Ayla and Crier were once again alone.

“You’re . . . ,” Crier said. Her voice was hoarse from begging for Ayla’s life. “You’re bleeding.”

Ayla nodded. She reached up, running two fingers along her collarbone. It wasn’t too deep a cut, and it didn’t even hurt that much. Just a dull, throbbing ache. She held up her fingers, tipped in dark red, almost black in the murky half-light of their cell. The rebels had escaped and were already in the labyrinth, making their way out. They didn’t know Ayla and Crier were trapped in the Heart as well.

Nobody knew.

Nobody was coming for them.

The air smelled of smoke and blood, and they were trapped in this tiny dark cell, and nobody was coming for them.

Ayla didn’t realize her breathing had quickened until she heard Crier say her name, except it sounded like Crier was calling out from across a wide body of water, or through a thick fog, or through a tunnel, hollow and echoing like that.

She pressed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to calm down, but it felt like half her mind was elsewhere, a scrap of paper caught in the wind. Carried all the way back to that day.

That day. That day.

In the outhouse, the tiny pitch-black outhouse, the smell of smoke and blood and human shit. Old, sour piss. Waiting for Storme to come back. Screaming from above, screaming and the sound of a village burning, the roar of fire and the great splintering crack of roofs collapsing. Waiting for Storme to come back. Knowing she’d just seen her parents slaughtered but not quite believing it, because how could they be dead? How could they be dead for real, forever?

Waiting for Storme to come back for her. Waiting and waiting and finally accepting that he wasn’t coming, nobody was.

Crawling up and out, falling once, landing hard on the foul wet ground . . .

Ayla, someone was saying. Ayla. Now, or then? Did it matter?

Both outcomes would be the same.

Except this time she wouldn’t escape. And she wasn’t alone. They would both die here.

I don’t want you to die, she thought hazily. I don’t—I don’t want you to die. Crier, I want you to live.

“Ayla!”

The shout startled her into opening her eyes. She felt dizzy, her head was swimming. Darkness at the edges of her vision like flames devouring paper. Storme hadn’t come.

“Ayla, I need you to calm down,” a familiar voice said. “Ayla, you have to breathe.”

I can’t, Ayla tried to say, but nothing came out. Her face was wet. Blood? No, salt on her lips. She was crying, which some part of her found humiliating, but mostly she just couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, her chest was too tight. Like someone had cracked open her rib cage, reached inside her, and wrapped their cold fingers around her lungs.

“Ayla. Ayla, please try to breathe. I think he’s coming back, I hear footsteps. You have to calm down.” Crier’s voice was low and strained, like she was speaking through clenched teeth. “Ayla, I’ll get us out of here, I swear to you, but I need you to calm down. Just try to breathe. Slowly, in and out.”