No, the real violence was how his father had to sacrifice his own magic and mind and life to keep the truth of that accident a secret. To save Baz from the consequences of it.
The real violence was the fact that they lived in a world where people like Keiran and the Regulators wanted to see Eclipse-born Collapse, all so they could use their raw magic for their own gain.
The real violence, Baz thought, was how he’d been so conditioned to fear this supposedly corrupt magic in his veins, he’d never learned how to live without the crushing weight of it, that all-consuming fear. All his life, he believed he wasn’t allowed to dream as his sister did. He never dared to want more than he had, to step past the careful lines he’d drawn around himself.
But it was an accident. It was a weight he’d carried until now and one he would shoulder for the rest of his life. Yet if he learned to breathe around this fear, to make peace with what he’d done… it might not feel quite as heavy a burden.
Blood and foam gathered around Keiran in the water. He looked oddly young. Innocent, even as he lay dying. For a moment, Baz thought he might be able to turn back time, make it so that none of this had ever happened. He would have never Collapsed, and Keiran’s parents would still be alive, and both Romie and Emory might still be here because Keiran would have never sought revenge, would never have had to live with this ache in his chest where Baz had unwittingly torn out a piece of his heart.
But then Jae would be rotting away at the Institute. The truth about Collapsings would be silenced with them. Eclipse-born would keep living in fear of their own power as people like Keiran and his parents inevitably found ways to use their magic for themselves.
No. There was still a line Baz wouldn’t cross. He might have Collapsed and expanded his limits, but surely he was not limitless. He couldn’t disrupt the fabric of life like that, couldn’t use his magic to fix everything that had ever gone wrong for everyone in the world, no matter how badly he wished to.
This was his doing. Now he needed to live with the consequences.
“I’m so sorry,” Baz whispered.
Keiran rasped one last breath and died.
41 EMORY
EMORY’S EYES SHOT OPEN. SHE brought her hands up—unmarred despite the white-hot star she’d held—and found no silver veins running along her skin, nothing to indicate she’d suffered her Collapsing. She should have Collapsed wielding that kind of magic. But other than being dazed and disoriented and completely depleted, she felt no different than before.
She pushed up onto her elbows. There was not an umbra in sight, and where the rift had been, there now was a silver door closed tightly shut.
“Ro?”
Romie lay beside her, face pale and clammy, lips cast in a bluish tint, and though her eyes were open, they stared ahead without any sort of awareness.
Terror seized Emory. “Romie.”
At last, Romie blinked. “I can’t feel my hands,” she said faintly.
Her hands curled upward in a charred mess, burned right down to the bone. It made no sense—Dreamers were used to touching stars all the time to enter dreams, and as far as Emory knew, they never got burnt. But maybe this physical version of the sleepscape didn’t follow the same rules as its slumbering equivalent. Maybe stars weren’t dreams at all here, but something else.
“I can’t feel anything,” Romie breathed weakly. Her eyes fluttered shut.
“Ro.” Emory bit back a sob as she reached for her, trying to assess the burns through her own bone-deep exhaustion. “Stay with me, all right?”
Her eyes found the silver door again. She had to get Romie through it, bring her to a Healer. Her own magic was all but spent; she knew if she pushed further into her depleted reservoir, she would Collapse. Besides, this type of injury was far beyond her skill. Romie needed a proper Healer, someone who excelled at this magic.
As Emory drew herself painfully to her feet, Romie whispered a pleading Don’t leave me.
It broke something in Emory. “I’m not—I won’t. I’ll be right over here.” She took a step toward the door. “Just keep talking, all right? Tell me why you came back, why you didn’t go through the door you found.”
“I almost did,” Romie mumbled. “I wanted to. I was certain it was my destiny. Then I thought about everything I did to get here, and I wasn’t so sure anymore.”
The secrets, the deaths. Emory had been thinking the same about her own poor decisions, but hearing Romie talk this way was startling; Romie never second-guessed herself on anything.
“I’m sorry, Em. Everything’s gone to shit because of me, and now we’re going to die in here, aren’t we?”
“No,” Emory said fiercely. “I’m going to get us out of here, Ro.”
Rivulets of water trickled down the door’s surface. A crack ran down the middle, starting from one corner and ending in the place where a knob should have been.
Emory pushed at it and pulled and clawed, but the door did not budge.
The way back out was shut.
The starlit path felt unsteady under her feet. The door back to Baz was broken, maybe forever shut, and the space around her had never seemed so vast and fathomless.
The space between worlds, and she and Romie alone in it.
A distant, foreboding shriek made the hairs on her neck rise. She remembered what Kai had said, about the umbrae being attracted to new magic—like the kind she’d used just now to heal the umbrae. To unmake them.
They couldn’t stay here.
Emory hurried back to Romie’s side, trying not to break down in panic.
“Romie—”
She was convulsing, eyes going to the back of her head, ravaged hands clutched rigidly against her chest.
“Romie!”
She was going into shock, her body contending with the burns in the worst possible way, organs at risk of damage. She needed a Healer—now.
Emory reached blindly for her Healing magic, whatever dregs of it remained, this power she’d resented all her life for how mediocre it made her feel. She gritted her teeth at the strain it caused her. Trying to pull any ounce of it up to the surface was like grasping at ash blowing away on a breeze: elusive and hopeless.
Healing had failed her with Travers and again with Lia, but this was Romie, her best friend, the one person who’d always seen her worth even when Emory herself could not. She refused to let it fail her now, determined to push past the point of total depletion to do this one thing.
Emory was a Tidecaller, with power more unique than she could have ever dreamed. She’d pushed her magic to reaches yet unknown, had turned umbrae into newborn stars, made plants bloom to new life, walked into dreams, but she would give it all up in this moment for the tiniest drop of healing.
Please.
There—less than a drop, the tiniest speck of magic. It burned through her, and Emory slumped to the ground, exhaustion making her limbs so heavy she thought she might faint.
“Ro?”
The convulsions stopped. Color returned to Romie’s face, and though her hands remained a mangled horror, tendons and tissue and bone stitched themselves together, enough that the burns weren’t so life-threatening anymore, enough that she gave Emory a wan smile and said, “Finally got to use those healing skills on a live subject, did you?”