Siena

SIENA

"Emmett." Her voice quietly shook.

"Sen." His expression was calculating and detached, her pet name monotone. Not that he was emotionless. Excitement flickered in his one eye, the scars on his cheeks and chin quivering as he forced a smile back.

He was trying to suppress his emotions.

She reached out, daring to touch his face with a gloved hand. Tangible. Not a figment of her imagination.

The moment he shot up to grab her wrist, a branch snapped to the right. Emmett's head whipped toward the sound, and slammed her fist with the lit lighter against his temple.

He released her and staggered back, the gleaming white of his eye rolling around before the lighter went out.

Darkness suffocated her. Emmett stumbled about as she fell against a tree and slipped behind it.

" Sen. "

One step forward, and then another. Her shin slammed into a log, and she almost tumbled over it. Orange light erupted behind her. He wielded a torch.

" Sen! "

She pressed her back against a tree, away from the light. Her whole body shook with both fear and pain, her feet so numb and limp that she could hardly control where she stepped. She couldn't outrun him, but she could hide.

Foliage rustled, and the glow of the flame dimmed. He was looking for her in the other direction. She risked creeping toward the next tree, and pressed herself against the trunk. Where had he come from? It was like he'd been waiting for her, sitting in this spot in the dark for an ungodly amount of time. What did he want, to seek revenge on her for leaving his body to rot? She'd had no other choice, and he'd come back to haunt her.

"I just want to talk to you," he said, his voice far too calm. "I have a lot to tell you, and I think you'll want to hear it."

The flame of the torch brightened as it swung in her direction, light catching on the plastic eyes of a gas mask.

Ren.

He lifted a finger. Quiet.

Dammit, she wished she could see his face, but with the dark and the mask, she didn't know what was about to happen.

Slowly he stepped forward, raising his unlit lantern and pushing it toward her. She took it, and cradled it against her so it wouldn't squeak.

In Emmett's torchlight, the knife in Ren's right hand gleamed.

Who did he think Emmett was? Did Ren recognize him as 's partner? Without the ability to see his face, she had no clue to his level of confidence. Whether ghosts were a common occurrence in the Edge, or if Ren was as shocked and afraid as she was, she didn't know.

Regardless, she shook her head rapidly, a silent plea. Whatever he was planning, it couldn't be to protect her. Confronting Emmett was too dangerous; she felt this truth in her bones.

"Run," he whispered, and then sprang forward, toward Emmett.

At the thud of bodies colliding, stumbled forward until she could no longer see. Behind her, one of them cried out, but she was too far away to tell who.

Go back. Help him.

She hesitated. With no weapon, turning back now would only get herself hurt or killed. She had no other choice but to trust Ren, and follow his instructions.

Run.

fumbled with the lamp until she found the knob and turned it, light bursting forth and illuminating a tangle of sopping briar. She had to push forward to stay hidden, even though no one ran to catch up with her, and all she heard were the nickel-sized drops of rain pelting the earth.

Her ear rang the way it did at the start of a panic attack, though she didn't feel at the brink of one. Her mind was sharp, and she wasn't about to squander the clean break from Emmett. This Emmett.

focused on the ringing, which wasn't coming from her own head but somewhere out in the dark, like a siren. With the noise as her north star, she slid from trunk to trunk, the lantern guiding her further into the unknown. She was too loud, moving too slowly, especially if the doppelg?nger overtook Ren and sniffed out her trail.

I have a lot to tell you, and I think you'll want to hear it. He'd spoken it so casually, as though teasing her with a bit of academic gossip that he'd overheard in the lab. Either he didn't plan on hurting her, or his words were bait, because he knew her, didn't he? How utterly drawn she was to secrets, knowledge, and missing puzzle pieces.

But none of it would matter if he tried to hurt her, or worse.

The ringing drove her in one direction, her way of walking in a straight line instead of in circles. She needed to put some distance between her and Emmett, concentrating on her quiet breath and her feet slopping through the wet leaves. The ringing grew louder and more refined as the trees thinned, and she stalled at the edge of a clearing. A hulking, beaten-down structure stood before her.

stepped forward and lifted the lantern, light illuminating the run-down husk of a cabin. Outpost 6. One more to go. Ren knew where they were, and the landmarks. She would wait here until he shook Emmett and caught up with her.

