Kaelen had been walking for two days when the ground dropped out from under her for no reason at all.
One moment she was picking her way along a dry creek bed, the badlands stretching wide and cracked around her, nothing but scrub brush and heat-shimmered rock as far as she could see. The next, her knees buckled without warning, air punching out of her lungs like she’d been struck, and she went down hard on her hands in the dirt, gasping.
Something had happened. She didn’t know how she knew, only that the low, aching pull she’d been carrying in her chest since the ceremony, the thread she refused to name, had gone suddenly, violently silent, like a held breath cut off mid-sound.
“Julian,” she said out loud, to no one, her voice cracking on the name she’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t sa
