“This way!” she called, but Simon was already behind her, his breath labored in the air. “Are you all right?”

“Splendid,” came his strained reply.

Crawlers scrambled across the ice on all sides. Hundreds, Eliana thought. Maybe thousands.

Gunfire split the air in two, followed by terrified human cries. She looked to the west. Some of the creatures had made it ashore. They slithered onto the beach from the water like sea monsters come to ground. The Astavari army engaged them with revolvers and swords, but the crawlers kept coming.

A shadow fell over her as they ran. She looked up. They’d reached the Astavari fleet—small, elegant ships, each mast a hundred feet in the air. Crawlers swarmed the nearest one, tearing sails from their masts and tackling Astavari soldiers to the decks.

“Almost there,” she shouted over the sounds of death and gunfire, howls and snapping wood. “Stay with me, Simon!”

They slid down the sharp incline of an iceberg and ran out onto a long, flat slab, now past the Astavari fleet and only a few hundreds yards from the shore. Simon’s knees buckled. He cried out in pain.

A brutal weight slammed into them from behind, knocking them both far across the ice.

Eliana’s vision faded, then flared back to life. She looked up, woozy.

A crawler had Simon pinned to the ice. It was the crawler from before, with those piles of matted dark hair. Its teeth—her teeth—gnashed just above his throat. He twisted away from her, punched her square in the jaw. She cried out, a garbled, familiar word that Eliana recognized as a Venteran curse.

Eliana jumped onto the crawler. She knocked her aside with one monstrous arm. Eliana sprang back to her feet just as Simon rolled away and sliced his sword across the crawler’s side.

The crawler screamed in agony, clutching her wound. Her hand was bulbous, malformed, and covered in oozing sores. Eliana saw the same markings that now stained Navi’s body and felt a rush of pity.

As she hesitated, the crawler looked up—and Eliana at last saw her bruised face in full view.

A thousand memories flew at Eliana in the span of a few seconds:

Sitting beside Rozen at home, Remy in her lap. Rozen holding open a book of children’s stories so that Eliana could read them aloud to her baby brother—stories of the seven saints and the animals that carried them into battle against the angels.

Rozen, finding Eliana sobbing in her bed in the middle of the night. The invasion had taken their kingdom, and her father had not come home.

Rozen teaching Eliana how to fight, how to lie, how to kill.

Now, standing half alive on the ice, Eliana looked for Rozen Ferracora in the crawler’s disfigured face, the angry world howling around her.

“Mother?” She placed the hand gripping Arabeth against her chest. A dull roar filled her ears, pulsing with the beat of her heart. “It’s me. It’s…Eliana.”

The crawler blinked, croaked something unintelligible. Then she snarled and lunged for Eliana.

Simon crashed into the creature, wrestled her to the ground, raised his sword.

“Wait!” Eliana cried. “Don’t hurt her!”

But then the crawler twisted out of Simon’s grip, struck him across the face.

Simon fell, his sword flying across the ice and into the water. The crawler pounced with bared teeth. Her fist, run through with metal spikes rimmed in infected flesh, punched the ground beside Simon’s face.

“Eliana!” Simon roared, dodging her. “Get out of here!”

But Eliana was already moving.

She ran, tears muddling her vision, and just when the crawler reared back to strike Simon with a killing blow, Eliana plunged Arabeth into her stomach.

Blood gushed out over her hand. The crawler jerked, choked, slid off Simon and onto the ice.

Eliana sank to her knees at the crawler’s side and watched as her last breaths seized her. With each harsh inhale, intelligence returned to her darkening eyes.

“I know that knife,” she gasped, her words broken, rattling, hardly comprehensible. But Eliana heard the threads of a familiar voice buried inside and was no longer afraid. “I know that face.”

Rozen brought a shaking hand to Eliana’s cheek, her own skin rough with scaly sores.

“Finish it,” Rozen pleaded, a wet cough seizing her. “Please…sweet girl.”

Eliana brushed a kiss across her swollen, fevered forehead and whispered through her tears, “I love you.”

Then she sank Arabeth into the side of Rozen’s throat and watched the light leave her bloodshot eyes.

• • •

Eliana’s head buzzed. Her breath came fast and thin. The world rolled away from her, then surged back and clawed away her air.

An immense rage was building inside her—hotter and blacker than any vicious urge that had ever sent her flying into a fight.

The battlefield roared around her, a symphony of explosions and agonized cries. Fire arced overhead—bombardiers, ignited and ready to explode, soaring for the beach. Crawlers surged out of the water, dragging Astavari soldiers under.

“Eliana,” Simon said, very near, “we have to move.”

His voice, firm but exceedingly gentle, was the thing that broke her.

She screamed.

The world screamed with her.

• • •

For a moment—brief but wild and impossible to understand—Eliana saw everything:

The ice, sky, and water flared to life, and she saw it all for what it was: a veil, nothing more. A covering hiding something incredible and divine.

Time slowed.

She saw herself, and Simon, both of them shivering and bloodied. She saw the beach being swarmed by monsters and the prows of the Empire fleet carving through the ice. She heard the Astavari soldiers’ cries for help, and she thought she heard Prince Malik Amaruk shouting orders for those fighting on the beach. She thought she heard Remy, hidden in Navi’s castle, whisper, “Eliana, please be all right.”

And she thought she heard a voice drift across the ocean to tell her, I felt that, Eliana. You can’t hide from me now.

Unseeing and all-seeing, Eliana stared at the exploding, frigid world around her.

Icy fingers of grief closed around her throat.

It will consume you. Her mother’s voice. A memory now and nothing more.

She dropped to her knees. Shoved Simon’s hands away, uttered a wordless protest.

I will not be consumed.

Then she slammed her fists hard against the ice and buckled over, struggling to breathe.