The initial plan had been to show up at Aldryn, unannounced and en masse, to disrupt the Selenic Order event happening tomorrow night. They had already sent out the call for others to do the same, Jae reaching out via underground networks to anyone and everyone who might have heard their initial radio message and wanted to voice their support of Eclipse-born. The idea was to take Atheia and the Order by surprise—and to use this protest as a cover for Emory, Baz, and Sidraeus to slip undetected into the Reaper room, while others reclaimed Obscura Hall.
But maybe there was a better way to go about it, all while getting justice for Professor Sao and everyone else held at the Institute in the process.
“We send out another radio message,” Emory said. Certainty soared through her as a plan formed in her mind. “We tell the world exactly where to find us, so that when the Regulators are looking away from the Institute, they won’t see us coming.”
31ROMIE
ATHEIA STARED AT THE SILVERblood scrubbed from her hands as it washed down the drain, hypnotized by the way it swirled and shimmered in the water. It wasalmostpretty. Just like the Eclipse woman hadalmostlooked like Tala, the Tidecaller who had been like a sister to Sidraeus. To Atheia, too.
She hoped the sight of her had hurt him just as badly as each spiral carved into her skin had.
Atheia still heard the Eclipse woman’s screams. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she could feel Romie’s revulsion, hear the fading echo of her own screams of protest at the horror Atheia had wrought. But it had been a necessary evil. A message sent to Sidraeus. A lure for what came next.
And yet Tala’s face haunted her, drawing something like guilt from deep within her.
Atheia scrubbed her hands harder, washing away any lingering trace of remorse even as memories flooded her mind. The early days of the Veiled Atlas, when she and Sidraeus and Tala hadspent countless hours talking about ways to reach other worlds, then the godsworld. The time the three of them had spent traveling through realms. Tala had been a leading figure among the first Tidecallers, so full of potential and life and charm that Atheia herself had been swept away by her, just as Sidraeus had. She had loved her, just as she had loved all the lunar mages she shared her magic with, perhaps more so because of how warm and human and kind Tala had been.
She was a light that drew everyone to her. The one Tidecaller Atheia had been utterly swept away by, and the one Tidecaller whose betrayal hurt more than all the others combined.
Yet another thing Sidraeus had stolen from her.
She was done letting him destroy all the things she would have loved to call her own.
Whenever Atheia slept, Romie was alone in her own mind.
Though not entirely. She was no longer ever truly alone, be it in waking where she shared her own body with Atheia, their mind split down the middle and coexisting in one vessel, or in sleep, where Romie found herself surrounded by the other keys.
She knew they were dead, yet here they were in her dreams, Aspen and Tol and Orfeyi, as seemingly alive as they used to be. The threads that had briefly connected them in the fountain were still there, wrapped around Romie’s pulse points. Wrist. Forearm. Neck. She could still feel that crackling energy coursing between them as if the threads werealive, even though her friends were dead, and this was only a dream.
Perhaps they were a part of her now, just as they were all part of Atheia.
Dreamer. Witch. Warrior. Guardian. Now we are but one.
But they did not seem to be of one mind.
Ever since the sea of ash, Romie had realized that, as Atheia, she was tapping into other magics the way she’d envied Emory doing for so long. This had always been what she’d wanted out of her time with the Selenic Order—to be more than a Dreamer of House Waning Moon. To know every facet of power that the moon and tides had to offer, not just the magic she’d been born with. Now she was the vessel of the Tides, and she had gotten her wish.
She should have reveled in it. Should have found some semblance of peace or contentment at knowing that all her dreams had come true. She had reached the song at the end of the world, had brought the Tides back to these shores, had all their magics now running through her veins.
And yet.
“Maybe we were wrong to trust Atheia,” Aspen and Tol and Orfeyi would say to her in dreaming. “Her goal, her methods… Can’t you see it’s all wrong?”
Their comments began to fray at Romie’s resolve, a voice of conscience in her head that grew louder every time she was with them. She knew firsthand how ruthless Atheia planned to be to eradicate Eclipse magic, had tasted her anger, her thirst for revenge.
But Atheia was convincing.Seductive.As soon as Romie woke, as soon as she found herself sharing consciousness with Atheia again, any unease she’d felt disappeared.
“Once we get rid of the Shadow, the stain of him will be washed from all Eclipse-borns’ souls,” Atheia promised her. “They’ll be saved, redeemed. Washed clean of their sins, in a way. Is that not what you want?”
Romie did want that. She wanted to save Emory and her brother and her father. Even though a part of her realized this made her exactly like Keiran, following the path he had started down.
And after what Atheia had done to the Luaguan professor… what she’d pried out of Louis and Javier…
What she meant to do next…
The haunting image of silver blood, of spirals carved into skin, followed Romie in sleep. She had not looked away as Atheia had told her. She had borne witness to the horror of the scene—had felt the blood on her own two hands—and in the process had become more disjointed from her own body and this deity who shared it.
A necessity,Atheia had told her gently, sensing her trepidation.
