I can’t breathe. I retch, gasping, as all five of us stagger back into the depths of the tunnel.

‘Ugh!’ Teddy says. ‘What the hell …?’

‘We’ll never make it,’ Clementine says. ‘We can’t climb up the rocks if we’re choking to death – we’ll fall, surely, and then …’

She trails off, looking stricken. But it’s too late; we’re all imagining a body hitting liquid Curiefer. The bubbles and scorching heat. The stink of boiling flesh and splitting bones, swallowed by the shine.

‘If we go back, we’ll die anyway,’ I say. ‘Farran will either shoot us or drag us off to the battlefield and let King Morrigan do the honours. Isn’t a small chance better than nothing?’

‘And if one of us falls?’ Clementine says. ‘Will you take the guilt, Danika? If I fall, or Teddy falls, or Mai –’ Her voice hitches. She takes an unsteady breath. ‘If Maisy falls, will you take the blame?’

I stare at her, my mouth dry. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to picture their bodies falling, melting. Nausea bubbles in my throat.

‘I think we can do it,’ Maisy says. ‘Clem … if you and I work together, I think we can keep them safe.’

Clementine starts to protest, but Maisy cuts her off.

‘You have an Air proclivity. If you can just push away the gasses, you could clear a space for us to breathe. You could keep fresh air flowing around our faces.’

‘I’ve only known my proclivity for a few minutes!’

‘I’m not asking you to travel through it,’ Maisy says. ‘That would be too dangerous. But you should be able to push outward a little, just to keep the air flowing around us.’ She looks at her sister with a pleading expression. ‘I know you can do it, Clem. I know it.’

Clementine glances at the rest of us, awaiting an objection. No one speaks.

‘I can help too,’ Maisy says. ‘I can keep us safe from spits of fire. Flame and Air. If ever there were two perfect proclivities for making it out of here alive …’

Clementine looks at her sister. I watch them both: two slender girls, their blonde curls tangled into knots, faces stained with soot and dirt. And just for a moment, the fierceness in Maisy’s face transfers to Clementine – like mirrors reflecting back into each other.

Clementine closes her eyes. And around us, the air begins to stir.

The rock stings with heat beneath my hand. I pull my sleeves over my palms and try to ignore the pain in my fingertips.

The boiling pit of Curiefer gurgles below us. Thick bubbles pop and splatter. Sometimes they hit the rocks and explode, spitting fire and alchemy juices. Clementine keeps her teeth gritted and the air around us spins. It’s a harsh flurry – amateurish and barely controlled – but it’s enough to keep the steam cleared, and the sulphuric gasses out of our lungs.

We climb with every inch of muscle and sinew in our bodies. We cling to rocky ledges, and haul our legs onto protruding boulders. We ignore the aches, the pain, the heat. We ignore the whiplash of air when it slams out of Clementine’s control. We ignore the scatterings of pebbles and broken stone from the climbers above us.

Clementine accidentally slams a handful of soot and gas into our faces, and I’m left to splutter as I cling to the rocks. I would trade anything for a gasp of fresh air: one last gasp, out in the open, away from this choking hole of dark and steam. Is that too much to ask? Just one last gasp, before I die?

Don’t let go, Danika. Don’t let go.

The Curiefer casts an unnatural light through the shaft. Tendrils of liquid lash up like strands of hair, then flop back down into the smouldering pit.

A new blast of gas envelops us. Clementine loses her grip and scrabbles at the rocks, shrieking. I lunge to grab her ankle, but can’t quite reach. She writhes, her expression desperate, her eyes clenched shut, struggling to dispel the steam before it can scald the flesh from our bones. I hear Maisy panting, using every desperate skerrick of her Flame proclivity to keep the heat at bay.

And then Clementine falls.

I reach for her with a cry, and my lungs fill with a choke of smoke and ash. I squeeze my eyes shut as the bubble of protective air dissolves and a sulphuric stink fills my throat. I swipe out blindly, vaguely aware of the screams and shouts and scrabbling limbs around me.

Nothing. Just empty air. She’s gone.

Suddenly I think of Radnor. I think of his body tumbling from the waterfall; my desperate hands trying to keep a grip on his limbs as they slip away. And now another body, another friend, lost to the churn of air and flame and –

No!

And without thinking, I dissolve.

Night slips around me, cool and inviting. I slip into its embrace and melt between the steam and shadows. I have no body. No hands, no arms, no eyes, no breath. She’s here somewhere. I know she is. Her proclivity is Air; she can’t have fallen, she must have –

And then I sense her. Just the slightest twitch. She’s dissolved into Air, but she’s losing herself: melting like candlewax into the dark until –

Nothing.

Perhaps I imagined it. The chance of sensing Clementine, in her proclivity form, is painfully slim. If we’d both dissolved into Night, it would be simple. Silver used the same trick to save me upon the Night-song. But our powers don’t match. A connection is technically possible, but difficult. It would require our melted forms to physically cross through each other, to be mutually searching, to overlap in the exact same patch of night-stained air …

Clementine! I shout the name inside my mind, as rough and raw and coarse as if my voice were made of gravel.

Nothing. Silence.

Then I hear it. My own name, lost and confused. More of a whisper than a cry: the echo of a voice almost gone. Danika.

And there she is. We cling to each other. A moment of shared breath, of shared power. Toxic steam billows around us, and Curiefer boils below. Somewhere above, our friends are choking. They can’t survive without Clementine’s proclivity – not for long.

But part of me is slipping. I can feel the lure of Night. What’s the point of going back? It just means more pain, more death, more struggling. Easier to end it this way. To end it all here, drifting into peace and shadow …

Maisy!

The word explodes inside my breath. Inside my bones. It’s Clementine calling, searching for her sister. The desperation in that cry shakes me from my confusion. I can’t fade. We can’t fade. Our friends still need us.

As one, we bluster back towards the rocks. Suddenly I’m solid, my raw fingertips fumbling on stone and my lungs heaving as Clementine reels a gush of wild breeze into our faces.

‘Clementine!’ someone cries.

‘Danika!’

Shouting, fumbling. The raucous cough of half-choked lungs. Ash stings my eyes as our crew takes a moment to check that we’re all here, we’re all safe. But we can’t afford to rest. Not yet. We have to keep climbing, our bodies strained, our minds wrecked.

And the twins use their proclivities to keep us alive. These spoilt richie girls, who once painted their nails to enter Rourton’s sewers, and who brought a pack of designer clothing on a refugee trek. I hated them at first. I hated them for their lives of luxury, while I starved and scrimped on the city’s winter streets. I’ve been wrong many times in my life, but underestimating those girls was perhaps my greatest mistake of all.

Like a slow-spinning waltz, we keep on moving. One hand, then the other. One foot, then the other. A patch of night sky above. Far above. It’s barely visible through the haze and steam and gas, but I can see it. I know I can.

The faintest shine of stars.