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The wind rose up, the icy breeze rattling his bones, making him shiver. He was only sixteen but was shaking like a frail old man. He was shivering so hard, he hardly noticed the buzzing in his pocket.
    When he finally heard the low rumble, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a stolen satellite phone. A text flickered on the screen, green letters glowing on the black display. Wes read the message twice, not quite believing what he was reading.
    It was from Shakes. His best friend. His right-hand man. It said:
    FOUND ELIZA
    Wes stuffed the phone back into his pocket, hurrying from the track, feeling hope spark in his heart again, as warm and bright as drakonfire.

Chapter 3
    T HE GRAYHAW K DISAPPEARED BACK into the clouds before the drakonflame could reach it, and Nat shook Wes’s warm brown eyes from her thoughts.
    Riding high above the ocean, she looked down at the islands below, a stony archipelago covered in blankets of snow and dotted with bursts of bright green foliage. She flew closer to the water, looking for the grayhawk that had chased her from the gorge, but it was nowhere to be found. The drone remained hidden in the misty fog.
    As she and her drakon flew closer to land, Nat could see the trees more clearly, hardy brown trunks sprouting from the frost-covered earth, their leafy branches reaching heavenward. Liannan, the sylph who’d guided them to the Blue, told them that one day its magic would cover the world. Here, at the bottom of New Pangaea, along the coasts of the Roo Islands, at the gate of Afal, the deep green forests of the earth were returning, and life was spreading across the black waters once more.
    This is what I fight for,
Nat thought, seeing the forest in all its beauty.
The land I love.
The words made her fly faster, as if only the speed itself could keep her from the thought she knew would be next.
Is that all you love? The land?
Nat tightened her grip, forcing herself to focus only on what lay ahead of her—just as she always had.
    And besides, what lay ahead of her was a truly staggering sight. Closer and closer they came, diving near the treetops, the smell of the sap pungent and heady, the scent of flowers wafting in the air. Nat tried not to let the forest distract her. The drone was still out there, hiding in the fog, waiting. She couldn’t let her guard down, even for a moment, even to see this forest, growing where nothing had lived for a century.
    When the ice and the floods came, when the world ended and almost everyone and everything died, she had thought these things were lost forever, that vast swaths of the world were too irradiated, the soil too poisoned for any greenery to grow again. But somehow, the Blue was changing everything. The earth was coming back to life. How precious it was: wildflowers and their many-colored blossoms rich with buzzing insects, butterflies flitting while ladybugs crawled. Nat wanted to stop, to smell and touch everything, almost worried the forest would vanish if she didn’t. She feared it was nothing but a mirage, like the image of Wes she had just seen, that her mind was soothing her with things she wanted to see. That, like Wes, it would disappear if she blinked or turned away. But it didn’t, and as they flew farther and farther, above rich and verdant acres of forest, Nat stopped worrying.
    Or so she told herself.
    Letting the drakon fly even lower, Nat marveled at the wide trunks and heavy branches of the trees, at the leafy canopies that soared above her. The trees were over eighty feet tall and would normally have taken a century to grow to this height. Only the power of the Blue could have accomplished this feat in such a short time. Vallonis and its magic was transforming the landscape, renewing what was destroyed.
    Nat herself felt renewed in its presence.
    During these past months, the days had passed like minutes. The rage and pain, the hurt that had once filled her heart was gone. She had believed she