Dawn Read Online Free PDF

wondered if he could perceive that simply by touching her. She was not hungry, for a start, and her throat was not dry, and she did not need to urinate. They said she had been asleep for a whole day. The dream felt like a lifetime, but her body seemed not to notice. She was growing younger, and the tide of time seemed to be changing with her.
    “It’s not pointless,” Alishia whispered at last. None of them answered—Trey merely squeezed her hand tighter—so she went on. “I’ve dreamed, Kosar, of something vast and priceless and in danger. That something is in me, and it wasn’t in me before. And I just know it’s from Rafe. He knew he was going to die. Perhaps he’d known right from the beginning. And it was his last act of defiance to pass it to me, because he knew he was also passing along his last scrap of hope.”
    “So magic is fucking with us,” Kosar said. “It seeds itself in Rafe, dooms him to die, then passes itself to you. But it kills A’Meer in the meantime, and leaves us to sit and rot here. Lets itself be taken by the Mages and twisted into whatever they want. That’s good. That’s all good.”
    “Magic lets nothing happen,” Alishia said. “Rafe told us that. It was so young, so passive, it was fighting to stay alive. But there’s so much below the surface of things that we can never see or understand, and I think what Rafe passed into me was an idea. A knowledge that only I can carry.”
    “Why only you?” Hope said, and the envy in her voice was obvious.
    “Because I’m a librarian,” Alishia said.
    Hope laughed. It was a horrible sound, loud and guttural. The skull raven called again in the distance, as if in response.
    “Something’s wrong with me,” Alishia said. Trey shuffled closer until she felt the heat of his flesh. “Trey, something’s wrong, and I know it’s all going to end so soon.”
    “It’s ended already,” Kosar said. “Noreela will change, that’s for certain, and anyone they do leave alive will have to change along with it.”
    “But I’m trying to tell you, Kosar, that there’s hope in me.”
    “What sort of hope? Magic?”
    Alishia shook her head, but she knew that was neither right nor wrong. “Not magic, but a route there.”
    “How do you pretend to know this?”
    “It’s what I feel. It’s what Rafe told me before he was taken. I don’t know; this is all so strange to me. All I know is I have dreams, and something unnatural is happening to me. There’s a reason behind that, and hope within it.”
    Kosar stared at her for a few heartbeats, his eyes unwavering. “The land has turned stranger than ever, and now you’ve turned too. I don’t believe a word.”
    “You’ve given up.”
    The thief looked down at his hands, touching fingertips together as if welcoming the pain.
    “Then perhaps I’ll go to Kang Kang on my own,” Alishia said.
    “Kang Kang?” Trey said.
    “It’s where the machine was taking us.”
    “We were heading south,” Hope said, “but that’s not to say we were going there. Nobody wants to go there. ”
    Alishia tried to stand but her legs were weak, her muscles fluid. Trey was by her side, helping her up instead of telling her to sit down. She leaned against him, her arm around his shoulder, his around her waist, and looked south. The landscape faded into darkness, but even against the dark sky she thought she could make out the jagged teeth of mountains on the horizon. They were low down, barely visible, yet she was certain she could see Kang Kang. The sight made her cold, but still she heard its call.
    “I need to be there,” she said. “There’s something there, a place where I’ll be safe, and maybe—”
    “There’s nowhere safe on Noreela anymore!” Kosar said, standing and kicking at the ground. He turned away, passing between two shattered ribs of the failed machine and walking out into the long grass.
    Alishia wanted him to stop and turn back, sigh, shake his head, admit that he may be wrong