34. Phoebe

It's over.

I think, anyway. I’ve never been so tired in my life. Did a convoy of trucks steamroll over me during Genevieve’s extraction? By the end, it felt like Huli was trying to take me with her.

The sickly green gunge plunged me into a weirdly lucid dream. I stood alone on an island, fighting to rebuild a stone wall being bashed by white, foaming waves. In the distance, away from the shore, I could see a thundercloud. A miserable, dark, coldness hovering over the ocean.

That dark core was whipping up the waves and sending them towards my crumbling, grey-brick defences. My only defence. Chunk flew off, forcing me to sprint up and down the painful, shingle beach to find replacement rocks. Fighting to keep together.

I knew, even though Huli said nothing and no instructions were provided. I knew that to give in and allow that wall to break was to give in completely and pay with my life.

But against the dark, foreboding thundercloud of Hulil’s hatred, I could feel the sun