Chapter 24 Kai
AT LOW TIDE, THEY WENT out to face the caves once more, only to find that Dovermere, too, was different in this time.
Kai and Baz wove through the network of tunnels and caverns without incident, though with each step closer to the Hourglass, Kai grew more and more uncertain.
He could tell Baz was unnerved too. He’d gone completely quiet, his breathing coming in shallow bursts as he no doubt assessed the risks of opening the door again.
Before they could even reach the Belly of the Beast, they found themselves stopped by a solid wall of rock.
“What the fuck?” Kai muttered.
Where the tunnel should have opened wider into the grotto that housed the Hourglass, it simply came to a dead end. He and Baz pushed and prodded at the wall with no luck. But if there was no Belly of the Beast…
“Maybe the Hourglass doesn’t exist yet?” Baz said, puzzled.
Kai’s mind raced with possibilities. None of them made sense. “We can’t have appeared here out of thin air. There has to be a door.”
“I don’t feel it,” Baz said, frowning at the wall.
“Feel what?”
“The magic of Dovermere. Of the door. It… it used to whisper to me. Like it recognized my own magic. Like they were one and the same.”
Kai realized he didn’t feel anything either. He heard no song. Felt no pull.
There was nothing.
Baz swore, looking at Kai with wide eyes. “What if we’re truly stuck here?”
If there was no Belly of the Beast, there could be no Hourglass. No door to the Deep.
No way for them to return to their time.
Kai refused to believe it. “Can’t you just bring the door back?”
Baz gulped down on the fear he was clearly trying to keep leashed. In a quiet, broken voice, he said, “I don’t trust myself to try.”
“Brysden…”
“No, listen. I don’t know if I alone did this or if it’s Dovermere itself that brought us here. Either way, we don’t know what my magic might do. Even if I were to make the door reappear, I don’t know the first thing about how take us back to the present.”
Kai had to admit he was right. “So what do you suggest?”
“Maybe I can find answers here. Another Timespinner who might have studied time travel? I don’t know.”
Of course Baz’s answer to their problem would be Tides-damned research.
“This isn’t a time we want to be stuck in, Brysden,” Kai cautioned, thinking of Wulfrid. The encounter still slithered unpleasantly along his spine—how much Wulfrid reminded him of Artem, and all the bullies like him. “We’ll need to be careful.”
“I know.” Baz scratched the back of his head in thought. “We’ll need to be mindful of our actions too. Surely there are rules, ways that our being here might affect the fabric of time. What if we trigger something that changes the future—our present?”
Kai’s mind hurt just thinking about it. “One thing at a time. First, let’s get out of here before the tide traps us in. The rest we’ll figure out together.”
Kai was in the printing press again.
The nightmarish scene was as it always was: it was the printing press one minute, then Dovermere, then the sleepscape. Machinery and rubble. Crumbling stone and crushing waves. Darkness and stars that reached for the one person Kai could not bear to be parted from.
Again the scenes bled into one another. Again Kai called out to Baz, and when Baz twisted toward him, he braced himself to see his friend transform into that towering umbra crowned in obsidian.
Braced for the creature he had glimpsed in the sleepscape to speak in that tongue again, beckoning Kai to open the door.
But none of that happened. Baz only stared at him—not the real Baz, but an imagined one plucked from Kai’s own nightmares—his features unchanged.
There was no crowned umbra, making Kai wonder if it had left the sleepscape entirely.
He had seen it go into Keiran’s revived body.
Maybe that meant it would no longer plague Kai’s nightmares.
What happened next was worse than the umbra:
On Baz’s neck appeared deep bruises, imprints of Kai’s fingers. Behind his glasses, his brown eyes pinned Kai with accusation.
“I wish you were the one to have disappeared,” the nightmare Baz spat, “instead of her.”
Her. Romie, Emory, it didn’t matter who he meant. It was all the same in the end.
Kai moved backward out of the prison of his own fears, scrambling to jump into another nightmare, any nightmare, just not his own.
A different sort of darkness called to him. He stepped into a nightmare that felt inexplicably safe, if nightmares could be called that at all. He felt the same tug as when he’d glimpsed Emory before, as if a glittering ribbon of stars had been pulling him to her.
Someone was there, but it wasn’t Emory. It was a young man, a boy around his age, though Kai couldn’t see his face as he leaned over a body lying in a pool of blood, shoulders shaking with quiet sobs.
“Hello?” Kai asked, his voice sounding distorted in his ears.
The boy did not seem to hear him. But another appeared from behind the first. He had fair skin and a wiry frame, with floppy chestnut curls. He stepped in front of the crying boy and looked straight at Kai from behind thick, half-moon glasses.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
There was a shove, hands pushing him out—
Kai awoke with a gasp.
There was no confusion this time. He knew he was awake, knew the young man who’d pushed him out of the nightmare was real, because he recognized him. Not his face, but his magic. The way Dreamers could recognize each other in the sleepscape, acting like beacons to one another.
Except this had been no Dreamer.
It was another Nightmare Weaver.