Sarai’s throat worked. “This isn’t real,” she whispered. “We aren’t here anymore.”
“We aren’t?” A voice of gurgled blood.
“No, I promise—”
“But what if you’re wrong?” Her younger self sat up in an eerie rush and pinned her with milky-white eyes. Her voice distorted to a raspy hiss, crimson slithering from her wounds. “What if we never left Sidran Tower? What if we’ve been dreaming and screaming all along?”
Panic struck Sarai like a knife when blood dripped from her younger self’s mouth.
Shaking, she stumbled back when the girl reached for her, growing cold when she chased her with unearthly speed. Wind sent the balcony door open again, and Sarai darted through, slamming it behind her. She stilled when the door vanished, her hands closing on nothing.
This can’t be real.Her chest tightened with panic when pinching herself did nothing.Why am I here?
She froze at a footstep behind her, turning in slow degrees and knowing what she would find even before white and silver robes entered the corner of her vision. A too-wide grin split his face like a scar.
“What a shame.” Rot carved chunks from Aelius’s cheeks. “A reckoning has followed in your wake. The gods have spoken and called for our end. The sky itself will laugh.”
She tottered back when he advanced, but the balcony railing behind her felt all too solid, the wind all too eager to howl past her falling body.
What if we never left Sidran Tower?Another step.What if we’ve been here all along?
She screamed.
“Sarai.Look at me.” Hands cupped her face. “Open your eyes. I have you.”
Reality struck in a garbled rush. She woke to her frantic gasps, the last note of a scream still hanging in the air. Sitting up, she let out a ragged sound at finding Kadra’s grim features above her.
“Breathe—” He broke off when she hugged him hard.
“Wisdom’s teeth, I’ve never had a nightmare like that,” she mumbled into his sweat-slick skin. “I’m sorry for startling you.”
“You never need to apologize.” Brow lined with worry, he held her while her pulse slowed its frantic drumbeat, reluctant to allow her out of bed until she insisted that she was well.
She related what she remembered of the dream while they bathed and tucked into the meal Cato had left atop Kadra’s desk. “Sidran Tower was bad enough, but I felt like I saw someone else’s dream before then.” She pressed a mug of tea to her throbbing forehead. “Likely something borne of a long workday, but Elsar only know how I conjured up such explicit details of illegal blazeleaf production.”
A muscle worked in Kadra’s jaw. “Did what you see trouble you?”
Acid burned up her throat at the blurry memory of the boy’s smooth knifework. And yet, that had been as much a performance as murder. She couldn’t remember what he looked like, but she’d caught the resigned glance he’d given his father, and his silent acceptance of his siblings’ fear. She’d seen the same loneliness in Kadra before they had become lovers.
His hard face was oddly closed when she raised her eyes. “I don’t know if I was afraid of him orforhim,” she confessed. “He seemed so young, and it looked like he had little choice. But someone like that could turn monstrous, if the wrong cause got its claws in him.” She thought of Aelius’s defenders and the Inquisitors of the Elsarian Order. “Do you think people deserve the chance to change?”
Something utterly bleak swam in the frozen depths of Kadra’s eyes. It was a long moment before he spoke. “They might not.”
Both dreams didn’t leave her mind throughout their descent from the Academiae’s citadel and into Edessa. Her Tetrarch was equally, strangely somber, broad shoulders tensed under some new strain. They’d just entered his Quarter when he exhaled heavily.
“Sarai—” He broke off at a sharp scream down the road.
Feet drummed against cobblestone coupled with the staccato snap of doors being flung open. Dawn was still new to the horizon, bleary-eyedfolk roused by the ruckus and emerging from their front doors with confusion. Riding toward the source of the sound, she stilled at the pandemonium flooding the streets.
Throngs jostled each other, running from an unknown evil. Others vomited onto the road, trembling fingers pressed to their temples.
“Magus Supreme Kadra!” one wailed upon spotting him. “The plague! It’s here!”
She went cold, urging her mare into a gallop. Frightened faces blurred; the screaming rose in volume as they neared the marketplace in which she had adjudicated with Kadra only yesterday afternoon. Pale-faced and trembling, his vigiles had formed a wall around it, but there was no hiding what lay within.
Corpses. Limbs splayed, eyes crusted with whitesleep, mouths agape in variations of agony. Seated, clustered, as though awaiting Kadra’s judgment, they were frozen dolls draped in crimson. And on every face, the same circular wax seal–like welts, and a seething wave of glistening creatures, gnawing endlessly into exposed flesh.
Time seemed to ebb slowly as the small lake of blood traversing through snow dripped onto the road, patterned with equally scarlet boil beetles. Every sound deepened, heightened.
