Angie didn't hesitate. She threw herself over the stone railing of the observation balcony, dropping to the lower scaffolding, and scrambled down the crumbling remains of the grand staircase. The world around her was slipping its anchors; chunks of stone masonry from the palace walls were breaking away, floating upward into the bleeding crimson sky like ash in an updraft.The air near the crater floor was raw, burning with the heavy smell of ozone and sulfur. The atmospheric pressure shifted violently with every mechanical heartbeat of the palace. Ten feet ahead, the pocket of localized static rippled, blurring the view of the boy she had grown up with.Chris was entirely blind, his eyes weeping lines of blinding white energy that pooled on his cheeks before evaporating into steam. He was tearing at his clothes, his fingers carving bloody lines into his collarbones as if trying to rip the crushing, freezing core of the negation right out of his own ribs. The pillar of absolute void tearing through his chest was vibrating, a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly into the center of her skull."Chris!" she screamed.The sound was instantly swallowed by the vacuum surrounding him.She ran into the distortion. The moment her boots crossed the threshold of the crater, a wave of absolute, freezing numbness slammed into her body. Her joints locked, her lungs seized, and the color began to drain out of her vision, turning the world into a flat, grayscale shadow. Her skin began to prickle with a grey, hardening frost—the very beginnings of the stone-turning ash that had claimed the vanguard.She kept moving. She dragged her numbing legs through the static, fighting the kinetic gravity pulling her upward."Chris, listen to my voice!" she choked out, her breath freezing into solid crystals in mid-air.Chris spun toward the sound, his face twisting into a mask of pure, chaotic horror. He couldn't see her, but the ancient, cosmic void inside him recognized the frequency of the only anchor he had left. He lashed out instinctively, a raw wave of kinetic repulsion exploding from his palm to throw her back.Angie didn't drop her gaze. She threw her weight forward, ignoring the force fracturing the air, and slammed her body against his chest, wrapping her arms around his shoulders.The contact hit the great hall like a physical hammer strike.The moment her skin touched his neck, the blinding white light in his eyes fractured. The grey frost consuming her limbs stopped its crawl. The immense pillar of negative light punching through the ceiling violently buckled, its edges sputtering like a dying flame as the emotional weight of her presence collided with the absolute vacuum of his fury."Angie..." Chris gasped, his voice cracking back down into the desperate, terrified tone of the seventeen-year-old boy from the garden. The white energy in his eyes receded, revealing his natural, bloodshot gaze. "Angie, it's all a lie. He killed them. Marcell killed them.""I know, Chris," she whispered, her tears freezing on his cheek as she held him tighter, using her own warmth to battle the sub-zero frost radiating from his skin. "I know everything. But if you don't stop, you're going to kill everyone else too."Above them, the fractured ceiling groaned as a massive, ten-ton marble archway cracked loose from the upper balcony, its structural integrity completely ruined by the blast. It hung suspended for a fraction of a second, then slipped, plummeting directly toward the crater floor where they stood entwined.