I sighed, looking at Nadin curled up asleep on the boulder. Her eyebrows were scrunched up like she was having a nightmare. I should never have made her take her earpiece off.

The cave was growing darker—and colder. Tuupa nudged me, staring unblinkingly with her yellow lizard-eyes. I should probably try to start a fire, I realized. Not that I really had the first idea as to how to go about that, but I wasn’t particularly interested in freezing to death tonight.

I started rummaging around the cave, picking up the most dried-out, woody-looking pieces of spider weed that I could find—and trying to drown out the thought that had been creeping into my mind almost constantly since I’d arrived here.

He’d used the same door as me. But no one I’d met here had ever heard of him. So if my dad had really come here… what had happened to him?

I pushed the thought out of my mind, dumping the kindling onto the burned-out patch on the floor. But as the yellow circle of Venus blinked down at me, I couldn’t help remembering that freezing, airless desert outside the citidome, and the ancient skeleton in the hills.

Chapter 26

My head hurt worse than it had ever hurt in my life.

Immediately after that thought, it occurred to me that I couldn’t really remember if that were true. Had my head hurt like this before? Had my head ever hurt before? Had my head ever not hurt like this? Was my life ever anything but this headache?

I managed to pry my eyes open, blinking up at a dark, unfamiliar ceiling. It was rough, marred with shadows that seemed to grow and shrink in size in the dim, flickering light. Wind howled through crevices in the rock, whistling noisily.

Where was I?

…Who was I?

I sat up in a panic, drowning in disorientation. Slowly, as the world stopped spinning, memories started trickling back to me, little by little. They felt fuzzier than usual, gray at the edges. But they were there.

And so was the headache.

“Nadin?”

Nadin. Yes, that was my name. I turned my head, following the sound of the voice. He was crouching beside a small, poorly-burning fire. My mind struggled for a moment, trying to remember what that face was called.

He smiled, half-encouraging, half-worried. “How are you feeling?” he asked, handing me a waterskin.

I drank while I thought. As the water coursed down my throat, a few more memories volunteered themselves. Finally, I managed, “Everything hurts. But I don’t think I’m going to die.”

Isaak laughed. “I’m glad. I’m really sorry, Nadin. I had no idea… I didn’t realize going off the System would hurt you like that.”