44BAZ
NO MATTER HOW LONG HEstared at it, no matter how much he turned it over in his mind, Baz couldn’t make sense of this new multilayered world before him—especially not as those black holes appeared. They tore open the skies and swallowed whole sections of the cove below where the tide had started to come in, sweeping through the rotten trees of the forest that now stood there.
There were quiet gasps and quiet sobs and a desperate, quiet bewilderment as the students around him watched the scene unfold. From somewhere near, they heard screams and the sound of crumbling stone, and Baz suspected those hungry pockets of darkness must have appeared on campus, too.
He has fueled himself with death itself, and so death will keep eating away at this new world of his like termites until there is nothing left of the realms.
Equilibris hadn’t lied. It was as if each dissonant puzzle piece ofthis new landscape Clover had created were vying for dominance over the others.
Baz thought someone might be speaking to him, but all he heard was a dull ringing in his ears, folded in with the echo of the hourglass breaking. He stared and stared at his bloodied hands, the cuts from the broken glass.
He’dbroken fate. That careful pattern Equilibris had spent all of existence overseeing. All those intricate threads woven into a tapestry older than time. Gone. Undone by Baz’s own two hands.
The barest thought had the threads of time around his wounded palms pulling back to when the gashes had never existed. His hands were clean and healed in an instant.
If Baz had thought the power his Collapsing allowed him was limitless, it was nothing compared to what he felt now. It was as if breaking fate had shattered the bottom of a far-reaching well inside him to unveil something even vaster, almost unfathomably so. Power thrummed in his veins like a steady vibration. He could see the threads of time all around him without even trying to—threads untethered from any sort of pattern, or rather choosing to make their own patterns at will.
Perhaps the fabric of the universe had changed completely with Clover’s meddling, and maybe that applied to time, too, unbinding it from the constraints it used to answer to. Baz wasn’t sure what that meant for his magic, and thinking of it made him sick to his stomach.
“Brysden. What now?”
The sound of Kai’s voice brought him back to reality.
“We have to go find the others,” Baz whispered.
They weaved through the gathered students, searching for their friends’ faces, but Emory and the others were nowhere to be found. Baz had to believe they had made it out of the Reapertree. He was of two minds about where they would have disappeared to: either they’d headed for the safety of Obscura Hall… or something terrible had happened to them.
Answers found him when he and Kai emerged in the quad. It was a jarring sight: part of the cloisters had been devoured by a pocket of darkness, and the ground was littered with the corpses of strange beasts. Small groups of students remained. There were a few Shadow-masked protesters here and there, but most were gone or in the process of fleeing.
“Baz!”
He spun around to see Penelope West heading their way, eyes wide with horror. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.
“What happened here?”
“Your sister did this—well, the Tides. They tried to stop the black holes from destroying everything and… and bled Emory of her magic. Right there in the fountain. Said this was how to fix whatever’s happening to the world, by giving back the power she stole and sending the Shadow back to the Deep.”
Baz’s stomach dropped. “Where’s Emory now? Is she—is she all right?”
“She’s alive.” Penelope’s face was grave. “But she was given the Unhallowed Seal. The Tides drained her power and gave it to the Selenic Order who now have access to all lunar magics. They’re not going to stop until it’s restored for everyone. I’m scared of what they’ll do to Emory at the Institute.”
“The Institute?” Baz repeated with bleak horror.
“That’s where they took her. Her and the Shadow and the others who were with them.”
“What others?” Kai asked.
If Penelope recognized him, she didn’t bat an eye at the fact that he was a fugitive of the Institute. “Virgil, Nisha, Ife, and Javier.And a blond woman I didn’t recognize. Had a Waning Moon sigil.”
Kai’s eyes squeezed shut, his face falling. “Luce.” He swore. “We need to get them back.”
“We already have people at the Institute,” Baz said. “Maybe they can…”
The words died on his tongue. Jae and Vera and the others who’d gone to scope out the Institute would still be waiting for Sidraeus to magically appear with backup. That had been the plan: to use the protest as a distraction while they got Kai and Luce out of hell, then head to the Institute to break free the Eclipse-born prisoners while everyone was still occupied at Aldryn.
But now that plan was shot. Sidraeus wasn’t here to whisk them back to the safe house. And with Atheia headed to the Institute, Baz could only hope Jae and the others would have the good sense to hide and find their own way to safety.
The sound of breaking porcelain caught his attention. Near the Fountain of Fate, a group of riotous students were smashing discarded Shadow masks on the ground and chanting hideous words.
