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“Nothing has changed,” Valdus says. “We’ll fight for a better desert. Be it with the emperor or the armies of our enemies.”

26

Lush green leaves tickle my face with the wind sweeping through the forest, and I know another nightmare awaits me. I look around, but trees covered in vines and moss spread in every direction before tendrils of mist swallow them in their murky embrace.

“Neylan,” my father calls, making my skin crawl.

Before he can reach me, I dart onto what once was a path. Wild herbs tug on my clothes, and fallen trunks devoured by insects bar my passage. My palms sting with cuts and bruises that branches leave on my skin, but the crunch of dead leaves under my father’s heavy boots makes me push myself to run faster.

A stream of light breaks through the fog, and I stretch my hand toward it, if only to wake up. As my fingers disappear through the mist, desert heat kisses my skin, and I close my eyes, ready to sit up in my bed and shake off the dream. Instead, my boots sink into the sand. After a trek over soft ground, I’m too slow to catch my footing. Stumbling and cursing, I fall and slide face first all the way to a crease nestled between ever-changing dunes. I spit sand. I even have to rub it off my tongue, but some of it still slips down my throat, choking me.

The forest is gone. Vanished. Destroyed in my nightmare. Only my father stands at the top of a high dune, where sand swirls around him like a cloak of its master.

He takes a step, and that’s all it takes. I’m on my knees, staggering to my feet, putting as much distance as I can between the two of us. I stumble, fall, roll down one dune after another, but I don’t stop and pull myself back up even when my muscles burn and I’ve conquered a hundredth dune.

Rooftops of a town shimmer against the heat of the desert. All the way on the horizon. Too far to reach, but I still try.

Heat makes my shirt stick to my sweaty skin and my breaths come out in harsh rasps. My father’s shadow grows larger, but I push forward, even when it threatens to overcome me.

I won’t become another marionette of the all-powerful puppeteer in Usmad.

I almost fall in a helpless heap when I reach the first line of houses, but my name on my father’s lips chases me deeper into the city of abandoned streets. Each of my steps sends a spray of sand.

The dread filling my mind doesn’t let me realize it yet. Not until I knock on a door and no one answers. I stumble on the landing of the house across the street, not ready to succumb to the hopelessness ebbing on the edges of my resolve, but it’s been abandoned too.

There is no one left.

Magnar calls my name and it echoes through the streets, chasing me deeper into a town of ghosts and wind, of shadows and sand.

I stumble around a corner, but a pebble shifts under my foot, and I fall to my knees. I struggle to my feet, but a hand grabs my ankle. I kick with everything I’ve got, and my boot is the only thing left in my father’s hand as I limp away, whimpering and crying, but moving further away with every breath I take.

I’m not going back. No matter what.

I don’t get far before Magnar pulls me back by the hair, forcing me to look at him. Green eyes stare back at me with calculated hatred. I buck to pull away, but he only tugs on my hair harder.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find you here?” Magnar says through clenched teeth, showing me the town that is now smoldering ruins. I choke on my tears, but his fingers only dig deeper into the skin of my arms. “You and I are the last ones left, and this is how you honor their memory?” my father adds, tearing at my hair, until I look at what he wants me to see.

On the pebbled road, thirteen bodies lie in a jumble of limbs. Dark cloaks hide their features, but I know who they are. I can still feel their ethera burning bright. The Originals. Binders who tried to heal the world after The Cataclysm. The ones the King—who had ruled this broken desert before my father—so mercilessly killed. With the next gust of wind, only ashes and memories remain.

The fading ashes reveal another bloodied horror. I see Lara’s lifeless body strewn in a grotesque heap. Valdus, Inara, Numair, Damen, every man and woman of the rebellion I’ve met lies dead at my feet.

Magnar’s voice is an echo in my mind. “This is all your fault.”

The tremble in my body is unbearable until I sit up in my bed. My throat is still burning with invisible sand and real tears. Lara presses my shoulder where her hand still lingers. Not a nightmare any longer, but crushing reality.

“It was just a dream,” she whispers.

I know she’s right, but I can still feel my father’s grip. I run my hand through my hair and shudder. Bile rises to my lips.

“Bathroom?” I croak.

Lara barely has time to motion to the back of the room as I dash toward it, shut the door behind me, and empty my stomach over a rusted sink. As I rinse out my mouth, a pair of scissors catches my gaze, and I grab them with only one thought in my mind.

No one will ever grab me like that again.

“Neylan?” Lara’s soft voice calls my name.

She opens the door as a clump of my hair falls on the tiled floor, and I look up at her with tears in my eyes. She pulls a chair into the bathroom and sets it next to me without a word. Her touch is soft but insistent as she pries the scissors from my hands and forces me to take a seat.