“Grey,” Jaya whispered, feeling a stab of pain deep in her heart. “I don’t know. I wish I could explain to him that… that I wasn’t trying to be cruel. It could be my way of undoing some of the damage I’ve done, of making amends before we say goodbye. But he won’t even speak to me. I haven’t given him any reason to.”

Isha studied her older sister, her jaw set. “Then I’ll have to give him one.”

CHAPTER 18

Grey

He was on Mount Sama, standing at the very edge, looking down over the town, the sharp rock jutting into the soles of his shoes, hurting him. The wind shrieked, an angry demoness.

Grey inched one foot forward and then the other.

The rock under him crumbled, and he fell, tumbling, his stomach not in his throat, no longer even in his body, but somewhere above him, waiting to catch up.

Grey grabbed the lip of the mountaintop with one hand, his fingers scrabbling for purchase. He couldn’t hang on too long. How was he supposed to get back up? He was going to die here, alone. His body would fall into the abyss below, never to be found.

“Help!” Grey yelled, hoping someone would miraculously be walking up the path, that someone would hear him. “Help! I can’t do this much longer!”

A hooded figure stepped up to him. He couldn’t see the person’s face.

“Oh, thank God,” Grey said, relief washing over him like a warm ocean wave. “Please, take my hand. Help me up.”

The person reached up to pull their hood back. Jaya’s face looked down at him, unsmiling. The wind whipped her hair around her face like a swirl of black smoke.

“Jaya?” Grey was confused. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she didn’t even know him?

“It’s not that I don’t know you,” Jaya said, apparently reading his mind. “It’s that you don’t know me.”

“Jaya, I—”

She lifted one snow boot–clad foot up. And she brought it down, hard, on his hand.

Grey jerked awake, not even twenty minutes after he’d fallen asleep, his body covered in a thin film of sweat, and lay there, his mind curiously blank.

Bit by bit, the night came back to him, like a car crash he couldn’t stop from happening. The good news was, his chest felt strangely hollow, like his heart had been scooped out. He got out of bed, brushed his teeth, showered, and got dressed. Then he slipped out of his dorm room and walked down the silent, empty hallway.

It was past midnight now—officially his birthday. Eighteen. The day his life wound down, like some broken toy. The day everything went silent and cold.