If there was one thing she hated in life, it was needles.
“My arm’s still sore from yesterday and the day before that,” she gritted out. A pinprick of blood formed between blooming bruises on her arm.
“Why don’t you just heal the pain away?”
Emory leaned back on the sofa, her muscles already going heavy. “I keep hoping it’ll motivate me to get it right for once.”
The drug was sleep magic imbued in salt water, a tonic that some Dreamer students used during their training to make themselves fall asleep, thus facilitating their access to the sleepscape. Baz had somehow managed to borrow a small stock of it from a teacher in Decrescens Hall.
They’d been experimenting with it for a week now, and still Emory wasn’t able to access the sleepscape.
The first couple of tries, she’d merely fallen into a deep, entirely normal slumber. According to Baz, she even snored a few times, out like a light until the effects of the drug began to wear off and she woke to Baz’s nervous pacing.
After those first few unsuccessful attempts, she’d at least become aware of herself as she slept. It was like being on the brink of sleep yet still awake, when the line between thought and dreaming blurred. It was in this state that she was supposed to find the sleepscape, a thing much easier said than done.
“Just follow the darkness,” Kai had instructed her at the Institute. “All sleep is dark, in a way, but sleepscape darkness is different. You’ll know when you see it.”
Emory thought she glimpsed it once. Blackness so impenetrable it felt tangible. But she’d been under too long already by then; before she could reach it, the sleeping drug wore off, and she was pulled back into waking.
She hoped this time would be different. Outside, the sun was setting, casting the Eclipse commons in warm golden light. The last sliver of a waning moon was already visible in the darkening sky, though if the last few days were any indication, it had no influence at all on Emory’s power and would likely not make using the Dreamer magic any easier now.
As sleep sunk its claws into her, slow and deliberate, Emory’s gaze found Baz sitting across from her on his usual rust-colored chair. She could tell he hated this, watching her go where he couldn’t follow, wield magic he could not see. There was a permanent weariness to him since the Institute. They hadn’t spoken of it, but she knew it bothered him, not knowing what was going on. He must be imagining the worst happening to his father and Kai, and with good reason. The Institute was a vile place.
Emory tried giving him a reassuring smile before she went under, but it only hardened the look in his eyes.
And then she was sleeping.
Her mind fought for clarity in this strange, floating state. She opened her senses, grappled for the Dreamer magic that was still so elusive to her. She couldn’t see anything, all of it dark, a blank void of nothingness.
But there, at the edge of it all, a darker smudge on the horizon.
She flung her consciousness in its direction. In her mind’s eye, she saw a semblance of a door, gleaming black obsidian.
She reached for it.
It unlocked.
And Emory stepped into impossible, velvety darkness, onto a path laden with ethereal stars that appeared both near and far, motionless and swirling, above and below and dizzyingly all around.
The sleepscape, at long last.
Her mind was her own again, and she was awake—at least here, in this strange in-between world. There was a living, breathing sort of quiet, at once peaceful and crushing, like the weight of being underwater. Her movements were slow and heavy, as if she were trying to move against a current. She inched toward the edge of the path, which curved in either direction, dipping away into darkness. Beyond the light of the stars lining it was a great vast nothing. She had the peculiar sensation of looking over the edge of a steep cliff. Yet that nothingness called to her, and she found herself wanting to go toward it.
What could hurt her here? This was the domain of dreams, lovely and enchanting. A realm of endless possibility.
The cold hand of Kai’s half-remembered words pulled her back from the edge. “First lesson of the sleepscape,” he’d said, his voice a midnight caress, “is never veer from the path.”
“Where does it lead?”
“No one knows. If you venture too far down in either direction, you start feeling overextended. It’s like diving too deep underwater, reaching that point where everything becomes a crushing weight. Depths you were never meant to exist in. You risk losing yourself, your connection to your waking body. But you won’t need to go that far.”
Emory glanced at the glowing orbs around her, reaching tentative fingers toward a winking star above her head.
“Every star is a dream,” Kai had explained. “Dreamers can just reach out to one, cup it in their hands, and step into that dream. But first, you need to find the star you’re looking for. That’s the tricky part. Thankfully for you, though, Dreamers recognize each other in the sleepscape. They’re like beacons to each other, so finding Romie should be easy enough. If she’s there.”
“And what of the darkness beyond the stars?”
“That,” Kai had said with a dangerous tilt of his mouth, “is the realm of nightmares. It’s where the monsters we call umbrae dwell. You know that feeling when a dream shifts and becomes a horror you can’t escape? That’s the umbrae. They devour dreams like black holes gobbling up any star that moves too close. Dreamers are trained to recognize the signs. As soon as they sense an umbra’s pull, they need to escape. They need to wake. If they don’t… the umbrae claim them.”
The umbrae. She’d heard Romie speaking of them only briefly, these things made of something worse than nightmares.
“The body those Dreamers leave behind in the waking world keeps functioning, at least for a while,” Kai had continued. “But in the sleepscape? Their consciousness is devoured. The umbrae feast on it until there’s nothing left and they become just another black hole of nothingness.” He’d pointed his chin at a passing attendant pushing a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. The man appeared to be sleeping. “That’s a Dreamer who never woke, his soul taken by the umbrae. There’s a whole wing dedicated to them, what we call eternal sleepers.”
“Is there no chance of them waking?”
“Not that I know of.”
Emory had watched the Dreamer with blank horror. “Please tell me the umbrae haven’t somehow found a way into the waking world. They can’t escape the nightmares they haunt, can they?”
“I thought I might have pulled one into the waking world with me once when I brought something out of a nightmare. But I didn’t. It stayed in the sleepscape. Couldn’t follow me out into the waking world, I guess. As far as I know, they’re contained to the sleepscape.”
“And what do they make of Nightmare Weavers?”
“They tend to let me be.”
Emory had wondered if it was because they sensed Kai had the power to destroy them, or if they recognized in him—in his magic—some of the same darkness they were made of.
“But you’re something new,” he’d told her. “Something the umbrae have never seen before. They’ll be drawn to you like moths to a flame. If you get so much as a prickling of their presence, you need to wake yourself up. Immediately.”
Cold ran up Emory’s spine now as she looked out at the impossible dark. The thought had crossed her mind to draw on Kai’s power instead of Dreamer magic—that maybe by using Nightmare Weaver magic, she, too, would be left alone. But given how hard it had been to draw on Baz’s magic, how bottomless and inaccessible it felt… something told her Kai’s magic would be the same, too vast for her to grasp.
She took a deep breath, searching for any sign of Romie. Distantly, she was aware of the sleep drug starting to wane, but she was so close, had finally made it into the sleepscape…