HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
A FOG SET IN. ITS MURKY WHITE FINGERTIPS REACHED OUT TO ME, enveloping my body in a careful embrace. Stiff grass bristled against my bare feet, contrasting the fluid movement of silk across my legs. I was wearing a couture gown, green brighter than the grass, so heavy it weighed on me, a train trailing behind me as I crossed the field.
The haze thickened quickly, its grasp tightening around my body until I was consumed by it. Grayness and nothingness filled my senses until I was utterly trapped by the clouds, swept under them as if they were solid. But I remained on my feet. The fog propelled me forward, toward an ominous mystery. Somehow, I knew I wasn't alone.
A huddled mass appeared at my feet, and my heart leapt as my mind processed what my eyes had seen.
It was Noah.
His eyes rolled back in his head as his hand twitched. His body was wrenched backward, and twisted in a way it shouldn't. He was dying.
Then Andrew. His hand appeared at my feet, breaking through the murky air. Blood ran down his milky skin, obscuring most of a crimson symbol on his wrist. As I stepped closer, the fog ebbed and flowed around him, forming a cavern over him. His body was in a frozen half-crawled position, his arms reaching out for help from me. But his eyes were closed, and he was stiff. He was already dead.
Then it was Cassie, a young Survivor with burning red eyes and veins so blue-black on her face they looked like cracks in marble. Then Hannah. Then Sarah. Then Lizzie. Sweet, pained, fair-haired Lizzie. Her eyes were open and glassy, perpetually staring into the hopeless oblivion of the scene around her.
Then, one by one, all the Survivors I cared about lay dead at my feet as I walked across the blood-stained plain. I bowed to none of them, though I couldn't say why.
I walked farther and farther across the green landscape, littered with the dead and dying members of my family, trying desperately to escape the clouds and the death and the weight it put in my gut. Ahead of me, the fog parted, as if anticipating my arrival, until I reached the final, wispy edges of the air where I could see beyond the clouds. Once in the open clearing of the field, the mangled bodies of every member of my family surrounded me. Bloodied and twisted, some writhing, some still. They went on for rows and rows this way, until they covered the ground as far as my eyes could see.
Then, laid out in a line, arms crossed over their chests, were the six bodies of the Gaulets, the human family we'd seen in the house in the hidden city where we'd met Ava Bientrut —Tituba. I thought about them a lot, especially the little girls, tucked into bed with their stuffed animals, the infant alone in the crib, and the mother who looked as if the baby had been violently ripped from her arms. The massacre of the Gaulets was the strongest, most jarring memory and the purest evidence I could attach to Alexander Raven's evil, and so they haunted me.
I stepped past their bodies, quieted by death, and walked farther into the unending sea of my dead family. The scene was set in such a way that it seemed real — so real that I could taste the blood in the air, could feel the summer wind in the Montana mountains.
