‘Have you ever even slept outside?’ Jem stifled a smirk.

‘Don’t patronise me please, Jem. I slept many a night under the stars with Alice at her cabin, thank you very much.’ They both smirked.

‘A night in the forest it is then!’ Jem agreed.

The two of them pulled up their chairs so they were sitting beside each other and started poring over their research materials. They circled vital pieces of information in pencil, flicked through the heavy books, and drew up several possible routes to their camp in the forest.

Occasionally, when Jem was fascinated by a book or was examining a map, she’d steal a glance at him. She wanted the image of him, relaxed and almost happy, with his hair in a careless bun, his furrowed brow almost invisible and his full lips pulled into a satisfied smile, to remain etched in her memory forever.

She had thought, when she had first met him, that hiding under his careless smiles, he was a thunderstorm, all power and rage and darkness. But Jem Rafferty was the calm stillness after the storm has passed. He was gentle and peaceful. He had that storm inside of him, yes, but he kept it contained. His sheer determination to be a solid unchanging force of good to support those who most relied on him morphed the stormy seas into a still, warm azure ocean. Lily realised she wasn’t alone at all; she never had been. She hated that her journey was necessary at all, but she was inexplicably glad to have Jem by her side now.

They sat like that, talking occasionally but mostly in a comfortable silence, until the sun started to set. Lily looked out across the sea, admiring the rusty glow over the world. The ocean was white-tipped and angry; she had learned enough about the sea in her time at the lighthouse to know that it was going to be a fog-coated, stormy night.

Jem broke the silence with the scraping of his chair against the wooden floor. ‘All right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Shall we go and see what everyone has managed to collect today then?’ He offered her a hand, which she took, and helped her out of her chair. He held onto her hand a few seconds longer than necessary, just long enough to make Lily’s heart do a little somersault in her chest, and then left the room. He glanced back to make sure she was following, and the two of them headed towards the main building.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Grace Rafferty was running. Running and running and running. But all she could hear in her mind were the echoes of Alice’s screams from the hall below.

The training room that she favoured was in the very depths of the lair, but Merryck and Arasgain were already in there, pummelling each other in the name of combat training, and she didn’t have the heart to stroll in and demand they leave. They had struggled to settle far more than Grace had, but they had finally seemed to relinquish their hopes of escape and had thrown themselves headlong into learning everything they could.