She could hear it, echoing. Broken with despair.

Hands shook her.

Darkness swallowed Asa’s glinting smile.

“Nomi. Nomi! Wake up!”

She shot up, her lungs gasping in gulps of air. Her arms flung outward, as if they were tearing off restraints.

“Nomi, it’s okay. You’re safe.”

Nomi opened her eyes, and Serina was there, lamplight flickering across her face. Slowly the ruined ballroom, half-eaten by swirls of blackened lava, coalesced around her.

Serina held her shoulders. Val stood behind her, his expression haunted. Malachi slept a couple of feet away.

“You were screaming,” Serina murmured.

Nomi’s gaze found Malachi’s haggard face. “He didn’t wake,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry,” Serina said, and they were the words of an older sister, offering comfort for comfort’s sake. It was a gesture of love, not an assurance that there was nothing to worry about.

“I saw him,” Nomi mumbled, rubbing at her face. “I saw Asa. I saw him in my dream.”

“Nightmare,” Serina corrected. “That’s all it was.”

Nomi’s throat ached, as if she’d been screaming for hours. At the other end of the ballroom, figures shifted and sighed on pallets. She noticed a couple of the injured women staring at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake anyone.”

Reaction was setting in. Nomi could feel the burn of tears, the thickening in her throat.

Serina tugged gently on her arm. “Come on. Let’s get some air. Val will keep an eye on Malachi.”

Nomi pulled herself up and shuffled after her sister. Before they’d bedded down for the night in the far corner of the infirmary, Serina had given Nomi and Maris some threadbare shirts and pants so they could change out of their dirty gowns. Nomi appreciated the ease of movement, but she couldn’t shake off the heaviness of the dress in her dream, the paralysis it had forced upon her.

Maris had found a room in the hotel with Helena; Nomi wondered if she was sleeping soundly or fighting her own dark dreams.

Serina led Nomi through the moonlit dark to a spot at the edge of a cliff, where the wind blew their hair back and the waves crashed in rhythmic percussion below. Serina dangled her feet off the cliff. Nomi didn’t feel so brave.

She curled up next to Serina, close enough that she could lean into her side. Serina wrapped an arm around her.

“I had trouble sleeping my first night here too,” Serina said. “I was so terrified.…”

She told Nomi about the fight that first night, how shocking it had been. She told her about the lava tube, the way the rock weighed down on her.