Page 44 of Storm of Stars

I turned, eyes scanning wildly. Eight Challengers had made their way to the islands.

Only six planes had landed.

Six.

My stomach turned to ice.

Lark. Devrin. That was two.

My plane. Three.

Briar’s. Four.

Bex. Five.

One more.

One left.

And no one had disembarked.

A cold sweat broke out across my back. I saw the same fear flicker across Bex’s face. The blood drained from her cheeks as she looked toward the final plane.

Then she was moving, running, limping, pushing her body past its limit.

“Ezra!” I called. My voice cracked in the cold air. “Ezra, come on, answer me!”

The world narrowed to that last plane. No movement. No sound.

Bex cried out his name again, her voice raw.

Pleaselet it be him. Let him be okay.

Let him be on that plane.

Let him be alive.

We stormed the plane the second we could, and for one brief moment, I felt a wave of relief crash over me at the sight of Ezra lying there on the floor. But it shattered just as quickly.

He wasn’t moving.

His entire left side was blackened, raw, the skin blistered and peeling. Smoke and blood clung to him. His face was ghost-pale, and his chest wasn’t rising.

I froze.

“Ezra!” Bex screamed, dropping to her knees beside him in the plane. Her hands trembled midair, hovering above him unwilling to cause more pain. “Ezra, please! Wake up. It’s me. We’re here,” she sobbed, her voice already fraying.

I dragged my eyes away, blinking furiously, and found Briar. The terror in her expression mirrored my own.

Where the hell were the medics? The Architects? The film crew? The fucking audience that watched every second of our suffering. Why were we alone now, when it mattered most?

Then I spotted it. A bus, waiting on the far end of the tarmac. Lark and Devrin were already walking toward it.

“We need to get on that bus,” I muttered, barely able to speak past the lump in my throat.

Bex turned to me, eyes red. “He’s unconscious.”

“We’ll carry him.”