Chapter 33 Kai
KAI WAS IN THAT SAME nightmare again.
Printing press, Dovermere, sleepscape. Machinery and stone and swirling stars.
Again he noted the absence of the crowned umbra, and he knew it had left for good.
Again the scene dissolved around him, and he was called to a different sort of darkness, a nightmare not his own. He saw the same two people, one sobbing over a body in a pool of blood, the other hanging back at the edge of the scene.
Except this time, they were no strangers. This time, Kai knew the bespectacled Fear Eater who watched the other was Thames, and in the other boy, he recognized the fine features of Cornelius Clover.
And this time, Kai saw the face of the body he was cradling.
It was Cordie.
“I’m sorry,” Clover was saying, rocking his dead sister gently back and forth. “I’m so sorry.”
Kai understood that he was in Clover’s nightmare. His worst fear laid bare: to lose his sister.
Thames watched the scene with heartbreaking empathy. The Fear Eater rested a hand on Clover’s shoulder, murmuring something Kai didn’t hear. Clover broke down in Thames’s arms as the darkness of the nightmare slowly ebbed into Thames.
It reminded Kai of all the times he had gone into Baz’s nightmares, sitting quietly with him as the printing press fell to ruins around them. Absorbing that darkness for him.
And suddenly someone else was by Thames and Clover’s side. At first Kai thought it was Cordie, revived—but this girl’s blond hair was a shade different, her eyes darker, and with a pang Kai realized it wasn’t Cordie at all but Emory.
A million questions surged to his lips as faint silver threads appeared between Clover and Thames and Emory. As if the stars themselves had drawn pathways between their souls.
Kai blinked, certain he was seeing things. He must have moved toward them, because Clover’s attention snapped to him with sudden awareness. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.
The nightmare trembled around them. Darkness pressed in.
The body that Clover leaned over was no longer his sister’s but a mound of faceless corpses that deteriorated before their eyes.
Clover clawed at his face as he, too, started succumbing to whatever dreadful affliction this was, his flesh tearing away from his body like ash billowing on a putrid breeze and dissolving into the growing darkness around them.
An unnatural, ravenous darkness that grew into elongated limbs and sharp claws.
The umbrae were here, ruthless with a hunger unlike Kai had ever seen from them. Emory disappeared, blinking out of the nightmare like a star. Thames braced against the umbrae, absorbing their darkness as much as he could while yelling at Clover to wake up, that none of this was real.
Clover’s veins rippled silver, and though Kai knew this was only a nightmare, he didn’t trust what a Tidecaller’s imagined Collapsing might do in a place like this. Clover wasn’t waking up, and more umbrae were swarming in, too many for one person to fend off.
Kai didn’t think twice as he rushed toward the umbrae. Their attention shifted to him. They flocked to him instantly, yet Kai did nothing, waiting for them to get closer…
“What are you doing?” Thames yelled at him.
“Getting them away from you.”
With the umbrae pressed tight around him, Kai pulled them with him into waking.
He opened his eyes to a dark room that grew darker still with the appearance of the umbrae. Kai struggled against them, willing them to disintegrate as all nightmares should when pulled into reality, but they did no such thing. This was not the time for his Collapsed magic to be stubborn.
“Sleep,” he said, throwing the full force of his magic into that one word, like he had back in Dovermere right after Baz had taken the Unhallowed Seal off his hand.
The umbrae at last seeped away into the dark, just as Kai’s door burst open, revealing a panting Thames.
Wide-eyed, Thames watched the umbrae disappear.
In the silence that followed, they stared at each other.
“How in the Shadow’s name did you do that?” Thames asked.
Kai tried for an unbothered shrug. “I… have a hard time controlling what I bring out of the sleepscape sometimes.”
If Thames suspected Kai was Collapsed, he didn’t say anything except, “I’ve never seen that kind of power before.”
“I’d gladly trade you for it.” Kai smirked. “These umbrae are a pain in my ass.”
“Are they always so ruthless in the nightmares you visit?”
“No. Are they in yours?”
“Never.”
A suspicion formed in Kai’s mind. The umbrae were attracted to power, to new magics especially. Whatever he’d seen between Clover, Thames, and Emory… those silver threads…
There was a bond there. Some kind of link between them. And with both Clover and Emory being Tidecallers, it didn’t surprise Kai that the umbrae would be so intrigued.
“Who was that girl with you?” he asked.
“Girl?” Thames echoed, raising a brow. “There was no girl.”
Kai didn’t push him, wondering if he had seen Emory at all. Reality and sleep fusing together again.
It made no sense that he should still be able to see her in his sleep when two hundred years separated them.
But this wasn’t the first time he’d found her so inexplicably.
When he’d been at the Institute, he’d somehow ended up in her nightmares despite his magic being put to sleep.
As if this connection they shared knew no limits.
“You and Clover… Do you often find yourself in his nightmares like that?”
Thames seemed flustered. “His nightmares are stronger than most people’s. And we’re very close, he and I, if you catch my meaning. So yes, I often drift to him in sleep.”
A certain bespectacled Timespinner came to mind. Kai asked, “Do you trust him?”
“With my life.” His expression softened. “If this is about the games, I assure you Baz is in good hands. If anyone can make it past these wards, it’s Cornelius.”
Because he’s a Tidecaller, Kai thought. He wanted to trust him, but Clover reminded him of Farran—more so than Thames did.
The Fear Eater might have the same last name, but the similarities stopped there.
Clover, on the other hand, had the same idealistic fervor that Farran once had.
Ideals Farran had abandoned at the first sign of hardship, the same way he’d abandoned Kai.
What Artem had said in the sleepscape came back to him.
The way you poisoned Farran’s mind with this “Tides and Shadow being equal” nonsense…
Kai had been racking his brain trying to figure out what Artem meant by it. Had Farran had a change of heart, in the end? Had he regretted siding with people who’d seen all Eclipse-born as vile?
All pointless questions, really. Farran had broken more than Kai’s heart. He’d shattered Kai’s trust in anyone who claimed to stand with Eclipse-born. The reality was, they all folded when things got hard.
Clover, he knew, was different. He was Eclipse-born himself—a Tidecaller at that.
Having to hide his nature meant he had more to lose than any of them, yet he still chose to put his neck out for his fellow Eclipse-born, when the safer approach would have been to not associate with them at all.
That earned points in his favor, Kai supposed.
But he couldn’t be too cautious. Not where Baz was concerned.