Kaelen had never wanted the Bangle. He’d seen what it did to the others—the way their eyes went flat, their wills subsumed into the cold, singing metal. But in the depths of the Eternal Gale, with a Thresher’s maw closing around his leg and the blood seeping into the black salt water, a dying man doesn’t choose his salvation. He grabs it.

Instead, he stepped backward.

“What I should have done at the start,” Kaelen whispered. He could feel the Bangle screaming in his mind, a thousand needles of panic and rage. No! You are MINE! You cannot—