“Mira?” The empress’s voice was distant. “What is it?” Her guards urged her to leave, but—

“It’s too late,” I gasped. “Seven gods.”

The heels of my palms dug against my temples, so hard my bones felt bruised, but it wasn’t a sound that existed outside my head; I couldn’t block it like this. I couldn’t block it at all. No matter how I stretched to suppress it, the noise grew worse.

“What is it?” Hristo held me up; he must have passed the dragons to Ilina or Viktor, because both his arms wrapped around me now. “Mira, what’s happening?”

“Run!” The keening rose higher. The noorestone moved, propelled into the air, and I didn’t think. I reacted. I lurched away from everyone else, and I pulled.

Power crackled toward me. Into me. So fast it cut the air and thunder broke all around.

Excruciating fire slammed into my body. I staggered back, leaving patches of scorched grass where I stepped.

Guards leaped in front of the empress. Ilina’s father jerked her away from me. Hristo stepped toward me, like he wanted to do something, but there was no help to offer. No way to make this right.

Noorestone fire screamed through my veins, twisting sideways with the instability that made these crystals so dangerous. In the back of my mind, all I saw was the Infinity, exploding into a million fragments. That was going to be me, because I couldn’t contain this. I couldn’t control this.

But still, I pulled faster and faster, because it was me or my friends, and none of them would be able to survive this.

It was too much.

Even now, I was separating from myself. I could see my body shuddering violently under the onslaught of power. I could see fire and wind whipping around me in a deadly storm. And I could see the others pulling away—the empress’s guards dragging her bodily to the carriage.

Screams tore from my throat, deep and wild, and nothing at all like a girl. Plasmic wings ripped from my back and stretched wide against the world. And angry noorestone fire sizzled along my skin like scales.

Someone shouted my name.

I couldn’t hear it, not really, over the wretched keen, and the horror of everything I could see but couldn’t say.

Beyond the others, above them, I saw an object flying high above the city of Sunder.

It was the size of a small house. On its own, a rock that large would have done incredible damage, shattering buildings and cracking open streets, crushing anyone who happened to be in its path.

But this was a noorestone: giant, deadly, and unstable. A blue-white inferno stormed around it, splintering apart where I grabbed at the power and pulled. Ropes of fire sailed across the sky, drawing stares from people across the city—those who hadn’t yet noticed the noorestone. But then their gazes traced the fire from end to end, and there they saw it.

Death.

Panic flared. People fled on foot, as though they could outrun what was coming. They had no idea how bad it was going to be. A conflagration. Consuming. Complete. True destruction, down to the dirt.