“To get us some synths. If we’re going through this door, we need all the help we can get.” He stopped and looked at her with something she couldn’t quite place. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
Emory righted her spine, strengthened her voice. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Then we’re going back to Dovermere—at noon, once the tide is low.” An ardent glimmer lit Keiran’s eyes. “I don’t suppose it’ll have any consequence on us opening the door, but it is rather fitting, I think, that there should be a partial solar eclipse today.”
The words struck a deep resonance in her soul. It felt like an auspicious omen, and suddenly she believed with all her being that this would work.
She’d first opened the door as a Healer, under the new moon sky she thought had governed her. And now… now she’d do so again as a Tidecaller, under the proper sign.
Emory might never wear the sigil of House Eclipse, but she belonged to it all the same.
34 BAZ
BAZ FOUND HIMSELF AT THE institute again.
He had faced all his fears in the confines of those damned caves. Nightmares given form, wrapped in memories that hurt so much he didn’t remember ever holding them inside. And here he was, alive and whole. Still breathing despite it all.
He didn’t want to be afraid anymore. Not of this.
Vera was an all-too-willing accomplice. She accompanied him to the Institute once more, deactivating the wards again for him to slip in unnoticed while she waited outside this time, ready for their getaway. Baz made it to Theodore’s room and opened the door.
Bare and white and clinical. The small comforts of books, a knit blanket, the Brysdens caught in a framed sepia photograph, a memory trapped in amber.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.
His father turned to him slowly, blank smile at the ready, no doubt expecting to see anyone else but him standing at his door. His smile faltered as he took Baz in, made sense of the person before him.
In. Hold. Out.
“Hi, Dad.”
A flicker of recognition, an ember of hope sparking behind his eyes.
“Basil?” his father croaked. “Baz. It’s really you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Baz stood awkwardly by the door. The last time he’d been alone with his father was just before that fateful day at the printing press. He’d visited him once at the Institute after that with his mother and sister, and that was it.
He looked at his father’s left hand. The Eclipse sigil was broken by the Unhallowed Seal, stark and slightly ridged against his skin. A singular U. Unhallowed. Unfit. Unbalanced. Unworthy. The sight of it still jarring after all these years.
Theodore was the first to speak. “I thought I saw you the other day. Must be my mind’s playing tricks on me.”
Baz shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit you sooner. I couldn’t…”
“It’s all right, son. It’s all right.”
You’ll be all right. Everything will be all right.
Baz adjusted his glasses. Now that he was here, he didn’t know what to say. His father eyed Baz’s Eclipse tattoo. He nodded, as if picking up the thread of a conversation they’d been having.
“It suits you. Aldryn, is it?”
Baz palmed the back of his neck, self-conscious about his unmarred sunflower in eclipse. “Yeah. I’m at Aldryn College.”
His father’s lips pressed into a firm line. “They brought another Aldryn student here. I warned him about it, told him how it starts. How they take it from us, then use it for themselves.”
The words made little sense. Theodore threw a glance at the door behind Baz, and when he spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. “You’ve been able to control it?”
Baz frowned. “What?”
“Your magic.”
“Of course.”
A nod. “That’s good. Very good. They can never know.”
Baz’s confusion deepened. “Know what?”
A sly smile from his father. “Precisely. The truth was buried in the rubble that day. No one will find out. Just you, me, and Jae.”
A tingling sensation started at Baz’s fingertips. His pulse beat quicker.
“Dad. What truth?”
His father blinked incomprehensibly at him before glancing at the door again. He lowered his voice. “Your Collapsing, of course.”
Baz’s heart broke. So this was what all these years in the Institute had done to Theodore Brysden: delusions and madness. “I’m not the one who Collapsed, Dad.” I’m not the one who killed those people. “That’s why you’re here. In this place.”
The corners of Theodore’s mouth pulled down. He shook his head, eyes full of sorrow. “No, son. That’s not why. I’m here to protect you. Our little secret, remember?”
Silver veins and rubble and blood—that’s what Baz remembered, what had been plaguing his nightmares since the day it had happened. It was all too vivid, especially now, after reliving the memory through the umbra’s cold, nightmarish pull.
Baz found that U on his father’s hand again, the scarred lines marring the once-delicate sunflower. He remembered clinging to that hand that day as his father’s arms wrapped around him, protecting him from the crumbling building and the blast of uncontrollable power that sought to take it down.
“I didn’t Collapse, Dad,” Baz said gently, hoping his father would see sense. “My blood doesn’t run silver, for one thing, and—”
“Well, of course it didn’t stay silver,” Theodore interrupted with a note of exasperation. “The blood only stays silver for a day or so after Collapsing before it settles back to red. It’s why we thought we could hide the truth, make it seem like I was the one who Collapsed instead of you. So that you’d escape the seal and stand a fighting chance at a normal life. If Jae could do it, so could you.”
The floor pitched beneath Baz’s feet as he slowly made sense of what his father was insinuating. “If Jae could do what, exactly?”
“Well, hide their Collapsing, of course.” Theodore’s brows scrunched up in confusion. “Did Jae not tell you any of this? They’ve been Collapsed for years.”
It couldn’t be true—surely Theodore wasn’t remembering it right, surely this place had addled his brain—yet he seemed so completely lucid and sure of himself in this moment, it made doubt bloom in Baz’s stomach. Was that why those people had been at the printing press that day, threatening to bring Jae into the Institute? Because they’d found out Jae had Collapsed and had somehow escaped the Unhallowed Seal?
“Jae assured me they would keep an eye on you,” Theodore continued. “That you’d be able to control it, just like they always did.”
Baz shook his head against the impossibility of it all. “Why hasn’t the curse gotten to Jae, then?”
“Think, Basil. The Shadow’s curse isn’t real, at least not the way they want us to believe. The Collapsing doesn’t plunge us into eternal darkness. It’s a threshold, and on the other side of it is this raw, undiluted power.”
A single wave, an entire ocean, the world itself. Nothing is out of your reach.