The fever didn’t come as a flush of heat; it arrived as static.
It was a jagged, buzzing vibration that started in the marrow of Selene’s wrists and crawled up the thick veins of her forearms, turning her blood into a slurry of liquid glass. In the absolute, pitch-black dark of the lower pit, the regular ticking of her senses had been stripped away. There was no day.
There was no night. There was only the rhythmic, mocking *drip... drip... drip* of the cistern overflow and the white-hot humming of the silver-flecked iron biting into her skin.
She lay on her right side, her cheek pressed against the freezing, slime-slick stone of the corner ledge Jaxon had pointed out.
Every breath was an exercise in geometry,if she expanded her lungs past a precise three-inch margin, the jagged edge
