31. Casandra
The silence presses in on me from all sides. I lie still for a few seconds, tracking the dull throb in my ribs and the scrape of gravel against my skin. Nothing is broken.
But my group is gone.
I pull myself up into a crouch, my eyes straining against the thick, suffocating smoke blanketed across the forest floor.
I can’t hear their footsteps. I can’t smell their scents through the sharp, synthetic stink.
Following Miranda’s explicit directive, I’m not going to waste precious time or risk my neck wandering blindly through the smoke to find them.
If we are separated, we focus on the exit.
I look up.
Tree hopping, I decide. If the smoke is limited to a low altitude above the forest floor, the canopy is my best shot. I can move faster, see further, and stay out of the path of whatever localized landslides or auditory traps the faculty has cooked up for us on the ground.
With a tight grip on the rough bark, I coil my muscles and spring upward. My fingers find a solid branch, and I pull myself up in one fluid, silent motion. I keep climbing, one hand above the other, vaulting through the dense pine needles until my head breaks through the top layer of the smoke.
The transition is jarring. Below me, the forest is a cauldron of gray soup. Above, the late morning sun hits my skin with a faint, deceptive warmth.
I stand balanced on top of a tree, my chest heaving slightly as I scan the horizon. The view confirms my worst suspicion: the landslide didn’t just knock me off balance; it carried me further west. I am significantly further off course than I realized,.
I narrow my eyes, turning my head to scan the sea of green canopy stretching out toward the east. I’m looking for any sign of Miranda. She’s smart, and there’s a high probability she had the exact same idea I did.
Nothing. The top of the forest is entirely still, an eerie, emerald ocean under the pale sky.
A heavy weight settles in my stomach. Either they’re still trapped down there in the dark together, or the group was fractured entirely, scattered across the different sectors of the forest like leaves in a storm.
“Focus, Cassie,” I whisper to myself, my voice sounding incredibly small against the vast open air. “Make it to the cliffs.”
I lock my gaze onto the distant northern horizon. I bend my knees, testing the spring of the branch beneath my boots. Then, I leap.
The air rushes past my face as I sail through the gap between the trees.
I land softly on a thick branch, my knees absorbing the impact with practiced ease, before immediately launching myself forward again.
The forest is incredibly dense out here in the western sector, the branches intertwining like a tangled web of wooden highways.
It makes the navigation easier, allowing me to maintain a steady, brutal rhythm.
Leap. Land. Scan. Repeat.
With every single jump, I pause for a fraction of a second, my eyes darting across the surrounding treetops. I keep hoping to see a familiar face, hoping to see Miranda’s frame breaking through the canopy. The isolation is a physical pressure.
Time seems to bleed away into a monotonous cycle of jumping from one tree to the next, only pausing to scan the forest for Miranda.
The muscles in my thighs begin to burn from the constant tension, my endurance tested by the sheer repetition of the movement.
The sun shifts across the sky, casting long, dramatic shadows over the sea of smoke below me.
Finally, after what feels like half a lifetime, the density of the trees begins to thin.
The massive oaks and pines give way to smaller, scrubbier birch trees, their branches too weak to support my weight. I slide to a halt on the last sturdy limb of an old spruce, my chest heaving as I look ahead.
I’ve made it to the edge of the forest.
The cliffs are close now.
The smoke has pooled here, thick and stagnant, creating a literal wall of blindness that stretches for another few hundred yards. To finish this, I have no choice but to go back under. I have to drop back into the dark and navigate the final stretch completely blind.
I take a deep breath, fixing the exact trajectory of the cliffside pathway in my mind. I calculate the steps, the angle, the distance. Straight line. If I don’t deviate, I’ll make it to the finish line in less than three minutes.
I drop from the branch.
The moment my boots hit the soil, the world goes black and gray. The smoke here is even thicker, a suffocating, dense wall that tastes like copper and ash on the back of my tongue. I can’t see my own knees. I can’t see the ground beneath my feet.
I don’t pause. I pin my arms to my sides and begin a dead sprint, counting the paces in my head, relying entirely on the internal compass I locked in before I jumped.
One fifty. One sixty. One seventy.
The wind whips through my hair, the damp fabric of my clothes clinging to my skin. The silence is suffocating, broken only by the rhythmic thud of my boots against the dirt. I’m close. I can feel the change in the air currents, the heavy pressure of the stone wall drawing near.
Two ten. Two twenty—
A sudden, violent tearing sound cuts through the mist behind me.
Before my reflexes can even register the danger, a blinding, white-hot agony detonates in my right shoulder.
“Ahhh!”
The scream tears from my throat, raw and unscripted, as a massive force drives into my back, the momentum throwing me violently forward.
I hit the dirt hard, sliding through the loose shale and mud, my hands clawing uselessly at the earth as the pain rips through my nervous system like a lightning strike.
It’s not just an injury. It’s a toxic, corrosive agony that sets my blood on fire, melting through my muscle and bone with a terrifying, liquid heat.
Silver.
The realization flashes through my mind like a death knell. A silver arrow has been driven directly through my shoulder blade from behind, pinning the joint, the metal reacting violently with my physiology. It feels like someone poured molten lava directly into my veins.
I roll onto my side, gasping for air, the smoke filling my lungs and making me choke. The pain is so absolute my vision begins to gray at the edges, tunneling down to a pinpoint of light.
“No,” I rasp, my teeth grinding together so hard I can hear the enamel click. “Fuck!”
I reach my left hand across my chest, trying to force my arm over my opposite shoulder to find the shaft of the weapon impaling me.
But the moment my fingers brush against the wound, a fresh wave of agony rips through my body, a violent spasm locking my muscles in place.
My arm drops, useless, trembling against the dirt.
I am completely paralyzed. The silver is leaching into my system, neutralizing my healing abilities, turning my own blood into a weapon against me.
I fall to my knees, my forehead pressing into the cold, damp mud of the forest floor. The smoke swirls around me, a gray shroud closing in to witness my failure.
The world begins to tilt, the heavy, suffocating blackness of unconsciousness rising up from the edges of my mind to swallow me whole. The pain begins to dull, turning into a cold, heavy numbness that pulls me down, down into the dirt.
I can’t fight it. My strength is entirely gone, my breath rattling in my throat as my eyes slide shut.
As the darkness finally takes over, obliterating the pain, a singular image flashes behind my eyelids.
Not my father. Not the throne.
Nikolai.
The memory of his growl, the fierce, possessive heat of his hands on my skin from just hours ago, and the unfinished mark lingering on my neck.
Nikolai..
And then, there is nothing but the dark.