Baz didn’t know what to say. It was true that Kai didn’t look well at all—dark bruises under his eyes, skin emaciated, once-luscious hair falling in limp, oily strands down to his shoulders. A haunted man in a haunting place.
Suddenly he couldn’t stand seeing Kai like this, in this Tides-forsaken prison. He realized the pain of missing him these past few months had been a dull thing compared to what the sight of him now conjured. Never had he longed so ardently for their late nights in the commons, with Kai sprawled on the sofa and he on the chair beside him and the briny breeze billowing between them. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the easy silence of mornings spent waiting for the coffee to brew, or the long conversations about the book they both loved. The solidarity that sprang from being the only two of their house. Tides, he even missed their training sessions where Kai turned Baz’s fears and nightmares into bone-chilling reality.
Kai didn’t belong here. His place was in Obscura Hall—with him.
Anger rose in Baz, sharp and quick. “Tell me you didn’t do this on purpose. That you didn’t deliberately push yourself to Collapse just to see what might happen.”
Kai’s eyes darkened. “I did what I had to.”
Silence settled between them like ash.
“I thought you said you weren’t stupid enough to try it,” Baz said on a shaky breath. “How else did you think this experiment would pan out?” He shook his head furiously. Then, without thinking, “Do you know what it was like to get back from my sister’s funeral and find out you were gone, just like that?”
He knew how pathetic he must sound, yet all this pent-up resentment in him didn’t care as it came bursting out. He’d needed Kai’s steady presence this summer, the only thing keeping him afloat in the ocean of grief he’d been drowning in after Romie. He needed the people around him to stop leaving. His father who Collapsed, his mother who checked out, his sister who drowned, Jae who never stayed put for long, and now Kai, who’d barreled headfirst into trouble without thinking of what it might do to Baz to lose him like that.
He’d never quite understood the acute pain of it until now, the gutting sense of abandonment he’d felt upon returning to the empty Eclipse commons. With his father, things had been different: Baz had seen his Collapse happen, had lived through it, and so his getting sent to the Institute made sense to him, a natural conclusion to the events he’d witnessed. With Kai, he felt he’d missed a beat, like climbing down stairs and thinking there was one last step, heart in his throat as he met solid ground instead.
“I’ve been carrying around this guilt because I knew you were obsessed with this idea and I didn’t take you seriously,” he said, too worked up to keep things bottled up now. “And then, what—you waited for me to go home so I’d be out of your way? Why’d you show up in my sleep the night before? To say goodbye? And still I didn’t clock in that you were going to do this.”
“I knew you’d try to talk me out of it if you were there,” Kai said. “I thought it’d be easier this way.”
Baz scoffed. “You did this for yourself and no one else. This was so selfish of—”
“Are you seriously calling me selfish? You? The guy who hasn’t visited his own father in nearly a decade because the thought makes him too uncomfortable.” A joyless laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Look at me, Brysden. I’m a shade of what I used to be, and I’ve only been here for a few months. The ones who’ve been in this shithole for years? It’s like they exist, but they’re not really here.”
A shiver licked up Baz’s spine. He thought of his father, locked away in a room just like this one somewhere in the correctional wing, withering away to nothing.
Empty and hollow.
“You really have no idea how hard it’s been,” Kai said. “So don’t call me selfish when I’m the only one trying to figure out what it is they do to us, because there’s something shady going on here, Brysden, and no one else but me and Jae seem to be taking it seriously. They believe me; why can’t you?”
Baz stilled. “What do you mean, what they do to us?”
Kai settled back against the wall and ran a hand over his face, still simmering with anger. He toyed with the moon-and-sunflower pendant at his throat. “They do experiments on us or something. They haven’t done it to me yet, as far as I can tell. But I hear others sometimes, screaming in the night. The power in here flickers in and out like it’s the end of the fucking world. Whatever it is has everyone scared. No one will talk to me, but I see it in their eyes, that fear. And the Regulators, they don’t care about us.” Kai’s gaze fell on the chess piece on the bedside table. “We’re all pawns in whatever fucked-up game they’re playing.” He suddenly knocked the piece over, letting it roll onto the floor. He pierced Baz with a stare. “So why are you here, Brysden? How are you here?”
Baz shifted uncomfortably. “Someone helped me deactivate the wards and pick the lock on your door.”
A pause—then Kai laughed in utter disbelief. “I leave you alone for a few months and you turn rogue? Where was this rebelliousness hiding all this time?”
“I went to see the Veiled Atlas.”
That seemed to wipe the smile off Kai’s face.
“I asked them about the missing epilogue. They told me about Adriana, how she might have known where to find it, and how both you and Romie had been there before, asking the same questions.”
Dreamer.
Stay out of my way, nightmare boy.
“You two were trying to find the epilogue, weren’t you?”
Kai peered at him curiously. “I thought you didn’t care about the epilogue.”
“I care because Romie did.” He pulled the note from his pocket and handed it to Kai. “Whatever competition I assume you two had going on, this senseless search for the epilogue… It’s what led her to Dovermere. To her death.”
Kai remained quiet as he stared at the note. Finally, he said, “I didn’t know she was going into those caves, Brysden.”
There was enough anguish on his face to convince Baz he was telling the truth.
“Then what happened?”
“After I went to the Veiled Atlas, I found your sister in the sleepscape. Asked if she’d had any luck finding Adriana or the epilogue.” He snorted. “She told me to fuck off and mind my own business. And it did become a sort of competition between us then, to see who might get to it first. Until we realized we were both hearing that same song in our sleep and decided to help each other instead.”
“What?”
“Romie was adamant it was Adriana calling us to the epilogue. Or at least a clue to finding it. Night after night, we tried to follow the song deeper into the sleepscape. We went further than I’ve ever been, until everything felt distorted and heavy and it was hard to breathe. But we could feel it, how close we were. One night, the umbrae came. Too many of them. I tried to keep them back, but it’s like they weren’t responding to my magic. I was on the verge of Collapsing. Romie could have kept going, could have left me behind while she pushed further, but she didn’t. She pulled me out of there, and that was the last time I saw her, both in the sleepscape and out. I don’t know if her going to Dovermere had anything to do with it, but I know she was as eager as I was to get the epilogue, and willing to do just about anything to get it.” A frown as he looked at her note again. “Where’d you find this, anyway?”
“She left it in Clover’s manuscript.”
Kai raised a brow. “The manuscript?”
Baz nodded solemnly; he knew Kai understood the weight of it, this fabled, mythical thing that was the manuscript, usually off-limits to the public eye. “I don’t know how Romie managed to get access to the Vault,” he said, “but it looks like she must have left this note there in a hurry.”
He’d been puzzling it over since finding the note. Had she meant to take it with her but was caught and forced to leave it behind? Or had she been meaning to leave it in the manuscript all along, maybe for someone else to find—like Kai?
“Wasn’t she friends with that girl who works there?”
Baz blinked at Kai. “Who?”