Emory, Emory.
She feels the bloom suffocating in its prison of glass. Its need for air strains her own lungs. Silver blood drips from her hand as she breaks the hourglass and it shatters into a thousand pieces, melding with the fine black sand in its midst. She reaches for the poppy. It crumbles at her touch, withering away to dust.
Emory, Emory.
The voice is music, and it comes from a door. The door is set at the bottom of the hourglass, an opening through which the sand starts to vanish, sinking, swirling. She takes a step past the sharp shards of glass and into the receding sand.
She falls
into
darkness,
and finds it is a strangely loving embrace. It is the sea’s beating heart, its doting hands pulling her home. Her feet wade through the shallows of this great nothingness, water cold as ice. More voices call her name now, an orchestra of sound, a tune half remembered guiding her through the dark, and she wants so desperately to follow it. She knows the song and knows the voices, for they are a part of her in some inexplicable way.
She takes a step to meet them.
Hands hold her back, and Romie is there in the dark, stars forming a corona in the depthless expanse above her head.
“Emory.” Her voice is the melody of crystal, clear and pure. “You’re alive.”
Of course I’m alive, but this is a dream, she thinks confusedly, even as a part of her wonders at how real Romie’s hands feel, how bright her eyes shine, how even the sea seems to pause at the intrusion, as if her presence here is not right, not quite the dream’s doing.
“Where are you?” she asks of her friend, because suddenly she knows she is somewhere other than here.
Romie opens her mouth, but only water spills from it as the sea wraps clawed, shadowed hands around her, eager to pull her back into its depths. The music around them is sharp now, angry. Romie reaches a desperate hand toward Emory, and on it there is a spiral burning silver.
All around them, nightmares erupt: blank eyes and stretched limbs over empty souls.
A screech makes Emory’s ears burst and bleed.
A bloody tidal wave pulls her friend under. Her voice shouts Emory’s name.
The shadows reach for Emory now, eager for her blood, her power—
Another pair of hands grips her arms. A different voice, this one close to her ear, velvet and darkness and the cold death of a burning star:
“Wake up.”
* * *
Emory woke with a gasp. She could swear constellations were swirling above her on the ceiling, an imagined sky that had followed her into the waking world. Her window was thrown open, clamoring against a sudden gust of wind. Outside, the sky flickered wildly with light, an electrical storm blowing past.
Brine and sea salt. The smell of the sea.
Already her dream was fading from memory—everything but Romie, the crystalline quality of her voice. And the other voice that pulled her from those deadly shadows, away from the dream itself…
Emory glanced at her wrist. The spiral scar shone faintest silver. A trick of the moonlight, perhaps. But she knew how it felt to have a Dreamer show up in her sleep. Romie had done it before, and Emory always remembered those dreams upon waking, how real Romie appeared to her in them. Just like she had now.
She grabbed a sweater, heart pounding with conviction. The dream was a message, a revelation, and Emory knew where she had to go.
But she couldn’t go alone.
20 BAZ
BAZ COULDN’T SLEEP. HE TRIED to read by the fireplace, tried to distract himself by playing with Dusk, but nothing could ease the sharp ache that seeing Kai at the Institute had left him with. Kai’s absence was everywhere, and it was unbearable.
He felt like the night sky outside, restless with a brewing storm.
With a frustrated sigh and his copy of Song of the Drowned Gods tucked under his arm, he headed out of the commons, hoping the Decrescens library might bring him the kind of solace he used to find here. When the elevator gate creaked open at the top, Baz swore, nearly dropping his book.
Emory was pacing in the corridor, looking half-crazed in a too-big sweater and striped pajama pants, her hair hanging in messy curls.
“Thank the Tides,” she breathed with visible relief.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wasn’t sure the wards would let me through.” The tears lining her eyes gave him pause, and there was a desperate, pleading note in her voice as she said, “I saw her. I saw Romie in a dream just now, and it was real, Baz.”
His brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“I dreamed of her in Dovermere. But it didn’t feel like a normal dream. It was Dreamer magic, I’m sure of it.” A sob that might have been a laugh slipped from her lips. “Romie’s alive.”
Baz blinked. Frowned. Shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“I thought the same about Travers,” Emory pressed, “yet we both know he wasn’t quite dead when he washed up onshore.”
“No. I had a Shadowguide look for her beyond the veil for precisely that reason. Romie’s gone.”
“What if she isn’t?”
“She is. The Shadowguide told me—”
Baz stopped himself. Alya had told him there was nothing of Romie for her to find beyond the veil—that, like Adriana, her spirit had most likely moved on.
Spirits who aren’t tethered to this plane sometimes seek horizons even us Shadowguides can’t reach.
Emory grabbed the sleeve of his cardigan. “It was Romie. I could feel that she was alive, Baz. I don’t know how, if it’s because of my magic, or Dovermere, or…” She let go of him, clutching her tattooed hand to her chest. “I just know I have to go back there. I have to go to Dovermere, because what if she’s there? What if she comes back like Travers did?”
Baz palmed the back of his neck, a thousand emotions fighting for control as he looked around the corridor, desperate for something to make sense of. Behind him, the elevator door still stood open. His mind went to the secret passage in the commons that led down to Dovermere. If there was a chance Emory was right…
To hell with everyone’s warnings.
Baz met her gaze squarely. “Let’s go find out.”
21 EMORY
EMORY WASTED NO TIME ONCE they got to the beach. She shucked off her shoes, waded into the sea, and plunged her hand into the cold, dark water lapping at her shins. She could feel Baz staring at the back of her neck, wariness and confusion coming off him in waves. She didn’t care if he saw the silver light of her Selenic Mark. She didn’t care what he thought as she closed her eyes and called on Romie with every fiber of her soul.
It’s all about intention, Keiran had said.
She summoned every ounce of it as she thought of Romie, picturing her coming back to their room after long hours spent in her greenhouse: ruddy-brown curls wild around her round face, smudges of dirt streaked like paint over her freckled skin, earthy smell clinging to her clothes. Her brow would crease in concentration as she tried to find the perfect spot to put her newly potted plant in their dorm—much like Baz looked when he was reading.
I want to speak to Romie Brysden, Emory thought.
She opened her mind to Romie. Her fingers were going numb in the cold water, but there was no prickle on her wrist, no indication that the mark had even awakened. She called for Lia Azula and Jordyn Briar Burke, the other two students whose bodies hadn’t been recovered, desperate for one of them to heed her call. For someone to answer.
Please, she begged the sea, the sky, everything in between.
Dovermere looked on with interest, but nothing answered the call.
Emory’s eyes flew open. Furiously, she stepped deeper into the water, not giving a single thought to the pieces of broken shells that sliced her feet. Dream twisted into reality, reality into dream, and in every shadow she saw things of nightmare, thought she heard an echo of that song calling her forward.
I want to speak to Romie Brysden.
Ominous clouds swallowed up the stars. Behind her, Baz shouted her name, but she didn’t listen.