The light was streaming from the thick glass window over my head, and I woke up with the overwhelming feeling of not wanting to live.

Yesterday, the opposite of grief came over me; an elation, a disbelief, a feeling I knew no one shared... well maybe those apostles in the Bible knew but no one else. And at once I was shoved into the crossroads of emotions.

Yesterday, I opened my eyes to the person I thought I would never see again. So overcome with joy, I almost jumped from my bed and into his arms if it wasn't for the quick realization that whatever reality this was, it was a world without Ilyaas.

Ilyaas deserved my tears. He deserved my sadness. He deserved inconsolable anguish. It would dishonor his memory to be happy.

Fate agreed with my mind almost instantly when I saw that the recognition in my eyes was not reflected in my brother's.

And then it was that voice for the first time... the same one that revisited me in the weird memor- dream. A nagging, echoing inside my skull, a voice that wasn't mine.

Stay still.

And so I did.

I watched my brother blankly stare at me as if he didn't know me, and I felt the remaining pieces of my heart crumble again. It couldn't not be Kaz... Those eyes, that nose, that silvery-gold hair, those hands that used to take the carrots off my plate, knowing I'd get scolded if I didn't eat them-

But he didn't know me.

He asked me my name and I simply couldn't speak.

That wasn't possible, was it? For him to forget? I knew he loved me, maybe more than I loved Ly... so that was impossible. I wouldn't even be able to forget Ly in another lifetime, much less six years.

"I-"

Stay still.

And so I did...

I stayed still until the three people dismissed themselves with thoughts of me in shock. They called me "Three" like the number embroidered on the chest of my crimson red jumpsuit. Going by that logic, the girl with the tattoos and the milky eyes was Two, the boy with the golden hair and an aura of death was Four, and my brother, just as life always put him, was number One.

I watched the light drain the color from my walls and the silver crisscrossing bars as twilight approached.

Concentrating on the colors, I found that dusk sucked the vibrance out of everything. Things didn't get darker, they got muted. Soon enough, everything was in grayscale.

When night came, I was too curious not to move, though, and the voice didn't stop me.

My muscles were rickety when I sat up. I could hear the slight cracks, my stiff joints remembering their jobs. Then I turned to the glass and pressed my hand against it. For once, it wasn't a screen like all the windows of the house.

What was outside was actually outside.

When the skies finally cleared, I confirmed that I wasn't dead, not unless hell shared the same constellations as the Islands in July.

I was absolutely floored. Where the fuck was I?

Maybe it was denial or grief or a mixture of both and a cocktail of drugs in my blood but the voice still spoke to me. Maybe that was it... Me going crazy. It was the natural progression, wasn't it? The Onus always go crazy.

And even humans go crazy.

I always prided myself in being mentally strong. I've come this far and managed to reshape my anxiety and depression into functional parts of my brain which feigned intelligence, composure, reservation, where in fact I was simply too dead to speak.

But considering what I'd been through recently, a break in my sanity was somehow deserved.

If you think you're crazy, you're probably not.

A whisper.

And that was the last I heard of the voice before losing my consciousness to a deep and troubled sleep.

I still didn't want to live.

But the sun still rose like any other day, rising from the east and greeting me from my window. How dare it? How dare it rise when the only face worthy of its light was either six feet under or reduced to a handful of ashes? How dare I not know? How dare I outlive him?

I stayed there for a while, staring straight into the sun as pinpricks of light formed little circles in my vision. The warmth made me sweat but it didn't manage to get in me. I was unbelievably cold.

The sob welled up inside my throat as the voice echoed again.

Do not let them see you break.

"You're not Ilyaas." Those words were Ly's but the voice was not. The voice was a mere figment of my senseless imagination.

Just because no one saw me break didn't mean I wasn't broken.

"Hello?"

It was Kaz. I slowly turned to face him, his hand raised next to his head in a small polite wave. Immediately, all thoughts of deathless deaths escaped me, and my eyes were glued to him forgetting how to blink.

"My name is One." He gestured to himself. "You are Three."

He slowly understood how I wasn't functioning well.

A small reassuring smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth. He tilted his head slightly forward and looked at me kindly through a small bow, through his eyebrows. "Would you like to eat breakfast?"

I swallowed. "They don't bring me breakfast?"

There was literally a crisscross of bars between me and him. How did they expect me to get my own food?

Kaz shook his head, a small chuckle escaping him. "I don't know." He shrugged. "My bars opened this morning and I smelled the food. They let me eat it, so I'm guessing that's how things work here."

How long has he been here?

"I noticed there were four rooms and there were only three of us there so..." He continued. "I would have gotten you food, but I didn't know what you wanted to eat."

I blinked at him. How was he real?

I forced myself to take a deep breath. It seemed like going along with it was the only real option I had. "How do I get out?"

He sighed in relief and beamed. Kaz remained as perfect as the day I lost him. "Just step forward. It opens!" He took a step back to let me come towards him.

I doubted that the bars would open.

Knowing that I was in the Islands meant I probably wasn't a guest. I remembered Zabdi and the pearls he gave my Prime Minister right before I was sentenced to death. I remembered how the alarms went off a bit too early, that it was impossible that my uncle triggered them, when I ran for Ly's life. I remembered how Theo left before I told him anything at all. I remembered how Zabdi destroyed the pyramid, telling me it was for the Ravens, and then how right about that time, the Islanders moved in the East, probably taking advantage of the lag in communications.

And I remembered how Zabdi disappeared right when Ilyaas died.

So if I was in the Islands, his territory, then I was a prisoner. But Kaz was right, of course.

The crisscrossing bars retracted into the walls and let me out. I hoped for an answer to whatever was happening to me, but I came up blank. I was so sure my death would have been preferable for all the players in this game of lives.

