Chapter 1

Three months ago, my fiancé, Bastien Thorne, and my own brother, Gage, dumped me at an abandoned outpost in the Sahara Desert. All because of a woman named Posey.

I'd pulled Posey out of a refugee camp five years ago, during a geological survey in East Africa. I begged my family to adopt her. I paid for her schooling. I raised her like a sister.

"You tampered with the safety parameters on the drilling rig. You almost got Posey killed." Bastien looked down at me kneeling in the sand. Nothing but disgust in his eyes.

"If I hadn't caught it in time, she'd be dead at the bottom of that shaft."

He turned away. "I've never met a woman as vicious as you, Sable. Stay here and reflect on what you did. We'll come back when you've learned your lesson."

Today is day ninety.

No helicopter. No jeep on the horizon.

I'm lying on the moldy wooden bed in the outpost, too weak to even roll over. My lips have split into dead flakes of skin. The slightest movement makes them bleed, and the blood slides down my raw throat without giving it a drop of relief.

My left leg is broken. So is my right arm.

Three days ago, a gang of raiders broke in. They took the last few things I owned worth stealing, then smashed my bones with a rusted iron bar—because I wouldn't let go of the necklace around my neck. Bastien gave it to me when he proposed. It holds a pinch of my parents' ashes.

They ripped it off me anyway. Rode off on their camels, cursing.

I didn't even have the strength left to scream.

Three months ago, we'd just wrapped up the survey in the Sahel basin. The wind was brutal that day.

I knelt in the burning sand, gripping Gage's pant leg.

"Gage, I didn't touch those parameters. I never wanted to hurt Posey! Please, don't leave me here. I'll die."

My brother. The same man who used to carry me on his shoulders to pick apples when we were kids. He kicked me off.

"Sable, you're the best geologist this family has. You can survive anything. Three months out here is basically an extended field trip. Use the time to think about what you did to Posey."

Posey peeked out from Gage's arms, her eyes rimmed red. "Bastien, maybe three months is too long... Sable just made a mistake. Don't be so hard on her."

Bastien pulled her closer. "It's not too long. If anything, it's too short."

Posey looked down, like she couldn't bear to watch.

But as she turned to get in the car, she glanced back over his shoulder.

And smiled at me.

They took every radio, every phone, the jeep—everything. They left a few barrels of water and some ration bars. They thought this was a mild punishment for a spoiled heiress.

They had no idea wild dogs would tear through those water barrels within the first week, or that this outpost had long since become a route for raiders and men running from something worse.

Ninety days. It started with hope. Then it became screaming myself hoarse at the dunes every day. By the end, I was on the ground licking dew off a rusted pipe.

The deadline is here now.

Nobody's coming.

My stomach cramps, and I throw up a mouthful of blackish acid.

Whatever was holding me together just gave out.

The pain fades. In its place comes a strange, floating lightness.

My vision starts rising. It keeps rising until I'm hovering above the outpost.

I look down and see her. The woman on the bed.

Skin stretched over bone. Blond hair matted with blood and sand. Eyes half-open, pupils gone gray and unfocused.

I'm dead.

Turns out, once you become a ghost, even heartbreak stops hurting.

Wind pours in through the broken window, burying my body under the sand, layer by layer.

I feel something pulling at me. Not downward.

West. Over the dunes. Toward the ocean.