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Roman nodded. Swallowed. “Yeah.” The burn of bile surged up his throat, and he swallowed again, his gut roiling. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“I’m going to need your help. So I can’t have you passing out on me, okay? I can’t do this without you.” Darien gave Roman a few seconds to breathe, to calm down, and Roman took them, grounding himself. Usually, he took in his surroundings bit by bit, but when darkness was everywhere, he had to do it another way. Breathing in, out… Inhale… Exhale…

Once he’d calmed down enough, he squeezed out, “What do we do?”

A beat of silence. And then Darien admitted, “I don’t know.”

“How did the tunnels not completely collapse?” It made no sense. They should be buried under rubble, not standing here breathing.

Another beat of silence, this one weighed down with something Roman couldn’t place, and then Darien said again, “I don’t know.”

Roman stared into the pitch; he had a feeling Darien was doing the same, searching for something, anything. But that darkness just wouldn’t bend, no matter how hard Roman willed his eyes to adjust. And as long as they were blind like this, they were no better than sitting ducks. Even his Sight did fuck-all; he couldn’t see anything.

Rock clacked nearby.

“Jack?” Roman called, quietly. “Atlas—” He was silenced when Darien’s grip tightened on his arm in warning.

Roman held very still, Darien doing the same at his side.

Something in that darkness hissed. The sound was echoed by others just like it, along with the guttural roars of beasts.

They were not alone.

121

The Control Tower

YVESWICH, STATE OF KER

Even with Loren’s magic shielding parts of the city, the explosion razed countless structures to the ground. It snuck through the apertures in her coat of protection, leveling almost the entire north end.

Blinding white light swallowed Yveswich in one fell swoop. Seismic waves erupted through the earth with horrid force, buckling the asphalt in violent ripples that could be felt in all corners of the city. Everywhere her magic failed to cover, destruction was wreaked.

Power lines snapped. Bridges and overpasses disintegrated. Vehicles cracked into pieces, as if they themselves were bombs, bits of shrapnel carving the torrid air apart like bullets.

With the suit protecting her, keeping her alive when by all rights she should have died the minute the bomb went off, Loren saw it all. And it was a nightmare.

It was Kalendae all over again, only—impossibly—worse. Because she did not pass out like last time; she was forced to witness the catastrophe in full.

A fitting punishment for someone who’d failed. Someone who had been birthed by the same monstrosity that had just killed millions of people—countless souls added to the replica’s ever-growing death toll.

She lay on her stomach among the wreckage, the force of the blast pinning her there, as that bright light continued to rip through the city. It had no end—it just kept going. Blasting with such force, she worried her magic would not hold.

She could already feel it bending. Felt her body warm under the weight of all that heat. That raw, horrible power that had no master.

Her nose began to bleed, red dripping to the pavement—what was left of it. Her eyes watered and burned. The back of her bodysuit heated up and began to blister and peel, exposing her back to the magic of the bomb—the weapon threatening to do the same to her flesh.

And she still couldn’t move, the blast immobilizing her, destruction tearing around her like a hurricane. It was utterly terrifying.

And Malakai was nowhere to be seen.

The people of Yveswich didn’t even have a chance to scream—to feel fear or even recognize that there was a threat. The explosion incinerated them, leaving not even bones behind—nothing to bury.

As quickly as it had come, the bright light of the eruption was swallowed up by something far more powerful.

Night. Thick, choking night. Or was it smoke?

The longer she lay there, squinting into the dark, the faster her heart beat. Had she gone blind?