Then … something went wrong. The plants around Aurora began to turn brown and dull. They continued moving as Jinx’s magic commanded, but they grew dry and brittle, and they snapped under the strain.

Aurora too felt strange. Her vision flashed with shadows despite the sunlight overhead. Her mouth felt as if a dust storm had rolled over her tongue then settled into a desert in her throat. A gnawing pain began at her temples and the base of her neck. The world started to wobble, the ground tipping from side to side below her. A fist curled around the belt at her waist and jerked her backward. Her fingers broke from the ladder like the brittle vines beside her. Dust flew up as she landed flat on her back, and the pain shattered the remaining control she had over her mental shields.

Sensations swamped her, foreign and overpowering, but even lost in the deluge it was the ache in her throat that bothered her most. Dizziness kept spinning her mind around as she tried to focus. A dark form came into view, and her vision cleared just enough for her to see.

The woman. The one with the claw-tipped, red glove—singular, for her other hand was bare. She was striking, and not just because Aurora felt like the air had been knocked from her lungs and refused to return. She had thick dark hair that trailed past her waist and was decorated with braids and curls. Her eyebrows were dark and straight over piercing brown-black eyes. Her cheekbones were sharply defined, and her skin a gold-touched brown. The woman wore fine clothes made of rich, draping fabrics that flowed around her shape as if at her command. She radiated power.

The dark spots in Aurora’s vision began to stretch and merge, blocking out even the sun that streamed through the open hatch above. When she dangled at the edge of consciousness, the woman bent down toward Aurora’s face, a shrewd look in her narrowed eyes.

“I can make it stop,” the woman said, her voice soft—just shy of kind. “If you tell me who sent you.”

Aurora tried to answer her, but her tongue was thick and dry and useless in her mouth. The woman reached out and pulled away the cloth covering the lower part of Aurora’s face, then tugged at the hood covering her hair. Aurora’s heart gave one heavy, panicked thump, but she was too weak to fight back.

A voice in her head shouted, “Stop!” And she tried to make the word herself.

“Stop!”

The word surprised her, for it came not from her mouth, but from somewhere outside her narrowed vision. She heard it repeated—a deep voice, a man’s voice.