Luna's eyes snapped open on grey.
Not the Kagu courtyard. Not Arthur's face bent over her. Grey sky, grey sand, a grey sea the colour of old lead dragging itself up a shore that went on forever. Salt spray stung her cheek, cold enough to hurt. Panic arrived before thought did, because her body knew this place before her mind would admit it.
She had been here before. Not this beach, exactly, but this kind of nowhere: the pocket outside causality where Julius Slatemark had put her the day he went to meet something far beyond him. He had sealed her away so the backlash of his last act would not take her with him. She had waited in a place like this for longer than she let herself count.
