Stilling, I waited for the moment when the pinging from the ice would stop.

If I wasn’t moving, though, then there shouldn’t—

I lifted my eyes with sudden understanding.

Slowly, I turned my head.

He stood on the ice at a distance of thirty feet, those two pinprick lights fixed on me, shining from within the depths of the silver mask that gleamed cerulean in the gloom.

He had thrown back his cloak. The garment spilled from his shoulders to frame his crimson uniform, which, against the backdrop of white, blazed brighter even than the blood that smeared his chest.

The pinging of the ice had stopped the moment my eyes met his, confirming my suspicion that it hadn’t been my movements that had caused the lake to sing that way . . . but his.

Now there was only the sound of my frightened breathing—my heart banging a death-metal rhythm in my ears.

How had he reached me so quickly? Could he appear where he wanted on a whim?

He showed no sign of exertion. No clouds of breath appeared in the vicinity of that mask.

Holding him with my stare, trying not to blink, I abandoned my rock, pressed my hands against the ice . . . and pushed to my feet. Slowly, the weakened ice groaning beneath me, I pivoted toward him.

“Don’t,” he said.

But just as I faced him, the ice at last gave.

Then he, along with the world, rushed up and out of sight, like a curtain being torn away to reveal a polar void.

The water, more frigid than I could ever have imagined, pierced me everywhere—a thousand stabbing knives.

I gritted my teeth as I sank, and, fighting the cold, I willed my limbs to move me farther down. Only, instead of ending in a place where the bottom of this lake broke through to the surface of mine, the blackness carried on, proving that this was not the same shallow body of water from the dream.

The glimmer of hope I’d felt when I’d beaten on the ice began to fade. And then that small light dimmed, readying itself to do what all lights eventually did. All lights except for perhaps two . . .

I stopped swimming and tilted my head up toward the unbroken sheet of ice that was my sky. The hole I’d fallen through. It had vanished.

Panic gripped me, and I pedaled for the surface, raising both hands above my head.

But it wasn’t until the moment my fingers grazed the frozen barrier that I remembered the way things reset themselves in this world.

The ice. I should have realized it would follow the same rules.

I wanted to scream. Instead, without meaning to, I inhaled.

Water flooded my lungs. And the darkness that I had hoped would deliver me home came to take me where it would.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Lucas

“Curious,” said Wes. “Is that the blazer you wore in the Halloween episode of Ethereal Encounters?”