Webb's a dead guy with no memory of his life, and that's how he likes it. He'd sworn he'd protect After, the city of the dead, from monsters, but the monsters have all been killed off. Now he has only one thing left to do: go through the Gate and fi...
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I followed the winding trail of trampled sand, delving further into the Dim than I'd ever gone before. I tried not to think about how the last time I was out here, we'd needed lux-charged flashlights to light our way in the pitch-blackness and to keep the shadows at bay. But now, Skye's sun illuminated my path. I took a moment to scan the surrounding wasteland, but even in the dim rose-hued light, there wasn't a lot to see; nothing but rolling dunes, mountains, porous black boulders, and stars. Not even a flash of red from stray lux fragments littered the sand. I was alone in a vast sea of blackness. I squared my shoulders at the path ahead. I had a lot of ground to cover. I almost missed Vale's ghastly monster of a motorcycle.
Also, I just missed Vale.
I chanced a look behind me, my own shuffling footprints mixed in with that of the monsters I tailed, and gazed toward home. But home had already disappeared beneath the horizon.
I looked upward instead.
"Did you see all that, Albrecht?" I asked the ghost in the sky. "Huh? Is it true what Void said?"
Albrecht, of course, didn't care to answer me. He never did. That red eye of his just spun and spun.
My heart broke every time I thought of the city I'd left, of what happened to Orville and Aluki. The child had already been through so much. Shadows had killed her mother, and now her surrogate father had been left for dead, first by monsters, and then by me. And now, because I wasn't able to stop Void, she'd been turned into one of those monsters and taken far away from her family. Something made my eyes sting, and I told myself it was just some grains of sand carried in the wind. I'd get her back for sure. And I'd bring her home to Orville, who was completely fine, and then—
An eerie howl filled the air. In an instant, I dove for the cover of a boulder's shadow and peeked around the side. Eye shine flashing in the twilight made me reflexively grab the hilt of my sword. Then I relaxed.
Soft, percussive paw steps filled the air as a troupe of canines wandered past where I hid. They playfully nipped at each other's tawny coats and wagged their tails. They were like wolves, but smaller and way scrawnier. What were those things called? Coyotes? Coyotes.
Either way, nothing to freak out over.
Then a scream cut through the atmosphere like a knife, and the haloed coyotes scattered. A dark shape bounded toward them from the other side of a dune. It, too, was a coyote, probably a former member of their little family, but its coat had melted away, and its sagging flesh scorched black. It now turned on its own kind. I watched in silent fear as the animal sank its fangs into the slowest of its kin. There was one short cry, like that of a human woman's.
Then silence.
I held a breath I didn't need and watched two voided coyotes, their halos absent, disappear over the crest of a dune, following the line of footsteps leading off into the unknown distance. Void's reach spread across the Dim like a plague.
