“The four of you?” Emory repeated.
“Farran, Keiran, Artem, and I.”
Something shuddered on Keiran’s face. “This has become so much bigger than what the four of us set out to do, Liza. To reset the balance in the world, rid it of the Shadow’s stain—that’s the favor we have to ask of the Tides now. The one thing we need to focus on. We can’t risk losing our one shot just to see our loved ones again.” His throat bobbed. “Dovermere chooses those who are worthy of the Selenics’ secrets—those who might go far enough to wake the Tides. Farran didn’t survive. We did. Maybe what’s dead is better left to the Deep.”
Silence dripped between the three of them as the full weight of Keiran’s words settled. Hurt and betrayal flashed across Lizaveta’s face.
“We said we’d bring Farran back. The whole reason I agreed to this—to sacrificing all our friends—was to bring him back.”
“So why did you try to sabotage our plan?”
Lizaveta’s cheeks burned furiously, that icy composure of hers slipping.
“Don’t try to deny it,” Keiran warned, voice lowered in a chilling tone. “You got cold feet about what needed to be done, and you used a Glamour synth to get Penelope West to out Emory to the dean, hoping she’d get sent to the Institute and receive the Unhallowed Seal. You hoped we’d lose our vessel so you wouldn’t have to stomach what needed to be done.”
Emory’s head snapped to Lizaveta. What Penelope had said about not acting of her own will… Tides, she’d been forced to do it. To betray Emory with information she hadn’t even known—information Lizaveta had planted in her head.
And she’d had her memory wiped for it—all for something that wasn’t her fault.
“How could you do that to her?” Emory gasped.
Lizaveta met her gaze, full of cold fury. “I did it for your own good, but you couldn’t take a hint, could you?”
You should have run when you had the chance, Tidethief.
Lizaveta rounded on Keiran. “All I wanted was to get Farran back. But to do it like this? To sacrifice our friends? It makes us just as bad as the Eclipse-born who killed our parents, Keiran. Worse, because this is intentional.” She held herself a little straighter, blinking rapidly. “But I was willing to do it all the same if it meant seeing Farran again. This was his dream, the reason we started going down this road in the first place. What do you think he’d say if he saw all we were willing to sacrifice to do this one thing?”
“He wouldn’t understand, because he was weak-willed, just like you. It’s why you won’t be coming with us, Liza.”
“Like hell I am.”
Keiran jerked his chin to the prone Selenics. “If you care so much about them that you were willing to risk our plan with that shit you pulled with Penelope, then save one of them. We have one offering too many. Both Ife and Louis are of House New Moon, but we only need one to take Bruma’s place in the Deep.”
The sacrifices—there were five bodies on the ground, but he only needed four. One of each lunar house. One for each Tide. Virgil for Quies. Javier for Aestas. Nisha for Anima. And either Ife or Louis for Bruma.
“I’m sorry, Liza,” Keiran lamented. “This is the way it has to be. So have your pick; save the one you want. Then leave before the tide comes.”
“You selfish bastard.”
Water sloshed at Lizaveta’s feet as she took a furious step toward him.
All of them paused, glancing at the cave floor. Water trickled into the Belly of the Beast from the passage they’d come through, a marker of the rising tide. The water reached all the way to the dais at the center. Where it touched the striated rock, it lifted from the ground in a thin tendril that wrapped around the Hourglass, mingling with the silver that ran along the rock. Around and around the stalagmite the ribbon of silvery water climbed, gathering in the middle of the column, where it formed a spiral to match the symbol on the rock.
That lock formed in the middle of the Hourglass again. Gooseflesh rose on Emory’s arms as she heard it: a melody calling her forward.
The door, readying itself to open in time with the tide.
There was urgency in Lizaveta’s voice now. Fear. “I’m not letting you go through that door without me.” Her fist closed around something at her side.
“Then I’m afraid this is where we part, Liza.”
Lizaveta lunged with a desperate scream, the gleam of a knife flashing as she swiped for Emory’s neck. Keiran stepped between them. He caught Lizaveta’s wrist, tried to wrench the knife free from her grasp.
“You can’t wake the Tides without your precious Tidecaller,” Lizaveta seethed, no match for Keiran’s strength as he pried her fingers open. “If I can’t have Farran back, you can—”
Lizaveta’s brows knit together in confusion, her red-painted mouth open on silenced words, as a trickle of blood fell from where Keiran had lodged the knife at the base of her neck.
36 BAZ
BAZ WOKE TO A WORLD of fog and stars.
Muffled voices sounded in his ears, at once very close and too far away. There was a dizzying pain on the back of his head. He tried to lift his arm to touch it and felt the cold bite of something against his skin, restricting the motion.
His hands were cuffed together.
Panic burst through the blur of unconsciousness. His surroundings came into sharp focus. He was in a small wood-paneled room, slumped against a bookshelf or an armoire that dug into his back. Weak light filtered in through a singular window on the opposite wall, where two people stood behind an antique mahogany desk. One of them was a man in a charcoal Regulator uniform; the other, a woman. Baz recognized neither of them. They didn’t notice he’d woken up, bickering in voices that still sounded odd to his ears.
He tried to focus on what they were saying—something about blood samples and order—and went rigid.
At his feet was a body.
Baz bit his tongue to keep from screaming. Kai’s face was pale, eyes closed in sleep or death; he couldn’t tell. He wanted to reach for him, shake him awake, will him to not be dead—but there. Kai’s chest rose and fell with faint breath. Not dead. Not yet.
It all came rushing back to him at once: the Institute, his father’s secret. The Regulators drawing silver blood from Kai—taking his slumbering power, his very life force, from him.
You weren’t supposed to see that.
Baz knew that honeyed voice, the way it dripped with thinly veiled condescension. With power. He’d only gotten a glimpse of chestnut hair before he was knocked out, but it was plenty for him to recognize Keiran Dunhall Thornby.
His gaze flickered to the Regulator and the woman across the room. He wondered how Keiran was involved in whatever screwed-up experiment this was—and where he had gone to now.
“Spare me the lecture, Vivianne,” the Regulator was saying. “Are you going to help me clean this mess or not?”
“Wiping their memory would be a lot easier if it were a waning moon,” the woman, Vivianne, bemoaned. “Calling on that much power through bloodletting is going to deplete me entirely.”
“Trust me, that won’t be a problem for much longer.”