A small voice splashes across Eve’s consciousness, a pebble dancing across the surface of a still pond. An ugly, guttural sound escapes her throat as the muscles of her chest pull tight.

  She thinks.

  Her voice cracks as she finally speaks, “you’re not alone.” Her surroundings begin to filter in through the haze of forced-sleep. The cold breeze. The weeping wound in her stomach. The jagged crystals in her back. “There’s at least 13 of you in there. 14 if Sennar ever wakes back up, but –”

  “What?” Eve rips her back from the floor, sitting up as a sharp pain stabs its way across her chest. Her hands rest gently in deep red pools of her own blood as she searches her mind for the familiar buzz of a over a dozen souls.

  Silence.

  She raises a hand to her throat, shifting weight to the other. She can still feel it. The cold embrace of the defiled souls. The Shade. The hand drops, reaching for the wound in her stomach but – she’s caught. Her arm crashes firmly into a protrusion from her chest. She tilts her head down to see it. Her eyes widen –

  A blade of crystal runs deep into the wall of her chest. Right where her heart should be. Raised runes flow across the handle. Maybe if it weren’t actively killing her, she’d admire its beauty. She wants to yell, to call out for help, to scream in pain. All she can muster is a pathetic “Oh.”

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  “What…what do you mean?” Eve pulls what little air she can back into her lungs. It’s uneven, that right half of her chest doing most of the work.

  Eve winced at the words and the audible strain in Rose’s thoughts.

  “‘That’s not right, just because this is the power you manifested when I bound you, doesn’t mean that–” a cough rips through her as a spray of blood coats the inside of her cheeks.

  Eve wasn’t sure if she was talking about the pain or the wound. It didn’t matter.

  “Arric,” his name falls from her lips almost involuntarily, “Arric, please, I’m bleeding, I….I need you to stop it or I’m not going to make it, I –” a surge of regret and loss threatens to overtake her. A hand still rests on the blade in her chest. She grabs the hilt without a thought. Every instinct is screaming at her to rip it out, to remove the foreign intrusion.

  She knows she can’t. To do so would mean certain death. Her fingers nervously trace the outline of the runes on the handle, unsure of what other to do than await her impending demise. “How am I still alive?” she asks to the empty air.

  She honestly wasn’t expecting an answer. She moves her arm around the blade, searching for the wound in her gut. Fingers slide across ragged flesh as she almost pulls a partially intact piece of skin away. The blood is thickening now, matted. It makes it impossible to tell where the fur lined leather of her jacket ends and her skin begins.

  “Us,”Rose says. A line Eve had never let the others cross before. The one that risked the blurred consciousness of a Shade-to-be. She pulls in another ragged breath as pain streaks across her chest.

  “You’re right,” she says, “this might kill us.” Her head dips to the side as sudden weakness takes her. She rights herself after just a moment. “Arric,” she calls desperately, “Arric, please wake up. Please help me. Please tell me you’re there.”

  Pain wracks her gut once again.

  “Don’t apologize. The pain…it’s not yours to bear, it’s not right for you to shoulder it. It’s mine, I’m the one who –”

  “I am here,” a familiar voice echoes across the crystal.