“You’re awake.”

Amber’s voice called out from the doorway, and Cade looked up to see her figure silhouetted against the flickering light of the Codex and its timer. He wondered if he had been crying out in his sleep and she had heard him from the girls’ room across the hall.

“Come on, might as well check on the smokehouse. It’ll be light soon.”

Cade groaned and rolled from the bed, careful not to tread on the snoring form of Quintus. The other boys had brought bunk beds from below up to the room—still too afraid to sleep in the ground floor barracks.

But the young legionary was more comfortable on the floor with a straw-filled mattress. He had taken to sleeping there while Cade recovered, to attend him if he needed water or help reaching the toilets far below. The arrangement had just stuck. Not that Cade minded.

Cade tiptoed over, and Amber led him to the round stone table in the room between the girls’ and the boys’ rooms.

“We need to talk,” she said, sitting down and motioning to the next chair over.

“Oh?” Cade said.

He sat on the stone chair, and only now did he see her clearly in the flickering blue light of the ticking timer. Her face was drawn and grim, stark contrast to the smile and soft kiss she had given him the night before.

“After our night together … I … I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

Cade’s heart twisted in his chest.

“I don’t understand,” he choked, the cold shock of disappointment chasing the sleep-drunk fog from his mind.

“I just … you’re not a good match.”

Amber tossed her hair and leaned back in the chair.

“The whole night, all I could think of was … how fragile you are.”

She motioned at him, summing him up with a dismissive wave of her hand. Cade felt his throat close up, and a hint of tears prick the edges of his eyes.

“Amber…”

But he could not think of anything else to say. It was so sudden. Had he read their date so wrong? They had talked through the night, watching the sunset, even as their heads nodded in sleep. A soft kiss goodbye, heartfelt and tender. It had all been so perfect.

“I need to think of my future here,” Amber said, seemingly ignorant of the abject misery her words were causing him. “I need someone who’s going to look after me. You know?”

Amber had never needed, nor wanted, a protector. She was as independent as any girl he’d met.

“This isn’t like you, Amber,” Cade said. “Why are you saying this?”

She smiled, but in the ethereal glow it seemed to have a cruel twist to it. It was familiar somehow.

“I just can’t be with someone as pathetic as you are.”

Cade reached for her hand, and as his fingers brushed her own, he felt a static shock. Amber’s smile turned into a shark-like grin, even as her face shrank and morphed, and her figure shrank before his eyes.