Page 80 of A ?Sky Beyond the Storm

“I do not feel like I’m drowning.”

“You’re strong.” He takes my hand and we walk. Something calls out to me deep in my mind, a scream locked in a chest, locked in a closet, locked in a room that is too far away from this place to notice. “You always have been, because of the Star. But for other reasons too.”

“The darkness,” I say. “The one that lives within.”

“Yes,” he says. “Tell me of it. For I have darkness within me also, and I would know if we are two sides of the same coin.”

“Two sides—” I look up at him, dazed. It hurts to breathe, and when I look down, my clothes are soaked, and my arms and hands bleed. I taste salt and put a hand to my head. My head bleeds too. A voice within calls out.Laia.

“I cannot tell you about it,” I say. “I am not supposed to.”

“Of course.” He is so gentle. So kind. “Let’s not wake it if we shouldn’t.”

“I have already woken it,” I say. “I woke it when I defied you.” I look down at my body again. I am so tired. “Keenan, I—I cannot breathe.”

“You’re drowning, my love,” he says with such sweetness. “You’re almost gone.”

A flash across my vision. Darkness. The rain-heavy sky. Debris-choked water around me, dragging me along. High canyon walls rise on either side, streaked red and white and orange and yellow, like one of Darin’s paintings.

Darin, my brother, who loves me, not like—

Fight him, Laia. A voice calls out. So far away. But insistent.

“I should not be here.” I pull my hand from Keenan’s, because if he does love me it is a twisted sort of love.

“No,” he says. “You should not.” Though his voice is soft, something behind it makes me draw away. Deep in his brown eyes, I see the flash of a feral creature, riven by a hunger that never ends. I feel surrounded by that hunger, suddenly, as if it’s a pack of wolves, closing in.

“Get away from me,” I say. “I will tell younothing—”

His body changes, the way it did when I gave him the armlet. Except he is no shadow creature now, but something explosive and wild, an unchecked fire, malevolence emanating from every flicker of his body.

“You will tell me what lives within you and where it came from—”

“I’ll die first!”

I open my eyes then to a nightmare world. A turbid river of rock and branches and debris tosses me to and fro like a rag doll, and though I try to stay afloat, I am yanked under again and again, until water fills my nose and I cannot breathe.

No, I think.Not like this. Not like this.I scream as I break through the surface of the water.

“Let me inside, girl!” Rehmat appears, reaching for me. “I can save you, but you have to let me in.”

I barely hear it before the water pulls me down once more. I claw and kick and thrash, pain exploding along my hands and legs as the flood’s undertow drags at me. When I surface again, Rehmat is somewhere between furious and frenzied.

“Stop fighting the flood!” it shouts. “Keep your feet up!”

I try to do as it asks, but the river is a starving giant clutching at my ankles, as hungry as the maelstrom I see in my nightmares.

“Let me in, Laia!”

As I break the surface, I imagine a door in my mind and fling it wide. Almost immediately, I go under again. My whole body is on fire. I swallow a lungful of water and this must be death.

Then, like that day weeks ago in Adisa, I am pushed to the back corner of my mind—this time with a shove instead of a nudge. My body shoots through the water, clothes ripping, my pack falling away. The wind bends beneath me, Rehmat manipulating it as easily as clay.

I wonder if this is real or if the flood has killed me.

It’s real. When Rehmat speaks, it is from inside my own mind now. The creature’s magic saturates my limbs and we are one, riding the wind as easily as I tread the ground. It carries me to the top of the canyon, and I collapse on my side, staring down at the flash flood in wonder and horror.Rise, Laia. The Nightbringer is near—

A soft thud beside me, and then there is a hand at my throat, lifting me, squeezing. The Nightbringer, cloaked and shadowed once more, fixes me with his hateful, sun-eyed stare.

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