“No!” I scream. I try to do the same thing I did with Maeve, but Dagm?r lunges out of the way, losing her grip on Artemisia as she does, and the flames take the other girl, swallowing her into the wall of fire before she even has the time to scream.

Dagm?r moves toward Art again, but this time I’m faster. Without thinking, I throw my body over Art’s, shielding her. I call on every remaining ounce of my power, drawing the flames larger and larger and larger, imagining the entire camp as nothing but fire, every inch burning. As soon as I think it, I hear the roar of it in my ears, feel the lick of flames against my skin, feel Dagm?r’s scream vibrating in the air. Then I push the fire down in my mind. I shove it deep into the ground until there is no fire left, only ashes.

Then all there is is silence and smoke and the world gone still. But I can feel Artemisia’s heart beating, feel the steady rise and fall of her chest, and that is enough.

I force my head up, force my eyes open to see only charred ground around me, the remains of burnt buildings, patches of a destroyed wall. And bodies—too many bodies to count, including one mere inches from me that I somehow know in my bones is Dagm?r’s, though there’s not enough left to truly recognize.

I hear someone shout my name, and a cacophony of voices, but then my vision goes dark and I don’t hear anything at all.

DARKNESS SURROUNDS ME, A NIGHT with no stars, no moon, nothing at all to see by. I feel it wrapping around my limbs, slithering over my skin like a dozen snakes. I feel it in the air, in every frigidly cold breath I take.

There is no ground beneath my feet, nothing at all around me except pitch-dark air. I open my mouth but no sound comes out, even when I scream at the top of my lungs.

Perhaps this is what death is—no After, no reunion with my mother and Ampelio and Hoa and Elpis and all of the others I’ve lost. Perhaps I didn’t deserve that, perhaps they turned me away. I dimly recall why they would, how I let Cress into my head and how thousands of Astreans at the Air Mine paid the price for it. Perhaps this is what I deserve—an eternity of conscious nothingness.

Time is immeasurable, an unending expanse where an hour could just as easily be a second which could be a week, and I would have no way of knowing. It is both infinite and infinitesimal at once.

I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I am no longer alone in the darkness. Cress is a few feet before me, her white-blond hair floating around her head like she’s suspended in water, her black lace gown billowing in an invisible current. For an instant, she looks at peace, her eyes closed and her expression relaxed, but then her eyes snap open and lock on to mine and I see the cold seething fury I’ve grown more accustomed to from her.

Maybe this is the After I deserve, an everlasting nothingness with only Cress for comfort. Maybe this is what we both deserve.

I thought once that by the time we saw one another in the After, we would maybe have forgiven each other, but that was before the trespasses piled up. Now, looking at her, I know that there is no forgiveness waiting, no grace, only a hate that will sustain us for eternity.

She reaches out a hand but can’t fully extend her arm before she hits some sort of barrier. The sound of the collision echoes around me, like a thud against a thick pane of glass. I reach out as well, feeling it for myself, cold and hard and solid.

Cress frowns. She opens her mouth, and I can see her forming words, speaking, but I can’t hear a thing. She must realize this as well because her frown deepens and she places both hands against the barrier that separates us. She leans in close, her features becoming distorted through it. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth wide, and this time, I can hear the scream, deafening in my ears. It raises goose bumps on my arms and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

She screams so loud that the barrier between us quivers and cracks, a spiderweb of fractures spreading over the surface before it shatters altogether.

* * *

—

I come to with a gasp, the air in my lungs no longer ice cold. It hurts to breathe, each inhale agony, but it’s a reminder that I’m alive, and so I savor it. With some effort, I force my heavy eyes open. At first, the brightness blinds me, but when I blink a few times, I realize that the only light is coming from a single candle set up beside me in an otherwise dark tent.

When I try to sit up, my head throbs and I have to lie down once more with a groan, throwing an arm over my eyes to block out the light, though even that small movement sends a wave of pain through my whole body.

“Theo?” a voice asks, barely louder than a whisper. I lower my arm, squinting into the dark to see Heron sitting nearby, between my bedroll and another one. Though the occupant’s back is to me, I can just make out the spill of cerulean hair. Artemisia.

“Is she all right?” I ask. My voice comes out raspy and rough, barely intelligible, and every syllable hurts, but Heron understands.

“I fixed everything I could,” he says, looking at her. “She’s alive. She’s breathing. But she hasn’t woken up yet.”

I swallow, but that only makes the pain in my throat worse. “How long has it been?” I ask.

“Just over a day. It’s almost sunrise,” he says. He pauses before asking the inevitable question.

“What happened, Theo?”

I close my eyes tight, memories filtering back in slowly, then all at once. “The scream—that last one I went in for—it was a trap,” I say, before telling him about Dagm?r and the other girls, about how Dagm?r grabbed Artemisia’s throat, choking and burning her at once.

“She was going to kill her,” I tell him. “So I…” I break off, unable to say it, but I force myself to tell him. “I tried to cover Art and then I caused the explosion. It was the only thing I could think of to stop Dagm?r.”

For a second, Heron doesn’t say anything. “It did, though. Stop her.”

I nod, looking at Artemisia again. I force myself not to think the worst—that it might not have been enough to save Art.

“What about the others?” I ask instead. “Was anyone else hurt in the explosion?”

Heron pauses before shaking his head. “Not in the explosion, no. By then, we’d gotten everyone out that we could,” he says, but doesn’t continue. He won’t look at me, either, his eyes focused on the flame of the candle.

“Tell me, Heron,” I say, quiet but firm. “I need to know.”

He takes a steadying breath. “Our best estimates say there were three thousand people in the camp, not including the guards who abandoned it when the fire started. All in all, close to five hundred survived.”

I close my eyes tightly. Twenty-five hundred people, dead. The thought is unfathomable, but Heron isn’t done.

“And we took losses of our own,” he adds. “There were guards lying in wait, ready to fight, as you thought there might be. And some who went into the fire to help didn’t make it out again.”

I don’t want to know the answer, but I have to ask the question anyway.

“How many did we lose?” I ask.

“A hundred altogether,” he says. “At first, only the Guardians went into the fire, but there were unblessed people going in as well. They saved lives, all of them, but…” He trails off. “We lost Guardians and non-Guardians alike.”

My mind is a blur of thoughts, but only one works its way past my lips.

“It’s my fault,” I say.

Heron must have expected me to say as much, because he doesn’t miss a beat. “It was their choice, Theo,” he says, moving closer and grabbing hold of my hand. My skin is still raw and my bones ache, but I don’t pull away. “They could have stayed in the camp; they could have found other ways to help. They chose to go into that fire, knowing perfectly well that they were risking their lives. It’s not your fault.”

I turn toward him and shake my head. “Not just that,” I say. “The fire itself. She did it to taunt me, because she was angry about Rigga. A little surprise, she called it. If I’d listened to you, or Blaise, or anyone who’d told me to take a dreamless potion and block my mind from her––”

“We still might be here,” Heron interrupts. “She might have still sent her ghouls here. She might not have taunted you about it, she might not have made it personal, but you said it yourself. If she couldn’t have the mine, she wanted it destroyed. Nothing about that would have changed.”

I know he’s right, but it doesn’t help ease my guilt. Twenty-six hundred lives lost.

Heron squeezes my hand tightly in his. “You made the best decision you could with the information you had. You couldn’t have seen this coming.”

“I should have,” I say, a sob leaking into my voice. “I know her, I should have known what she would do.”