Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. I don’t pay any attention to whether or not I hit the targets. This isn’t for fun; this is a power play, making Elliott wait and wonder while I dawdle. He gained the upper hand during our earlier meeting. I’ve got to put him in his place fast if I want this deal to go my way now. I need to remind him that I’ve got just as much leverage as he does—after all, he might be my best shot at getting out of this hellhole, but I’m the only person left who’s still selling what he wants to buy.

My body tenses when I remember Sam being hauled toward the fog. That won’t be me. I can’t let it be me. Thwack. I throw the next dart so hard that the tip snaps off, the shaft clattering to the boardwalk below.

I take a deep breath, trying to center myself. I can’t walk into this deal scared or it’ll go south fast. I glance at the sun again to check its position—two-thirds of the way down now—and then wince. One of the massive, distant chunks of reflective metal in the Shatter Ring is catching the light just right to blind me. I narrow my eyes to slits, let myself glare at the ring. A sluggish sort of hatred stirs beneath my nervousness. These chunks of metal are what separated me from my brother. They’re what caused the deadly fog that now covers the entire world—with the exceptions of London, Singapore, and for some unknown reason, one tiny island off the coast of Florida. Also known as … us.

No one knows exactly what happened during the event we now call the Fracture. The only thing we do know is that one random Tuesday in July of last year, a giant reflective oval appeared in the sky like a second moon. Aliens was everyone’s first guess. And when we—or rather, the people in charge of the missile silos on the mainland—started shooting at it, we knew our guess was right.

But it wasn’t a ship the aliens had sent us. It was a weapon.

When the missiles hit it, it broke apart into a thousand massive pieces. Those pieces formed the Shatter Ring. And then they ended life as we’d known it.

We call it the Fracture because a lot of things broke that day, thirteen months and some-odd days ago. The world was one of them.

I throw another dart, actually bothering to aim it this time, and hit square on the smallest bull’s-eye. I feel better now, more focused. Anger is always better than fear.