Free Entice: An Ignite Novella by Erica Crouch

about it, I almost forget to breathe. Azael and Gus turn back to each other to continue bickering back and forth, but their argument sounds like a dull buzzing to me.
    It feels like cobwebs are growing on my lungs. My heart feels as if it’s working twice as hard to beat half as much. Something feels wrong but I can’t find the words to say anything. They’ve abandoned me to find a mouth to live in with more air.
    “YOU MUST WORK WITH THEM!” Gus’s voice breaks through the tightness in my chest, distracting me for a moment from the gasp gasp gasp of my lungs.
    “Why?” I croak out.
    “Because your plan won’t work.” He skirts around Azael to retrieve his notebook, flips to a page, and shoves it in Azael’s face. “You will fail.”
    “I don’t trust anything I read,” Azael says, waving away the paper. “Too easily altered, forged.”
    I’m out of my bed and on my feet before Gus moves to close the notebook again. A handful of words are scattered across the page. Disgrace, dishonor. Unnecessary, fallback, useless.
    “What does this mean?” I ask. I try to turn to another page, but he pulls the words out of my reach and shoves them deep into his pockets.
    “It means the plan you two are about to hatch won’t work.”
    “We haven’t hatched it yet...” I shake my head.
    “The outcome won’t change.” He gesticulates wildly, suddenly emphatic about getting his point across. “You have to listen to me if you want to make anything of yourselves down here. Your path may change, but the destination won’t unless you listen.”
    “Even our end?”
    Gus rolls his head on his neck, as if working out some knot of muscles. “No. But the minor things. Day-to-day can change. Small events can be altered.”
    I find myself nodding along with his words. There’s not a hint of a lie on his face now; he’s emphatic and open, driven forward by the need to be understood. I could ask him anything right now and I’m sure he’d answer me, but I can’t come up with any questions. At least none that I want an answer to.
    “Do what you want and fail,” he says with a sigh, “because that is the path you are on now. No matter the plan you come up with, if you are on your own, it will not work. Listen to me—work with Naamah and Botis—and succeed.”
    “We’ll take that under consideration,” Azael says, opening the door wide. With a great sweep of his arm, he points Gus into the hallway.
    Gus leaves slowly, his heels dragging on the ice with a scratching sound. Something in me thinks he knew this conversation would lead nowhere.

Chapter 11
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    I KNEW THIS MOMENT WAS coming. Some small, rational part of my mind didn’t believe it would actually be possible, but the rest of myself has been preparing for it. I have been steeling myself for this exact moment longer than I care to admit. I just never expected it to happen in the middle of the night. Didn’t think it would wake me up.
    More than anything, it’s the nothingness that rouses me from my sleep. The sudden stillness. I’m slammed awake, jolting from unconsciousness with a gasp so loud I’m surprised it doesn’t wake Azael. My chest burns, as if a hot poker is searing through my heart, and I panic. Air comes too quickly to my greedy lungs, my confused brain. I need to breathe; I need to hear my heartbeat. Something needs to happen—before before before nothing ever happens again.
    But I missed it.
    Silence takes residence in my chest, an unwelcome tenant.
    There should have been a moment for me to savor the last time it happened. I deserved that much, I think. The last beat that pulsed through my body should have been memorialized or, at the very least, remembered. I shouldn’t have been asleep when my heart stopped. I should have known I needed to be awake for this.
    Sleep should have waited.
    My body is too quiet without its metronome. I don’t know how to keep time anymore, and I’m afraid I’ll get clumsy without