Chapter 1: Lara

My feet take me to the very edge of the world.
There is nothing beyond this place if I look at it straight on—the woods, the path, and even the sky above them disappear, lost in a white mist. If I turn my eyes far to the side, I can almost see ghostly images of trees and hills, spread out below. So maybe the world does go on, and a part of me somehow knows that it must. But it’s the edge of my world.
If I think about it ahead of time, I can’t come here. I can’t decide to walk to this place; I can only do it as if by accident. If I’m upset enough and just walk, without planning to go anywhere in particular, I end up here. It’s a reflex, like my leg jerking up if my knee is hit just so with a hammer.
Why was I upset? My thoughts veer in a direction they can’t take, and slip away.
I lean forward, tilting into the world that vanishes beyond and below—arms outstretched in a sort of Titanic moment—and close my eyes. Can I lose my balance and tumble forward down this hill, out of this place?
Maybe I could if I fell asleep. No one can control where I go in my dreams—not even me. I shiver, my thoughts dragged back to last night. To . . . to . . . well. Whatever it was has vanished from my thoughts. Calm washes through me once again.
Unable to stop myself from trying, I lift my right foot and step forward. But when I open my eyes, it’s the same as always: I’ve turned and gone the other way, away from the edge. I sigh and lean against a tree.
Roots stretch out near my feet, twisted and exposed. If my foot caught against a root, just here, could I sprawl and fall forward then? But no, it’s too late: I’ve thought about it now. I can’t trick my feet into a trip that formed in my thoughts.
Maybe next time.
Then I hear the summons, deep in my mind—
Lara, come.
And it’s another reflex that has me instantly running, back the way I came, with direction and purpose—
Obedience.
The sort that is blind.

Chapter 2: Shay

The plane lurches again, and I grip the arms of my seat tight.
Elena sits terrified in the row in front of me; Beatriz, next to her, isn’t bothered at all. Maybe when you’re eight years old like Beatriz, you’re not scared; you can’t be. But the usual assumption with that would be that you’re not scared because you don’t understand you could really be hurt, or what death even means. That doesn’t apply to her, right? Beatriz has seen her whole family—and many more—die from the epidemic. She saw survivors like us, too, die around her in the fires of the vigilante survivor hunters, Vigil. Beatriz knows what death is, what it looks like, how it feels to watch someone you care about die screaming. To be flooded with their last thoughts if you touch them after they’re gone. Maybe after all that, flying into a storm seems tame.
Chamberlain has hitched a ride too, and is half on the seat next to me, half on my knees. The tip of his tail twitches almost imperceptibly, like he is annoyed but not deigning to let it ruffle his cool cat persona. His front claws are embedded in my jeans, holding on and scratching my leg underneath now and then when the plane pitches or drops—the feline version of the brace-for-your-life position? I stroke him as much to reassure myself as to reassure him, and I try to concentrate on here, now, on my fear and his warm weight and claws. But it isn’t anywhere near enough to take my focus away from the agony inside.
Kai closed his mind.
He turned his back to me and walked away.
I feel as if I’m draining away, my essence leaving me, drop by painful drop.
Hang on, everyone, we’ll be through this in a moment. Alex broadcasts the thought to all of our minds from his seat up front: he’s the one at the controls, flying this thing.
Alex—Xander, I mean, as that’s how he is known by everyone here. My father.
Not that he’s ever been that to me.
Fairness makes me admit he never had the chance—not when Mum left him and never told him about me. But now he knows I’m his daughter, and the thought makes me uneasy. Mum didn’t want him to know, did she? Now that she’s gone, I can’t even ask her why. Xander isn’t scared, at least not that he lets any of us see. None of his followers on the plane with us are either—they are calm, serene, even—and somehow I know that Xander’s reassurances were more for Beatriz, Elena, and me than anyone else. The others trust him completely.
Who are these people, really? They are all members of Multiverse. It’s like a cult, Iona said—one that worships truth. They worship Xander too, by the looks of things. The day Iona read something about them in the newspaper on the school bus and then told me about it seems like a million years ago, and remembering that day, one of our last ordinary days together, fills me with longing to be with her. My best friend—is she all right? What would she make of Xander? I hope she never has the chance to find out.
As if Xander controls the sky and weather as much as this plane and all of our lives, our path evens out soon after his reassurance. The plane glides smooth, safe, but Chamberlain’s claws continue to hold on like the tumult inside me. I fix my eyes out the window, mental barriers up—not wanting any stray thoughts to leak out to those around me. I struggle to control the tears that threaten, but one spills down my cheek and I flick it away.
Kai, how could you shut me out?
I agreed to go with Xander to try to find Kai’s sister, Callie, but Kai wouldn’t listen to why. All he saw was me leaving with his ex-stepdad, a man he hates; all he heard was that Xander is also my father, something I hadn’t told him. I knew I should have ages ago, but couldn’t bring myself to say the words. At first there were too many other things for him to deal with, then the longer I kept quiet, the harder it was to explain why I hadn’t told him before. But the way it came out—Xander being the one who told him—made everything worse.
And Kai didn’t believe me that it wasn’t Callie’s ghost who had been with us all along, that instead it was Jenna, an imposter. That it was actually Jenna who was destroyed in the bomb blast—Jenna who gave up her existence, such as it was, to save me. More pain twists in my gut. We went through so much together, and now, because of me, she’s gone.
But it all adds up to this: Kai’s sister, Callie, a real girl who lived and breathed and may do so still, could be out there somewhere, and only Xander can lead me to her.
Worse than everything else is that Kai didn’t believe in me. Xander said he knows how much it hurts to be different, to lose somebody because of it. He lost Mum because she sensed the difference—a wrongness, she called it—inside of him.
I’m scared she’d think the same about me now.
Is that the real reason behind Kai’s rejection?
He’s always struggled with how I changed when I survived the epidemic that killed so many—the one he is immune to. The way I can talk in his mind, and manipulate auras—to heal, to kill. The latter may have only ever been to defend myself, but his horror when he knew . . . He couldn’t handle it, could he?
By shutting me out of his mind, Kai left me with no other way to reach him than through a message—one I had to pass hurriedly to his friend Freja. She knew I spoke the truth; I’m sure of that. When you speak directly into somebody’s mind, survivor to survivor, it’s hard to do anything else. And she said she’d tell him what I said.
Please, Kai: believe Freja. Even though you wouldn’t believe me. The plane soon starts to descend, and I glance across the aisle at these followers of Xander’s. Gold glints at their necks like it does at mine. The pendant, a gift from Xander, is a model of an atom—the mark of Multiverse—and although the chain hangs loosely, it feels like a noose slowly tightening around my throat.
One of his followers must feel my gaze; he turns and smiles. There is respect for me that wasn’t there before, now that he knows I’m Xander’s daughter. Like the rest of them, he seems calm, gentle—kind, even. But I know they killed easily enough when they rescued us from the army. There is something about that combination—casual violence with a smile—that makes me shiver.
Admit it, Shay, if only to yourself. You’re scared.
I want to step back in time to get away from these people, but I must find Callie. It’s the only way to make Kai see I’m doing all of this for him.