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She held him tighter. “What changed?”

“You did,” he said plainly. “You were human. Destined to die. As long as you were here, I swore I would be too. But without that—without you…” They spun through a pool of sunlight. “No one resists the inevitable forever. Not without something worth fighting for. I could push back against it for a while, stretch out my time, but I always knew the truth. My time here on Tempris had an expiration. This life would end, and the next would stretch into eternity. So, I had to make it count. Every moment, every memory. I had to gather up as much of the good as possible, because once you were gone… that was all I’d have left.”

“Where you go, I go.” Even into eternity. Taly leaned into him, closing her eyes and listening to the gentle thud of his heart beneath her cheek.

“Exactly. Now that we have time, I can make plans for it. And maybe it won’t be the first or even the second thing we’ll get done, but I want you to be a part of that life. I want to show you where I grew up, take you to all my favorite places. I want to work to make this world a place where that’s even a possibility.”

Skye was an idiot most days. But sometimes—damn it— “Shards, you’re insufferable when you’re sweet.”

He picked her up and spun her around. Taly laughed and held on.

The moment he set her down, the worry came crashing back tenfold as she looked at him, overwhelmed with the realization of just how much she loved this man. And how lucky she was to have found him. And how utterly lost she would be if he didn’t come back.

“Here.” With trembling fingers, she unclasped her necklace, thrusting it into his hands. “Take this with you.”

The necklace was as much her mother now as it was him. Skye frowned, but he took it from her.

“You have to bring that back to me now.”

A soft smile curved his lips. “I will.”

“Good.” She swiped a hand across her cheek. And because she refused to say goodbye—never goodbye—she kissed him instead. Wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close, throwing everything that she didn’t know how to say behind it and feeling him respond in kind.

“I hate this,” she said when he pulled away. “Em, I hate this, I—”

“I know,” he said and hugged her. “I know you wanted to be the one to kill him. But we’re using your bombs, so you’ll be killing him by proxy.”

Taly laughed at that, wiping away her tears.

A low hum vibrated through the air, a sound just on the edge of perception. From deep in the shadows pooling in the depths of that massive hole, lights flashed.

“Come on,” Skye said, kneeling to lift her in his arms. He held her easily, standing on the edge of that sheer drop, cloak swaying on the breeze. “I know you’re dying to get your hands on all thatjuicytech—”

“You can’t bribe me, Em.”

“So, you’renotplanning to take the riftway apart while we’re gone?”

“… I didn’t say that.”

“Ah, I see,” he said with a slight smirk.

Then he stepped off the edge. No warning.

“Oh my Shards, you jeeeeerk—”

Chapter 80

The riftways worked in two directions. If there was a way to reprogram the destination, it wasn’t obvious. Thankfully, they had enough keys that the next riftway console was usually within a mile of each jump.

Skye remembered it like falling.

Going through a second time, however, he decided he must’ve blocked out the memory because he was dead wrong.

Stepping through the riftway, the ground suddenly ripped out from underneath him, and while he did feel a steady force sucking himdown, there were an infinite number of other forces all pulling outward along their vectors as each atom of his body attempted to spin off its axis.

The pressure threatened to pulp his bones. His skin stretched tight.

Then his feet hit solid ground, and he could only remember the fall—the wind and stars and infinite nothingness they had flown through to get to the other side.