Page 14 of The Fallen Kingdom

Derrick darts around some boulders against a particularly rocky part of the ravine and I follow him, scrambling up the rough granite. “Where are we?” I finally ask, tired of the silence.

Derrick hasn’t spoken since the forest. When he thinks I’m not looking, I catch him staring, studying me. As if he’s thinking about what he saw when my mind invaded his. Maybe he’s wondering if I can ever be fixed.

I don’t miss the way he looks away sharply, guilt flashing in his features, as if he suddenly realizes how quiet he’s been. He might have forgiven me for what I did to him back in the woods, but I can sense how tense he is, like he’s waiting for me to lose control again.

“Skye,” he says mechanically. “We’re still on Skye. We never left.”

“Still?” I ask lightly, so as not to upset him.

In the hours we’ve been walking, I have taken care not to move like I did back in the forest. I keep my powers reined in so tightly that it’s painful. I don’t want Derrick to see that monster again. Thatthing.

I want him to see me like I’m a human—the way I used to be. His Aileana. His friend.

“You died on the island,” he says. “We could have gone somewhere else, but there’s not much point when it’s all falling apart.” He gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Any plans before that happens? You could always get blackout drunk with me. We could sing inappropriate songs, dress like pirates, and dance over the entrails of our enemies.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Is that something I enjoy?”

“Not yet. But only because you’ve never tried it. I assure you, it comes highly recommended.”

“By whom?”

“Byme.” He huffs. “Honestly, Aileana, everyone ought to dress up like an inebriated pirate at least once. It’s much more fun killing things in costume.”

I can’t help but smile when he calls me by my name. It’s the first time he’s said it since the forest, and the sound of it wraps around me like a warm blanket. In the past few hours I’ve begun to remember feelings associated with that name. Stirrings of memories that include Derrick’s wee body curled against the crook of my neck, hands tangled in my hair because he’d fallen asleep plaiting it.

“Then I’ll try it,” I say, approaching the edge of the fissure. “We’ll dress like pirates, and we’ll dance, and you’ll sing me a song before the end. And maybe we’ll stab a few things with cutlasses.”

He flies over to my shoulder as I inch closer to the ledge, careful lest the rocks fall. “Are you all right?”

I shake my head. My memory stirs again, with images from that nightmarish place that are so overshadowed by fear that I can’t see beyond it. I try to trigger other thoughts by kicking a large rock over the lip of the crag. It tumbles down the escarpment and into the sea below.

There it is. A man’s voice somewhere in the shadows of my past.The land was whole and now it’s cracked right down the middle. It’s all falling apart.

I was on an island floating in the air within a vast chasm, like a leaf on a river stream. It drifted endlessly through an alien landscape even more colorless than this one. It had been full of buildings set atop platforms made of jagged rocks hanging in empty space.

That memory comes with teeth. With a sense of helplessness that makes me sick to my stomach. A name floats to the top of my memory. “This looks like theSìthbhrùth,” I say to myself.

Derrick turns sharply. “What makes you say that?”

I don’t know.

When I search my memories for something about theSìthbhrùth, the only thing that comes up is an overwhelming sense of despair and grief and desperation. Whatever my reason for being there, it was not of my own free will. I was trapped there.

“I think it was like this.” I stare out at the colorless landscape. “It didn’t always look this way here, did it?”

“No. It started shortly after—” Derrick bites his lip and I know what he was about to say.After I died. He continues as if he never stopped. “First it was just the color. Then one day the land started breaking apart all across the island and the mainland. I expect it’s only a matter of time before this whole bloody place crumbles into the sea.”

I glance at the escarpment, at the sea below. “What then?”

Derrick’s laugh is short, strangely bitter. “What then? The end of the world, unless Aithinne kills Ki—the King. If she doesn’t, I hope my end is swift and painless. By then, we’ll have collapsed on the ground in our pirate costumes, I hope.”

The end of the world. The message I have to recall tugs at me in that dark trembling voice again.Remember, I tell myself.Remember. You have to remember.

Accept the offer, child.

And if I don’t?

Skeletal arms wrapping hard around me. Agonizing pain as if every bone in my body were being pieced back together again, muscles and sinew being formed anew.

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