Cruze tried to keep track of the time, but during a tempest, the whole world slowed down and sped up all at once. The downpour soaked past the skin, until the cold felt like it would never let you go. First, you wanted to move constantly in an attempt to create heat. But after a while, you realized that creating heat means losing it, and then you didn’t want to move at all. You wanted to sleep. But it was too cold for that too. The unexpected changes of the wind kept you on high alert, always wondering if there was something worse than wet and wind coming next. If you were the other children, you cried and cried and cried.

Cruze did not cry, not even when the voice in his head came back—the voice that whispered of destruction and death. He waited for something more to come of the voice, for madness to take him fully, or the voice’s owner to present itself. But the whispers remained whispers, just skimming the surface of his thoughts; sometimes he even had to strain to hear them over the sobbing of the other children. They cried for mothers and fathers he knew would never come.

Only one other child seemed to understand that they were on their own out here—the girl with the bruise across her neck. Together, she and Cruze had done their best to build a shelter in the time before the storm hit. They found a set of boulders close together, and piled long sticks over the top, followed by fern leaves. When they had finished, it had looked like a makeshift hut, and Cruze had been proud.

But it had done next to nothing to protect them from the rain when it came. The leaves grew heavy and curled downward, leaving gaps in their would-be roof. The earth beneath them grew into sodden soup that stuck to their feet and legs in muddy smears and clumps. The others huddled closer and closer around him, until Cruze could feel their shaking limbs against his own. And with that whisper still in the back of his mind, he had a sudden urge to shove and shove until he had space, until none of that weakness touched him.

Instead, he hurled himself forward and up, crawling out of their pitiful shelter and submitting to the fury of the storm outside.

“Where are you going?” a voice asked, small and high-pitched.

Cruze did not stop to answer. He kept putting one foot in front of the other, and he did not stop until his clothes were soaked through and his skin was slick with rainwater. Thunder howled overhead, trees quaking at its roar, and he stopped to listen, to feel fear, to perhaps finally cry like the others.

But still … it never came.

Because for the first time possibly ever, Cruze felt free.