Then a pair of hands catch my wrists.
Strong, rough, older hands.
Not my brother’s.
I squint, trying to see past the lapidary sheets of rain. The figure hovering over me on the cliff is my father.
“I’ve got you, kid! I won’t let you go.”
“Sapphire! Wake up!”
I can hear Niklaus coughing up a lung beside me. I try to reach for him, but my hands are bound around something, elongated behind my back. My eyes peel open, sticky and dry. The storm wasn’t just in my dream. We’re outside. Voices are scattered a few yards away. Niklaus is hyperventilating. Thrashing.
I turn my head to see him tied to a pike. As am I. Piles of wood at our feet.
Wait…
“Niklaus,” I croak. Sand, debris, and phlegm line and web across my throat. “What’s—happening?”
“Dellilian was right!” he coughs. We choke on the swamp of rain firing down at us.
Not too far from our posts, a stage stands in front of uniform rows of people. Rags and shreds of wool clothing. A dismal display of captives being forced to watch an appalling event. A gallows without rope.
I try to travel, to call upon the Nightlung, to dip my hands into its vast, fulminate energy.
But I stumble upon the same obstacle I was in when Meridei weakened me with electroconvulsive treatments and starvation. That river of power that usually floods my senses is now parched and dead.
“Dellilian!” I gasp against the diseases killing us. “Help—us.”
“Sapphire, to your right.” Niklaus cranks his head to point with his eyes past me.
And I refuse to accept what I see through my feverish gaze. Dellilian is caged, bound, muzzled, and unconscious. That is the only details I let myself linger on.
I search the area frantically, trying to pinpoint the source of our capture.
It’s not the ropes around my wrists and midsection.
It’s not the guards.
It’shim.
Vrath stands oddly on a bird’s nest above the stage, watching the scene below with detached curiosity. A short tower: a watch post with splintered beams for those who try to flee.
Where the fuck are we?!
“It’s okay. We can—we can get out of this,” I tell Niklaus, fighting a strained, raspy voice.
I assess what’s crippling us so outrageously. Vrath stares down at us without moving, inspecting our current state before being burned at the stake like insects being pinned behind glass. A psychotic mathematician of time. His coal pinstripes, bowler hat, and pocket watch set him apart from the many Vexamen officials and keepers down on the ground.
And in his twiggy hand lies the branch of that tree Dellilian told us about. The frequencies soaring off its crooked stem is a quiet malfunction of pure evil.
A plague encased in a wooden rod.
And Vrath sets its eyes on us.
“Sapphire!” Niklaus roars over the enraged symphony and treacherous winds. “My dad!”
I rip my eyes away from Vrath and look to the stage.
