Emory couldn’t say she cared, so long as her mother was spared the oblivion she was destined for.
She was too absorbed watching Sidraeus to realize the room had suddenly gone silent. Everyone had turned to Jae, who stood with a grave-looking Ife.
“We’ve received word from a trusted source,” Jae announced, “that Romie—or rather, Atheia—is at the Institute, taking a special interest in synth-making.”
Emory noticed the absent-minded way Ife traced the spiral mark on her wrist. An inkling of who this trusted source might be formed in her mind.
“Apparently,” Jae continued, “she’s even encouraged the Regulators to force Eclipse-born prisoners to Collapse if they haven’t already so that they can get more silver blood. And that’s not all. There’s talk of the Selenic Order hosting some big event at Aldryn. They’ve invited important names from all over, from Regulators and Tidelore leaders to major donors and political figures invested in the college. Our source says this is when the Selenic Order plans to officially declare the Tides’ return. They want to make a big show out of it and take all the credit.”
“When is this happening?” Baz asked.
“In two days.”
Emory’s thoughts raced. If the Order publicized the Tides’ return, news of it would spread like wildfire, and Atheia’s agenda against the Eclipse-born would only give more credibility to those already out to get them. “We need to get ahead of this,” she said. “Make our own grand reveal about the Shadow’s return before they can spin the story however they want.”
Jae nodded in agreement. “We need a way to appeal to everyone, get them on our side. It might be dangerous, a little reckless even, but if we were to disrupt their evening in protest…”
“Screw this.” The pale-faced scholar who’d been so confrontational with Sidraeus yesterday—an Illusionist from Ilsker College, Emory had learned—rose to his feet, chair grating loudly on the floor as he did. “What we need to do is break into the Cadence Institute and set all the Eclipse-born free. We can’t just sit idly by while they’re left to suffer there.”
“We’ve been over this before.” Jae spoke over the mutters of assent that followed the scholar’s statement. “The Institute’s security is not as lax as it once was. That place has become a fortress. There’s no way we can get in, much less break anyone out.”
“What about him?” someone asked, pointing to Sidraeus. “If he’s really the almighty Shadow, then breaking past a few Regulators and wards should be nothing to him.”
Sidraeus remained as stoic as ever, though there was an eagerness to him that made Emory think he might be inclined to agree, if only to get his hands on Atheia.
“It’s not just Regulators and wards we’d have to get through,” Emory argued, “but Atheia, too, and she’s out for blood. You think she won’t expect him to come, that she won’t have some kind of trap laid out for him?” This she spoke directly to Sidraeus. A warning and a plea to stay put and remember what he’d said toher just last night. “If we barge in there laying waste to the place and attacking everyone that stands in our way, they’ll villainize us even more than they already have. We need to play this smart, consider other avenues before going after them guns blazing.”
It was what she should have done back in the fourth world—listened to Romie’s warning and thought things through instead of forging ahead anyway and leading the keys to their deaths. Emory had been driven by desperation, and desperation could only ever lead to mistakes. The keys had paid for hers; she couldn’t afford to let history repeat itself now.
The Ilsker scholar crossed his arms. “So what do you suggest, Tidecaller?”
“We get our message out before Atheia does. Write the first line before the Selenic Order dictates how the rest of our story goes. And if we have to march on Aldryn to stop them, so be it.”
Emory met Baz’s gaze, knowing he would be thinking the same thing she was. If the Selenic Order were planning to unveil Atheia at Aldryn—the very place they needed to be to perform the ritual—then this was their chance to bring down two birds with one stone.
“I might have an idea,” Vera piped in. She’d propped her feet up on the long communal table, and as everyone turned to look at her, she nodded toward a pile of dusty radio equipment tucked away in a corner. “You want to get your message out to the world, that’s how we do it.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing there?”
Virgil voiced the skepticism everyone felt as they watched Vera tinkering with the radio.
“You all might have your fancy magic,” Vera said, catching her tongue between her lips in concentration, “but this is where I shine.”
Radios, much like telephones, were a relatively new invention that had originated in Trevel and made their way across the world,becoming a source of information to rival the humble newspaper. The island of Elegy was behind the times when it came to radios, and so long-range transmission of voice messages was nearly impossible, restricting broadcasts to the island alone. But they needed to go wider than Elegy. They needed to reach potential allies in the Constellation Isles and Trevel, all the way to the far reaches of the Outerlands.
If they could broadcast their message out to the world, they might get people from all over to join their cause, or at the very least to hear them out and challenge their own perceptions of Eclipse-born. The hope was to have it spark real change for Eclipse-born—and make Atheia’s task of destroying them harder, if there were fewer people believing her lies.
Vera, thankfully, had studied engineering at Trevelyan University and knew just how to tinker with their transmission to allow it to reach the biggest radio broadcast companies in Trevel and Luagua. She walked Emory through the inner workings of what she was doing so that Emory could lace Amplifying magic into the transmission to help the message reach even wider.
The radio crackled to life, emitting a static noise that had Vera giving Virgil a cocky smile. “Told you I’d make it work.” She motioned for Emory to sit across from her at the desk. “Ready, cousin?”
Emory felt self-conscious with everyone’s attention on her. There was Jae, Baz, Theodore, and Henry in one corner of the office they had all crammed into; Virgil, Nisha, and Ife hovering behind Emory; a few Eclipse-born she had yet to learn the names of watching her with varying degrees of skepticism and hope; and Sidraeus by the window, hanging back from the group, sticking to the shadows like he was one himself.
Emory found herself marveling at the way the sunset blazing outside brought out the coppers and reds in his hair. The spiralsclimbing up his neck seemed gold in the light, making him look like the burnished sun itself. As if sensing her eyes on him, he met her gaze. She didn’t know what he might be thinking—if he thought all of this was a waste of time. But he was here at least. If not in solidarity, then maybe out of curiosity.
Nerves gathered in her stomach as she stared blankly at the metal microphone Vera pushed in front of her. Beside it was the script that she, Baz, and Jae had worked all day to write. Well, Baz had written most of it with Emory and Jae throwing ideas while looking over his shoulder. He was technically anauthor, after all—and they needed this speech to pack a punch.
Vera pressed a button and nodded at Emory. Silence fell heavy in the room. Emory met Baz’s eye, and his nod of encouragement was all she needed to gather her courage and start talking into the microphone:
