The atmosphere processor blasted vapor into the clouds. A wall of seawater stretched to either side, the boundary fueled by a subsurface filtering system that split oxygen and hydrogen atoms and fed them back to the processor.

  Jàden had learned the engineering side years ago before she’d entered the Guild program, but right now Jon held all of her focus. His forehead warm against hers, his breath rolled across her mouth, triggering a burning desire she could not ignore.

  “I worked in the prisons a long time, and I know when a man is telling the truth. Frank knows where Kale is.” Jon’s thumb caressed her cheek, but a dark anger hardened his features.

  “Two lies and a truth,” Frank always used to say, long before he knew about her connection to the Flame. “Give a man the truth he wants and two lies to trap him with. You’ll always get what you want.”

  And she’d done the same damn thing to herself. The truth that she needed to find Kale. A lie that Kale would fix everything wrong in her life.

  And the trap of an energy tie binding Jon to her side.

  Except it bound Jàden to him, and as she traced her fingers down his prickly jawline, the atmosphere processor blasted again. “This is why Frank’s taunting is so effective. Bird in a cage, that’s what Kale used to call it. You give a bird exactly what it wants, and it doesn’t see the bars of its cage until it’s too late.”

  “What does he want, Jàden? This isn’t about power. It’s about something bigger, or Frank wouldn’t be hunting you this way.” The way Jon swallowed the lump in his throat and tightened his jaw against her hand told Jàden he would keep digging until he found the answer he wanted. “I need to know everything.” He lifted her chin. “I won’t lose you, but I can’t protect you when everything you do is so damn unpredictable.”

  He pulled her into a tight hug.

  She gripped his shirt, thankful for the seawater to hide her tears. Giant firemarks lit the unmuddied side of the atmosphere processor, all the power and computer systems she’d need to search for Kale, if she could get past the security locks.

  But Frank had found her today because of the datapad. He’d tracked her location the moment she accessed her account, Kale’s horrible funeral ending with a single nightmare word across her screen: Gotcha.

  “How do you do it?” she whispered. “How can you live every day with this constant barrage of death and fear?”

  Jàden wanted so desperately to return to her old life, but all roads led to death or a cage. Kale’s zankata, with its promise of safety, had ended in a graveyard. Using the Flame had resulted in waking Frank from hypersleep. And now she couldn’t even use a computer without him sourcing her location.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” she said.

  “You have to, or today means nothing.” Jon leaned his cheek against her head. “Look for the things that matter and hold on tight.”

  “I had someone who mattered, and now he’s gone.” Bitter anger flowed through her veins. Kale was too young to die.

  He stepped back, his eyes unreadable and anger etched into his features. “You didn’t answer my questions. What does Frank want with you, and why didn’t you take his offer? I want the whole truth.”

  Agnar grunted, and she leaned against the stallion’s shoulder, though more for her own comfort than his. “Frank wants the Flame, but he can’t wield it without me.”

  “Why? For what purpose, Jàden?” Even Jon’s blade couldn’t hold a candle to the sharpness in his words as his demeanor transformed from gentle protector to tense soldier. “What will he do with this power?”

  She shied away, one hand over her ears as if that would quiet his tone. This was the secret she couldn’t tell anyone, not in her world and definitely not in Jon’s.

  Below the sand and the sea, deep in the hollow caverns of the moon’s interior beat the heart of something else. An alien technology whose builders died to protect it. A gateway that sparked the technology for Hàlon’s tower gates and the key Jon carried around his neck.

  She’d only seen it once, and the secret had nearly gotten her and Kale both killed. It was where she’d first met Bradshaw, a brilliant biotheric surgeon with the charm of a playboy and the heart of a rabid hound.

  He’d changed after her capture—cold, distant, eccentric. He didn’t see humans anymore; he only saw test subjects.

  That horrible place filled with monstrous creatures was something she wanted to forget. And by the look in Jon’s eyes, she had to tell him at least some part of what she’d seen.

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  “Frank won’t do anything, not until he finds the other Flame.” The heart of Sandaris had its own energy stream weighing her down, blending into her senses as if it ached for the Flame’s power.

  Jon pulled out his cigarettes, cursing that they were soaked. “What other Flame?”

  “An opposite from me, different as day and night. When power from both Flames unite, it creates a reaction, a fusion of energy that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” She couldn’t explain it without delving deep into physics and scientific principles Jon most certainly had never learned.

  He laid his hands on her shoulders. “But why? What does he want?”

  To power the inner gate. Words she couldn’t say without putting Jon in even greater danger, and she’d already torn apart his life enough. “I don’t know.”

  The lie wedged into her chest. She had to let him go, cut him loose. Because next time Frank attacked, they wouldn’t be so lucky. Someone was bound to die, and as Jon’s strength flowed through her veins, it pulled with it the guilt of forcing him to be her bodyguard.

