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Mixed between the visions of death comes the sensation of pulling, a tug at the fabric of my being, an attempt to unravel me. It strengthens, slipping among memories, all the moments that make me who I am, tethering them to the Centress.

She’s actually going to take my memories.

She pulls and pulls and pulls. I try to tie them down, root them inside of me, etch them into the map within.

You can’t take away who I am before I’ve even figured it out.

But the pain, it makes it so hard to fight.I scour the depths of my mind for an escape.Let her kill me. Make it stop.

“She’s mine.” Eli’s stone-hard voice comes from behind me, then a cool tenderness wisps over my arms, tightening into an embrace. He traps me between the Centress and him. A shadow cuts into me, taking as it pleases, digging for parts of me much deeper than memories.

His lips skim my ear. “I got you.” Those words—a confusing comfort. Kelter whispered them to me inside the sack.

Eli’s head tucks in against my cheek, his cold chin nestling into the skin where my shoulder meets my neck. The battering on my nerves dissipates into the fleeting flashes of a nightmare upon awakening. Awareness crawls back and lets me open my eyes. Feeling returns to my limbs. The pain is gone despite the Centress’ fighting grasp on me.

Milo drops to the bed from the hole in the ceiling, a slingshot aimed at the Centress’ face. With the release of the sling, he lets a large stone fly the short distance to her forehead. She stumbles back at the impact, releasing me and reaching to soothe the dent in her flawless face. Milo jumps off the bed in a flare of cerulean blue. Hailstones crunch beneath his boots as he nears the Centress, pulling a club from a back pocket of his jumpsuit. He smashes it down over her head and watches her crumple to the ground.

“What did I just do?” The club slips from Milo’s hand to the floor. His pale face turns white, his blue eyes round.

“The right thing.” Eli pulls out his knife and grips a handful of hair atop her head, wrenching it back to expose her neck.

“No!” Milo and I shout together.

“You can’t kill her,” I beg, breathless.She has all the answers.

“She fucking touched you.” He looks at me, fingers tightening, the line of his jaw so sharp that I step closer to Milo. His next words appear painful. “She hurt you.”

Please.I try to puncture that hostile gaze with desperation in my own. Eli’s shoulders drop, his body conceding, the internal struggle still all over his face. He drags her unconscious body to the foot of the bed, the familiar clink of chains sounding as he slaps the hanging cuffs around her wrists.

“Sh-she tried to take my memories,” I mutter, still adjusting to the lack of pain.

“That’s her gift—memory stealing,” Eli says, guiding me out of the room with a hand latched tight onto my waist.

Milo looks back at the birthing room with a grimace. “It’s a painful process, and it’s why the last Centress chose her as successor.”

I know. I felt it.

In the atrium, Sola and Coen hold Jace and Poett’s faces to the ground and keep eyes on the Life Cycle workers as the hail beats against the white stepping stones, now a full-blown storm. Sypher and Kaleida have another two guards pinned among the bodies. The mothers are still silent, drugged.

“Take her back to the castle.” Eli shoves me toward Milo, and he nods in understanding. “I’ll take care of the rest of them, then we’ll be right behind you.”

Milo points a finger at Eli. “Cuffs only.”

“We’ll see.” He twirls his knife in his fingers and takes off.

“Follow me,” Milo says, and I run after him, my legs weak, yet functional.

We pass through the room where the babies screamed from their baskets and continue straight through an exit at the exterior of the Ring. The round outer walls curve left and right. Milo veers right, and I ready my feet to follow, but a decrepit wooden carriage with a cover is parked off to the left, loaded with baskets balancing on top of sacks crammed along the floor, like the ones used to make the tea.

The babies.They’ll be sent away, separated from their mothers. I refuse to leave them to live out my same past, to grow up searching, wondering,hoping…until they lose that too.

I dash left, hugging the edge of the building, my boots barely skidding over the hailstones with each soaring step. I only need to take the babies back inside. But the carriage doors slam shut, and the wheels turn, gaining enough traction to send thecarriage bumping away after a violent lurch. And it’s gone. I glance behind me. Milo’s gone too.

I’m alone.

I reach the spot where the carriage had been moments before and sprint after the wheel tracks, unbothered by the sting of cold and hail on my cheeks. I only feel the mounting storm within.

I bolt past trees and leap over roots, hailstones smacking me in the face and pelting my arms and legs. Broken branches crash to the ground. Every parentless moment of my life drives me forward, the memory of the babies’ screams scarring my heart. The scrawny figure of a young boy flashes to my right, running with me. I look again, and he’s gone. I run as if I were the storm, teeming with wrath and destruction, vengeance and justice.