* * *
She dreams of the sea.
Great waves wrap around all the people in her life, pulling them under one by one until Emory is the only one left, alone and adrift at sea. And she is the sea, she realizes, or at the very least the one who commands it, dragging those around her to their watery ends.
Suddenly Romie is there in a sea of a different making. Stars swirl around her, reflected in her eyes. They form a corona atop her head, a crown of stars for the one who rules this realm of dreams.
“I’m going now, Em,” says Romie, her voice crystal clear. “There’s no one here but me anymore, so I’m following the song to wherever it leads.”
“You can’t. What if it leads to the Deep?”
The stars cast Romie in a queenly glow. “Only one way to find out.”
“It’ll kill you. The epilogue—you need a key.”
“The epilogue’s not what we thought. Not a key, exactly, but… It’s like in the book: The travelers never needed a key. They were the key, each one of them a piece of the whole. I hear their song calling me forward. The pull of Dovermere, of other worlds. It’s what I was meant for, I think. To find the others beyond the door.”
“Please don’t leave me again. Let me find a way to bring you home.”
“I love you, Em. But I have to go.”
“No,” Emory says. “Wait,” she begs.
But already another wave comes crashing in. It coils around Romie and draws her toward a deeper sort of darkness. “Tell Kai I left it for him to find.”
Romie disappears, and then Emory is truly alone.
* * *
Emory’s eyes fluttered open, and for a panicked moment she didn’t know where she was. The sight of Keiran’s face dappled in the morning light anchored her. She felt split in half, with her body here in his bed, limbs tangled with his, while her mind was still in that dream, the sound of waves growing fainter in her ears.
Keiran cracked an eye open and smiled sleepily at her. “Morning, Ains.”
Emory sat up, hair spilling over her bare shoulders. Grim determination sang in her blood as she reached for her clothes.
Keiran’s hand snaked around her torso. “Come back to bed.”
He pressed a kiss to her spine, and she wanted so badly to stay here and relive what they’d done last night time and again, but all she could see was Romie being dragged farther off to sea. The same way she’d described Travers and Lia disappearing.
I love you, Em. But I have to go.
It didn’t matter that Emory’s dreaming self had begged Romie not to go; Romie wouldn’t listen. She would do as Romie always did, following whatever held her fancy without thinking of the consequences or who she might hurt in the process.
Emory had to tell Baz.
She pulled on her sweater and felt her resolve slip. Could she truly put him through this again? Half-formed hopes and theories and reckless plans that ended up hurting those around her, him most of all.
Everything you touch crumbles to dust.
No. This was her burden to bear now. Her wrong to right.
She turned to Keiran. “We have to go to Dovermere. Right now.”
He froze, his hand still on her waist. “We’re not ready.”
“Romie’s trying to leave that in-between space, and I can’t let her.” She told him of the dream. “If all we need to open the door is a ritual with the five houses like we did last spring, then we can open it again. Today. I don’t care that we don’t have the epilogue or know what’s needed to survive crossing into the Deep. If I don’t stop Romie, she’s going to die just like Travers and Lia.”
Keiran frowned in thought. “What did Romie say about the key, exactly?”
“Something about the book characters never needing a key to travel through worlds because they are the key.”
“That’s it,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “We don’t need the epilogue at all. We have you.”
“Me?”
“Think about it. The door demands payment both to go in and out. The ritual around the Hourglass—an offering of blood, of one’s mortal life, to enter the world of the dead. And to reenter the world of the living, an offering of magic. A piece of one’s soul.”
A Healer withering to bones, a Wordsmith robbed of a voice.
“For all we know, the door can only open from one side,” Keiran continued. “This side. It didn’t open until you touched the Hourglass last spring. And Travers and Lia couldn’t escape their purgatory until you were near Dovermere. What if the door is keyed to your blood? Maybe it doesn’t need blood from the five houses to open, only yours. A Tidecaller who holds all the moon’s phases in her veins.”
“No. I—”
“You bled on the Hourglass during the initiation ritual. You cut yourself walking along the beach the night of the bonfires, right before Travers appeared, remember? And didn’t you tell me you were in the water when you found Lia, too?”
The blood leeched from Emory’s face. A new moon for Travers, a waxing gibbous for Lia. She’d stood near Dovermere on both those nights, blood pearling on her feet as she waded through the shallows toward it. Toward a door that called to her, and her to it.
Emory, Emory.
I hear their song calling me forward. The pull of Dovermere, of other worlds.
The same pull Emory felt.
Her thoughts scrambled to make sense of it. Romie had said she wasn’t able to follow Travers or Lia when they heard that voice calling them home. Her voice. Her Tidecaller blood. If their moon phase had anything to do with their being able to return to the world of the living, it stood to reason that Romie couldn’t follow them, because it wasn’t her time. Wasn’t her tide.
And Jordyn… Jordyn had become something else when he’d crossed back over. Something other, not quite living or dead. Maybe as an umbra, the moon had no consequence on him anymore.
Emory’s blood had called them all home, and in doing so, she had doomed each one of them, sealed their fates.
“With that rare eclipse in your blood,” Keiran said, “I think you’ll be able to travel to the Deep and back unscathed. It’ll protect you. It’s just as Romie said: the key was never the missing epilogue, nor any physical object at all. It’s you, Ains. You’re the key.”
Emory’s heart thudded painfully. If Romie had indeed found a way out of the purgatory she’d described—if she believed she was the key, able to travel through worlds unscathed even though she wasn’t a Tidecaller—Emory feared she would be lost for good.
“We need to do the ritual, Keiran. I can’t let Romie meet the same fate the rest of them did.” Guiltily, she thought of the last time she’d gotten too hasty—the near Collapsing she had yet to tell Keiran about. But this might be her last chance to save her friend. She wouldn’t wait around and gamble with Romie’s life. “Please, I have to at least try.”
She braced for him to react the same way Baz had. To tell her how senseless and dangerous this was.
But Keiran drew himself up and put on his clothes. “Round up the others,” he said. “Tell them to meet us in the Treasury.”
“Where are you going?”