Gitrin didn’t respond. Her mouth just moved wordlessly. Marin leaned over her and said, “We can’t allow that. Elytherios’ location must remain an absolute secret.” She frowned, looking at her age-bleached hands. “This has never happened before.”

The words stung worse than I thought they would. I had come all this way, fought so hard, learned so much—only to have the door slammed in my face.

“They’re going to kill us,” I said resolutely.

Ceilos put his hand on my shoulder firmly. “Of course not—”

“They are, Ceilos,” I snapped. “There’s no other alternative. We know too much. If we can’t stay…” I swallowed. “We’ll have to go.”

Ceilos didn’t reply. I knew he knew I was right.

Eos was talking again, saying something about Isaak and his father. I tried to pay attention, but the panic in my mind was drowning everything else out.

“Our final group of newcomers is not seeking sanctuary in Elytherious. They are instead asking for our help to return to their home—”

I’d sworn that night—the night of my annual—that I wasn’t going to give up. I didn’t want to die. I refused to die. But I was going to die all the same.

“I know it’s probably hard to believe, but the three of us actually are from Iamos—in our time, it’s called ‘Mars’—several thousand years in the future.”

I wish I had never gone out that night. I had wanted to see the sunset, but for what? To prove to myself that everything really was as bad as it seemed?

Several voices of disbelief rose up over the top of Isaak’s in a smoky cloud of noise. Gitrin stood up beside me, trying to talk over the top of them, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen. I slumped forward on the bench, staring down at the spinning ground beneath my feet. Twigs and fallen leaves and pebbles and mud blurred together before my eyes as Isaak and Gitrin tried to explain what I’d already accepted days ago.

Gitrin had asked me, “What if there was a way to save Iamos?” And I had told her that there wasn’t, I’d told her everything the geroi had always taught me to believe. But the truth was, I didn’t believe them. I believed Gitrin. That’s what I was really looking for, that night—the answer that we had overlooked. The way to save Iamos, the one that Gitrin had hinted existed.

I thought I’d found it in Isaak.

Ceilos put his hand on my back, running his palm back and forth across it reassuringly.

I wish I’d never met him.

Even as I thought that, I knew it was a lie.