The collision drove the air from his lungs with a shattering smack. His chest and stomach and face stung. The dark water sucked him down, pressed him against the ocean floor. He struggled to turn himself upright, managing to plant his feet on the sand and then push himself upward. He exploded out of the water in a fit of coughing to find the sky was on fire.
“Sophie!” he gasped, casting about. Burning debris rained from the sky like a shower of tiny flaming asteroids, littering the water around him. The blast from the explosion had thrown him far from the cliff, possibly saving his life. If he’d fallen to the foot of the cliff he’d have been killed on the rocks.
Sophie had dived before him, though. She might not have landed as far out.
He swam with all his strength toward the shoreline. Watching for any sign of her. The water burned orange around him as if he were swimming in a pool of fire. He kept calling her name, over and over until he was hoarse, choking on ash and saltwater.
He dove underwater and searched, but saw only a confusion of light and sand and patches of darkness. When he broke surface again, he was much closer to the shore.
“Sophie!”
The body was floating a few yards away, face down. He swam hard toward it, grabbed it and turned it over—then yelled and let go. It was the dead Vitro boy who’d fallen over the cliff. His eyes were still open and the side of his head was bashed in where it had hit the rocks. Jim’s stomach somersaulted and he gagged. He swam in the other direction, letting the body float off to sea.
The waves tossed him and crashed down on him, pulling him beneath the water. When he finally reached the shallows he stood up and wandered back and forth, bracing for each wave, coughing so hard his chest ached. Burning embers rained from the sky; would they never stop?
Lux had defied him.
She had looked as if she’d half killed herself in doing it. Her face white, her eyes nearly popping from their sockets, blood running from her nose.
But she did it. She broke free. Somehow, though sheer willpower, she broke the thread between them, snapped his hold on her. He could have cheered, could have celebrated with her— but she’d blown herself up, and Nicholas with her.
He cursed Lux as he searched for her sister. It wasn’t until he dragged himself, weary and aching, onto the shore that he realized the salt he tasted on his lips wasn’t entirely from the sea. The current had swept him around the island, tossing him onto an unfamiliar shore, on the eastern side if he was reading the sky correctly. Most of the stars above were blacked out by the plume of smoke pouring upward from the Vitro building. He could see where the smoke began, off toward the west, behind the trees. This shore was deserted save for an old broken pier and the flock of gulls sleeping on its rotting posts.
He lay on the sand, panting, chest heaving, mind struggling to come to grips with the world around him. Surely this can’t be real. The night had a surreal quality to it, half dream, half hallucination. He felt too disconnected from his senses for this to be reality. The colors were too dim, the sounds too distant, the sand beneath his hands too coarse and hot. Like ashes and embers.
He jerked to his feet, stumbled across the sand like a drunk as the world spun around him. He blinked repeatedly to wash the ash from his eyes and to make the whirling lights and colors stop long enough for him to get his bearings.
He tripped over a rock and landed heavily on his face, getting a mouthful of sand. Propping himself up on his elbows, he spat out the grit and looked back.
“Sophie!” It wasn’t a rock at all. She was lying in a crumpled heap; the surf rushed around her, slurping and nibbling at her hungrily. The same current that had left him here must have carried her also.
Jim gently turned her over, called her name. She groaned and tried to push him away, but she was alive. Dizzy with relief, he pulled her against his chest and murmured into her hair, feeling the pounding of her heart against his own. “Wake up, Sophie. Please.”
“Umph. You’re squeezing too tight!”
Embarrassed, he released her at arm’s length.
“You okay?”
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “That was a bad idea.”
“You must have hit the shallows. You’re lucky to be alive. You’re completely insane.”
“Yeah . . . What about Lux? Did she get away?”
“I don’t know.” But he feared that he did. She had been too near the building, too far from the cliff. He kept an arm around Sophie and hid his grim expression from her, afraid she’d see the doubt in his eyes. She murmured something unintelligible, her eyes slipping shut. He made sure she was breathing normally, then leaned against a rough, pockmarked rock and tried to find within himself the energy to climb up the beach and trek back to the site of the explosion.
But when he opened his eyes, dawn was beginning to spread across the sky before him. The horizon line glowed hot orange, as if a distant fire were devouring the sea. Behind him, in the trees, a gull screamed repeatedly, annoying as an alarm clock. Wait. It wasn’t a gull—it was a human voice, calling his name and Sophie’s.
“Here!” he called out, his voice throaty and dry, startling Sophie, who jolted in his arms.
“Where are you?” cried the voice.
“Down here! On the beach!”
“What’s going on?” Sophie mumbled, her eyes bleary.
“How you feeling?” Jim asked.
“Hurts,” she moaned, and a wave of shock washed over Jim as he dizzily recalled waking Lux just forty-eight hours earlier, and her saying the same thing when she opened her eyes.
“You’re alive!” a voice cried, and they turned and looked up. Andreyev stood over them, his face haggard. As ever, his silent bodyguards flanked him. They looked a bit worse for the wear, lacking their sunglasses, white ash on their shoulders.
“Carry her up,” he said to them. One of them scooped Sophie up as if she weighed nothing, and they followed Andreyev up the beach and through the resort. They’d been closer to the Vitro building than Jim had reckoned, and Andreyev told him they’d been searching the night through for any sign of him and Sophie. “We saw you jump from the cliff,” he said. “After that, nothing. We looked but it was so dark, and there were so many hurt by the explosion. We had to help them first.”
“My mom . . .” Sophie moaned.
“She lives. She’ll recover, but she may never walk again. It is too early to tell. The doctors have her.”
“Nicholas?”
“Nothing left of him.”
“And . . .”
“Lux,” he said softly. “We found her. But it was too late.”
Sophie shut her eyes. Tears leaked from their corners.
When they reached the area below the Vitro building, he saw the crowd of doctors and Vitros and guards, who were gathered beneath the restaurant with the thatched roof; some of them ran to and from the still-burning Vitro building, trying to put out smaller fires. Jim saw no sign of Strauss. The big, grand building still stood in skeletal form, but from the look of the flames, it would be burning for a while. A column of smoke coiled into the dawning sky and hung over the island like a dark, malevolent spirit. All the palms around the building were naked, smoking pillars, their leaves blasted away. How Moira had survived, he did not know.
When he saw Moira, he saw that her survival had come at a cost. She lay on one of the tables beneath the restaurant’s thatched roof, her face and arms covered with blistering burns.
Sophie demanded to be put down, but leaned on Jim for support as she limped toward Dr. Crue.
“You’re alive!” Moira cried, then she fell into a ragged cough.