There was pain as he slammed into a wall and slid down its surface. Then, he was out, into the bright light of the sky. Spinning into nothingness.

Far beneath him, he saw the patchwork quilt of Acies, and the ship seemed to tumble up and past him. And far above, he saw the flash.

Cade stared at the timer. Glimpsed the remote before it was snatched away by the wind.

00:00

He’d done it. The gods were dead … and Cade was finally free.

EPILOGUE

Cade fell and fell.

It felt like hours of falling. He threw out his arms and legs to catch as much friction as he could to slow him down.

Above him he had seen the pieces of the pantheon ship falling through the atmosphere, blazing like meteorites before burning to nothingness. The streaking of the smaller pieces strobed out light, and great lumps of material left behind smoking trails, crisscrossing the sky as they burned slowly toward the planet’s surface.

Whatever material the Gray ship had been made from, it was sturdier stuff than the pantheon’s.

He knew at some point he would need to open his parachute. But he needed to decide where he would land first.

He knew what he was looking for. It was just one patch among the hundreds spread across the world below him. A drop of blue, in a sea of green, within an ocean of desert.

Once he found it, he pulled the cord on his parachute. Yanked the guide straps to take him left, take him right.

He drifted on the wind, breathing the suit’s oxygen. There was no cold. No pain. The suit kept him safe.

The parachute spiraled, and Cade prayed he would land in the right place. Prayed he would survive the impact.

Fiery debris flamed past him. Dozens of metal shards, raining like a meteor shower around him.

He could do no more than stare at the canopy above him. That thin, ancient stretch of canvas, half-rotted by seawater and the jungle heat. Any second, a flaming ball of death could end him.

So it was with some surprise when he found himself circling above what he thought was the caldera, honing down into the square he had called home for so long. It was painstaking work, keeping himself centered, and twice he spiraled out of control, kicking at the rat’s nest of strings tangling above him.

Somehow, they held.

He knew where the keep was. Had stared at the Codex’s map for so long, he knew it as well as the freckles upon Amber’s face.

Pulling the straps, he angled toward it. Past it, into the salt flats, then back. The ground was growing closer and closer now. Beyond him, he could see the entrance to the bone fields.

And tiny figures, streaming out from the keep.

Down he went, the wind whipping at him. He was going so fast. Too fast. He felt giddy, as if it couldn’t be real.