Page 53 of Bad Bunny
They’re not ghosts.
They have to fight the crowd too.
The egg hums louder. Light spills from the widening crack, gold and strange and bright enough that it burns my eyes.
Almost there.
A boy barrels into me chasing a glittering blue egg, and I stagger sideways. My shoulder slams into a woman in heels.Who wears heels to a garden?Her mimosa tips over, and sticky champagne splashes across my arm.
“Hey!”
I don’t stop.
Sorren reaches the base first. His white ears flatten back. For a split second, he glances over his shoulder at me, making sure I’m still there.
A flicker of worry and something softer, maybe an apology, brushes across the bond between us. Then he disappears into the seam, which blazes like a wound in the world.
I sprint harder, a sudden fear clawing up my chest that I might never see him again.
One of the hunters is only yards away. His eyes lock on me, and he picks up the pace. If he keeps that up, he’ll reach the egg before I do.
Not a chance.
I throw myself forward with everything I’ve got and dive into the light.
Chapter eight
In The Dirt
Nora
I’m falling, plummeting through darkness with no end in sight. Air tears past my ears, cold and rushing. My stomach lurches up into my throat as I reach for something, anything, to stop it.
Nothing answers.
No floor. No wall. No light.
Panic claws its way up my chest and, for one awful second, I reach for the bond, secretly convinced it’ll be gone, but…
I find it.
Alive. Steady.
Sorren.
My vision blurs with tears of gratitude. Somewhere below me, I hear him cry out briefly before his voice is swallowed by the dark. I cling to it anyway.
He made it through the doorway.
He’s here. Inside the Egg with me.
I hit the metal floor so hard it rattles up through my teeth.
Lights flicker on, but not all at once. Instead, they pop on in staggered bursts. A click here. Another across the room. Then three more in quick succession. They snap to life like bulbs warming in their sockets, scattered and uneven. But the light that spills out isn’t quite right. It’s too bright. Too sharp. It flattens everything it touches, leaching the color from the walls, from my own hands, until it fills the chamber with something that looks like illumination but feels more like exposure.
Like we’re standing under spotlights built on an alien planet.
Like we’re under a microscope.
