AUTUMNAL EQUINOX, MIDNIGHT
The burn began like the strike of a match, quick and bearable, reminiscent of the gates I’d taken before, the kind of gate that flips from heat to ice, then brings the sweet relief of freedom.
Not this gate.
The simple flame licking my skin exploded into a solar flare, blistering and burning, as if the match had been tossed into an ocean of gasoline. The fireball engulfed me, as hot as the sun.
I was Icarus, burning.
Melting.
Falling.
The pain was unbearable.
I did the only thing I could: I retreated within.
Within me.
White walls, closed room.
I slammed the door and locked it tight, squeezing my eyes closed, shutting everything out. This room—this quiet sanctuary within me—was where I would ride out the end. Where I would end, taking Nil with me.
Beyond the walls, the darkness roared. Fire exploded from the inside out and the outside in, ignited by the torch I’d carried into the gate; the door rattled under the pressure. Even here I sensed it: the frightening depth of Nil’s fury and fear … its hope and its hate … and above all, its pain; echoes of it all battered the walls around me. It was extraordinary, and extraordinarily terrible.
Nil was being burned alive.
Inside my room, inside me, memories swirled like a vortex, drawing me deeper.
A thin boy with my eyes, carving the words Look Inside.
Thad, throwing Charley into a gate, victory on his face.
Lana, tracing a rough 3-2-1-4, her finger lingering on the 4.
A girl named Macy, peace in her soul, whispering, Four chambers of the heart.
The princess, believing.
The prince, returning.
Talla, begging, Choose me.
Me, telling Paulo, You always have a choice.
Paulo, choosing.
My dad, urging, Think.
Rives, saying, Balance reigns.
Rives, vowing, I love you.
Rives, his heart breaking, letting me go.
My heart skipped.
My heart, not Nil’s. I’d created this place, inside me, a place Nil couldn’t breach, a place where my heart and soul and mind were mine alone. Light blazed around me, soothing, not burning, the light of a new moon, the light of a new day.
The white—the light—was mine.
Clarity struck, quelling all thoughts but one: I had the power to choose.
I had the power.
Love was stronger than hate, stronger than fear; love turned pain into strength, into a power I could wield. I wasn’t alone, I didn’t have to die alone, and just maybe I didn’t have to die at all. Nil’s pain was not mine. I could block it out. I already had, right here, right now.
I would trap Nil in the dark, rather than hide in the light.
I choose to live.
I flung open the door and stepped into the maelstrom of fire. The protective walls vanished; silky darkness converged around me with a choking power: snarling and hungry and cruelly ecstatic; it burned to live, and lived to burn. Behind my eyes, the world churned black and red, like lava, like molten steel. Heat seared my skin; darkness brushed my mind.
And I knew.
The darkness had already declared victory; it relished the fight. It wanted to toy and to hurt, to bring me to my knees and break me; it ached to revel in the power of my pain. Images of Paulo and Hafthor, of Dai and Dex and Talla and hundreds of others roared through my head, a silent film infused with painful emotions in levels coldly designed to make me shatter; cruel laughter imbued with hate and power echoed in my head even as it fought to claim me.
No.
My thought was calm, because I’d made my choice. I’d chosen to die; then chosen to live. My future hinged on the now. Now the fight was mine.
I would fight fire with fire.
Reaching through the darkness, I reached deep inside, into that place Nil couldn’t touch because it couldn’t understand, and I grasped all the love and light and beauty I held inside my heart—and with all the strength of my human soul, I flung my power into the black void.
Rives.
I pictured his face as he looked back at me with grief in his heart; I remembered his incredible depth of compassion and kindness, his last promise and his fierce declaration of love; I imagined our future, the one he’d given up because I’d asked him to. Because I thought I needed to die with Nil for Nil to die.
But my heart wasn’t entwined with Nil’s, nor was my fate.
Nil wasn’t my counterweight.
That was Rives.
Rives! I shouted his name in the dark.
I CHOOSE TO LIVE.
I poured every bit of love I’d ever felt into the fiery blackness around me. Love brought the greatest pain and the sweetest joy; it was the purest source of power I’d ever felt; I wielded it like armor and sword alike. Love offered hope and light and protection and forgiveness, and with my very last breath, I pitted all of mine against the cruel dark.
Love for Rives.
Love for my parents. Love for my friends.
Love for Jillian and Dex, for Charley and Thad. For Hafthor and Paulo.
Love uniting Rives and me; love binding Charley and Thad; love bursting between Molly and Davey. Love shared by others I’d never met, others the island had known, love that brought people home and pulled them through. Love wrapped me like armor, absorbing the fire and the pain; walls rose around me of my own creation.
I was bound in light and life and love. I was on fire, and it came from me.
Love cleaved the dark; it revealed a speck of light, still there, dim but present. A girl stood in the dark, smiling.
Talla.
She nodded, once; the flames flickered.
In the deepest part of me, I felt a stillness. Abrupt and unexpected, the barest whisper of time. The tiniest fraction of the now.
A hesitation.
It was enough.
Coolness pressed against my shoulder blade, a soothing liquid touch in the midst of cruel fire.
Live.
The hand on my back pushed.
I hurtled forward as the fire turned to ice. A thick layer of me stripped away, taking a suffocating weight with it, leaving my entire body stinging and raw and free—and then there was nothing.
No dark, no pain.
Just me, tumbling through, wrapped in my shell of light.
No air. No direction.
Rives.
He was my final thought before there was absolutely nothing at all.