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Someplace Unfamiliar

TERRA

It was too bright in here. Too crowded.

She had jolted into consciousness with a ragged gasp that tore apart her lungs, and although several minutes had passed since then, she still couldn’t catch her breath.

The walls of the room were curved like a fishbowl and colored like an opal. She sat upon a floating tabletop, her hands braced behind her on the smooth, glassy material. Several inches of water covered the floor, sloshing under the feet of five people who drifted into the room to join the sixth.

She didn’t recognize a single person. Several of those people were calling her ‘Loren’.

Was that her name? Loren?

It was the only word she could pick out. The rest confused her, too many people speaking at once. Or maybe it just felt that way because her ears were ringing, her head weighed a thousand pounds, and her heart was jackhammering in her chest.

And then she recalled the spider—how the Nameless being had told her that her name was ‘Loren’. Recalled how she’d run toward life in another dimension, Singer at her side—

Singer. Where was he?

She was going to throw up. There were too many colors in here, too many sounds, too many faces. The lights were too bright. She was dizzy and nauseous and—

Her attention snagged on the man closest to her.

For a moment, she forgot everything else, everything and everyone except him.

This was the face that had kept her going in that strange world, when she had come so close to giving up. The face she had run to.

Tattooed hands gripped the edge of the floating platform. There were a lot of scars on those hands. Some on his arms too, though she couldn’t see past the sleeves that were pushed up to his elbows, the muscles in his forearms rigid. He was leaning toward her, but still giving her room to breathe. His face was lined with concern, his dark brows thrown low over eyes that were a stormy mix of gray and blue. Smooth black hair was styled back from his face, though a defiant strand had fallen loose, fluttering with every labored exhale.

He was breathing as heavily as she was.

She wished she knew why.

A symbol was inked below his ear. A small one. It was a letter—an S with a devil’s horn on each end. She looked at the symbol for only a moment before her eyes were magnetized back to his face.

She couldn’t decide which of his features was the most captivating: his eyes or his mouth.

“Who are you?” Her voice was barely a croak.

All sound in the room ceased.

Her skin prickled. The silence pressed harder. “Did I say something wrong?” she ventured.

The dark-haired one with the tattoos and scars turned very still.

And then his hands that were gripping the edge of the table tightened, squeezing the glass. The magic inside it flared, light crackling under his hold. Black flickered in his eyes—the Sight, she realized—but he fought it with fierce blinks until it disappeared again.

A different man stepped forward. This one had very short brown hair and gray eyes, his tall frame leaner than the one who’d captured her attention so thoroughly. His features were sharp and severe, yet somehow still managed to look kind if you paid close enough attention, his mouth framed by a five o’clock shadow. His bracelet and necklace were designed to look like circuit boards, and a full sleeve of similar designs was inked on his left arm.

“You…,” he began, his eyes skating her face. “You don’t recognize him?” He gestured to the black-haired one with the stormy eyes.

The one who still wasn’t moving. He didn’t appear to be breathing anymore, either.

She glanced about the room. A breathtakingly beautiful, dark-haired woman stood behind the heavily tattooed male; she looked like she could be his twin. Beside her were three more hellsehers—one with brown skin, a small tattoo of a bleeding black skull on his cheekbone, and another male with curly brown hair and brown eyes. The third was a female hellseher in her thirties, her gray eyes nearly identical to the man who wore the circuit board jewelry. His mother, maybe. None of them were smiling.

The silence was heavy. Suffocating.