We've all had that feeling before. So many times I can remember being in school the day after staying up late to watch a football game or a movie, and just being exhausted. Class would be miserable, no matter the topic, and beckoning strings of sleep would pull at your eyelids all day. Every second you imagine how nice it would be just to curl up on the ground and take a power nap. Then it hits you.

Your head jerks, the world seems to bend in on itself for a split second, and you realize that you just fell asleep for an instant. It's a peculiar feeling, almost like you'd just served a secret mission for the government and had your memory erased.

Except for the slow building up of exhaustion, that moment of instantaneous falling asleep and jerking awake again is exactly what it felt like as we closed the final gap between the boat and us. Something inexplicable, in the middle of all that insanity, made me fall asleep. It could not have been more than a second before my head snapped up from its descent to my chest in its quest for peaceful slumber.

But we were already falling—small, sparkling jewels of shattered Ice our only company. The Ka had shattered the rope during my very brief and very unexplainable nap.

Falling was no new thing for me. The absence of fear was like a vacuum—I knew that I should be scared, and yet that feeling didn't even register in my mind. The only thing that kicked in was an immediate sense of calculation. The methods, the inner workings of my mind had changed so much since that fateful day in the woods. It didn't seem possible that it had only been a matter of months since it all began. It felt like years.

The oddest thing was that I was having these thoughts while plummeting toward the ocean with a girl frozen to my back, my friends and family growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

I shook myself mentally.

The chance of shooting Ice at the ship to reestablish a connection had come and gone before I could react. Gravity is a powerful thing. The distance between the ship and us had increased at a mind-numbing pace, and the boat already had grown small and insubstantial in the clouds.

Wind and rain whipped at us as we fell, our backs pointing down, our eyes facing the departing ship. I didn't know how high up we had gone, but I could feel the ocean below, coming to meet us at a blistering speed. There was not much time before we would burst into the waters like a stone bubble, protected but lost to the sea forever. I had two wonderful Gifts, but flying or radio communication was not one of them. I had two …

Then it came to me as an image, a vision in my mind. A plan.

It just might work …