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needed doing. But I wasn’t quite able to remember now why I had come to Stonemore. And I didn’t care.  
    The place had come alive. It was like a giant storm cloud had been lifted from the backs of the people, and now they floated about their lives weightlessly. It had been so long since I had seen people, any people, happy . I drank in the long-muffled song of Stonemore, thinking about how nice it must be to live here, with everyone walking around so vibrant and friendly. Perhaps I would stay.
    “Child,” a man motioned to me from a stall of fruit. “Come over here.”  
    I grinned widely and walked his way.  
    “Here,” he said, holding out an apple to me. “Take this. You look hungry.”
    A flash. A memory. Something I had forgotten. I blinked, trying to grasp it. But it floated away from me.  
    I shook my head to clear it, laughing. I was hungry. How had he known?  
    “Thank you, sir,” I said. “But I don’t have payment.”
    “No payment required,” he said, chuckling. He dropped the apple into my hand.
    I bit into the apple, the sweet juice trickling down my chin.
    Suddenly the sky was the ground and the ground the sky, and I lost control of my legs. My world turned inside out. The pangs of hunger that had been plaguing me for months now shouted out loudly. The crunch of the apple had reminded my body of its near-starving state. And with the memory came the pain, of hunger, of fear, of loss, all at once. Jade’s wicked face flashed in my mind. Almara, walking without awareness into the depths of the sea.
    And Rhainn.
    A moment later, the sky had righted itself and I lay sprawled on the ground. The colors of the buildings above suddenly looked jarring and overdone, like a freshly painted amusement park. What had been pleasing a moment before now looked garish with the memory of why I was here.  
    “Oh, you poor boy!” the man with the apple exclaimed. He offered me his hand. “Are you alright, son?”
    A small crowd had gathered around me, concern only momentarily outlining their features. When they saw my eyes open, and the man helping me back to my feet, their smiles returned. To them, all was well again. They dispersed quickly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
    But it had.
    I gripped my head with my hands, trying to keep it clear, the apple forgotten. Then I bolted away from the man without answering, panic flooding through me.
    Something was wrong here. Really wrong.
    I kept my eyes on the ground, taking care to look at nothing but the gray cobblestones at my feet, aiming for the center of the city. I knocked into people as I fled, but I didn’t care, and neither did they, it seemed. Had I been anywhere else, angry words might have been shouted in my wake, but I heard instead only mild observations.
    “That boy is sure in a hurry!” one man said.
    “Where is he going so fast?” said another I pushed aside.
    One woman stood directly in my path, and I knocked her down in my haste.
    “Oh!” she said to her friend as she splayed out onto the hard ground. “He surprised me!”
    I didn’t have it in me to shout my apologies over my shoulder, and besides, none were required. It seemed my rudeness was forgotten within moments each time.  
    What had happened to this place I had known? I had to get to Kiron, or Chapman, or anyone I knew before I fell back under the spell. It reminded me of something I had experienced once, and my brain struggled to grasp the memory as my feet pounded the street. A sickly sweet dream I had once had on a beach. It had been a distraction, a trick of the Corentin’s, to get Almara away from us while we slept. To kill him.
    I thought of that desolate beach, the one Jade, Almara and I had landed on right before we made our first link together. Watching my footsteps on the stone street now, I remembered the rocky shore that had turned to dark, hard sand as I had flown across it. Nice beaches had once existed, perhaps still did, where the sand was