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him.
    The impact jolts me awake, in my own body. I gasp, sitting up, sending crumbling rock flying every way. Dust clouds rise up and obscure everything. I make out the shape of the fiend as the dust clears. Its eyes are screwed up, and pieces of it have already broken away. But a horrible, gurgling laughter comes from its throat, and I realise with horror that it’s trying to speak.
    “You Transcendents… all monsters at heart.”
    Blackness clouds my vision again, and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely. I’m in front of another fiend, one with two long, clawed hands and two sets of bat-like wings.
    A knife’s in my hands, blazing like the sky above.
    “Play nice,” whispers a voice. Jared. “Don’t break each other too badly, huh?”
    Rage fills me, thick and burning, and—
    “Leah!”
    My forehead’s pressed to the ground. I look up, and Nolan’s crouching nearby.
    Is the same thing happening to Cas? If he can somehow channel my pain, like the cut on my arm, maybe it is. But if I get drawn into Cas’s mind, who’s going to save him?
    Don’t think about that. I know how to remove that tattoo. When I find him, I can stop this.
    I focus on that. Something I can do.
    “You passed out,” Nolan says, unnecessarily.
    “It happens.” I shudder. I don’t want to tell him the truth, but my life’s in his hands if it happens again.
    Am I making a huge mistake?
    Common sense tells me I am. I should at least have asked some of the others to help. But I wanted them to be safe. I can’t save both them and Cas at the same time, much as I wish I could.
    “I get… visions,” I say. “Cas and I are linked, and I sometimes see through his eyes.”
    “You’re joking.” Nolan stares at me.
    “No,” I say. “We need to get a move on, anyway.”
    I don’t relax even as we put more than a mile between us and the fiend. Nolan isn’t as fast as me, but we can far outpace regular people. We run until there’s nothing but sea on one side and empty fields on the other, with the occasional Burned Spot marking where there might have once been a village or town.
    The energy blasts. They came when the fiends did, and were almost as effective at killing. Anyone within a ten-mile radius of one is vaporised.
    Anyone except the Pyros, that is.
    Even now, the memory of that day is seared into my mind. The first time I saw an energy blast. The same day I lost my parents, my friends—everyone in my town. The fiends took everything from me. But it’s Jared’s grinning face I see now, when I think of the evil that’s invaded the world.
    “Wait up!”
    I pause. I was so preoccupied in my own thoughts, Nolan’s been left behind. He hurries to catch up, looking around uneasily. Guess he thinks we might run into the fiends again.
    Unless they’re attacking the others, back at the base.
    No. They’ll be fine. We’re the vulnerable ones out here. And Cas? If there’s a way to stop the tattoos working, is there a way to sever our connection, too? Short of one of us actually dying. Jared implied it was too late. Yet he hasn’t hurt or killed Cas yet.
    My mind spins with the possibilities. Even three days of rest aren’t enough to make up for the horrors I’ve been through lately. It feels like the slightest push, another trip into Cas’s memories would make me fracture like glass. Forget who I am, lose myself in the madness of memories. It almost happened when I lost my sister, before I made the decision to carry on living for her sake.
    I made the same decision for the others. To fight.
    I’m not about to back down now.
    ***
    The sky never really gets dark anymore, but the sun dips out of sight beyond the horizon, turning the sea to blood-red. It seems ominous, and I think of the river of lava I saw Cas standing near. Is he on the other side with the fiends? But Jared was with him, too. Something doesn’t add up—I’ve no way to tell if the visions are happening right now, or in the past. And the urgent look