EMORY’S EYES SHOT OPEN. SHE brought her hands up—unmarred despite the white-hot star she’d held—and found no silver veins running along her skin, nothing to indicate she’d suffered her Collapsing. She should have Collapsed wielding that kind of magic. But other than being dazed and disoriented and completely depleted, she felt no different than before.
She pushed up onto her elbows. There was not an umbra in sight, and where the rift had been, there now was a silver door closed tightly shut.
“Ro?”
Romie lay beside her, face pale and clammy, lips cast in a bluish tint, and though her eyes were open, they stared ahead without any sort of awareness.
Terror seized Emory. “Romie.”
At last, Romie blinked. “I can’t feel my hands,” she said faintly.
Her hands curled upward in a charred mess, burned right down to the bone. It made no sense—Dreamers were used to touching stars all the time to enter dreams, and as far as Emory knew, they never got burnt. But maybe this physical version of the sleepscape didn’t follow the same rules as its slumbering equivalent. Maybe stars weren’t dreams at all here, but something else.
“I can’t feel anything,” Romie breathed weakly. Her eyes fluttered shut.
“Ro.” Emory bit back a sob as she reached for her, trying to assess the burns through her own bone-deep exhaustion. “Stay with me, all right?”
Her eyes found the silver door again. She had to get Romie through it, bring her to a Healer. Her own magic was all but spent; she knew if she pushed further into her depleted reservoir, she would Collapse. Besides, this type of injury was far beyond her skill. Romie needed a proper Healer, someone who excelled at this magic.
As Emory drew herself painfully to her feet, Romie whispered a pleading Don’t leave me.
It broke something in Emory. “I’m not—I won’t. I’ll be right over here.” She took a step toward the door. “Just keep talking, all right? Tell me why you came back, why you didn’t go through the door you found.”
“I almost did,” Romie mumbled. “I wanted to. I was certain it was my destiny. Then I thought about everything I did to get here, and I wasn’t so sure anymore.”
The secrets, the deaths. Emory had been thinking the same about her own poor decisions, but hearing Romie talk this way was startling; Romie never second-guessed herself on anything.
“I’m sorry, Em. Everything’s gone to shit because of me, and now we’re going to die in here, aren’t we?”
“No,” Emory said fiercely. “I’m going to get us out of here, Ro.”
Rivulets of water trickled down the door’s surface. A crack ran down the middle, starting from one corner and ending in the place where a knob should have been.
Emory pushed at it and pulled and clawed, but the door did not budge.
The way back out was shut.
The starlit path felt unsteady under her feet. The door back to Baz was broken, maybe forever shut, and the space around her had never seemed so vast and fathomless.
The space between worlds, and she and Romie alone in it.
A distant, foreboding shriek made the hairs on her neck rise. She remembered what Kai had said, about the umbrae being attracted to new magic—like the kind she’d used just now to heal the umbrae. To unmake them.
They couldn’t stay here.
Emory hurried back to Romie’s side, trying not to break down in panic.
“Romie—”
She was convulsing, eyes going to the back of her head, ravaged hands clutched rigidly against her chest.
“Romie!”
She was going into shock, her body contending with the burns in the worst possible way, organs at risk of damage. She needed a Healer—now.
Emory reached blindly for her Healing magic, whatever dregs of it remained, this power she’d resented all her life for how mediocre it made her feel. She gritted her teeth at the strain it caused her. Trying to pull any ounce of it up to the surface was like grasping at ash blowing away on a breeze: elusive and hopeless.
Healing had failed her with Travers and again with Lia, but this was Romie, her best friend, the one person who’d always seen her worth even when Emory herself could not. She refused to let it fail her now, determined to push past the point of total depletion to do this one thing.
Emory was a Tidecaller, with power more unique than she could have ever dreamed. She’d pushed her magic to reaches yet unknown, had turned umbrae into newborn stars, made plants bloom to new life, walked into dreams, but she would give it all up in this moment for the tiniest drop of healing.
Please.
There—less than a drop, the tiniest speck of magic. It burned through her, and Emory slumped to the ground, exhaustion making her limbs so heavy she thought she might faint.
“Ro?”
The convulsions stopped. Color returned to Romie’s face, and though her hands remained a mangled horror, tendons and tissue and bone stitched themselves together, enough that the burns weren’t so life-threatening anymore, enough that she gave Emory a wan smile and said, “Finally got to use those healing skills on a live subject, did you?”
Emory laughed through tears, adding somberly, “It’ll all be for nothing if we can’t find a way out of here.”
“I trust you, Em. If anyone can get us out of this mess, it’s you.”
Those words meant more to Emory than anything she’d ever heard. Tidecaller, Healer—she realized then that what she was never mattered to Romie, who loved her for her, not for the magic she wielded. Emory had been letting her Tidecaller magic determine her worth, seeing her significance through that and that alone as she lost herself in this power she so desperately wanted to make her special.
But maybe she’d always been exactly who she’d wanted to be. Not mediocre at all, not doomed to live in Romie’s shadow, but her own person with her own worth.
How sad, she thought, that it took losing Romie to find herself.
Still, she was glad for it, even if it had brought them here, to this place with no escape. The shrieks of distant umbrae were closer now than before.
“We need to find a way out of here.”
Farther down the curved path, stars gathered and aligned, with voices rising between them.
Patience, they seemed to whisper. Take heart.
“Follow the song,” Romie mumbled.
Sure enough, a melody took shape in the darkness, and it was a song Emory knew, having heard it before in a dream. An inexplicable sense of surety came over her. It started in her blood and seeped through to her bones. Calm and purpose in her heart. Direction in her soul.
The song was a compass guiding her on, the mournful chords of a lyre beckoning her down the starlit path, past the point where the path curved inward and disappeared into the dark.
And why should she be afraid of this darkness? She’d been born to it, after all. A new moon, a solar eclipse. She’d walked alongside it for as long as she could remember, and so had Romie. A Dreamer born on the very last sliver of a waning crescent.
She could have sworn she heard both their names woven within that melody, calling them forward like a lodestar.
Emory, Emory.
Romie, Romie.
Emory and Romie, their names practically an anagram.
Fate brought them together and ripped them apart and gave them a second chance here in this liminal space, in the seam between living and dead.
Emory threw one last glance at the silver door sealed shut. She thought of Baz and his stories, of Romie and her dreams, of the three of them running through fields of gold that bent toward the sea, their laughter making them soar like all the gulls flying in the cloudless skies above.
We are born of the moon and tides, and to them we return.
They would find their way back. One way or another, she would hear Baz laugh again, would see the three of them reunited, no matter the price. But for now, at least, they had to look onward.