the breeze. Her raw skin was smeared with ash and her clothes were singed tatters, clinging to the dried scabs on her body. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She saw that her burns were already healing somewhat. Had it been a whole day? Two days?
Lily licked her lips and realized that someone must have poured water in her mouth because it was cleaned of ash and it felt damp. She concentrated on the last vestiges of venom in her veins and realized that it had not only knocked her out and kept her immobile, it had eased her pain and kept her injury from festering. A chemical cocktail that complicated had to have been engineered.
She heard groaning, and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Just next to her was Juliet. Lily sat up and found Una, already sitting upright with a blank and devastated look on her face. Caleb was just pulling himself up to standing and Tristan was beside him, still clutching a dagger. Lily looked frantically to her other side and found the source of the groaning. It was Breakfast. He flopped onto his back and grabbed his head.
“Lily,” the other Tristan said, coming toward her. He staggered to Lily and helped her sit all the way up.
“He’s dead. My Tristan is dead,” she whispered, clutching at the other Tristan’s hand.
He nodded and dropped his head. Lily looked around her in a daze, too numb to feel anything just yet. They were in the middle of a field of flowers. The sun was bright and the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg. Lily could taste the ocean on the air. She lifted her face into the salty breeze. It was coming from the west. The ocean was to the west.
The other Tristan—now the only Tristan—and Lily helped each other stand, and then bent down to help Juliet up to her feet. Lily saw Caleb, Breakfast, and Una already standing and facing west.
The sun was just tipping down into a late afternoon and it hung over the walls of an immense city. Flowers were everywhere—pouring over the sides of the walls and carpeting the tops of every building that soared up behind the colossal wall.
“This is no city I’ve ever been to,” Caleb said.
“That’s because you’ve never been this far west,” Una said.
“No one has ever been this far west,” Juliet said.
“Are you sure Lillian didn’t know about this?” Tristan asked.
“Of course I’m sure!” Juliet looked scared.
“Lillian didn’t know,” Lily said, holding up a hand before an argument could break out. “If she did, she would have sent an army out here to conquer it. She’s not the kind of person who likes having anything beyond her control.”
Everyone heard the logic in what Lily said and dropped that possibility. The truth was, if either Lillian or Alaric knew that there was another city all the way across the continent, they would have tried to get here long ago.
“But how could this have been kept a secret?” Breakfast asked skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Lily mumbled. “But I bet it wasn’t easy.”
She staggered forward, staring at what shouldn’t be there. The perfume of the flowers being crushed beneath her soot-blackened feet sweetened the soft breeze. The sky was the exact shade of blue that Rowan imagined in his dreams of California, and the sun shone with the same sparkling golden light.
“That’s the Pacific Ocean,” Lily said. “That’s impossible. We hadn’t even made it through Kansas.” She heard her voice catch, and realized that she was crying.
“The Hive must have flown us over half the country to get us here,” Una said.
Lily couldn’t start mourning Tristan now or she knew she’d fall apart. She didn’t really believe it yet, anyway. A part of her kept whispering that it was impossible. Tristan couldn’t be dead because she couldn’t imagine a world without him. Lily swiped angrily at the tears streaming down her face and read what was written over the main gate of this impossibly beautiful Shangri-la.
WELCOME TO BOWER CITY.
End of Book Two
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Ahanu: Outlander girl who tried to tame a Woven
Alaric Windrider: known as the Sachem, he became the leader of the Outlanders after his wife and baby daughter froze outside the Citadel
Anoki: Carrick’s abusive father who worked as bait man for his tribe
Caleb Crow: an Outlander who is friends and stone kin with Rowan, one of Lily’s claimed; Elias was his partner
