Emory glanced at her watch. “We need to keep moving.”
She trudged on ahead. Her grim determination should have been reassuring, but it only widened the pit in his stomach. Time dripped, slipped, stood still, as they walked on in silence. Baz had an awareness of it he didn’t usually have, and it felt both deeply unsettling and oddly familiar to him.
This place was strange.
At last, they reached the Belly of the Beast. The cavern opened like a womb around them, dark even with their lanterns to illuminate it. Its jagged teeth cast shadows in every direction, and at the very center of the grotto, perched on a natural platform, stood what Emory had called the Hourglass: a towering formation made up of a conjoined stalactite and stalagmite that clung to each other by a mere thread, veins of silver running along its sides. It looked nothing like what he’d expect of a door to the Deep, if it even was one at all. The doors he’d read about were described as water holes close to shore, the remains of collapsed sea caves. But this cave still stood, and the Hourglass with it.
While Emory faltered at the sight, Baz went right up to it, marveling at the spiral etched on the stalagmite, which glowed a faint silver. The same Tides-damned spiral that was on her hand.
“This is where you all got those marks, isn’t it?” he asked.
Emory nodded. Slowly, she stepped onto the promontory beside him. Her hand hovered over the strangely striated rock, a frown knitting her brows together. She reached for the symbol, and a dread like he’d never felt before gripped Baz. He pulled her hand away before she could touch it.
“Don’t.”
She blinked at him incomprehensibly.
“Look what happened last time you touched it.” Four students dead, and four more disappeared. “Let’s just get this over with without touching anything, okay?”
Emory seemed to snap out of whatever pull the rock had on her and nodded. Baz took the syringe and sleeping drug out of his bag. Glanced at his watch. There were four hours left until high tide. He locked eyes with Emory, who’d pushed up her sleeve, waiting.
Baz hesitated. “Maybe we should just—”
“Baz, I swear, if you don’t jab that needle in right now—”
He stuck the needle into her arm, eliciting a hiss of surprise from her.
“There,” he said darkly as he pulled the needle out.
She wiped a thumb over the pinprick of blood on her arm. “Was that so hard?”
Baz bit back a retort. Emory pulled her sleeve down and stepped off the platform. She sat leaning against the rocky ledge, hands braced on the wet floor, readying for sleep to pull her under.
“You’ll keep an eye on the time?”
“Of course,” Baz promised as her eyes fluttered shut. If it got too late, he would pause time, wait for her to wake up. And hope it was enough.
Emory mumbled what sounded like a thank-you before slumber took her, and into the waiting arms of the sleepscape she fell.
* * *
Baz was going to be sick.
He paced in front of the Hourglass, eyes flitting back and forth between his watch and Emory’s sleeping figure. The silver hands on his watch moved to and fro, slow and fast. Here in this strange place, a minute could last an hour, and an hour could slip away to nothing in the space of a blink. Time made little sense, and the fear coating Baz’s mouth only grew thicker as he wondered if it would bend to him at all, or if it only answered to one master here. To whatever old magic ruled these depths.
It called to him, that magic. A susurration that grated against his senses, that set every part of him aflame with how strangely familiar it felt. How inviting.
Breathe in.
Hold.
Out.
He tried to resent Emory for convincing him to come. All his life, he’d lived in his perfect little safety bubble. Never reaching, never daring to dream outside the confines of his make-believe worlds and narrow existence contained to the library and Obscura Hall.
His skin still crawled at the thought of the magic he’d used last time there was a new moon, when he’d kept Emory’s magic from running rampant on the beach. And though a part of him remembered how good it had felt to use it, and every fiber in him knew he’d barely scratched the surface of the power he kept such a tight lid over, he didn’t want any of it. Had never dared to want it.
But he would have to now. And for Emory—for Romie, too—he could try. Maybe there was power in finally stepping over that carefully drawn line if it was for them.
Still, it did nothing to ease his nerves.
Baz looked at his watch. Ten more minutes, he told himself, and then he’d try to wake Emory, whether she’d found Romie or not. They were cutting it too close, and all this pacing around wasn’t helping him. His breathing exercises did nothing to appease him. He needed to do something.
The dark pull of the magic around him seemed to agree, trying to coax his power out.
Come play, it whispered.
Tentatively, Baz answered the call.
He extended the barest sliver of his power out to the Hourglass, gently probing as he tried to find the threads of time that might have seen it open once.
But this was not such a simple lock to pick.
So many threads wove through it. A great entanglement of them that he couldn’t begin to make sense of, much less know which one to tug on. Too many moving parts surrounded its inner workings, complicated clockwork that was out of Baz’s depth. It wasn’t as simple as turning the dial of a small object back in time, or even like what he’d done with Emory’s magic the night of the bonfires. It felt more complicated still than what he imagined pausing the threads of time for people might be.
But if he concentrated enough, if he reached for this one part, bigger than the others…
Emory mumbled in her sleep, and Baz’s concentration slipped, his magic going back to slumbering in his veins. He took a step toward her as she uttered what sounded like Romie’s name.
Then her mouth opened on a scream.
Baz’s heart was in his throat as he reached for her—and Emory’s eyes shot open.
She drew an unnatural breath, arms grappling for purchase as if fighting some invisible demon. Baz took her face in his hands. Her wide eyes settled on his.
She was awake, alive, out of the sleepscape—
And darkness had followed her into waking, he realized, as the stuff of nightmares erupted around them.
29 EMORY
EMORY OPENED THE DOOR TO the sleepscape and stepped onto that curved path lined with impossible stars. She immediately reached into her pocket, breathing a sigh of relief as her hand closed around the vial of salt water she’d brought. She poured it into her cupped hand and rested her marked wrist in the little makeshift pool.
The Selenic Mark glowed silver as it activated, and with it, Emory called out to Romie.
I want to speak to Romie Brysden.
She threw every ounce of magic into this place of dreams and nightmares, trying not to think of Baz in the Belly of the Beast, of the minutes trickling down like sand in an hourglass, each grain bringing them closer to the rising tide.
Something, at last, answered.
Emory, Emory.
A prickling on the back of her neck. She turned, scanning the darkness.
And there Romie stood, a little farther down the path.
Romie turned slowly toward her, looking just as she had the night of the initiation: soft brown curls framing her freckled face, clad in a simple collared shirt and corduroy pants that hugged her generous curves, so different from the plaid skirts and frilly tops she usually wore. More practical. Everything about her was the same as it had been last spring, down to the shadows under her eyes, which widened as they fell on Emory.