“She’ll be fine,” Kai said. There was an almost pained note to his voice, a flash of something Baz couldn’t understand in his expression before it yielded to steely resolve. “But we’re running out of time.”
He was right. Emory was gone and Baz couldn’t follow, and they needed to get out of here.
Through unshed tears, Baz glanced at his wristwatch. The hands tremored slightly, yearning to inch forward. He felt the strain against his magic, the consciousness of the students frozen around him, the weight of the tide trying to break free at his back, an entire ocean battering against the time-still wave at the mouth of the cave.
With a breath, he released the students around the Hourglass from time’s hold, careful to keep the halted tide under his magic’s influence. Five upperclassmen Baz recognized staggered into motion, looking around in confusion. A sixth one—hair as red as the blood pooling around her—did not rise.
Someone uttered a scream that turned into a wrenching sob. Virgil Dade sloshed through the shallow water and bent over the lifeless body of Lizaveta Orlov.
“What the fuck happened?” he asked, blinking between Baz and Kai. Tears ran down his face. “What did you Shadow-cursed Eclipse-born do?”
Kai glowered at him. “That wasn’t us. We’re the ones who saved your asses.”
“Then who killed her?”
“It was Keiran,” Baz said miserably. Then, “Emory said he was going to sacrifice all of you to the Tides.”
Disbelief met his statement.
“They went through the door, didn’t they?”
This from Nisha Zenara, whose sorrowful eyes swept over the door to meet his. Baz nodded in answer. A muscle feathered in Nisha’s jaw. She was quite the Dreamer, she had said of his sister that day in the Vault. He wondered if she, too, felt this urge to go through the door, if she hoped Romie might be waiting on the other side.
“We don’t have time for this,” Kai urged. “We need to—”
Baz heard it before the widening of Kai’s eyes gave it away: a low rumbling sound he mistook for the tide. But it wasn’t coming from the right direction; not from the sea but from the gaping darkness beyond the Hourglass.
“Look out!”
Kai knocked Baz to the floor just as a searing pain singed his back. Darkness and light erupted from the door, and a horde of umbrae burst past the threshold.
Baz’s hold on his magic slipped, and time resumed its fateful ticking, unleashing the tide. It was all too eager to rush in past the barrier he had erected, the full might of the sea pushing into the cave. Baz flung his magic out again despite the pain, desperately trying to stop the tidal wave surging in as he buckled under the force of it.
At his side, Kai sought to do the same with the nightmares spilling into the cave from the open door. Screams echoed around them as the umbrae found fear-ridden victims to leech from. The Belly of the Beast shook at the impact of these two opposing forces seeking to fill it. Rock and dust fell from the ceiling, and a piece of jagged stone fell right onto the Hourglass. A crack ran down its middle, and in the rupturing sound that thundered around them, the door disappeared, darkness and silver-laced tendrils of water receding, leaving only the precarious column of rock in its wake, split down the very middle.
“No!” Baz yelled.
He felt the magic of the door slipping, knew if the Hourglass fell, it would be destroyed—and Emory and Romie would be lost forever behind it. But the sea pushed against his magic and the umbrae feasted on the souls around them, and Kai tried to command them to stop as he had earlier, but there had only been two umbrae then, not an army of them. It was chaos, and all Baz could do was hold on to the threads of time that made the tide batter against an invisible wall, chipping slowly away at his resolve.
Kai swore and stood tall. He was the Nightmare Weaver again, more fearsome than fear itself. The umbrae turned their depthless eyes on him. They flocked to him like he was a prince of darkness who commanded them. They enveloped him until Baz could no longer see him beneath, only this cloak of black velvet and claws, and he knew then that this was it. This was what would put an end to his friend. Not the Collapsing, not the magic the Regulators had tried to wrest from him, but this. The demons he had walked beside all his life.
The nightmares pulled in closer, a viselike grip around their weaver. But those were Kai’s eyes Baz could make out in their midst, and that was a laugh like a midnight promise he heard vibrating against the walls.
The shadows seeped into Kai. He absorbed the nightmares until there was just him standing there, shadows dancing on his skin. Kai opened his eyes, blew out a breath. The shadows dissipated, his skin returning to its normal hue, his eyes to their normal blackness, and in the stillness, the Nightmare Weaver grinned at Baz as if to say, This is what we can do now. What they tried to take from us.
Power that felt limitless.
The crack on the Hourglass nearly cleaved the rock in two, but for now, it held.
Someone choked and sputtered. Baz looked down to see Keiran’s battered form at the foot of the dais, half-submerged in a pool of blood and water and foam. His hands were clasped over his chest, where the umbrae had torn a hole in his middle.
Baz knelt at his side. He gripped Keiran’s wet, bloodied shirt. “Where’s Emory? Is she alive?”
Keiran laughed, white teeth a bloody flash in the dark. “With that door gone, she might as well be dead.” He coughed up blood, eyes staring around him wildly until they focused on Baz. His throat worked as he fought to get the words out. “I see you got out of the Institute with your magic intact.”
“Why did you do this?”
“You know why.” Keiran laughed again, the sound drawing another bloody cough from him. His hands sought purchase on Baz’s arm, his breath coming in an ugly rasp. “I only ever wanted justice for them. All of it was for them.”
Baz knew he meant his parents. He didn’t think he owed anything to Keiran, not after what he had done to Kai and Emory, but this was his one chance to come clean. He swallowed past the tightness in his chest. “The accident at the printing press… It was me. I’m the one who Collapsed and—and killed your parents.”
Keiran’s grip on Baz’s arm loosened. He looked at him beneath wet lashes, the light behind his eyes already dimming. “How fitting I should die here with you, then.”
Guilt sought to pull Baz under.
Those deaths were on his hands, not his father’s. The truth buried in the rubble, in the deepest recesses of Baz’s mind because of how horrible it was, how inconceivable.
What had Kai once said to him, about people suppressing their fears and memories and nightmares and childhood wounds until they were no longer aware of them?
It’s always the quietest minds that hide the worst sort of violence.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Maybe the real violence wasn’t the one Baz had committed that day. That had been an accident, a slip of his magic as he tried to defend Jae, to keep them from being hurt by the very people who ended up getting killed in the blast. There was no excusing what he’d done, but he’d acted out of fear, trying to save someone who was dear to him with magic he’d barely started to understand, let alone control.