Emory blanched. “You think they’d have survived if they’d had the compass with them?”
Vera nodded. “Protection against the absolute weirdness that is the space between worlds.” She fiddled with the compass, eyeing Emory. “Adriana left this with you, right? Then she disappeared, and we know she somehow made it through the door, since she left the epilogue there foryouto find.” She pointed to Romie at that. “Maybe you Dreamers are made of different stuff than us and that means you’re able to withstand the sleepscape longer without the compass’s protection. I don’t know. But without this thing guiding us, I don’t think we’d have found the Wychwood door. It pointed us right to it, and then to thenextdoor once we were in the Wychwood.”
“And what about Keiran?” Emory asked.
“I thought we’d have to fight him once we realized he’d slipped through the door with us,” Nisha said, “but he suddenly didn’t seem to care about us. He slipped right through our fingers, disappearing into shadows. We hoped that might be the last we saw of him until we followed the compass and found him at the next door with you.”
“Okay, back up,” Romie said, her head hurting. “You gotBaztoopen the Hourglass, watched a Reanimator bring Tides-damned Keiran back to life, then managed to find us in the Wychwood thanks to Emory’s lost mother’s compass.” She ticked off every statement on her fingers, each more ludicrous than the last. “Where is Baz in all of this?”
The three of them exchanged looks that unsettled Romie.
“Is he all right?” Emory asked in a small voice, echoing Romie’s thoughts.
“He’s fine,” Virgil said with forced confidence.
“We don’t know that,” Nisha corrected him.
Romie felt her nerves fraying. “Someone had better tell me where my brother is or I swear—”
“We lost him in the sleepscape,” Nisha relented with a sigh. “Him and Kai.”
“What do you mean youlost them? Are they—alive?”
“We don’t know.”
Romie felt dizzy. For a moment, it was as if she were back on the ley line having all her energy drained, or in the sleepscape with stars swirling around her, making her wonder where was up and where was down. Her world was tilting on its axis. First Keiran coming back to life. Then Aspen nearly dying, Emory’s apparent inability to Collapse despite using scores of magic, and the suspicion that she was leeching power from Romie. And now Baz…
No. He couldn’t be dead. Romie refused to even consider it.
“There was this kind of… opening,” Vera explained. “Almost like another portal forming within the sleepscape. It sucked Baz and Kai right in. One minute, they were with us, and the next, they were gone.”
Pulled into another door. Forced down another path.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine.” Virgil’s feigned cheeriness convinced no one. “They probably just ended up somewhere else in the sleepscape, right? Or maybe back in Dovermere. Anyway, withboth their Collapsed powers, I’ve no doubt they can do just about anything.”
Romie clamped down on the worry that was threatening to pull her under. Virgil was right—hehadto be, because she refused to believe her brother was gone.
“We should settle in for the night, wait for your friend here to wake up,” Vera said after a long silence.
The day was rapidly fading around them—toorapidly. The moon already hung low in the sky despite the sun still being out, tinting the world in hazy hues of orange and purple. An eerie sound pierced the quiet, a faraway beast, perhaps, like the mythical ones the warrior fought in Clover’s book.
Romie shuddered. “Let’s just hope whatever’s in this world lets us live till morning.”
“And that Keiran doesn’t come back to finish us off,” Virgil added. “I hope he gets his eyes plucked out by those giant-ass birds. He deserves every bit of pain after what he made you go through, Em.”
“What he made usallgo through,” Emory said, her cheeks tinged pink as Virgil threw an arm around her and gave her a playful kiss atop the head.
“Yeah, but you especially,” Virgil said. “Playing with your heart like that… You were always far too good for him.”
“I swear if we’d known what he intended to do, we would have told you,” Nisha chimed in, squeezing Emory’s shoulder.
Emory very pointedly ignored Romie’s stare as the pieces suddenly fell into place.
It wasn’t just that Emory, like the rest of the Selenic Order, had been oblivious to Keiran’s true intentions. Something had happened between the two of them. Something Emory had been keeping from Romie after swearing there would be no more secrets between them.
Hurt and betrayal seared through Romie. As she watched the familiarity between the three of them, it struck her that these peopleshehad gotten close to in secrecy last year, these friendships she’d made outside of Emory… they weren’t hers alone now. Emory had as much of a claim on Virgil and Nisha as she did, perhaps even more after what they’d all gone through. And Emory was the one keeping Romie out of the loop now, giving her a taste of her own medicine with this vital piece of the puzzle that she’d hidden from her.
It made sense, of course. Romie should have put it together before, but she’d been too caught up in everything else to see what was so obvious now. She supposed in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter whether Emory and Keiran had been more than what Emory had let her believe, but it was the lying that bothered her.
