Kai slid Baz an irritated look. Oh, he was enjoying this—sulking in the corner waiting to prove Kai wrong, seeing this ridiculous, risky plan fall apart. Every line of Baz’s body spelled outtold you so. And he was right. No Dreamer would ever risk their life to help the likes of him. The only one he could think of was gone. He was on his own.
But there was one other thing they hadn’t tried.
Kai looked at Baz, recalling the way he’d so easily pulled at the threads of time surrounding the door, when the Hourglass had nearly been torn down by falling debris. Baz had reversed time so that the crack running down its middle would be fixed. And if he’d been able to dothat, who was to say he couldn’t also turn back time on the door’s lock, wind it back so that it unlocked as it had for Emory?
“You could do it,” Kai said quietly, fearing the words might be too big. “You’re strong enough to do it.”
Though neither of them had ever broached the subject, he knew Baz had thought of it. He seemed to consider it now, inching evercloser to the door, as if he too felt its odd, gravitational pull. But Baz pulled back, shaking his head.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t, or don’t want to?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you care more about protecting this damn door than helping me out. You don’twantme to open it. Not if it might prevent Emory and Romie from coming back.”
From the way Baz averted his gaze, it was clear Kai was right.
It was like Baz had taken it upon himself to become the guardian of the door. A safeguard against those who might try to breach it, a sentinel awaiting Emory and Romie’s homecoming—if they were even still alive. Baz didn’t want to try reversing time on the door for fear of slipping up, affecting the door’s power in a way that might mean Emory and Romie could never return.
“You won’t even consider trying, will you?”
Baz readjusted his glasses, palmed the back of his neck. He was nervous. “How is going through the Hourglass going to help you with your magic anyway? It might just make everything worse—both for you and them.”
Kai’s gaze slid to Baz’s neck. He could practically see the imprints his fingers had left there. Shame roiled in his stomach. What happened at the lighthouse wasexactlywhy he needed to figure things out—why he’d come back to Aldryn at all. “I can’t keep hurting those around me.”
“And I can’t risklosingyou,” Baz cried out. “Not again.”
The admission echoed in the silence. Something charged passed between them. It was the kind of rare moment where Kai dared to hope. Where he imagined Baz finally reaching for the bruised, broken heart laid out in offering before him.
But Baz looked away, fighting a flush creeping up his neck. As if the moment were too much for him. “We should get out of here.Get some sleep. Jae will be here first thing in the morning to come fetch you. They’ll make sure no one sees you heading back to the lighthouse.”
“You really want me to go?”
“I want you to be safe. And with the Quadri starting tomorrow, this place won’t be safe at all.”
Kai didn’t want to argue. He felt empty, hollow at the thought of leaving again. Of being at that lighthouse again, cut off from the world he knew and those he loved.
He’d managed to get a message across to his parents a few weeks back, letting them know he was safe. But they couldn’t risk further contact; he didn’t want to lead the Regulators to them. And anyway, it wasn’t his parents he missed. That wasn’t to say he didn’t love them—he did—but he was used to spending time away from them. Their business meant they hadn’t been a concrete part of his life for some time now, and he’d grown used to it.
Baz, on the other hand, had become a constant. A point of reference he could turn to, always. But as Baz walked away—from Kai, from the Hourglass—Kai felt for the first time like things might never be the same between them. Like maybe he’d messed it all up, and nothing could fix this.
He’d never been so scared to lose something in his life.
Kai did not wish to dream that night.
He knew what his own nightmares would show him. What Baz’s would too. And so he sought something different. The sort of nightmare that would hold no true fear for him, that could not hurt him, because it was nothisor anyone else’s that he cared about.
He delayed sleep for as long as he could, sitting alone in the illusioned fields of Obscura Hall, with a night sky full of stars above him. He didn’t dare fall asleep in the commons, where Baz would be susceptible to whatever horror he might conjure. Where Kai’shands might find themselves around his neck again, unable to tell where nightmare ended and reality began.
Sleep came inevitably. Kai drifted through darkness and stars, doing everything in his power to avoid the pull of Baz’s nightmares, the pull of Dovermere, the pull of his own fears.
He felt a different sort of pull then. The hollow void of a familiar type of nightmare. There was nothing to it but oppressive silence and bleak despair. An infinite, empty sort of darkness.
Kai knew instantly that he’d slipped into the slumber of an Eclipse-born who’d been branded with the Unhallowed Seal. It was just as terrifying as he remembered, especially now that he knew exactly how it felt to have one’s magic snuffed out by the brand. His own hollow dreaming when he’d been at the Institute had been unbearable.
Fury surged inside him, and he wanted nothing more than to tear the Unhallowed Seal off of this Eclipse-born’s hand, to rid them of this unspeakable burden and restore their magic to them. Magic waslife, and to take it away in such a cruel way was as good as a death sentence.
