SOPHIA HAD VANISHED, and I couldn’t follow. It was wrong—all wrong. It should have been me in there. She was the real one. The one with a life, with a voice, with a soul. The Six-Wing advanced on me.
In the moment before it ended, I heard her. It wasn’t words but a feeling. A knowing. The connection between us hummed.
Sophie—listen.
She washed over me. I gasped, as desperate for air as if I was drowning. It was too much—she was emptying herself, and I couldn’t hold all of that for her and stay myself.
And so I stopped trying.
Sophie.
Sophia.
We are here.
We are.
We—
And then, in one bright instant of pain, she was gone, and I was only myself.
It was like an electric shock—the connection between us broken so suddenly, so violently, that the energy of it rebounded. The shard flared with brilliant light.
And then it shattered. It fractured into a thousand pieces and they burst apart. I ducked instinctively, but the slivers halted, hovering in a cloud of scintillating fragments.
The Six-Wing screamed, wings beating in the frantic arrhythmic tempo of a dying bird. It hunched, clawing at its face.
“We have to go!” Abby yelled. She clasped one hand over her shoulder, wounded in the fight, though I hadn’t seen it.
“Sophia,” Liam said simply.
I looked at the shattered heart of the world. Somewhere in those many facets, I almost imagined I caught a glimpse of a face staring back at me. My reflection, maybe.
Maybe not.
“Gone,” I whispered. “She’s gone.”
We fled.