"I wanted to get you food, but I didn't know your preferences." He smiled at me kindly, his eyebrows raising a little in the middle, his eyes wide and innocent. Kaz gestured for me to cross the threshold.

As I stepped outside and came mere inches from him, he sucked in a breath.

"What?" I asked.

He blinked at me. "I-"

I inclined my head in a silent question.

"Do I know you from somewhere?" He asked. My eyes watered at the question. Kaz really forgot me.

Lie. The voice echoed in my head.

I didn't know the consequences of defying him, but since nothing bad has happened yet from following him, I did as he asked. "I don't know."

He shrugged and turned away, walking down the sunlit hallway made of white concrete and silver lines to breakfast, I presumed.

Somewhat in a daze, I followed his steps; his right then his left, just one step behind. It was jarring how six years of forgetting disappeared in a snap... and I was thirteen again, walking behind the boy that would be king.

Following him felt like part of my DNA.

Something about the place felt small around me. Back at the House the walls were always a few meters away from my shoulders, the ceilings, a few meters above my head. Here though, if I stretched my hand from my side, I could graze against the silver. It made me curl into myself. The walk was long and curving despite the building feeling small. We passed by windows stretching from ceiling to floor showing us a view of the ocean, and two curved buildings around us. If this was a prison, it was a luxurious one.

"You're awfully quiet." My brother said.

I looked around more. This didn't look like a prison, but if it wasn't then what the heck? "They just let us out? Is that normal?"

He shrugged, gracefully turning a bit towards me, his hair rolling over his shoulder. "I don't know, I just got here."

"Got here?" I almost stopped walking.

He nodded. "Yeah, earlier today."

But-

"Where were you yesterday?" I asked, following his train of thought.

"I..." He looked at me, his brows furrowed, his eyes sparkling just a little less.

"They have chicken!" I heard a girl's voice say when the hall opened to a cafeteria. "I can smell it!"

She started hobbling to the trays of food laid out for us on a stainless steel ledge. There were four tables and four chairs, but all of them were set around the table closest to the food. There sat the blond boy with a tattoo curling up his neck, peeking through his jumpsuit. The girl was far more painted.

I wanted to stop staring, but that was a fool's errand. Her head was shaved, five points on her scalp looked like they were burned in by a cigarette. Apart from her face, each square inch of skin I could see of her was tattooed with script in a language I didn't know. When she turned towards me and Kaz, probably from the sound of our footsteps, I saw her milky eyes again. She was blind.

The blond boy told me. "She knows when you stare."

So I stared at him instead.

Something about him was gorgeous and dangerous and alluring. I didn't know which part I feared and which part I loved. I've never seen anyone look more Onus than he did. One of his eyes was sea green like the color around islands reflecting the trees in still water. The other one looked like the horizon in a storm.

He looked exhausted, like he wanted to say something but couldn't. He was a coiled spring, and he tried sighing the tension away, but I was sure it did nothing for him.

Kaz pulled a chair for me beside him, and I sat across the boy. Without thinking much, I reached my hand out to touch him, to see what he remembered, but I recoiled just as fast. All his fingers had silver rings.

A prison... I thought. For Onus?

I sat at the table, my appetite already a casualty of the day, early as it was.

"What's your name?" I whispered to the boy across from me. He seemed to be my age. He stared at me in suppressed terror and raised his hand to the number embroidered on his chest.

"Four."

"No, I mean-"

"Four." He said plainly, firmly. I knew he knew it wasn't Four.

Realizing I wasn't going for the food, Kaz stood up and got me a plate. I didn't care what he put on it, I was sure to throw up just as soon as it entered my body. There were too many questions. Judging from the walk from the cells to here, I saw no one. No one to ask, no one to answer.

I need to get out of here.

Then the plate was in front of me. Rice. Corn. Corned beef.

My eyes snapped to Kaz. Did he remember?

But before I could ask him anything, as Two was walking towards us with a spoon she got from the counter, she screamed.

"EMPRESS! EMPRESS! EMPRESS!"

She ran towards me, in full force. Her eyes were wide and unseeing, her arms stretched out to clutch me. Two stumbled against the table, started climbing over their food, scrambling for me.

On instinct, I drew back, almost falling from my chair, grabbing the closest sharp object I could find, a fork. Making sure only a wall was behind me, and my feet planted in a combat stance, I held it firmly but loosely, ready to stab her neck when she got close enough when-

She touched me.

And instead of seeing a life shy of its second decade, I saw only two days.

I gasped.

Two forms in hazmat suits grabbed her arms. They appeared from the other entrance, another hall. Maybe they were always there, waiting for something like this to happen. Maybe they were everywhere.

"BRING US THE SKY! THE LIGHTNING STRIKES THE SEA! GIVE IT ALL BACK! BONES AND GLASS! BONES!" She was weak against the hazmats, but she fought. Two was frail and sickly compared to the bodies dragging her away. Her stick-thin limbs strained and strained as she screamed more and more nonsense. Her blank eyes seemed to stare directly at me. How could she possibly see?

"Where are you taking her?" I asked, gasping, grasping for some kind of explanation.

She was obviously sick in the head, but they weren't being gentle either. I needed to see more, because that couldn't possibly be it. Her life? Two days? No.

"Hey, where are you taking her?" My legs managed to start walking towards them as they walked backwards to where they came from. "Hey, let her go!"

And before I could run for her, Kaz and Four were already blocking me.

"What?" I tried pushing past them, but my eyes only met their shoulders.

"They'll hurt you if you do that." Four said.

"I don't get-" Hurt.

Shush it. The voice strangled the breath out of me.

"Where is she going?" I said instead.

"I don't..." Kaz seemed to be racking his brain for something... something missing.

And I stared into my brother's eyes and wondered if he truly only remembered a day.