  “You don’t deserve any of this.” If she continued trying to find Kale, she would get them all killed. And her feelings for Jon were becoming more complicated by the day. She wanted him in her arms, in her bed, and every day she rode beside him pushed Kale into faded memory. “I don’t know what to do anymore except find a way off Sandaris before I get everyone killed.”

  Before Frank and Sandaris pulled the Flame’s power out of her and opened the gate inside the moon. No one knew what lay on the other side, but the creatures they’d found near it were a nightmare Sandaris didn’t need. Thank the Guardians they’d never made it to the surface.

  Jàden tightened her fist, hating that the only thing keeping her from a lonely insanity was Jon’s energy, but she had to let him go. She had to stop the lie. She’d kept Jon bound to her out of fear for her own life, but he deserved the freedom he and his men had worked so hard for.

  A thread of light pulled away from her wrist as Jon stepped closer. He towered nearly a span over her head. “Then I’m coming with—”

  Engines roared high in the clouds, and three silver scout craft raced by. Jàden pressed closer to Agnar, hiding behind his bulk until the craft were out of sight.

  “The tracking beacons.”

  Sure enough, they disappeared in the same direction as Naréa’s ship. Frank wasn’t messing around anymore. He’d expected her to be a broken blob of a woman, but she’d gotten away from him twice. He would use every soldier and every tracking program to find her.

  “He’ll be angry now,” she muttered.

  The gun pressed against her stomach like lead. If Frank could track his soldiers and monitor heat signatures, what else could he do that she didn’t know about?

  She pulled the gun from her waistband and popped the firemark. “I have to get rid of this.”

  She hated to let go of her gun, but its metal alloy would stand apart from the forged steel of the others’ weapons, and she didn’t trust that they could elude Frank a third time.

  Jon grabbed the gun and lobbed it into the trees. “Every day, from now on, we learn to fight against those weapons. Including you.”

  He grabbed his stallion’s reins and nudged her forward, but she already led Agnar toward the others. She still needed to untie her energy from Jon, but as they angled deeper under the canopy, any exertion of power might alert Frank to their exact location.

  And they needed to get dry before they did anything.

  But as the waves crashed over their feet, Jon threw his arm in front of Jàden and froze where he was, the horses tossing their heads in irritation.

  A long, shimmering thread stretched across their path between two mangrove roots. They followed the thread’s trail through a cluster of branches to vivid green leaves with bright orange flowers. Dewdrops glistened along the petals, attaching to several more threads that stretched high in the trees to a giant white web nearly as tall as the Ironstar Tower.

  “Fuck me,” Jon said.

  “Sahir?.” Lead dropped into Jàden’s gut. “There must be millions of them. Billions.”

  The feathered sahir? spider, never larger than the palm of Jàden’s hand, carried a neurotoxin in its body that could knock out a grown man. But they were nomadic creatures that lived alone until mating season. The males never lived longer than a year, but the females could live more than a decade.

  “Not millions.” Jon edged backwards, pushing into her so she and Agnar were forced to retreat. “These are shifters, Jàden, not animals. Sahiranath are cannibals.”

  Dread fell into her gut. Spider shifters, just like the bird men. What the fuck had happened to this world? The others had all frozen, edging away from other web threads, but the only safe place now was the sea.

  “What do we do?” she asked. They had no chance against that many spiders if they released their toxin into the air, and turning around wasn’t an option.

  She wanted so desperately to climb on Agnar’s back and keep running until all her terrors disappeared with the tides. Everyone on Hàlon was human, or so the Guilds would have them believe.

  “I don’t understand. Where did they come from?”

  Maybe they’d come across another ship while she’d been in hypersleep, a parasitic sentient that could mimic human physiognomy, though even that seemed a little far-fetched.

  “There are more shifters on Sandaris than humans.” Jon wrapped an arm around her shoulders, edging them backwards until the water was to their ankles again.

  But even Jon’s warmth wasn’t enough to push away the ice in her skin. Her clothing and hair were soaked, and cold rain drizzled the landscape. She needed to get dry before hypothermia set in.

  Plus, Frank could be anywhere now.

  She tightened her grip on Agnar’s bridle and followed Jon away from the giant web. It stretched at least a league down the shore.

  “We’re safe as long as we don’t touch any of the threads,” Jon muttered, but by the look on the others’ faces, even skirting the sahiranath would take hours.

  The rain turned to a heavy drizzle, adding to her misery.

  If Frank turned back, maybe he’d see more heat signatures in that tower of web than a small cluster of horsemen, but it was a very thin shot.

  “I think I have an idea,” she whispered.

  Death in a cage, drown in the shallows if a sahir? toxin hit her or be fed to a horde of spiders. She may have nowhere left to go, but she didn’t want to die yet.

  If her idea worked, she might stay alive long enough to figure out a way off the moon’s surface. “We’re going to need some blankets and a really hot fire.”