“I wasn’t saying—”
“I’m sure you know how principled he is when it comes to magic. Him helping you with this? It goes against all his precious rules. Which means he trusts you. And that’s the thing about Brysden: under all that worry, all that anxiety, his loyalty, once you earn it, is unswerving.” He leaned in threateningly close. “Don’t fuck that up.”
There was a sudden thickness in her throat at the shame his words conjured. She’d been treating Baz as a necessary means to an end, and for Kai to see the truth of her so easily… Was she really leading Baz on so strong that it was that obvious?
She thought of that fleeting moment on the beach, the way Baz had leaned in. Recalled the quiet emotion on his face the next morning, his evident pride as he showed her around Obscura Hall. And this subtle shift she’d noticed in him since, like he felt more confident around her, more at ease…
Maybe she’d beguiled Baz into helping her long enough, and she should stop. Especially given how close she and Keiran were becoming.
Baz trusted her more than she deserved, of that she was painfully aware. But she needed him. They needed each other.
And yet… she really didn’t want to hurt him.
“I won’t,” Emory told Kai in earnest. It was a promise to him as much as to herself.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
The skepticism in his voice made it obvious he didn’t trust her to keep her word. It should have irked her, but all she could think was how lucky Baz was to have Kai on his side. Maybe their friendship wasn’t so strange after all. Kai was like a keeper of fear where Baz was concerned, protective of him in his own way. A fierce friend—or maybe something more. Something she suspected Baz couldn’t even see.
An odd feeling swept over her at the thought. Before she could dwell on it, Kai leaned back against the bench, the threat of his words evaporating around them.
“All right, then. The sleepscape. What is it you want to know?”
26 BAZ
BAZ SLIPPED FROM THE COURTYARD, leaving Kai and Emory to their lesson. His thoughts raced with the idea of Kai and his father—of his father being subjected to whatever it was the Regulators were experimenting with. The screams he’d heard the night he visited Kai…
They needed to get to the bottom of this.
He found the room that Kai had described, thankfully not bumping into anyone on the way. It had no windows and was locked, but Baz had learned the hairpin trick from Vera, figuring it might come in handy one day and prevent him from using magic to do so. He proceeded to unlock it and found—
Nothing.
At least, nothing out of the ordinary. It was a medical room, clinical and spotless, with surgical instruments locked away behind glass cases. Cold crept up the back of Baz’s spine. Before he could investigate further, he heard the jangle of keys outside.
Baz backed out of the room, leaving the door unlocked before he disappeared down another corridor. An older attendant looked his way, brows furrowing slightly as if in recognition, but someone called their name, drawing their attention away as Baz rounded another corner.
His eyes zeroed in on the label next to one of the doors.
Theodore Brysden.
Heart pounding in his chest, Baz peered through the slender window, noting the small comforts that made the room almost homey. A pile of books. A knit blanket thrown at the foot of the bed—his mother’s handiwork, no doubt. A picture frame on the desk held a sepia-toned memory of another life, a better time. Four smiling figures that were unrecognizable now.
Breathe in, hold, breathe out.
Baz had been repeating the mantra to himself ever since getting out of the cab, trying to stay grounded. But he suddenly forgot how it went as he spotted his father on the bed, his profile nearly unrecognizable, thanks to the passage of time and something crueler still.
Baz’s throat worked for air that would not come, everything in him locking up as memories of that day erupted behind his eyes.
School had been on holiday, and fifteen-year-old Baz couldn’t wait to spend an entire week holed up in the printing press, reading quietly in an empty office or listening to Jae tell stories against the backdrop of melodical machinery. He distinctly remembered the three clients who’d come into the printing press at noon, the chime over the door announcing their presence. He’d looked up from his book with disinterest, and only suspected something might be wrong when he heard raised voices and saw his father standing between Jae and the clients—two men and a woman—his arms extended as if to stop a fight.
Baz remembered how scared he’d been as one of the men lunged for Jae, damper cuffs in hand, and Jae responded by flinging illusion magic his way and Theodore screamed at everyone to stop, to please just stop.
Then: a blast like that of a star in collapse. Screams and silver veins and the wet glimmer in Theodore’s eyes as the Regulators who eventually showed up subdued him. As they took him away to be branded with the Unhallowed Seal and become this. A frail, pale imitation of the man he’d once been.
You’ll be all right, his father had said to him before Baz was wrenched from his arms. Everything will be all right, Basil.
He watched his father now as he flipped the page of the book he was reading. It felt surreal that only a glass window separated them after so many years. Theodore’s back suddenly went rigid, his face lifting toward the door, as if he could feel his son’s presence on the other side of it.
Baz stepped out of sight before his father could see him. And then he was sprinting down the corridor, lungs burning, everything in him holding on by a flimsy thread. He made it back to the courtyard just in time to see the patients being herded away by an attendant. Something about it being lunchtime, he was distantly aware of Emory saying as she sidled up to him.
Kai spotted him from across the courtyard. His shoulders fell at whatever he saw on Baz’s face. There was nothing to say. No time to say it.
Only when Kai disappeared did Baz’s knees give way. He crumbled against a wall, and it took everything in him to get a grip on his breathing. In and hold and out and in again until the world stilled, quiet and safe once more.
His name spoken softly brought him back to himself. Emory knelt in front of him.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I saw my dad.” His eyes squeezed shut. “After all these years, I still couldn’t bring myself to face him. He killed those people. And I know it was an accident, but I always wondered how it could have happened in the first place.”
Theodore was a Nullifier—it had felt to Baz like that should be the safest kind of Eclipse magic to wield, yet he still Collapsed.
“If I could have stopped it…”
“Hey.”
Emory’s hand gripped his, soft and real and warm. He looked into her stormy eyes and found them to be grounding.
“You were a kid,” she breathed, “and there’s nothing you could have done. But if you need to see him now, if you want to go back…”
“I can’t.”
“Then come on. Let’s go home.”
Home was a funny word, Baz thought. Once, he had never felt more at home than when he was at the printing press with his father and Jae. And when he’d had that ripped from him, home became books, the stories they contained. When he thought of home now, he thought of Aldryn, of the warded sanctuary of Obscura Hall, the warmth of the Eclipse commons. But that home wasn’t one at all, he realized, without Kai there to share it with.
He needed to bring this—whatever was happening at the Institute—into the light. He’d had enough of Eclipse-born hiding in the shadows.
27 EMORY
“OW.” EMORY WINCED AT THE sting of the needle. “Do you have to jab that in quite so hard?”
A withering look from Baz as he pulled the syringe, releasing the sleeping drug into her muscle. “You say that every time, and every time I try to do it more gently.”