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“Here,” she said raggedly, devoid of emotion.

A streak of ice shot toward my ankles, melting into frost that formed a cast around my ankles. The pain numbed instantly, soothed and submerged.

“Thank you,” I coughed.

Quinn didn’t respond to that, just jerked her head. “Come on. The tunnel keeps going. I want to be the first ones back.”

Okay, then. Glancing over my shoulder, I watched the statues resume their former positions, clutching their weapons dutifully once more. By the lockpick and the lyre, I hoped we didn’t have to go through that again on the way back.

We trudged forward. Quinn’s firelight still flickered all around us, but the shadows seemed to converge and thicken even more than before. Much too dense. Much too… shaped. In fact, the more I blinked, the more it seemed like the silhouettes of another army crouched ahead, poised to attack.

Quinn faltered at the same moment I did.

“You see that too?” she asked.

I nodded and against my better judgement, closed my eyes. When my Object Summoning hands tried to graze the figures ahead, they fell through nothing.

“I don’t… I don’t think they’re real. At least not in a physical sense.”

“What do you mean?” Quinn squinted. “They’re not elemental at all. I don’t sense any wind made solid or shadow brought to life.”

No, that wasn’t quite it either. This time, it was my Mind Manipulating power that sensed something buzzing in the air. It reminded me of the time Coen had dragged me and his friends into a peculiarly white and empty building during my first year, right before Kitterfol Lexington had flown in to investigate Mr. Fenway’s death. The Isolator, it had been called, a place that could block other Mind Manipulators from listening in. At the time, I hadn’t understood it, but now I knew the walls had been infused with a mental blockade.

Here, it felt like the opposite. As if the tunnel walls were infused with an invasion of our minds, an implantation of images that weren’t real.

“They’re hallucinations,” I whispered. “They can’t hurt us, but…” I submerged myself into my own mind, locating the false visions. It was strange. There was no other consciousness in the confines of my brain, but rather the imprint of someone else’s work. Quickly, I swept the imprints away.

And chills skittered down my spine.

“They’re not the only hallucinations.”

Now that I could see the tunnel for what it was, the silhouettes were gone… as were huge chunks of the ground itself. Our path forward had been fractured, fissures opening up right before our feet with only narrow strips of rock available for us to step on. When I leaned forward to peer down, cold air puffed against my face.

If we had kept going even another step, those false shadows would have driven us straight toward any one of the edges—and a bottomless fall.

Quinn peered at me suspiciously. “I thought you only had Wild Whispering and Object Summoning. How do you know these are hallucinations?”

I froze. Scrambling for a good enough coverup, I came up with, “It is my Object Summoning. It can sense an absence of physical matter. Try to shift your Element Wielding focus to the ground,” I said quickly, determined to steer her attention away from any suspicious musings.

Quinn gasped. I assumed that meant she could now sense the fissures, but I decided it would be safer to grab her hand and lead her onward anyway. When she flinched, I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes.

“I think this is slightly better than being dead, Quinn.”

“Right. Yeah. Go on.”

Step by careful step, I steered her along the narrow ledges zigzagging forward. The incident on the Uninhabitable Zone’s bridge breathed down my neck. Don’t you know the first rule of traveling along shoulder-width ridges bordered by certain death? Coen would say if he were here. Don’t look down.

Suddenly, I missed him with enough force to make my stomach lurch. Or maybe that was just Quinn, who stumbled behind me with a sharp intake of breath.

“Are the hallucinations getting you, too?” I asked after we regained our balance. I couldn’t see the shadows anymore, but I could pretend to.

She swallowed. “One just chopped off my head.”

“Damn.” We began shuffling forward again. “Would you be able to grow a new one with your Shape Shifting power, or would that have been the end?”

Quinn gave a snort that sounded dangerously close to a laugh. “That definitely would have been the end. Best I could do is regrow a finger, but even that would take continuous effort. Oh God, one just stabbed me in the fucking neck.”

I winced, more thankful than ever before for the brand Coen had burned into the back of my neck. I would try to spare Quinn from the mental torture, too, but that would just reveal one of my secrets to her, and I couldn’t sacrifice that for her comfort.