An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or...

Don’t wake up,” he said.

She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held...

She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin’s voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder...

The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.

Kestrel’s cruel calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people...