But as Romie locked eyes with Emory, she knew exactly what she, too, was thinking.
The rib cage that wraps around the heart of the world…
The door required a rib bone.
Romie wanted to laugh at how outrageous the idea sounded. How on earth were they supposed to take a rib bone—oranybone—out of Aspen without hurting her? Romie was fairly certain Emory’s healing magic would not go so far as to regenerate a bone. But if this was what was needed to open the door…
They all stared at each other in petrified silence.
“There you are.”
The three of them spun at the haunting voice that rose behind them, the lantern shattering at their feet as one of them knocked it over—and stared at a face that was a nightmare itself.
21BAZ
BAZ STOOD FROZEN WITH FEARas Kai thrashed around, sputtering as if something were choking him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nisha asked in a panic.
It looked as though Kai was fighting an invisible demon, and Baz realized that might very well be the case. They were in the sleepscape, after all—the realm of dreams and nightmares. The same place Kai had been having a hard time distinguishing from reality, never knowing what was fabricated fear encountered in sleep and what was tangible out in the real world.
But this… Whatever unseen horror Kai was fighting against, there was no denying that his suffering was real.
Baz snapped out of it, recalling another time he’d seen someone he cared about falling prey to inexplicable magic. And just as he’d wound back time on the budding Tidecaller abilities Emory had unleashed the night Travers washed ashore, he pulled back the threads around Kai now, desperate to wind back time to before this nightmare started.
In the Belly of the Beast, it had been easy to call on his magic to open the door. As soon as he’d stepped close to the Hourglass, he’d felt the magic of Dovermere brushing against his, whispering lovingly in his ear.Hello, Timespinner. We’ve been waiting for you.
This power that permeated Dovermere had always felt vast and unknowable to him, yet so very familiar. It was the strangest thing Baz had ever known, stranger still, he thought, than the Tidecaller power Emory could wield or the fluttering he got in his stomach when he caught Kai’s gaze sometimes. Inexplicable and wonderful and frightening all at once.
And so Baz had reached for the threads of time around the door, tugging ever so gently at the ones that made up the fabric of the Hourglass, this column of rock that was just rock until it unlocked and became a portal into realms of endless possibility. He had pulled away at the threads with the utmost concentration, the most delicate touch. As if he were a mechanic operating on the inner workings of complicated clockwork.
Pull. Untangle. Stop and start again until at last he had unraveled the mechanisms of the door, wound it back to the time it was unlocked and open to other worlds. It had felt natural, instinctive, as if his magic had been created for the sole purpose of tending to this door.
But now, as Baz reached for the threads of time inside the sleepscape, he found that time here was not what he was used to. It was more complicated than the threads bound to the portal. In fact, they were not just loose threads at all. Time was a tapestry of closely woven threadwork, patterns that were complex in a way he couldn’t understand. An overlapping of color and sense and feeling and life and death andeverything.
Time here was a language he did not speak, undecipherable and strange. Though it left him with the impression that it wassomething he had understood, long ago. A language he’d once heard and tasted and forgotten since.
The tapestry shifted before his eyes, something darker tugging at the edges of his vision. A sense of urgency gripped him. He reached for the thread he thought was connected to Kai and pulled it back, letting go of his magic as quickly as he could.
In a blink, Kai was no longer convulsing and choking on air, but standing beside Baz once more, as if the past few minutes had never happened.
Kai gaped at Baz with confused bewilderment.
“What was that?” Vera exclaimed.
Kai’s eyes caught on a point behind Baz and all the color leeched from his face again, the same as it had done before.
“Brysden,” he said in warning.
Baz whirled, hoping to catch sight of this nightmare that was starting all over again.
But where before the nightmare that came for Kai had been invisible, this one was decidedly not.
Three figures had just stepped through the rift still open to the caves beyond, joining them in this liminal space between worlds.
At first Baz thought them to be umbrae, and his hand reached for Kai’s arm in a quiet plea. But the newcomers were not umbrae.
“I knew I’d find you here,” said Artem Orlov.
