Romie hadn’t noticed the darkness pressing in at the edges of the dream. And she certainly hadn’t noticedhimthere.
“Kai?”
37KAI
IT TOOK KAI TWO DAYSto find Emory in the sleepscape.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. He simply couldn’t feel her there, which he assumed meant she was awake, since she didn’t show up in Clover’s nightmares either. He’d never sought her out this way before, had always simply found himself in her nightmares without knowing how he’d shown up there in the first place. He’d started to believe he’d imagined the whole thing.
Until the night before the games started. As soon as Kai drifted to sleep, he was like a magnet being pulled along the starlit path by a great force field, a thread tugging on his soul. This was different from the song, but similar too. Familiar in a way Kai didn’t understand.
When he found her, she wasn’t surrounded by ghosts like she’d been last time. In fact, she seemed almost peaceful.
And at her side was Romie.
“Kai?” The Dreamer gaped.
Emory glanced between the two of them—and at the shiningthreads that bound her to each of them. One flowing between her and Romie, the other between her and Kai. “Please tell me this is real,” she said, in such an echo of Kai’s last nightmare that he had to remindhimselfthat this was real, this was real, this wasreal.
“Looks like it,” he said.
Romie nearly bowled him over as she threw herself at him with what he could only describe as a Tides-damnedsqueal. “I can’t believe it’s you!”
“Didn’t realize you’d missed me so much,” Kai wheezed under her tight embrace.
“Shut up and hug me.”
Around them, the scene glitched, flickering between a sunlit beach and the gloom of a familiar cave. As if going from dream to nightmare.
“This makes no sense,” Emory said with a laugh as she looked from Kai to Romie to the shifting sleepscape around them. Kai could tell her grip on reality was slipping. “I don’t… I need to wake up.”
“No, hey,wait.” Romie grabbed Emory by the shoulders, forcing her to look at her. “This is real. See?” She put Emory’s hand on Kai’s shoulder. “Kai and I are inyoursubconscious. If you wake up now, I don’t know if we’ll be able to get this connection again. So take a breath and concentrate on stayingasleep.”
Emory blinked at her hand on Kai. She snatched it back as she realized hewasreal. “How is this possible when we’re worlds apart?”
“There’s more than worlds separating us now.” Kai wanted to laugh at the absurdity of their situation. “Baz and I are stuck in time. Two hundred years in the past, to be exact.”
“What?” Romie gasped. “How?”
“No idea.”
“When the others said you disappeared, we thought maybe…” Emory’s eyes were bright. “But you’realive.”
“Wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Romie gave a breathy laugh of relief. “Thank the Tides for that.”
Kai frowned. “When you said the others—you mean…”
“Nisha, Virgil, Vera,” Romie said. “They made it through the sleepscape and found us in the Wychwood. We’re all in the Wastes now.”
“So it’s all real, then?” Kai asked, unable to hide the wistful note in his voice. “The other worlds, everything?”
Romie brimmed with excitement. “Yes, it’s all real.”
A part of Kai was jealous he wasn’t there to see it. He and Baz were the biggest fans ofSong of the Drowned Godsthat he knew, and here Emory and Romie were, getting to live through the real-life version of it.
Their meeting Clover seemed to pale in comparison.