She approached, her light rolling over the sign above the door.

Outpost 7 .

What ?

They hadn't passed Outpost 6. She would have remembered. Unless...

Paths to nowhere. Quantum entanglement. Lapses in time. Ren had recalled how the Briardark acted in the southern Edge. Her little waltz through the fairytale forest had been more than just a psychotic break. And now she was here, faster than predicted. The end.

She'd made it.

Her body reacted with a shudder, panicked and unsure, but she needed to seize the opportunity of shelter at the very least. She ducked under the eaves and felt around the door with her hands, before turning the rusted knob.

As expected, the hinges screeched, in tune with the ringing scream.

slipped inside and quickly shut the door behind her. Even with the balaclava covering her face, the stench of mold and rot overpowered her.

The lantern shone bright in the enclosure, casting a glow over flaky, soggy planks. Some had rotted away, leaving black gaps between. The farthest corner had crumbled to almost nothing.

The outpost was empty. Not even an old shelf lined the walls. No bottles or wrappers on the ground. No stove or fireplace. No clothes spread out to dry. No history.

spun and examined the back of the door with the lantern. Two large rusted hooks were screwed into the wood on either side of the door, a bar propped against the wall. Better than nothing, though the door would crumble with a large enough shove.

She picked up the bar and rested it between the hooks. Panic fluttered inside her. Think. There was nothing to think about. She was here. She'd made it to the outpost on the map with the circle with two lines slashed into it. The passage. The Way Back. Isaac had known it would take her home, and so had Ren.

Looking around, she caught sight of herself in the cabin's only window, and peeled her balaclava from her head. She recognized nothing. The fat in her cheeks were gone. Her skin hung from her skull, grayer than a corpse. Strands of hair had escaped her tie and now hung limply around her face, patches of her scalp peeking through the top of her head. Her lips were split in many places along the line of her mouth, like someone had sewn them shut with dark thread.

Her massive eyes blinked astonishedly, the only part of her unshrunken. A husk, like this outpost, so little left that she didn't know if she could ever grow the rest of herself back.

The orb of the lantern reflected brightly in the window. Beyond, the blackness was absolute, a beacon within a sea of dark matter.

A beacon. Shit .

The handle on the lantern squeaked as she turned the knob and snuffed out the light.

She stood still in the pitch black, trying to calculate the likelihood that she'd given away her position with the lantern. Did she want to give away her position? Did Ren know the Edge well enough to find her without a light of his own? No—he was merely human. He needed his eyesight.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

The gentle sound came from the glass, less than two feet in front of her nose. Her insides liquified .

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

She couldn't step back. She couldn't move at all. jammed the key into the ignition of her brain, and the starter turned over and over. Every spark of thought refused to form.

Holding her breath, she waited for the noise to break the steady ringing once more. It didn't come, but she felt the presence of someone else right in front of her, just on the other side of the glass, intense and unwavering. The lantern squeaked as her hand trembled. She knew they could hear it, whoever they were.

Not Ren. Ren wouldn't play these games.

If she did nothing, she would be here forever, waiting in the dark. No sunrise approached. No dawn raced to save her. She breathed in deeply, breath faintly rattling in her lungs, and then reached up to turn on the lantern. A hiss, then unrelenting brightness, and was met not with the face of Emmett, but Ren. Blood filled his eyes and dribbled from his nose. His slack mouth hung limply open, tongue lolling out to the side. His neck ended in a violent mess of torn flesh and muscle.

Emmett stepped forward, and pressed his forehead to the glass. stumbled backward and screamed until her throat was raw meat.

A monster wearing the skin of her dead ex gripped the head of the person who had spent his last months making sure she escaped. Ren was dead. This thing had killed him.

Something strange happened then. With a rush of warmth, anger flushed away her fear. She wanted to rush the window. Burst through the glass and grab this thing that wore Emmett's skin by the throat, squeeze his neck so tightly that his eye popped from its socket. Yank on the eyeball until the optic nerve snapped, and eat it. Jam her fingers into the hollow above his collarbone with enough force to break the skin and tear through muscle. Saw through his neck with her hands until every one of her fingernails broke, until she could see his spinal cord, until she could wrap her fist around it and shake him until his head snapped off .

