He had no regrets. They were about to be separated by an entire world, their paths diverging, and maybe that was okay, because at least he wouldn’t have to wonder what might have been. He could turn the page and be grateful for what they’d shared together. And if they happened to find each other again—when they found each other again, because she had to come back—well. It was like an epilogue yet to be written, and whatever awaited them, Baz would be content to have had this story with her at least.
Emory pulled away slightly to look at him. The tears staining her face reminded Baz of the taste of salt on her lips, and he wanted so badly to pull her mouth to his one last time to ingrain it in his mind forever. But he couldn’t. If he did, he’d never let her go. Instead he let the space between them fill with words left unsaid that would forever remain in this place lost to time. And maybe that was okay too.
Emory kissed his cheek. A fleeting thing, the barest brush of lips. Like she, too, couldn’t stand much else without breaking her resolve.
It felt like goodbye.
As she pulled away one last time, her gaze went to Kai, who quickly looked away, blinking back some emotion Baz couldn’t figure out.
Then she turned her back on them both.
She took a step toward that darkness at the center of the Hourglass. Her name nearly tore from him again, fear like he’d never known threatening to choke him. But he bit back the sound, swallowed the fear. Emory’s head tilted ever so slightly toward him, as if she’d heard him anyway and she, too, was gripped with a sudden dread, the same painful thought Baz had, that this was the last time they would ever see each other.
Her feet crossed the threshold before their eyes could meet. The darkness reached for her, drawing her in.
She disappeared like a star winking out of existence.
And out of the corner of his eye, something else darted past. Keiran, no longer lying unconscious on the floor, but scrambling after Emory through the door. Kai shouted something. Baz sent his magic flying, willing time to stop him, but he was a second too late and the darkness was quicker, a stranger magic than his own, and it pulled Keiran through the door.
39 EMORY
EMORY TUMBLED THROUGH DARKNESS, AND it was like free-falling into death’s open arms, depthless, abysmal, until all at once it stopped, and here she stood on a starlit path that was all too familiar, in a silence she could choke on.
It was the sleepscape but not. The same darkness, the same swirling stars and curving path. But it felt… clearer, somehow; realer than it had when she’d found Romie in it just yesterday. As if that had only been an illusion, like the sky in Obscura Hall, and this was the real thing at last. Gone was the feeling of being underwater. She felt grounded.
Stay on the path, dreamling, Kai had cautioned, the words at once unsettling and oddly comforting.
Emory took a careful step toward the edge of that star-lined path and frowned as water sloshed beneath her feet. It flowed along the path, trickling down the sides of it into the abyss. She peered into the black velvet tapestry beyond the stars. There was a rift in the blackness, she noticed: the still-open doorway that bled into the caves she’d just left. The water was coming from the other side of it, from the Belly of the Beast visible through the rift. She could just make out the indistinct shapes within, but it was like looking through the surface of rippling water, trying to discern the shifting bottom. She wanted to reach for it, but the words Kai had parted with stopped her, made her pull back.
She needed to stay on the path and find Romie—if she was still here at all.
Emory glanced at her wrist, at the curved spiral glowing silver on her skin. Romie, she called through her silver mark, through the dark, through every bit of magic she had inside her.
Alone, she waited for the answer to come and the suffocating quiet to break. It didn’t—and with a pang of fresh grief, Emory realized Romie might truly be gone.
Might truly be dead.
The only sound came from behind. Emory whirled in time to see Keiran appear on the path, beaten and bloodied and bruised, but still standing, if a little askew. His widening eyes took in the impossible darkness around them. A wheezing laugh blew past his split lips.
“So this is it,” he mused. “The purgatory that leads to the Deep.”
“It’s the sleepscape,” Emory said breathlessly.
Keiran pressed a hand to his side, wincing. “You said Romie couldn’t pull herself out of this place like she usually could. That this couldn’t be the sleepscape.”
But everything was starting to make sense in Emory’s mind. Why she’d been able to commune with Romie. Why Romie had survived this place longer than Travers and Lia and Jordyn had. Because as a Dreamer, she was used to inhabiting such liminal spaces.
And what was the sleepscape but a place between worlds? The space between waking and dreaming, living and dead. This world and the next.
Whatever purgatory this must be…
Romie and Travers and Lia and Jordyn had all been stuck in this nether region, lost in transit among the stars as they waited for the next train to arrive—for Emory to unlock the door again and pull them out.
This was the sleepscape. Not something like it, not the recreation of it that Dreamers visited in their sleep, but the real thing. A world of its own. Romie hadn’t been able to escape it because she hadn’t stepped into it like she normally did—hadn’t accessed it through sleep at all. It was her body that had gone through the door that led her here. A physical door into a physical world made of dreams. And if both Romie’s body and her subconscious were stuck here, in between the worlds of the living and the dead, then of course she couldn’t wake, couldn’t escape. There was nowhere to escape to, no body for her subconscious to flutter back to. She couldn’t leave this world at all, not without paying in magic and blood as the others had.
Not without a key.
Romie, Emory called again, a desperate plea.
Keiran eyed her Selenic Mark. “Do you sense her presence?” he asked. “Is she here to answer your call?”
His mouth pulled down when she didn’t answer. “I’m sorry, Ains. I really am.” He limped toward her, his marked hand reaching for her. “Come with me. There’s nothing left for us now but to find the Tides.”
Emory glanced at the rift in the darkness between stars. She could have sworn it was shrinking, the door closing behind them.
“How did you figure out what my blood could do?” she asked Keiran. “All this time, getting close to me… Was it really all to get me here? To use me for your own gain?”
Keiran looked around him warily.
“There’s nothing here but you and me and the dark,” Emory said. “The least you can do is to tell me the truth—for once.”
His eyes found hers, bruises already blooming on his face from Kai’s pounding. “I suspected there was something more to you last spring. When I saw what happened in the Belly of the Beast.” He nodded at her frown. “I was there, Ains. I wasn’t waiting for the others on the beach. I was in the caves with them.”
It was impossible; there had only been the nine of them in the caves—Emory and the eight initiates. Keiran couldn’t have been there too. She would have seen him.
He held his tattooed hand up to his face, dried blood marring the Full Moon sigil. “I told you once how I was never satisfied with being a Lightkeeper. How I always thought it was a terribly worthless tidal alignment… until I realized what bending light could be.”