The countdown clock reads ten days until the end of the world. The citizens are organized. Everyone's been notified and assigned a duty. The problem is . . . no one knows for sure how it will end.

Energy-hungry Mages are the most likely culprit. They travel toward a single location from every corner of the continent. Fueled by the two suns, each Mage holds the power of an element: air, earth, fire, metal, water, or ether. They harness their powers to draw energy from the most readily available resource: humans.

Ashara has been assigned to the Ethereal task force, made up of human ether manipulators and directed by Loken, a young man with whom she has a complicated past. Loken and Ashara bond over a common goal: to stop the Mages from occupying their home and gaining more energy than they can contain. But soon, they begin to suspect that the future of the world may depend on Ashara's death.

A metal plate occupied the wall to the right of the door. Loken pressed his hand to it. The door slid away and disappeared into the left side of the doorway. Loken stepped through and down the stairs on the other side. His footsteps clanged against the metal steps as he descended.

Unlike in the overly bright training room on the other side of the building, dim lights filled this room with shadows. The team clustered at the bottom of the steps, blocking my view. As they shuffled slowly out of the way, I caught sight of what had stopped everyone else in their tracks.

A glass wall separated us from what looked like a large cell. The only entry point into the cell was another thick metal door with a security pad next to it. Behind the glass, three people stood as far away from one another as they could possibly get within the enclosed space: a hugely tall man, a woman with blond hair that hung past her waist, and a smaller man. All three were nude.

They looked human but . . . wrong somehow. Despite their lack of clothing, they made no effort to cover themselves. The larger man’s muscles bulged in odd places. While the woman wasn’t as massive, her body was more toned than any woman I’d ever met, more so than even Elder Ethereal.

From across the room, their black eyes cut through the darkness. A chill raced up and down my back like icy fingertips.

I stared at the smaller man. His eyes bore through me. I wondered if he saw me at all, or if he just happened to be looking where I was standing. At first glance, I’d thought him to be relatively slight. Although the other man dwarfed him, his thin arms were as tight as a predator’s, coiled to strike. The sharp planes of his face only emphasized the eerie black of his eyes, sunken into their sockets.

Loken’s voice startled me from the man’s hypnotic gaze. “In case you haven’t guessed it, these three are—”

“Mages,” I whispered.