Dawn by S. J. West

impossible balancing act, and the longer I stood there the more my hatred for the queen grew. If I wanted to kill her before, now I wanted to strangle her neck with my bare hands until her head popped off her shoulders. She was a sadist of the worst kind. Who, in their right mind, would make their daughter have to choose between the life of the man she loved and the life of an innocent child?
    I felt tears of frustration sting my eyes when I saw Jace finally succumb to the pain and pass out. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Now I couldn’t judge the effect of the voltage running through his body each time I had to lower the water in Simon’s box. I had no way of knowing just how much I was hurting him, but perhaps that was a blessing in disguise.
    “Skye, what’s going on?”
    I turned my head to look at Ash standing by my side.
    “I can’t keep doing this,” I cried, tears streaming down my face because I wasn’t able to hold in my grief any longer. “She’s trying to make me decide which one to kill and I can’t!”
    Ash looked at what was happening and did something totally unexpected.
    He reached out and grabbed the arm I was holding Rose in.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The space around me fell away and reshaped itself into a cityscape. The blare of a car horn made me jump, and I watched as a woman pushing a shopping cart full of groceries gave the driver the middle finger for honking at her. There had to be at least three hundred people frantically rushing around the parking lot in front of me trying to pack their cars and trucks with food, water, and other supplies as quickly as possible.
    The anger within my soul stoked towards the queen found a new target. I turned on Ash.
    “Why did you do that?” I demanded hotly. “They could both die now!”
    Ash shook his head. His jaw firm as he said, “No, she won’t let them die. She needs them alive so she can use them to torture you with when you go back. Now, she’ll have to stop what she was doing and wait for you to return so she can use them against you again.”
    Ash's words acted like a damp cloth on the inferno of anger I felt, effectively snuffing out the heat with cool reason. He was absolutely right. By transporting us to the past and away from Jace and Simon, Ash had effectively ended the queen’s cruel experiment to break me. I took in a deep, ragged breath to steady my raw nerves and made myself focus on the new surroundings.
    “Where are we?” I asked Ash, watching a sundry of people rush into and out of the building we stood beside.
    We were standing on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store. The name of it was Wegman’s, and I vaguely remembered coming to this particular chain of stores as a child. A feeling of déjà vu assailed me as I realized this was the very store where we used to shop. The memory of smelling freshly baked cheddar bagels when I walked into the store and the sweetness of a fruit tart made at the dessert counter invaded my mind, bringing back fond moments I shared with my parents. Every Saturday morning, we would come to this exact store and do our grocery shopping. My mother would let me pick out the bagels for our breakfast and buy the tart as a special treat to be served in the evening after supper. They were memories formed during a time when certain routines could be counted on in life, a pattern which had been disrupted by the queen's quest for world domination.
    “Rochester, NY,” Ash told me, surveying the chaotic crowd of panicked people around us. “My parents used to grocery shop here.”
    I knew Ash and I had lived close to one another in our lives before the Harvester war, but never thought about the real possibility that we had probably seen each other before being paired in the Harvester breeding camp and didn’t even know it. In the old world, you would see people every day in shops, doctor’s offices, everywhere you went really, and never know their names until fate brought you