est.
I was hyperventilating, trying desperately to breathe. Everything was getting fuzzy, except the pain. I was passing out.
But after what felt like a century of torture, the gap zipped closed as quickly as it had opened.
I gagged, sucking in the cooling air. I was alive. With intact skin and feathers. How was that even possible? I squinted upward, disbelieving. Except for some dying red streaks, the fire was no longer scorching the sky.
My adrenaline finally caught up to the insanity and the world rushed back into place. I scrambled to my feet, looking around wildly. I didn’t know what I was looking for—just an answer, a direction I could follow.
“Everybody’s at the caves!” Fang wheezed over the now furious wind. Smoke and ash billowed around us.
I shook my head stubbornly. “Not Angel,” I croaked, my throat raw. Fang looked me in the eye and saw what else I couldn’t say: Or Dylan.
They’d be at the cliffs, rounding up the rest of the community.
Like I should’ve been from the start.
Together, in silent agreement, Fang and I shot into the sky. A few hundred meters away, all the trees were scorched—a few more seconds of that heat and we would’ve been human fireworks. As we raced over the smoking jungle toward the coastline, we saw trees crashed down on one another like dominoes. Their trunks were stripped of bark and branches from where the fire had come.
Suddenly then there was a bang like nothing I’d ever heard—like a bomb connected to an amp had been detonated right inside my skull. It sounded like what the fiery explosion should’ve sounded like, but it came more than a full minute later.
It was like I’d been shot.
I felt it in my teeth, and vibrating through my brain.
I felt it in my wings as I flapped and spun uncontrollably.
It sang through my eardrums and made my eyes blur.
And then we were falling.
Down.
Down.
Like Angel knew we would.
I watched, helpless, as the ash whirled around and the jutting precipice of rock raced up to meet me.
Then the eyes of the world winked shut.
85
GET UP, A fuzzy voice shrieked. Get up get up get up. It sounded water-soaked, low and slow. Was it my Voice, or Angel’s, or someone else’s entirely? I didn’t even know if it was real.
The ringing in my head grew, turning into a sound like the hiss of rushing water, an echo bouncing around like a rubber ball inside my head. Wind whipped around me and the hiss grew to a wail. My brain throbbed.
I covered my ears and felt wetness. The metallic smell of blood burned in my nostrils. I pried open my eyes, and that’s when the hurricane-strength needles of rain started to hit my face.
I turned to look for help and felt my stomach lurch as a strong arm yanked me back, keeping me from plummeting over the edge of the cliff. “Get up!” Fang yelled in my face, finally piercing through my confusion and dragging me to my feet.
I looked across the cliffs for the other kids, but saw only a wall of water out in the sea. Not just a wall—a massive wall, miles long and taller than a skyscraper. Surrounding us. The monstrous wave grew more massive by the second, almost blotting out the smoking sky as it surged toward the precarious crag we clung to.
A mega-tsunami.
I instinctively tried to flap, but a searing pain shot through my mangled, bleeding wing. Panic froze my heart. This was it.
There would be no more.