A rainbow sheen that flickers through the mercurial ice around us. It’s trying to tell me something. I can almost understand it, as if the colors are words with half their letters scrambled. If I could just decode them—if I could just put them in the right order …

Elliott’s grip on my arm tightens. It vanishes.

And then I wake up on a cold, hard floor—alone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I INHALE.

My ribs creak with the motion, like I haven’t breathed deeply in eons. The world is dark. My thoughts are fuzzy and gray around the edges, like the fog has crept into my brain, too. I can still smell it: metallic, faintly burnt. But the world isn’t made of ice anymore, and the dizzying kaleidoscope of sensations is gone—and so is the noise of the storm. There’s no howling wind, no booms of thunder. The silence is vast around me.

My brain sends an order to my fingers. Move. But nothing twitches.

I exhale.

Some of the fog clears from my brain. I realize that the reason the world is dark is because my eyes are closed. My brain sends another order. This time, it’s obeyed. My eyes open.

I’m staring at a field of stars.

I squint. My eyes feel rusted shut, like I haven’t opened them in eons either. I try to move my fingers again, and this time, my right hand obeys. I rub my eyes. Open them again. The stars are above me, impossibly clear and bright, the arm of the Milky Way spangled with purples and blues overhead. A phrase snags in my mind: The stars are wrong. I don’t have any idea which stars I’m looking at or whether the constellations above me are correct, but somehow these stars look clearer, brighter, and sharper and more painfully real than anything I’ve seen in a long time.

I sit up. The floor beneath me feels like glass but is opaque, and a gentle shimmer of rainbow light flows across it like a mirage. Chartreuse, sapphire, candy-apple red. It’s hypnotizing and distracts me for a long moment—until I realize I’m wearing shoes.

I frown. Some more of the fog in my brain clears. I wasn’t wearing shoes before. Was I? No. I’d kicked one off to get rid of a scorpion, and threw the other at … someone, I think. But now I’m somehow wearing them again, and they look nearly brand-new, the way they used to look last year when I first bought them. And—I’m wearing a different shirt, too, a nice button-down with a crisp white undershirt. None of my clothes have been white, not for months, not with the electricity on the island so carefully guarded that hardly anyone can afford to use a real washer and dryer.