Chapter 37 Kai
IT TOOK KAI TWO DAYS to find Emory in the sleepscape.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. He simply couldn’t feel her there, which he assumed meant she was awake, since she didn’t show up in Clover’s nightmares either.
He’d never sought her out this way before, had always simply found himself in her nightmares without knowing how he’d shown up there in the first place.
He’d started to believe he’d imagined the whole thing.
Until the night before the games started. As soon as Kai drifted to sleep, he was like a magnet being pulled along the starlit path by a great force field, a thread tugging on his soul. This was different from the song, but similar too. Familiar in a way Kai didn’t understand.
When he found her, she wasn’t surrounded by ghosts like she’d been last time. In fact, she seemed almost peaceful.
And at her side was Romie.
“Kai?” The Dreamer gaped.
Emory glanced between the two of them—and at the shining threads that bound her to each of them.
One flowing between her and Romie, the other between her and Kai.
“Please tell me this is real,” she said, in such an echo of Kai’s last nightmare that he had to remind himself that this was real, this was real, this was real.
“Looks like it,” he said.
Romie nearly bowled him over as she threw herself at him with what he could only describe as a Tides-damned squeal. “I can’t believe it’s you!”
“Didn’t realize you’d missed me so much,” Kai wheezed under her tight embrace.
“Shut up and hug me.”
Around them, the scene glitched, flickering between a sunlit beach and the gloom of a familiar cave. As if going from dream to nightmare.
“This makes no sense,” Emory said with a laugh as she looked from Kai to Romie to the shifting sleepscape around them. Kai could tell her grip on reality was slipping. “I don’t… I need to wake up.”
“No, hey, wait.” Romie grabbed Emory by the shoulders, forcing her to look at her.
“This is real. See?” She put Emory’s hand on Kai’s shoulder.
“Kai and I are in your subconscious. If you wake up now, I don’t know if we’ll be able to get this connection again.
So take a breath and concentrate on staying asleep. ”
Emory blinked at her hand on Kai. She snatched it back as she realized he was real. “How is this possible when we’re worlds apart?”
“There’s more than worlds separating us now.” Kai wanted to laugh at the absurdity of their situation. “Baz and I are stuck in time. Two hundred years in the past, to be exact.”
“What?” Romie gasped. “How?”
“No idea.”
“When the others said you disappeared, we thought maybe…” Emory’s eyes were bright. “But you’re alive.”
“Wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Romie gave a breathy laugh of relief. “Thank the Tides for that.”
Kai frowned. “When you said the others—you mean…”
“Nisha, Virgil, Vera,” Romie said. “They made it through the sleepscape and found us in the Wychwood. We’re all in the Wastes now.”
“So it’s all real, then?” Kai asked, unable to hide the wistful note in his voice. “The other worlds, everything?”
Romie brimmed with excitement. “Yes, it’s all real.”
A part of Kai was jealous he wasn’t there to see it. He and Baz were the biggest fans of Song of the Drowned Gods that he knew, and here Emory and Romie were, getting to live through the real-life version of it.
Their meeting Clover seemed to pale in comparison.
“It’s not all good, though,” Emory said, putting a damper on Romie’s excitement.
Kai raised a brow. “You’re traipsing around in Clover’s worlds. How bad can it be?”
The girls exchanged a look. It was Romie who answered: “Things here are a bit more dire than what Clover’s book portrays. The worlds are dying. We’re going to the sea of ash to heal them.”
Dying worlds—just like Professor Selandyn had read about in Clover’s journal.
“It gets worse.” Emory peered at the darkness. “Something escaped the sleepscape and tried to kill the key from the Wychwood.”
The crowned umbra who’d gone into Keiran’s reanimated corpse. Kai looked for it in the folds of darkness around them, but again couldn’t feel it anywhere.
What he did feel were the umbrae pressing in.
Romie seemed to notice it too, this sense of foreboding that permeated the sleepscape.
She swore, face blanching, no doubt at the thought of being made an eternal sleeper.
“We need to wake up.” She squeezed Kai’s hand. “Tell my brother I miss him, okay?”
The Dreamer winked out like a star, and then Kai and Emory were alone in the dark.
Emory turned pleading eyes on him. “Don’t tell Baz about this.”
Kai wanted to strangle her for suggesting such a thing. “I warned you I’d make your life a living nightmare if you fucked him over, do you remember that?” At least she had the decency to look ashamed. “Unlike you, I don’t spend my time hiding things from him and using him for my own gain.”
“This isn’t—look, you and I both know he’ll worry himself to death.”
“He’s stronger than you give him credit for.”
“You’re right. But—shit.”
The darkness was suffocating now. It became harder for Kai to hold on to the connection.
“Wake up,” he gritted out. “Now.”
“You’ll come back?” Emory asked, full of hope. “Whatever this is, we can—”
Kai opened his eyes. He pushed the bedcovers back, his first thought being of barging into Baz’s room to tell him what just happened.
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob as Emory’s words slid against the walls of his mind.
The games were starting tomorrow. Baz needed to stay sharp. Focused.
And maybe Emory was right. Maybe it was best Baz didn’t know, at least not until Kai could make sense of things.
You’re just protecting him, he told himself. He’ll understand.
Kai went back to bed, the sting of his own betrayal churning in his gut.