My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t give her my earpiece—what if we got lost and needed to call for help? Or what if I couldn’t understand Isaak and needed it to translate for me? What if Gitrin had left another message for me somewhere? I had never taken my earpiece off. I couldn’t even comprehend how I would manage to function, to think, without the System there to help me process the world around me. It was a part of me, and I was a part of it. I couldn’t go without it.

But Eliin’s eyes were beginning to get a suspicious glint to them, and Isaak looked as if he was about to come over and rip it right out of my ear personally. So I forced a small chuckle. “Oh, how silly of me. I completely forgot I was wearing it.”

Eliin smiled again, hesitantly. “I understand. You wore one your whole life. But that’s behind you now. You don’t need it anymore.”

I tugged my earlobe and quickly, before I could allow myself to think twice, I pulled my earpiece out of my ear.

Eliin turned to toss my earpiece—my life—into one of the baskets of tack on the ground while I gripped the reins of my gurza tightly, trying to keep from falling over. My vision blurred and spun, focusing and unfocusing as my brain tried to function without the System supporting it. But the strangest thing was the quiet. I thought I’d known quiet before, but it was nothing like this. Even when I was alone, in the solitude of my room, there had always been the distant hum of the System running in the background. I had never noticed it before. It had always been there.

But now it was gone. And it was silent. There was nothing but me, and Eliin, and Isaak, and the snuffling animals beside us.

Isaak nudged me. “Are you ready to go?”

I had never felt less ready to do anything in my life. But I didn’t have a choice in the matter. So I nodded my head at him and said, “Yes.”

Part III

Chapter 25

We rode westward through the caves, winding our way through a jumbled labyrinth of tunnels. The globe in Nadin’s classroom had shown that Bright Horizon citidome was built in the valley east of the Elysium mountains. I remembered them from when I was little, when we lived in Elysium province, near Lake Amazonis—three giant, extinct shield volcanoes. Well, they were extinct in my time, anyway. Who even knew what they’d be like now? Considering the fact that I was currently riding on the back of a torquing horse-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex, anything seemed possible.