" What are you? " she roared. She could taste his blood in her mouth.

Emmett dropped Ren's head. It thudded against the ground.

"Don't be silly," he said.

"You're dead ."

His hand slipped behind him. She expected him to pull a weapon from beneath his clothing. Instead, he pressed something small and flat against the glass. A card. A wizened man peering at her between the bars.

THE WARDEN.

"I have you cornered," he said.

She'd been foolish enough to believe a map painted on the wall, but if the passage at the research cabin had collapsed, what was to say that this one hadn't?

"Why are you here?" she choked out with a sob, hating herself for crying. Her tears quenched her molten rage when she wanted to rally. Wanted revenge.

She stepped back, staggering when the wood beneath her groaned and gave under her weight. She took her eyes off Emmett to glance at the broken planks on this side of the outpost, where the floor yawned open to darkness. Except this cabin had been built atop solid ground. She remembered from when she'd first entered.

stared down into the hole. Far below her, a web of light strung across the gaping maw.

The Way Back wasn't in this house. It was beneath her.

glanced up as this Emmett flashed her a wide-toothed smile. Through the grimy window, she spotted a missing molar.

"I know what The Shadow wants from you," he said.

The shrill ringing crescendoed, though it couldn't mask the thrill bolting through her. She couldn't trust this thing , but how did it know the one question she kept asking herself? How could it see inside her?

"I don't believe you," she said. Even with the murky glass separating them, she loathed the way he smiled at her like he could see her hesitation.

She dropped her chin to the light in the depths, and stomped on one of the rotting boards until it broke and fell. The web of light exploded in ethereal tendrils as the plank burst through it. She listened for it to hit the bottom of the sinkhole. Nothing.

She glanced up, but she'd had her eyes off him for too long. Emmett no longer held the card, but a rock the size of a brick. She shielded her face as he threw it at the window. Glass shattered everywhere. The rock landed next to her, cracking more floorboards.

"." Her name was more animal growl than spoken word, but she caught the waver in his voice. He was afraid—maybe of the hole beneath her.

"I know what The Shadow wants from you, and I know you don't want to leave." The doppelg?nger swatted away broken glass, hopped over the windowsill, and landed with a splintering of wood. "I won't let you kill yourself."

"You know what's beneath us," she whispered.

"And I know what you're about to do." He slid right against the wall, planning on circling all the way around the room to reach her. He was broader and bigger than the Emmett she knew. Her Emmett. There would be no escaping him once he caught her.

"Why should I believe you?" Her eyes darted to another plank less than a meter away, farther from Emmett and about as rotten as the one she stood on now. If she jumped, her weight could break it, and then she'd fall through the beetles that shifted reality.

The Way Back.

Unproven.

There was no proving this. Nothing but intuition.

"You feel like you belong here," Emmett said. "Somewhere deep down, you're fighting against the idea of going home."

She stalled, searching for a counterargument. Anything to convincingly refute him. She couldn't. He was right. He was so right that she felt the edges of her will collapse. She wanted to believe this murderous fiend because she hungered for the real reason why she had to endure this torturous escape from the Briardark.

She wanted to believe he knew what The Shadow really wanted from her.

But this Emmett had killed Ren. And if he really knew her—if he really wanted to coax her from the outpost—he wouldn't have committed such an atrocity against the one person who'd kept her alive.

"You're lying," she said.

jumped the moment his face fell. As her weight hit the plank, it snapped. She thought of her mother, the way her papery skin had felt as gripped her hand for dear life on amusement park rides.

This wasn't like that at all.

At first there was resistance, like a cord wrapped around her feet, dragging her through an atmosphere thicker than water. She burst through what remained of the web of light.

Then, the pressure bore down, and with it she felt guilt. Grief. And the end of everything she'd ever wanted.

She couldn't scream, couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Felt nothing against her, not even her clothing, until her mother's papery hand slipped into her own and 's sob remained trapped in her chest. Days. Weeks. Months. Until her body hit the ground.