“It’s getting . . . The world, it’s . . . vibrating.”
“What’d they do to you?”
“Your agents relocated me. So kind.” She coughed. “Earlier, I felt the rift. I worried. Needed to find you. I broke from the other cell. They didn’t appreciate my . . . tantrum.” She sniffed indignantly, which was the first thing that sounded like the Neven I knew.
She must’ve felt the rift expanding—the same thing that made the MGA decide to evacuate. Her escape attempt explained the commotion I’d heard on the grounds. And why it’d taken the agents so long to come looking for me.
“They shot me. With darts. Dragged me here.” Under her breath, Neven added, “Cheating.”
“I’ll get you out,” I said. “Is there a door? How did they put you in here?”
“The walls can lift.”
My gaze dropped to the bottom of the wall. The glass had buried itself a solid foot into the ground. I whirled and checked out the room. My eyes were already adjusting to the dimness. A large touchscreen sat embedded on the right-hand wall, but nothing I did—press, tap, swipe—activated it.
That left one option. I positioned myself in front of the glass wall and held out my knife.
“The wall is thicker than you think,” Neven said.
“What did you sense?” I started carving. The knife sank easily into the glass. “About the rift?”
“It’s starting . . . The fabric is unraveling. It’ll tear open.”
“How soon are we talking about? Hours?”
“Perhaps.” She inhaled deeply, the sound reaching me all the way through those air holes above. “How are the others?”
“I don’t know.” I filled her in on the evacuation, Red’s attempt to investigate, and her subsequent capture. “She found something. Something about the rift. Maybe it’s the key to closing it.” I hesitated. “I was hoping you could help me free her.”
Guilt writhed in my gut. Neven being captured and drugged was my fault. I’d even argued against getting her out—and now that I had decided to help, it was taking far too long. Neven wasn’t wrong about the glass being thick; my knife didn’t go all the way through. I’d need to carve out entire chunks to reach the other side.
I hacked and sweated and grimaced. As smoothly as the knife went into the wall, the glass screeched and whined as it slid past itself. Pieces dropped to the floor, sometimes thudding onto my feet or shins. Carving a hole big enough to let out Neven would take ages.
The question was what came after I cut through the wall, after I freed Neven, after I found Red. This knife wouldn’t magically close the rift, yet it was my one advantage, no matter what Neven had told me in Damford.
You’re the Chosen One. That’s not entirely meaningless.
What on earth did that mean? My being linked to the rift might help the MGA with their research, but the solution couldn’t be to let them prod at me until they found what they needed. This was something I needed to do. That much, the Powers That Be had made clear.
So what method of closing the rift would the MGA researchers be unable to pull off with all their knowledge and equipment, that my Chosen-One-ness could, all by myself?
A solution that required no skill (as I had none), simply drama and bravery (as the Powers demanded), simply the Chosen One’s connection to the rift . . .
My hand holding the knife slowed.
“Neven?” I watched her fractured silhouette through the wall.
“Yes?”
My voice sounded hollow. “When I died, what happened to the rift?”
Neven sat silent and unmoving in her cell. I couldn’t tell whether she’d heard me.
“Did it close?” I asked.
Her head lifted. “Yes.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
My knife dropped. It embedded into the floor next to my foot. Only the hilt remained visible.
“What?” The word took forever to find.
“Not immediately, and not completely,” Neven amended, “but it started to.”
I didn’t answer.
“Before the rift closed fully and cut off the Power’s access to your world, the Power reverted your death. This further weakened the walls of your world, allowing the rift to abruptly triple in size.”
“Oh.” My mind whispered so softly I struggled to make sense of my thoughts. After what felt like an eternity—standing in the dark, my hands empty by my sides, my eyes fixed on Neven, my mouth painfully dry—I managed to ask, “So is that the solution? I need to die?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not . . .” My legs felt weak. I lowered myself to the floor, never taking my eyes off Neven. A glass chunk I’d cut from the wall pressed painfully into my shin. “The Powers That Be brought me back. I thought they needed me alive.”
I thought I was important.
“They wouldn’t—Why—” I shook my head. “That can’t be the answer.”
“It is.”
“I thought I was supposed to . . . to somehow board up the rift like you talked about, or to use the MGA’s research to close it properly, or . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” The words felt like gravel in my throat. “That I need to die? Or that you knew and didn’t tell me?”
“Both.”
“It’s . . . Oh. Oh.” I tried to swallow. It felt more like choking. “I get why they brought me back. I hadn’t gotten rid of the trolls yet. I’d only just reached Damford. We were about to find Alpha; the Powers still thought I could win. They still thought they could win. That I could kill Alpha and save the world the way they’d intended. Right?”
“Yes.”
I wondered if Neven was so brief because she didn’t know what to say, or wasn’t allowed to say it.
“Why did my death close the rift?” I asked quietly. “You said the rift is linked to me so it can pick up on my, my heroism or something, and so it can follow me around, but my presence doesn’t cause it. Right?”
“Do you remember when I first explained the rift?”
I couldn’t begin to think of what she was aiming at.
“I told you that your birthday was a trigger for the rift to grow. And that completing your destiny—your act of
