"Emily."
"Yes?"
"Breathe."
She breathed.
Hell's Paradise Island was enormous.
He had known it academically — every Legacy child grew up with the geography drilled into them the way American children memorized the shape of Florida — but knowing a thing on a map was nothing compared to watching it slide past the tinted window like a living, breathing beast awakening in the dark.
Buildings towered higher than he had expected, arrogant spires of glass and steel that stabbed the night sky with imperial confidence. Avenues stretched broader than he had imagined, wide enough for entire processions of empire.
The skyline carried itself with the unapologetic weight of something that had never once needed to ask permission to exist.
And only a quarter of the island was city.
The rest was forest.
