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I’m not sure I can even feel my body. My hands move to my throat. “I-I’m—no.”

Milo turns my head toward him, his fingers inspecting me and wiping rain from my face, even as it continues to fall. His bruises are already blackening, and his golden hair looks dark, drenched and flattened to his forehead. “Come on, we have to get you back to the castle. It’s going to be okay.” He slides me off his lap and stands.

“What about Elivander? And Sypher and Kaleida?” I peer around the tree. Eli is still wrestling with Jace, each of them throwing punches. She somehow competes with his strength.

“Youare Eli’s priority. He’s told me over and over. Let’s go.” Milo tugs at my arm.

Poett stumbles his way to where Jace now sits on Eli, grabs her club and slams it against Eli’s throat.

“Eli!” It hurts as if the club were onmythroat, stealingmyair.

Milo leans down behind me and throws a hand over my mouth. “Let’s go,” he hisses.

My fingers rip his hand away. “No, go help him!” I drop to my hands and knees, fists curling around the lush undergrowth. A vision strikes me, images blasting through my mind.

Knife after knife in Eli’s body, blades buried, handles gleaming, limbs speared to the ground.

“He’ll be fine. He can get out of anything.” Milo tugs at my waist, trying to pull me up. I resist, holding tight to the foliage and blinking through the lingering flashes of the vision.

Eli struggles, his hands locked on either side of the club and pushing upward, preventing it from cutting off all air. Jace, straddling his stomach, leans forward, hands on his chest, and spits in his face.

Oh, fuck no. My whole body ignites. My throat flattens with his. Every drop of blood in me boils, rushing through the tiny rivers of my veins, spreading and marking their path like ink spilling over a map. My ears fill with roiling, rioting blood, drowning out all other sounds.

Eli’s legs jerk. His hands fight the wet club at his neck. Poett props his knee on Eli’s head and with the crack of his knuckles in preparation, he forces his weight down.

The surge of rage reaches my hands, navigates down my fingers and out through the tips. And with the outpouring of emotion, energy rushes into me, a tidal wave of sensation, and staggering, bright white light splashes on the ground, moving from my fists and out and out and out.

I stare down, not trusting my eyes. I know they said magic exists. I know I’ve seen it, but experiencing the flip of impossible to possible in my own hands, the world waking up inside me, the reordering of reality—it’s different than knowing or seeing. It’s believing.

“You’re doing it.” Milo panics, his hands slipping from my waist.

The wave of white illuminates the night. The two guards and Eli are blasted into the air. Their bodies soar ten feet off the ground, flailing and twisting, turning and cursing. They land with heavy thuds. The glowing stems and flora and bits of grass sweep beneath them and beyond. In a sea of white, Eli lifts his head and finds me, and I’m looking right back at him, breathless. Magic bursts from every plant and root below and shovels into me.

“Run!” he shouts, and Jace appears behind him.

“Look what you let happen.” She knocks his head down. Face to ground, smashed into the mud and luminous leaves below. “Your Hollow is stealing our magic.”

“Stop, not here!” Milo forces me to my feet.

The light fades, and only fistfuls of uprooted sprouts are left in my hands. He pulls me through the dripping trees, ducking under branches, weaving through trunks, hurtling forward. Traces of white energy trickle through me. I propel myself onward through the trees and the rain, hand in hand with Milo, step after step after step in my wet, heavy boots—

Right into the massive chest of a guard, the one who left Kaleida in a heap, and probably Sypher too. My nose crunches against his damp jumpsuit, filling my nostrils with the scent of blood and rain and sweat. Crooked teeth on a dark face grin down at me. Then his fist clobbers my head—and all goes black.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

“I can’t listen to another one, Milo.” I clamp my hands over my ears as yet another woman sucks in long breaths between moans.

“Me either.” Milo rolls away from the foot-wide grate along the bottom of the door that we’re taking turns watching through, lying on our bellies on the floor. I hear him right through the pointless covering of my ears, along with the steady tap of rain and all the miserable sounds—the screams and groans and roars of labor that we’ve been listening to since late last night. And now it’s dark again.

I woke up from the blow to my head inside a wooden carriage with Milo, pitching through the woods. I tried to convince myself the memory of a white sea of magic was the result of aconcussion as the guard sat on a bench with a foot on each of our backs, pinning us to the cabin floor until we reached the round building—the Ring, as Milo told me, where women come to give birth.

We were dragged through the double marble doors at the entrance, the only exterior part of the structure not covered in leafy vines, and locked inside this room. The huge guard passed canteens and stale bars to us through the grate early this morning before leaving us unguarded with no way out. At first I refused to drink, with the whole land’s water tainted by the elixir, but I didn’t have a choice.

I uncover my ears, take Milo’s spot on the floor and look through the grate, unable to stay away. It’s better than staring at the four blank walls that surround us or the narrow bed raised to waist-height and sitting on a silver post in the center of the room. It’s similar to a hospital bed with a pedal for adjusting the height, metal rails lining the long sides and a thin mattress covered by a white sheet. Except the sheet is more pink than white, stained with faded blood, and four sets of chains and cuffs dangle from the rails.

On the other side of the grate, the walls form a ring, enclosing an open-sky atrium with doors all around. I can see into almost all of them from here, mostly more rooms like this one with a single bed. Thousands of white stepping stones are built into meandering, looping pathways on the atrium ground, and green moss pecked with teensy red flowers fills the crevices between them.