EMBER’S POV

That’s the thought I leave the medical wing with. It follows me through the great, cold halls of a house I still don’t know my way around.

More or less by accident, I find a set of glass doors and push through them, stepping out into a grey morning and a wide frozen lawn that drops away toward the tree line.

I need air. I need to think.

I need to figure out how a woman reaches a thing that lives inside her own chest and refuses to come when called, and I’m so deep in it that I’m halfway across the lawn before I register the sound....