“This place is coming down,” Perry said, tying off the bandage.

She nodded. “The corridor circles the Panop. If we stay on it, we should find an access door.” She pushed herself off the wall. The bleeding had slowed, but she still felt light-headed.

Perry peered through the door. The corridor had fallen into darkness, lit only by emergency lights every twenty paces. “Stay close to me.”

They ran along the curving corridor together, the wail of fire alarms echoing off the cement walls and filling her ears. Aria smelled smoke, and the temperature had spiked. The fires had moved inside the Pod. Her strength was draining rapidly, just as she’d feared. She felt like she was running underwater.

“Here,” she said, stopping at wide double doors marked PANOPTICON. “This is where Hess locked them in.” She pressed at the control board next to it. NO ACCESS flashed up on the screen. She tried again, stabbing at the panel in anger. They couldn’t be this close and not get inside.

She didn’t hear the Reverie soldiers rounding the bend toward them. The alarms had swallowed the sounds of their approach. But Perry saw them. A staccato of bright bursts exploded beside her as he fired. Down the corridor, the Guardians fell. Perry broke into a run, covering the distance to the soldiers with a shocking surge of speed. He wrenched one of the Guardians off the ground by the collar and returned with the struggling man, who’d been shot in the leg.

“Open the door,” he commanded, holding the Guardian in front of the panel.

“No!” The man twisted his body to break loose. In a flash, Aria saw her mother’s face. Lifeless, as she’d last seen her. She couldn’t fail again. Talon was in there. Thousands of people would die if they couldn’t get in.

With her good arm, she drew her knife and slashed it across the Guardian’s face. She caught him across the chin, the steel blade scraping against bone. “Get us in there!”

The man screamed and jerked back. Then he pressed desperately at the panel, entering an access code as he begged to be let go.

The doors slid open, revealing a long hallway.

She ran, her feet pounding on the slick floor, and froze as she came through the other side, into the Panop. Into her home.

She absorbed it instantaneously, feeling like a stranger. Rising up in a perfect spiraling corkscrew around the central atrium were the forty levels where she’d slept, eaten, attended school, and fractioned to the Realms.

It looked bigger, bleaker than she remembered. The gray color, which had once seemed almost invisible to her, now struck her as lifeless, suffocating in its coldness. How had she ever been happy here?