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“What are you doing,” I ask. He takes another set of cuffs from his jumpsuit pocket and latches one side to my ankle cuff and the other to a metal grate on the floor. “You have more fucking cuffs?”

Squatting before me, a smirk teases his lips. “I’m a guard.” That invisible darkness crowds in and sits on my skin like a layer of cold sweat. He pinches my chin, holding me in place and coercing my eyes to stay on his. “I can cuff you wherever and whenever I want—inanyposition—so don’t misbehave.”

“How am I going to misbehave while chained to the floor?” I yank the cuffs. Steel clangs and clatters, but that doesn’t keep my freak mind from wonderingwhichpositions.

“You always seem to find a way.” He releases my chin with a twist, then spreads two fingers apart over the crease of my brow, forcing away my scowl before backing up to the door to wait.

Kaleida leads Kelter to the corner to sit next to me. “It didn’t used to be like this. It’s been getting worse over the years,” she says, crouching next to the grate and cuffing Kelter’s ankle to it like mine. “The weather, the disasters. It’s been raining and storming since the day you showed up, and now this. I don’t know what we’re going to do if this keeps up.”

“Those really came from the sky?” I ask, though I know it’s impossible.

“Where else?” Kaleida says, compelling her face into one of indifference. She pats Kelter on the head, then me, and stands up. “We’ll be back for you.”

I lean back against the granite wall. The weather in Caldera ismild. The only disasters are in the books I read—and myhead. But here, only miles from Caldera, the tormented sky of Sonnet is always shifting, stalking, menacing through that arched window in the black room. It has a life of its own. And the power to kill.

Arm to arm and hip to hip with Kelter, he rests his head on my shoulder and his cuffed hands over my raised knees.

Eli glares at us. “What did I say about touching?” he scolds, then follows Kaleida out the door. Everyone else has already left, even the children that were trapped, leaving me and Kelter in the corner, finally together, surrounded by ice and destruction.

Chapter

Ten

“We have to get out of here, Kelter,” I gasp out as I rattle the cuffs and chains.

He shifts, tucking his knees into his chest and facing me, our cuffed ankles lined up. “You had another episode on the way here.” He drops his chin to look me in the eyes, yet avoids what I said. “A bad one.”

“I did.” I look toward the gray wall. What else can I say?Thank you for always being so damn devastated when I die?

“Remember when you fell down the stairs to your room?”

“Yes.”Because I was busy dying in my head.

“And I was there to catch you.” He pushes my cheek until I’m looking at him again.

“You were.” He carried me back inside, then spent the day adding padding to the staircase and landing while I begged him not to.

His cuffed hands hold mine. “I’ll always be here, Ever. Tell me what’s going on with these episodes.”

Death and blood and pain and loss.No.“It’s nothing. I get distracted sometimes.”

Kelter holds his stare, gold sparking in one eye. He sighs at my lie, the one I always tell him, and moves on. “You shouldn’t talk to your guard any more than you have to.”

“Why not?”Not that I want to. “Because I shouldn’t talk to anyone but you?”

Kelter made sure I had only his company day and night, taking up every minute of my spare time. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t inclined to talk to anyone else beyond the necessary back-and-forth at the coffee shop—which I was told was never enough, nor pleasant—but I’m not sure how it would have gone if I’d tried to make another friend.

“Not when they end up hurting you,” he says quietly, knowing exactly what I meant. “Watching movies with me every night was a better option.”

“You don’t have to keep anyone away from me. I accomplish that by being myself.” I try to pull my hands away to warm them in the folds of my dress, but Kelter holds them tight.

“Idohave to.”

“You’re my friend, Kelt. All you have to do is be you.”

“And I’m telling you,as a friend, don’t talk to your guard. He can’t be trusted, and you don’t know anything about him or what he’s capable of.”

“And you do?”