Elias woke with a scream caught in his throat.
He sat up, gasping, his hand flying to the rifle beside him. The fire had burned down to embers, and the others slept—children huddled together, Jesus propped against a palm tree, Reyes on watch near the waterline. The sea was calm, the sky thick with stars. No enemy. No sound.
But the dream still clawed at him.
In it, he had stood on a plain of black glass, and the children had been there, but they were not children. They were shadows, their eyes empty, their mouths open in silent screams. And behind them, a vast, shapeless thing had risen, its hunger pressing against his mind like a weight. The Silence. It had whispered to him, not in words but in feelings—loneliness, despair, a cold so deep it burned. It had called him brother.
He shook
