I hold my hand out, and Maeve flinches before realizing I hold no fire.
She laughs. “Out already, Thora?” she asks me. “All that talk about being stronger—”
Before she can finish, I yank my hand back to me, and from behind her a tendril of fire reaches out like a hand, wrapping around Maeve’s waist, and dragging her into the flames. Her screams are deafening before they die out altogether.
Artemisia glances my way, her eyes lit up like they always are in the heat of battle, her expression beatific.
“Amazing, Theo—” Before she can finish, Dagmær pounces, all of her feline grace gone as she tackles Artemisia to the ground. She wraps her hands around Artemisia’s neck, squeezing and burning her at once.
“No!” I scream. I try to do the same thing I did with Maeve, but Dagmær lunges out of the way, losing her grip on Artemisia as she does, and the flames take the other girl, swallowing her into the wall of fire before she even has the time to scream.
Dagmær moves toward Art again, but this time I’m faster. Without thinking, I throw my body over Art’s, shielding her. I call on every remaining ounce of my power, drawing the flames larger and larger and larger, imagining the entire camp as nothing but fire, every inch burning. As soon as I think it, I hear the roar of it in my ears, feel the lick of flames against my skin, feel Dagmær’s scream vibrating in the air. Then I push the fire down in my mind. I shove it deep into the ground until there is no fire left, only ashes.
Then all there is is silence and smoke and the world gone still. But I can feel Artemisia’s heart beating, feel the steady rise and fall of her chest, and that is enough.
I force my head up, force my eyes open to see only charred ground around me, the remains of burnt buildings, patches of a destroyed wall. And bodies—too many bodies to count, including one mere inches from me that I somehow know in my bones is Dagmær’s, though there’s not enough left to truly recognize.
I hear someone shout my name, and a cacophony of voices, but then my vision goes dark and I don’t hear anything at all.
DARKNESS SURROUNDS ME, A NIGHT with no stars, no moon, nothing at all to see by. I feel it wrapping around my limbs, slithering over my skin like a dozen snakes. I feel it in the air, in every frigidly cold breath I take.
There is no ground beneath my feet, nothing at all around me except pitch-dark air. I open my mouth but no sound comes out, even when I scream at the top of my lungs.
Perhaps this is what death is—no After, no reunion with my mother and Ampelio and Hoa and Elpis and all of the others I’ve lost. Perhaps I didn’t deserve that, perhaps they turned me away. I dimly recall why they would, how I let Cress into my head and how thousands of Astreans at the Air Mine paid the price for it. Perhaps this is what I deserve—an eternity of conscious nothingness.
Time is immeasurable, an unending expanse where an hour could just as easily be a second which could be a week, and I would have no way of knowing. It is both infinite and infinitesimal at once.
I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I am no longer alone in the darkness. Cress is a few feet before me, her white-blond hair floating around her head like she’s suspended in water, her black lace gown billowing in an invisible current. For an instant, she looks at peace, her eyes closed and her expression relaxed, but then her eyes snap open and lock on to mine and I see the cold seething fury I’ve grown more accustomed to from her.
Maybe this is the After I deserve, an everlasting nothingness with only Cress for comfort. Maybe this is what we both deserve.
I thought once that by the time we saw one another in the After, we would maybe have forgiven each other, but that was before the trespasses piled up. Now, looking at her, I know that there is no forgiveness waiting, no grace, only a hate that will sustain us for eternity.
She reaches out a hand but can’t fully extend her arm before she hits some sort of barrier. The sound of the collision echoes around me, like a thud against a thick pane of glass. I reach out as well, feeling it for myself, cold and hard and solid.
Cress frowns. She opens her mouth, and I can see her forming words, speaking, but I can’t hear a thing. She must realize this as well because her frown deepens and she places both hands against the barrier that separates us. She leans in close, her features becoming distorted through it. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth wide, and this time, I can hear the scream, deafening in my ears. It raises goose bumps on my arms and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.
She screams so loud that the barrier between us quivers and cracks, a spiderweb of fractures spreading over the surface before it shatters altogether.
* * *
—
I come to with a gasp, the air in my lungs no longer ice cold. It hurts to breathe, each inhale agony, but it’s a reminder that I’m alive, and so I savor it. With some effort, I force my heavy eyes open. At first, the brightness blinds me, but when I blink a few times, I realize that the only light is coming from a single candle set up beside me in an otherwise dark tent.
When I try to sit up, my head throbs and I have to lie down once more with a groan, throwing an arm over my eyes to block out the light, though even that small movement sends a wave of pain through my whole body.
“Theo?” a voice asks, barely louder than a whisper. I lower my arm, squinting into the dark to see Heron sitting nearby, between my bedroll and another one. Though the occupant’s back is to me, I can just make out the spill of cerulean hair. Artemisia.
“Is she all right?” I ask. My voice comes out raspy and rough, barely intelligible, and every syllable hurts, but Heron understands.
“I fixed everything I could,” he says, looking at her. “She’s alive. She’s breathing. But she hasn’t woken up yet.”
I swallow, but that only makes the pain in my throat worse. “How long has it been?” I ask.
“Just over a day. It’s almost sunrise,” he says. He pauses before asking the inevitable question.
“What happened, Theo?”
I close my eyes tight, memories filtering back in slowly, then all at once. “The scream—that last one I went in for—it was a trap,” I say, before telling him about Dagmær and the other girls, about how Dagmær grabbed Artemisia’s throat, choking and burning her at once.
“She was going to kill her,” I tell him. “So I…” I break off, unable to say it, but I force myself to tell him. “I tried to cover Art and then I caused the explosion. It was the only thing I could think of to stop Dagmær.”
For a second, Heron doesn’t say anything. “It did, though. Stop her.”