Baz tracked the shimmer of gold in the strand of hair she tucked behind her ear, images of that golden-hued era stark in his mind. He cleared his throat. “Right. So, the Collapsing.” He pointed to the book in front of him.
Emory leaned over it. “The eclipsing of one’s self,” she read.
They both stared at the horrifying sketch below those words, a young man screaming to the heavens, his face distorted in pain as he erupted in an incendiary blast of power. Silver veins bulged on his arms, his neck, his temples.
Baz tapped the illustration. “This is what happens when Eclipse-born aren’t careful. We slip into something wild and untamable, a state of power so vast it seeks to erase us entirely. Our magic acts as a sort of eclipse of its own then, burning bright and destructive and consuming us from the inside. Then it goes dark. Makes us… evil. It’s known as the Shadow’s curse. The only way to save us from that curse is for Regulators to brand us with the Unhallowed Seal that puts our magic to sleep.”
Emory gave him a sidelong glance. The words she spoke were soft, hesitant. “Like what they did to your dad?”
A tightness in his chest. Silver veins rippling in his memory. A blinding blast of power.
The key is taking carefully measured breaths.
“Yeah,” Baz said. “Like that.”
He could tell by the way she looked at him that she remembered it too, how it had been back then. The kindness she’d shown him while everyone else shunned him—at least for those first few days after the incident, before even she pulled away, no doubt realizing the other students were right to keep their distance. To fear his magic lest he Collapse.
“I heard another Eclipse student Collapsed over the summer,” Emory said slowly. “Were you two friends?”
Baz swallowed with difficulty, trying not to think of Kai’s sharp smile and midnight voice. Had they been friends? Their relationship could be chalked up to circumstance, two people forced to occupy the same space and confront all the ways in which they were different and alike. They were cognitive dissonance. Night and day. By all logic they shouldn’t have worked, yet they’d been something enough for Baz to miss him, to feel his absence every time he read in the commons or walked past Kai’s shuttered room or brewed too much coffee before remembering it was only him now.
They’d been something enough for him to be furious with Kai for what he’d done, to feel such crushing guilt that he hadn’t taken him seriously enough to try to stop him.
The last time Kai had slipped into Baz’s dreaming was right after Romie’s funeral. Something about sleeping in his childhood bed had made his recurring nightmare more unbearable than usual—until the Nightmare Weaver showed up, making the darkness ebb away. He’d sat beside Baz in the rubble of the printing press until the chaos around them calmed and Baz’s dreaming self could breathe easy again.
Are you that bored at Aldryn without me that you find me in sleep even here? Baz had asked.
Clearly you’re the one who can’t handle being away from me. The teasing in Kai’s tone hadn’t quite reached his eyes. Are you going to be all right?
I will. I have to be.
Just remember to breathe, Brysden. Don’t let the nightmare control you.
I know. Easier said than done.
Kai had drawn himself up, the darkness of Baz’s nightmare rippling behind him like a cloak. It’s over now. A hint of that sharp smile, though it lacked some of its usual mischief, weighted by an uncharacteristic sadness. Night, Brysden.
Baz hadn’t realized it then—that it had been Kai’s way of saying goodbye. The last moment they’d shared before he Collapsed.
“Yes, we were friends,” Baz said at last, even though friends sounded entirely too reductive.
Emory arched a brow at whatever she heard in his tone. He focused on the book in front of him, clearing his throat. “This is why knowing our limits is so important. Control is crucial, because our magic isn’t like the other lunar houses. It’s not exactly something you call on. It calls to you, and you have to learn how to resist that pull while at the same time succumbing to it just enough that the pressure doesn’t become too much.”
He flipped to the next page, where blood was shown dripping from a hand. “Bloodletting helps relieve some of that pressure, if needed. The other lunar houses use bloodletting to access their magic when it’s not their moon phase, essentially leeching from their power’s growth cycle so that when their lunar phase comes around again, the scope of their power depends on how often they tapped into it through bloodletting. But it’s different for us. Eclipse magic doesn’t go through this regeneration cycle. It’s just always there beneath the surface.”
One of the many reasons people loathed the Eclipse-born so much: they resented the fact they had to live with all these limitations on their magic—the phasal nature of it and how bloodletting, while practical, came at the price of weakening their magic once their moon phase came around—while the Eclipse-born did not.
“When we use bloodletting,” Baz continued, “it actually weakens our ties to our magic, lessening that pressure, at least for a little while. Using magic in small doses has the same effect.”
Emory glanced at her palms, brows furrowed slightly, as if she could see the power growing in her veins. There was a glimmer of a scar on her wrist, there and gone as she curled her hands into fists and set them in her lap.
Storm clouds gathered in the depths of her blue-gray eyes. “You keep saying us and our,” she said tightly, “but I’m not convinced I’m Eclipse-born at all. I mean… Yes, I felt the sort of pressure you’re describing this summer, and it did seem to lessen whenever I drew blood or used my healing magic. But all my life, bloodletting has worked the way it should for me, letting me call on my magic outside of the new moon like anyone else.”
“Then how would you explain it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a weird coincidence. Something about Dovermere warping my magic. Look what it did to Travers—I wouldn’t put it past it to be at the root of this, too.”
Baz shifted in his seat, pondering the possibility. The newspapers could spin it however they liked; he knew there was no way Travers’s death was natural. It was strange enough that he’d still been alive after all this time—though that might be attributed to his Healing abilities—but the way he died, combined with the sudden appearance of Emory’s impossible magic…
Maybe Dovermere did do something to them.
Baz reached for the note in his pocket, the paper worn completely smooth by now. Again, he thought of showing it to Emory. He wanted to believe what she’d told him in the greenhouse, about why she’d gone to Dovermere and what had happened there. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, that if she could make sense of Romie’s note, she’d give him a straight answer.
But after seeing her with Keiran yesterday… he had to wonder if she was hiding something. If she, like Romie, was part of something bigger, a larger piece of the puzzle he wasn’t being allowed to see.
He left the note in his pocket, feeling somewhat protective of it now, this last piece of Romie he had. Besides, he was meeting Jae Ahn tomorrow, and if anyone knew anything about the missing epilogue and might be able to shed some light on this, it was Jae.