“I’ve failed you all,” Emory insisted. “Everything’s hopeless now.”
“No, it isn’t,” Tol said gruffly, reaching over Aspen to grasp Emory’s wrist. “Romie wants you to know she’s fighting Atheia with everything she has.”
Emory blinked at him. “She is?”
“She needs you to hang on a while longer.” Aspen’s gaze drifted sadly to the still silent Orfeyi. “We all do.”
“I don’t understand…”
“You can bring us back,” Tol said. “We know you can.”
The dream suddenly felt too real, his words slicing into Emory’s awareness. Could it be that their souls were truly here, finding her in the realm of sleep? Desperate for her to help them. To save them, perhaps, from the hold Clover had taken of their wayward souls. “I don’t have my magic anymore,” Emory said defeatedly. “And even if I did, resurrecting you wouldn’t be possible…”
It was Orfeyi who spoke next, his voice flat, his gaze still unfocused.
“It’s not resurrection if we’re not entirely dead.”
Before she could ask what that meant, the dream dissolved.
48ROMIE
ROMIE EXISTED ONLY IN DREAMS.
Atheia had banished her consciousness from her body after her outburst at Aldryn, like a mother sending an unruly child to their room and throwing away the key. But in sleeping, Romie was free.
Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi were still here, those threads wrapped around Romie’s pulse points like a lifeline. It was like their consciousness was kept locked away with her own. Or perhaps it was just the parts of them that were Atheia that lived on—the parts of them that were divinity, fused into Romie to bring Atheia back.
Buttheywere dead, she reminded herself. Their personhoods erased, no matter how alive they appeared to her. Aspen would never get to hold her sister Bryony again, would never get to prove her mother wrong or follow in the High Matriarch’s footsteps. Tol would never get justice for what the Knight Commander and all the masters within the Fellowship of the Light had done to draconics like him and the dragons they claimed to worship. Orfeyiwould never return triumphant to the people who’d put their faith in him, nor would he ever get to play music again.
They were dead, they were dead, they were dead.
And Romie might as well be dead with them.
“You can’t give up,” Aspen pleaded with her, a note of anger in her voice. “Where’s the girl who kept pestering me for answers in the Wychwood? Where’s the girl who crossed through worlds and stopped at nothing to bring us all together?”
“She’s gone, just like you.”
Aspen shook her head, adopting a stern expression that could have rivaled her mother’s. “You’re wrong. This”—she tugged on the thread that connected them, sending a little jolt of feeling through Romie, as if waking her senses— “this is proof we’re still here, still connected. So use those connections.”
Romie didn’t understand. Until, slowly, she tugged on the thread that connected her to Aspen and found herself able to use the witch’s magic, much like when she, Aspen, and Tol had shared power in the Wastes. With a hitch of her breath, Romie found herself seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. The person felt familiar, and as she saw the faces at her side—Virgil, Ife, Javier, Luce—she realized who she was scrying through with Aspen’s residual magic wasNisha.
Her heart broke all over at seeing the pain Atheia had inflicted on Nisha and the others. They were being held now in another part of the Institute. Being drained of their blood—of their magic—for Atheia’s twisted idea of repentance. All it did was keep them weak and disoriented and in pain. She could feel it in Nisha, this hollowness.
And it lit a fire in her she thought had been snuffed out.
Aspen was right: she couldn’t give up. Maybe, if she tried hard enough, she could get a message across to Nisha and the others, tell them to hold on—
But the dream ended, the connection severed, and Atheia once more took over.
As soon as Atheia slept, Romie tried again, and again, and again.
This was how she spent her existence now: trying to contact others in dreaming, or through scrying, using her own magic as well as that of the keys to get a sense of what was happening in the waking world. She couldn’t even be sure any of it wasreal—for all she knew, she was imagining Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi, and they really were dead, and everything else was just her own sad, frightened imagination trying to provide comfort.
But she was done giving up, done being afraid.
Fear of failure’s the bitch that holds you back from success,Romie used to say. It was more so Atheia now that kept her from successfully contacting others—and she was indeed a bitch.
The extent of Atheia’s cruelty hit Romie in full when she finally got eyes on Emory. Using Aspen’s scrying magic, she’d flitted into the consciousness of a Regulator just as they entered a sterile room where Emory was strapped to a gurney and people were taking vials of her blood, like vultures to a corpse.
